"...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, May 1, 2020

Weekend Link Dump

"The Witches' Cove," Follower of Jan Mandijn

This week's Link Dump is hosted by this mighty Viking!




Watch out for those spectral dogs!

A very creepy Chinese tomb.

The real story behind a murder ballad.

Bull, mascot cat of New York's Cotton Exchange.

The old music hall songs had deeper meanings than you'd think.

Agatha Christie's real-life mystery.

19th century forensic medicine.

A 5,000 year-old energy bar.

Take my 200-year-old jokes, please.

The dark side of apothecary gardens.

How a dead guy once won an Olympic event.

The "Captain Swing" riots.

Renaissance Italians were not fans of casual dining.

A bibliophile's encounters with famous authors.

Warlocks never know when to keep their mouths shut.  (I wrote about Major Weir here.)

A famed Spitalfields herbalist.

How Mr. Muschamp's wooden leg came to be immortalized in the British Library archives.

The most dangerous place in our planet's history.  No, no, not Strange Company HQ.  We could only achieve runner-up status.

Pauper burials on Hart Island, 1900.

Details about the life of Dido Elizabeth Belle.

The Hunger Stones of Europe.

How Shakespeare became an icon.

Evelyn Waugh and America.

Strange wonders of the natural world.

The more we examine Gobekli Tepe, the weirder it gets.

If you think the universe is a weird place, science just proved you right.

The professor and the corpse that refused to stay properly dead.

The first newspaper in Derby, England.

The spiritualist pandemic.

Baudelaire's mysterious mistress.

19th century safety masks.

Napoleon as a British hero.

A Scottish mermaid.

Early 19th century "Vagabondiana."

The man who was killed by a meteorite.

That's it for this week! Tune in on Monday, when we look at a one of Australia's most famous murder mysteries. In the meantime, here's a bit of Mozart. Lovely stuff.

3 comments:

  1. 120 years on, the scenes on Hart Island are the same as people who died from the COVID-19 pandemic are buried in mass graves on the island.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hart Island has fairly consistently gotten about 1,500 burials a year for the last few decades. About 60% are adults and 40% infants. While some of the adults had no families to claim their bodies, more often there were family members who were aware of the deaths but elected the Hart Island option. Unidentified bodies are quite rare, seldom more than 10 to 15 a year.

      The large number of burials in the past few weeks were not those of Covid-19 victims. The city generally keeps unclaimed bodies in morgues for a year or more, but began clearing them out in anticipation of a surge of virus victim.

      Delete
  2. What does it say about me that I think some of the two hundred year old jokes are funnier than what I hear now?

    But I still find the 'hunger stones' eerie. Why would people take such effort to make them?

    ReplyDelete

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