Weekend Link Dump

Strange company has devoted this week to gardening.

And so have the cats.

This week's Carnival of the Weird:

Sing it with me, my friends:  What the hell is this?!

A look inside the Mary Rose, Henry VIII's doomed flagship.

The curious saga of an American journalist's censored anti-Nazi film.

Rescue an injured starling, and you've got a friend for life.

The strange tale of a baby lost, then found, and now lost again.

The 2013 meeting of the Bilderberg group, aka Conspiracy Theorist Disneyland, is upon us.  Here's a list of attendees, in case you want to know who to feel paranoid about.

Speaking of events that spawn conspiracy theories, here's a roundup of books about the granddaddy of them all, the JFK assassination.

An interesting documentary about the megalithic structures of Britain and Ireland.  Available online!

Here's the trailer for another documentary, about the popular Florida Sea World attraction who also happens to be a serial killer.

A look at the Merry Cemetery of Romania.

If the cemetery gets so merry they bury you alive, here are some helpful tips.

Emily Davison:  Heroic suffragette or hysterical outragette?

How to "chuse" a husband, 1738.  Cyrano de Bergerac and Kirk Douglas need not apply.

Want to learn to read tea leaves?  Madame Zodiah explains it all for you!

Taming the Unmannerly Poor.  The last line of this post is a minor classic.

I think I have my next project:  Reviving the grand lost art of Text Hexes.

The sun is more than ready for its close-up.

Starbucks makes men gossipy and impotent.  But I suppose you already knew that.

A look at some of the more idiosyncratic historical mysteries.

"Lo! Death has reared himself a throne
In a strange city lying alone
Far down within the dim West,
Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best
Have gone to their eternal rest.
There shrines and palaces and towers
(Time-eaten towers that tremble not!)
Resemble nothing that is ours.
Around, by lifting winds forgot,
Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie.

No rays from the holy heaven come down
On the long night-time of that town;
But light from out the lurid sea
Streams up the turrets silently —
Gleams up the pinnacles far and free —
Up domes — up spires — up kingly halls —
Up fanes — up Babylon-like walls —
Up shadowy long-forgotten bowers
Of sculptured ivy and stone flowers —
Up many and many a marvelous shrine
Whose wreathéd friezes intertwine
The viol, the violet, and the vine.
So blend the turrets and shadows there
That all seem pendulous in the air,
While from a proud tower in the town
Death looks gigantically down.

There open fanes and gaping graves
Yawn level with the luminous waves;
But not the riches there that lie
In each idol's diamond eye —
Not the gaily-jeweled dead
Tempt the waters from their bed;
For no ripples curl, alas!
Along that wilderness of glass —
No swellings tell that winds may be
Upon some far-off happier sea —
No heavings hint that winds have been
On seas less hideously serene.

But lo, a stir is in the air!
The wave — there is a movement there!
As if the towers had thrust aside,
In slightly sinking, the dull tide —
As if their tops had feebly given
A void within the filmy Heaven.
The waves have now a redder glow —
The hours are breathing faint and low —
And when, amid no earthly moans,
Down, down that town shall settle hence,
Hell, rising from a thousand thrones,
Shall do it reverence."


Incidentally, I now have my very own neighborhood What the Hell is This.  Sometime during the night last Sunday, a sinister giant mutant bunny appeared on the street opposite my house, and it's been sitting there, grinning evilly at passerby, ever since.

Unless the visitor shown above goes on a rampage and kills everyone on my block, I'll see you all on Monday, where I will be presenting a tale of disappearance, doppelgangers, death, and decapitation.  Perfect reading material for all the sinister giant mutant mystery bunnies out there.