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| "The Witches' Cove," Follower of Jan Mandijn |
The Strange Company Campanologists are here to announce the arrival of this week's Link Dump!
Why the hell do we sleep?
Who the hell was in the Killhope Moor coffin?
What the hell just exploded in Tennessee?
Watch out for the Bat Beast of Kent!
A cache of ancient gold has been discovered in Denmark.
Images of a very strange asteroid.
The northernmost island in the world has just been discovered.
How the birth of farming affected human immune systems.
Scientists are always doing studies that are old news to anyone who knows cats.
An Empress and her ice palace.
A striking image of Earth taken from the ISS.
A shroud made from a wedding dress.
Contemporary newspaper reports about 9/11.
The church with a very weird skull.
The Great Meteor of 1783.
A brief history of the slang term "Molly."
A brief history of ambergris.
Influential British TV shows from the 1960s.
The conspiracy theory that the whole internet is now a fake. This reminds me of one of my weirder online experiences: some years back, I was doing a lot of research on a particular historical figure. I found a website that had a lot of primary source material about him, along with a discussion forum in which I began to participate. Before long, I noticed some odd things: when I would look up the old newspaper and magazine articles on the site, I found that many of them either did not really exist, or were markedly different from the text the site owner posted. And I began to have a funny feeling about some of the people posting on the forum--for one reason or another, I came to suspect many of them were fake accounts. I got so creeped out that I stopped posting on the forum, although I'd occasionally lurk, just to see what was going on. One day, I found that the site had been taken over by someone else, and the forum had disappeared. I e-mailed the new owner, to ask what was going on. He replied that he had successfully sued the previous owner, because she had posted photos he owned the rights to without permission. Part of the settlement from the lawsuit was that he got the site. He also confirmed my suspicions about the forum: a majority of the "people" posting there were all the previous site owner, using a bunch of pseudonyms. It made me wonder how much of this sort of tomfoolery was cluttering up the internet.
The Great Tea Race.
That time in Scotland where you could buy beer by the slice.
The strange side of New York's Long Island.
1963 was a big year for the occult.
Sightseeing in Medieval England.
The mistress of George I.
The horrifying solution behind a girl's disappearance.
Let's talk Victorian eyebrows.
A murderer plays dead.
A shipwrecked king and queen visit Henry VII.
Something unusual has been spotted in Loch Ness.
A haunted railway car.
New York's first Labor Day.
A wedding turns deadly.
The birth of television.
Dissing some works of classic literature.
Personal reflections on the Indian Political Service.
Ripper the Talking Duck.
A daring Civil War raid.
One of the earliest Merlin narratives.
The largest known comet.
The last great Viking king.
If you've ever wished you lived in ancient Rome, be aware that they crucified dogs. They also had a strange idea of humor.
A one-legged champion swimmer.
A child's unsolved disappearance.
Michelangelo may have been short. I'm not sure why we should care, but here's the link anyway.
That time someone mailed a puppy. Not to fear, it ended well.
Graywood, New York police dog.
Parliament and the Naval Review.
The island where manliness means knitting some badass hats.
The pygmy mammoths of California's Channel Islands.
A tour of the medieval town called Sandwich.
A ghost bear at the Tower of London.
A brief history of pickles.
A brief history of crime literature.
WWII's very young hero.
That's all for this week! See you on Monday, when we'll look at an unusual ghost story. In the meantime, let's get medieval:
Your own experiences of the manipulated forum are interesting, and disturbing. It makes me think the person running that forum was not quite living in reality, or trying to construct her own. I'm not surprised that you would have tumbled to it, but less perspicacious people might have been led in any directon - as they probably are every day on other sites.
ReplyDeleteThe influential British tv series of the 1960s was a good article. I've watched most of them. It reminds of my belief that the BBC has never been as good as when all their series were videotaped. Not only was that indicative of low budgets (and the imagination and inventiveness that have to work with such confines) but it brought an intimacy to television, making it seem like recorded plays, put on just for one viewer. Like many artistic endeavours, something is lost when budgets get bigger.
From the first time I saw the site, I realized the woman who ran it was “in love” with this historical person; that he was her fantasy husband/boyfriend. I suppose she wanted to invent his history to suit her imagination.
DeleteThat's a sad thing to happen to someone but probably little different than someone fantasising about a living celebrity and endowing them with the traits of a fictional character they may portray.
DeleteThat's actually fairly common among people who become interested in a particular historical era. The Richard III Society is chock-full of them.
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