"...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, May 24, 2013

Weekend Link Dump


Strange company's all a-flutter this week.



And so are the cats.

This week's News of the Odd:

All together now: What the hell is this?

The star-crossed history of Marie Antoinette's watch.

The puzzling Stonehenge Archer.

The saga of Soldier Jennie.

I can't decide if Brunelleschi was a freaking genius or just one sick son-of-a-bitch.  Perhaps both.

An interesting study of unreliable memories and our penchant for rewriting our own history.

The coins that may rewrite Australian history.

Motto:  "I Date Dead People."

Oh, just another story about mustachioed ladies taking an axe to their admirers.

Oh, just another photograph of a woman walking her pet bear.

Some handy tips on ballroom etiquette.  Don't forget to throw your flower-pots at the linkman!

"I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity":  Edgar Allan Poe describing the death of his wife.

Voltaire, lottery-rigger.

Some wonderful old photographs of the Tower of London.

It's nearly the weekend. Time to party with Learned Pigs.

Or better yet, with Stone Age Zombies.

Setenil de las Bodegas, world's most rockin' city.  Seriously.

The Mystery Booms just keep on coming.  (A footnote:  I was among the many people unfortunate enough to experience the Northridge Earthquake of 1994.  As I recall, in the days before the quake, loud booms were occasionally heard in the area from some unknown cause.  For the sake of the good people of Onaway, let's hope there wasn't a connection.)

"But stay! these walls--these ivy-clad arcades--
These mouldering plinths--these sad and blackened shafts--
These vague entablatures--this crumbling frieze--
These shattered cornices--this wreck--this ruin--
These stones--alas! these gray stones--are they all--
All of the famed, and the colossal left
By the corrosive Hours to Fate and me?"
-Edgar Allan Poe, "The Coliseum"

Somehow, it seems fitting that the largest organism on this planet is a old  fungus.

Let's round things off with my favorite tweet of the week:




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