"...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 17, 2019
Weekend Link Dump
The staff here at Strange Company HQ decided to skip work to spend the weekend at the beach.
A brief history of English vagrancy.
A Bristol academic thinks he's deciphered the Voynich Manuscript. And another academic thinks he's full of crap. And so it goes.
Bringing to life forgotten creatures of folklore.
India's worst serial killer.
Why Renaissance artists loved sexy weasels.
The world's oldest printed book. And it was intended to be public domain!
So now you can explore shipwrecks without even leaving this link dump.
Analyzing the costume of the plague doctor.
London's phone booths at night.
A female writer in early Hollywood.
Frogmore House throws a heck of a party.
When medieval priests tried to claim sanctuary.
Illustrating murder.
A Prussian grifter.
An 18th century fortune-teller.
The tragic case of the Sea Waif.
The man who met 20 ghosts. Liked most of 'em, too.
The gravedigger who buried two queens.
There's a new record-holder for the world's deepest dive.
A story of a bigamous wife.
That time when doctors prescribed slippers made of dead pigeons.
This week in Russian Weird introduces us to the Almasty.
Islam and Restoration England.
England's first known Christian burial.
People in Bavaria are being killed by crossbows.
How time became universal.
The man who tried to assassinate Napoleon III, and came to regret it.
Investigating a haunted Irish castle.
Tales from the world of Victorian post-mortem photography.
Escaping Gloucester jail, 1765.
Prehistoric medicine.
A brief history of German humor.
A medieval best-selling book.
Rome's "talking statues."
Howard-Bury and the Yeti.
Hitler and the dead tramp.
A mysterious French rock.
Mapping Doggerland.
An Edwardian pet photographer.
Regency era swimwear.
Some people who survived the hangman.
The argument that Shakespeare was a woman.
A mysterious murder in Hawaii.
Love and death on Clapham Common.
The Anti-Corn Law League's own Robin Hood.
Shorter version: we don't know squat about the sun.
The plane that accidentally flew around the world.
A fishing feline golf mascot.
The castle that's haunted by Satan the monkey.
That's it for this week! See you on Monday, when we'll look at a very mysterious murderer. In the meantime, here's a favorite old country song of mine. Considering the rate at which people are fleeing my state, I've been threatening to write a sequel called, "California's the Reason God Made All These U-Hauls."
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The story about the Diamond Sutra had me wondering. It states that the date was written at the end of the book ("11 May 868"). I assume that that is our equivalent of what was really written; I wouldn't have thought that Christian chronology or the Julian calendar would have been used by the author. If it wasn't, you'd think the article would have given what was really written there, with an explanatory note added.
ReplyDeleteI looked up more about the Sutra. The actual date on the book reads, "15th of the 4th moon of the 9th year of Xiantong." This translates into "11 May 868." You're right, the article should have clarified that.
DeleteAnd I'd never heard of Doggerland. It's interesting that such a vast region would have been submerged only 7500 years ago.
ReplyDelete