"...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 28, 2023

Weekend Link Dump

 

"The Witches' Cove," Follower of Jan Mandijn

Enjoy this week's Link Dump!

And then let's all join the Strange Company staffers for a swim!


Jesse Pomeroy, notorious "boy fiend."

A particularly horrifying suicide.

Some research on a troubled 19th century family.

Shropshire's forgotten ghosts.

A young gentleman's very unfortunate encounter with a bottle.

Life on a late 19th century Royal Navy warship.

The first woman to circumnavigate the world by car.

More evidence that we have been seriously underestimating early humans.  And don't get me started on Neanderthals.

The woman who refused to marry her rapist.

So, is the Loch Ness Monster just a freaking big eel?

The Renaissance tradition of "punitive portraits."

It's Swan Upping time on the Thames.

A lot of people have been noticing this peculiar shift in the UFO narrative.  We just have no idea what it means.

The 1814 burning of Washington, as seen by the British.

The California town that was submerged by a lake.

The Kentucky cave wars.

In praise of booze.

The Old Jokes' Home.

Some vintage descriptions of Amsterdam.

The rescue of a cat from a chimney.  It wasn't easy.

The vanished Viking settlers of Greenland.

What may be the earliest known curry in Southeast Asia.

The books that were hidden behind a wall for five centuries.

King James I was a very odd piece of work, but at least he bathed.

The origins of the expression "steal a march."

Finally, someone has created a murder map of medieval London.

A look at the Treaty of Lausanne.

A shockingly young father.

That's all for this week!  See you on Monday, when we'll look at a bizarre attempted murder.  In the meantime, here's a bit of glass harp.

4 comments:

  1. It is little known but the largest collection of dead jokes can be found in the Knock-Knockronomicon.

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  2. The story of the young man and the bottle with the bit of potassium in it brought back memories of the days when I used to demonstrate such reactions (without the participation of a human guinea pig, naturally). He's lucky he still had a penis! And clearly in the 19th century, student labs had many fewer safety rules than were drilled in to my head when I was a student. I can still hear my former teacher saying in such a calm tone "Hair is an organic substance that burns very easily. Tie your hair back." I can't imagine what he'd have said about having bottles with random bits of chemicals in them lying around so you could pee in them.

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  3. What about Aloha??? https://www.alohawanderwell.com/

    ReplyDelete
  4. An interesting article on the 'burning of Washington', though, as may be learned from the article itself, mostly it was only public buildings were destroyed, with a couple of private houses. The fires were impressive but most of the city was undamaged. And the article on life on board a Royal Navy ship in the Victorian era was also interesting. I would not have liked to have been part of coaling a steam-ship; I wonder that the officers and men ever got clean.

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