"...we should pass over all biographies of 'the good and the great,' while we search carefully the slight records of wretches who died in prison, in Bedlam, or upon the gallows."
~Edgar Allan Poe

Friday, July 28, 2017

Weekend Link Dump



This week's Link Dump is sponsored by another of our Cats From the Past.  This is one of my aunts standing in front of her home in Minneapolis.  Wish I could say who the cat was.





What the hell is the Bermuda Triangle?  This guy thinks he knows.

What the hell was the Thing in the Woods?  Now we know!

Watch out for those eyeless ghosts!

Watch out for those Mad Gassers!

Watch out for those sharks!  They love parasols!

Watch out for those Wampus Cats!

Watch out for those paranormal pterodactyls!

Watch out for those competitive table-setters!

Oh, just another drunk Swedish king being kidnapped by dwarves.

The murder of the Colleen Bawn.

Pseudoscience vs. pseudometaphysicians.

The world's oldest lunch box.

Vehicle folklore.

Betting on Kitchener's life.

The colorful life of a vaudevillian.

The moon is all wet.

Contradictory surnames.

A 16th century law student's ghost story.

Charlemagne's canal.

Memoirs of a 19th century soldier in India.

How one man overturned 150 years of biology.

This week in Russian Weird: how the whole country was influenced by an American soap opera.  (I watched "Santa Barbara" for two years in the mid-80s, but solely because I was crazy in love with Lane Davies.  Had little use for the show otherwise.  Considering how SB got such consistently low ratings in the U.S., it's fascinating how it became such a cultural phenomenon overseas.)

The early days of the Jockey Club.

Napoleon vs. insects.  Napoleon lost.

You can buy a Scottish lighthouse that was also the scene of a notorious murder.  (Hey, Paula Bryner, care to pool our pennies and put in a bid?)

If you need a few extra bucks and happen to be an expert in ancient Chinese script, do I have the job for you.

A brief history of chimneys.

The execution of an abused wife.

Where Beowulf was read.

Manatee conspiracy theories.

The problems with Georgian water.

The Case of the Twinkling Intestines.

An ancient Indonesian record of tsunamis.

An attempted assassination of Napoleon.

The letter that revealed a murder.

The wife of Lafayette.

And that's it for this week.  See you on Monday, when we'll look at murder in 17th century Scotland.  What could be more delightful?  In the meantime, here's my favorite "summer song."


2 comments:

  1. What a truly excellent link dump! Three thoughts:

    (1) On the vaudeville countess: I totally agree with her that you should live to be 150, because the first 50 years are wasted in learning how to live.

    (2) On soap operas: I never watched "Santa Barbara," but I did watch "General Hospital" one summer (must have been around 1980), back when Luke had his eye-patch. Horrible things, soap operas. Anyway, what struck me most in later life was how much the horrible "Heather" character reminded me of that radio actress who played almost every bad girl on shows like "The Whistler" or "Philip Marlowe" back in the 1940s. (Sorry, can't remember the actual names of the actresses.) I guess some things don't change.

    (3) On Napoleon vs. the bugs: I always knew Buffy was right (in the original movie, "Buffy the Vampire-Slayer," not to be confused with the television series), when Buffy named "bugs" as the major problem facing our world today, and was laughed at as shallow by all the little pseudo-intellectuals at her high school. Sometimes, you just gotta go with your gut feeling. :)

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  2. The story on the 'letter that revealed a murder' didn't conclude with the arrested man's hanging but I think we may conclude the story that way ourselves. Some murderers just don't do much to cover their tracks, do they?

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