"...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, November 20, 2020

Weekend Link Dump

 

"The Witches' Cove," Follower of Jan Mandijn


The WLD is here!

Let the show begin!





Where the hell were modern humans born?

Who the hell painted "Salvator Mundi?"

Connecticut is really booming!

America's first modern supermarket.

It's not always a good thing to find buried treasure.

31 visions of Hell.  Surprisingly, I'm not talking about a 2020 calendar.

A Neolithic construction boom.

Recently uncovered ancient Egyptian inscriptions.

A very unusual tree.

17th century construction rules.

The unsolved--and unsolvable--mystery of Poe's death.  (Note: the reason it's impossible to know how Poe died is that we have so few reliable details about his last days.  The main source about his final illness is Dr. Moran, and he was, to say the least, untrustworthy.)

A man who had molten metal spurted into his eye--and it turned out to be no biggie.  I still wouldn't try that at home, though.

The sad end of a heartbroken prison cat.

The meaning behind Celtic knots.

The 19th century man who invented flight.

Britain's most haunted road.

America's loneliest road.

A Stone Age campsite.

Five legends of Portsmouth.

The "mother" of the American Thanksgiving Day.

Ghosts and America's first pharmacy.

The chapbooks of John Fairburn.

The paranormal Prime Minister.  (I've read some of King's diaries--they're available online--and I can confirm that he swam in some really weird waters.)

That time Earl Stanley Gardner became a real Perry Mason.

A strange disappearance in Yosemite.

Scientists want us to be able to smell ancient Europe, thus proving some researchers have way too much spare time on their hands.

The adventures of a female Victorian explorer.

The history behind a George Romney portrait.

A record of ancient Roman bribery.

Manet and alternative medicine.

The story of the fatal drops.

The time the Bronx had a panther hunt.

The theory that life on our planet was started by asteroids.

Pigeons: you love 'em, you need 'em, you've gotta have them.

The most important intellectual nobody's ever heard of.  Uh, except for the writer of this article, of course.

The first Englishman in Japan.

A brief history of dolls' houses.

A haunted wedding dress.

A seal turns tourist.

A poisoner gets a theatrical execution.

Considering how the year is going, this wouldn't surprise me a bit.

A little-known battle's importance to the Revolutionary War.

The unsolved murder of a hitchhiker.

A cat's gonna cat.

The search for cinnamon.

A psychic predicts her own death.

Unearthing the secrets of Saqqara.

A sinister disappearance at sea.

Why it's never a good idea to store arsenic in the kitchen.

1943's Dambusters Raid.

A brief history of gout.

The diary of a body-snatcher.

The most famous speech in history.

Excavating a Viking ship.

The Great Blizzard of 1888.

The "Princess Alice" disaster.

That's it for this week!  See you on Monday, when we'll look at what just might be the weirdest story I've posted on this blog.  In the meantime, here's some Dowland.


2 comments:

  1. William Adams, the first Englishman in Japan, was likely the model for the main character in the book 'Shogun'. (I wonder if he looked like Richard Chamberlain?) And the Dam-busters' raid was a daring operation, made possible by the phenomenal ingenuity of Barnes Wallis. I'd heard that Peter Jackson was planning to re-make the movie about that attack, but haven't heard if it's going ahead.

    ReplyDelete
  2. When there were mysterious “booms” going on in my area a couple years ago it turned out to be some nut who ran a chemical retailer and was building homemade explosives. The FBI ended up involved and the guy and his girlfriend were arrested and all sorts of scary stuff was found.

    ReplyDelete

Comments are moderated. Because no one gets to be rude and obnoxious around here except the author of this blog.