"...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 12, 2019

Weekend Link Dump



This week's Link Dump is proud to be sponsored by royalty!

[Just don't tell him this is the case with all cats.]


Watch out for those sea vamps!

Watch out for those haunted mirrors!

Marie Antoinette and a notable royal hunt.

The Doge of Genoa goes up against Louis XII.  And eventually wishes he hadn't.

The long history of "Jack and the Beanstalk."

Stolen Nazi era items at the British Library.

A rock band whose music you undoubtedly know.  Even though you've never heard of them.

A new look at an old case I covered on this blog a while back: The Green Bicycle Mystery.

The mystery light of Ballymoney.

The link between fraud and proper haberdashery.

Scientists are searching for a parallel universe.  As if the one we already have isn't bad enough.

An unlucky lucky cat.

How the 18th century gave us those three magic words, "Pooping robot duck."

The conclusion to last week's post about the saga of Mermanjan.

The Mitford sisters were an odd lot.  But you probably already knew that.

Speaking of peculiar families, here's the woman who had her daughter sterilized.

Robert Kirk and the fairies.

This week in Russian Weird: what in hell was this submarine up to? 

This week in Russian Weird also features in the Darwin Awards.

All you need to know about Victorian corpse coolers.

A Georgian-era home and its residents.

Did D.B. Cooper recently pass away in San Diego?

The American Revolution's Dr. Strange.

Poor old Pompeii.  First the volcano, and now this.

Don't spit!

The voyage that inspired "Moby Dick."

Uncovering a Viking boat burial in Sweden.

That time it was claimed Mark Twain acted as a ghostwriter.  I am speaking quite literally.

If you go to chiropractors, thank a ghost.

You can't keep a good cockatoo down.

The Ghost Club.

Queen Victoria's hairdresser.

The strange case of the missing girl and the Vatican.

Murder in a boarding house.

A professor's mysterious suicide.

A brief history of the hot dog.

For dessert, a brief history of chocolate and vanilla.

John Quincy Adams, dirty dancer.

And, of course, a brief history of picnics.

Britain's most haunted village.

America's most haunted small town.

LSD and a legendary suicide.

An abandoned French time capsule.

If you're anxious to obtain information about how to eat from, uh, the wrong end, have I got the link for you.  And yes, this is a Thomas Morris post.  Consider yourselves warned.

And yet another Link Dump comes to a close.  See you on Monday, when we'll look at an Icelandic poltergeist.  In the meantime, it's summer, so this means War:

5 comments:

  1. The Victoria's hairdresser link ndoesn't work

    ReplyDelete
  2. The most likely D.B. Cooper candidate wasn't Rackstraw, and for that matter wasn't even a man. Barbara Dayton (1926-2002) had been born Bobby Dayton and a few years prior to the hijacking had underwent one of the country's first gender reassignment procedures. Some years after the hijacking Dayton bragged to people that she had temporarily reverted to her former male identity to carry out the crime, noting that as a woman she'd never be a suspect. Dayton quickly shut up when someone told her that the statute of limitations hadn't run out.
    Whoever the hijacker was, he/she must have had a knowledge of aviation and parachuting experience, and was familiar with the geography of the Puget Sound area. Dayton, a University Washington librarian who was a private pilot and as Bobby had been a military paratrooper, met all of these requirements. In addition, everyone who knew her said that she had a very bold, risk-taking personality, and supposedly in a man's clothing and haircut she would have resembled the sketches of the hijacker. The only complicating factor is that Dayton was a few inches shorter than the lowest estimate of the hijacker's height, but then again no witnesses remembered standing next to Cooper and estimates of a seated person's height can be wildly inaccurate.

    ReplyDelete
  3. The Mitford sisters must have been their parents' nightmare (except maybe Deborah, who was pretty normal, or as normal as possible with such sisters.) After becoming involved in Fascism, Communism and devoting a life to various forms of oppression and political evil, they must have been thinking, 'Why couldn't they have run away with a nice drunk or swindler?'

    And that parallel universe... I think scientists are just looking for an escape plan.

    ReplyDelete

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