"...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, September 3, 2021

Weekend Link Dump

 

"The Witches' Cove," Follower of Jan Mandijn


Strange Company HQ invites you to relax in our adjacent restaurant (immortalized, of course, by Louis Wain,) while you read this week's Link Dump.



Who the hell decapitated Sasquatch?

A murderer's "weight of grief."

Social media and fractured identities.

The lighthouse keeper who was "the bravest woman in America."

Just another reminder that TikTok is the home of our very goofiest humans.

It's now believed that the Vinland Map is a fake.

An ancient commerce scam.

The Solomon Islands and some nasty UFOs.

The mysteries of an English village.

A young man's career in the East India Company.

Pompeii wasn't the only ancient city to be buried by a volcano.

A brief history of the breakup album.

A police dog saves a cat family.

The "other" Norman Conquests.

That time an English village was haunted by a cockatrice.

Madame Palatine, the most fun person at the court of Louis XIV.

The "strangest cabinet in British history."

Some "inevitable" wars that didn't happen.

New research on the Dead Sea Scrolls.

A couple of innovative surgical techniques.

A child's particularly brutal murder.

The life of a paranormal investigator.

The memoirs of a 19th century London delivery boy.

Europe's first farmers.

Very ancient humans got creative with elephant bones.

One of the longest manhunts in U.S. history.

You might not be surprised to learn that cemetery superintendents see the damnedest things. 

Upwardly mobile in Pompeii.

That time Thomas Jefferson harbored a killer ram.

The sinking of the SS Princess Alice.

The consolation of a cat.

That's it for this week!  See you on Monday, when we'll look at a teenage girl's disappearance.  In the meantime, here's Warren Zevon.  If you put a gun to my head and forced me to name my one favorite rock album, this would be it.  I first heard it when I was 14, I think, and I've been playing it pretty much nonstop ever since.


4 comments:

  1. And the mostly forgotten Norman Conquest

    https://www.goodreads.com/series/77501-norman-conquest

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  2. Kate Summerscale has a book on paranormal investigation "The Haunting of Alma Fielding". It's a fascinating look at Nandor Fodor, an investigator who became a psychoanalyst, partly because of his study of Alma Fielding, the "victim" of poltergeists who was believed to be a medium. The tension in the investigators between the desire to believe the causes of her problems were supernatural and the desire to prove this scientifically is fascinating, especially as it clearly becomes harder and harder to prove what they wanted to believe.

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  3. I was just thinking the other day about the Norman conquest of Sicily. (I don't know why I was thinking thus.) The Normans were a particularly adventurous sub-species of Viking, and I understand the Kingdom of Sicily that they founded was, for a time, a marvellously civilised and advanced country.

    On the other hand, the mysteries of Copgrove seem quite genteel by comparison, the perfect type of mystery for a quiet English village.

    But it's sad for me to learn that the Vinland map has at last (and finally, I imagine) been proven a fake...

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    Replies
    1. The news about the Vinland map was a big disappointment to me, too.

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