"...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 30, 2021

Weekend Link Dump

 

"The Witches' Cove," Follower of Jan Mandijn

It's time for this week's Link Dump!

And the Strange Company Army is on the march!



Lydia Sherman, poison fiend.

Nobody told me that it was Lydia Sherman Week around the blogosphere.

Some stained glass windows at Canterbury Cathedral are even older than we thought.

I never thought I'd see "Hobby Lobby" and "Epic of Gilgamesh" in the same news story, but that's 2021 for you.

An account of children living in a den of snakes.

A novel way of dealing with public transportation.

Gravediggers go on strike.

The ghosts of Norton Hall.

The giant of Alton, Illinois.

The mystery of a Winchester rifle.

A birdwatcher in early 20th century Assam.

The weird death of Mitrice Richardson.

A dangerous old New York City tradition.

The mystery of post-mortem meditation.

The only people to not die on this planet.

The Japanese Embassy Hoax.

The Duke of Wellington in India.

New York's Tonsillectomy Riots.

Strange moorland carvings.

Ireland takes fairies very very seriously.

Don't lie to your dog.  

Emily Bronte's lost second novel.  To be honest, I wouldn't have objected if the first had been lost as well.

Squiggly wiggly fossils!

A captain's very unlucky first voyage.

The oldest known "message in a bottle."

English is a weird language.

Britain's first female Olympians.

The world of the thief-trainers.

Over in England, they still have live bombs from WWII lying about the place.

The pigeon armies of WWI.

A brief history of Nathan's Famous hot dogs.

That's all for this week!  See you on Monday, when we'll revisit the never-a-dull-moment world of Scottish witchcraft.  In the meantime, here's Marshall Crenshaw.

5 comments:

  1. The article on English is a good one, with an excellent sentence: "The vernacular translations [of Latin] were written to be pronounced, and the spelling was intended to get as close to the pronunciation as possible." That, I think, is a secret to the diversity of pronunciation in English: every district had a different pronunciation of a word, and therefore might have a different spelling.

    'Wellington in India' was interesting, too. Though best-known for Waterloo, and, famous as well for his Spanish campaigns, the Duke was most proud of the way he fought the Battle of Assaye. (As an aside, the article mentions the Indian town of Jalna. There is a series of classic Canadian novels about a fictional wealthy family that lived in an Ontario house called Jalna. The family's founder had fought there while in the army. I had long thought the town was as fictional as the house. Apparently not.)

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    Replies
    1. I’ve read all of the Jalna novels. I found them interesting, if increasingly weird in a psychological way. By the time I got to the last books, I concluded that the author had...issues.

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    2. I;m going to have to research those novels. They sound more interesting than I thought...

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    3. They're very soap-operaish, but like a good soap opera, they keep you reading to find out "what happens next." The last couple of books in the series suddenly got pretty lurid--a child commits murder, hints of father-daughter incest...eesh.

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  2. And the Strange Company Army looks a fine and disciplined force!

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