"...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, August 12, 2022

Weekend Link Dump

 

"The Witches' Cove," Follower of Jan Mandijn

What's summer fun without a family of lucky black cats?


A miniature "book" by Charlotte Bronte goes back home.

Some Nigerian bronzes are going back home.

The lives of lower and middle-classes in Pompeii.

There may be buried treasure under Portland, Oregon.

A very well-preserved medieval kitchen.

The sinking of SS Princess Alice.

A brief history of lipstick.

A work of fiction that was a bit too realistic.

Crime and mystery on British railways.

The ancient people of the Amazon.

A widow's ingenious way of dealing with a deathbed promise.

How a Sultan's skull wound up as part of the Treaty of Versailles.

A unique way of remembering a lost soldier.  This is my favorite story from this week.

Killer ice cream!

In which Andrew Carnegie tells a joke.

The legacy of an amateur glaciologist.

An Irish girl's disappearance.  (This is one of those where it's pretty clear what happened, but nobody can prove it.)

Mrs. Southern's sad (and homicidal) case.

A family claims they were driven from their home by poltergeists.

Hetty Green, notorious tightwad.

The birth of bird-watching.

No, I do not want to upload my brain to a computer.  My life is weird enough already.

The hoax that inspired "Frankenstein."

Some executions of women in Early Modern England.

A treasure trove has been recovered from a 17th century shipwreck.

The beginning of the end for Sir Robert Walpole.

Reporting the fall of Richard II.

What it was like to live on a reduced income in 1868.  (Spoiler: it wasn't fun.)

Explorers were once big on "portable soup."

The grim side of railway work.

When the Thames was a "zombie river."

Some missing monarchs.

Another of the Salem witches has been cleared.  Albeit a bit late in the day.

The members of Led Zeppelin were an unpleasant lot, even by rock star standards.

The bizarre resolution to a missing-persons case.

That's it for this week!  See you on Monday, when two young men stage a practical joke during a wake, and things do not go as planned.  To put it mildly.  In the meantime, here's the late Judith Durham.  I love her voice.

6 comments:

  1. "The hoax that inspired "Frankenstein."

    Helluva hoax to inspire a book written eight years earlier!

    On the other hand there's Captain America's decades 'on ice'

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  2. Sadly indeed, the carnival is over.

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  3. https://www.hindustantimes.com/cities/mumbai-news/a-series-of-fortunate-events-16-year-old-reunited-with-mother-after-9-years-101659727607671.html

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  4. That is a good story about 'Chintey' indeed. Many regiments have animal mascots, but Chintey is rather special. And the state of the Thames in the nineteenth century was truly horrifying. The best that could be said about it, I guess, is that most of the pollution was organic...

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    1. There's a story--I assume it's apocryphal, but I'd like to think it isn't--where Queen Victoria was boating on the Thames, and observed all these various scraps used for toilet paper floating in the water. She asked an aide what they were, and he responded tactfully, "Madam, those are 'No swimming' signs."

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  5. Oh, and I always liked "Morningtown Ride"; what a lovely lullaby. And Morningtown itself sounds like a nice place to live.

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