"...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 3, 2024

Weekend Link Dump

 

"The Witches' Cove," Follower of Jan Mandijn

Welcome to the first Link Dump of May 2024!






We're still wondering:  "What the hell was Oumuamua?"

We're still wondering: "What the hell was the Dover Demon?"

We're still wondering: "Where the hell is the Mongolian Death Worm?"

Watch out for those blood-sucking Capelobos!

The days when you could take a hippie bus from London to Calcutta.

The grave of an unhappy civil servant.  (It veers into "libelous tombstone" territory.)

The end of Royal Navy muzzle-loaders.

Victorian "strawberry parties."

The children who remember past lives.

A newly-recovered account of Plato's final hours.

Orangutan, heal thyself.

The Persian king who humiliated ancient Rome.

54 years of Eurovision headlines.

The Baron who gave his name to Munchausen's Syndrome.

Murders at a health care facility.

The man who excelled at pushing peanuts with his nose.  Which just goes to show that we all have hidden talents.

Telephone girls and their shocking hairstyles.

How a ring helped identify a murder victim.

Contemporary reports of the Lusitania sinking.

The "underbelly" of Victorian Paris.

The first seeing eye dog.

The Dark Watchers of the Santa Lucia Mountains.

Crowning a dead May Queen.

The WWII spy who used leprosy to her advantage.

The gardeners of the British Parliament.

The Spring dance of German witches.

The letters of a British military wife in India.

The power of the pun.

Headline of the week:  Was Amelia Earhart eaten by giant crabs?

The birth of Pop-Tarts.

The birth of Penguin Books.

Common legal knowledge in 15th and 16th century England.

In praise of the history of words.

A prisoner of war in the House of Lords.

The first murderer to be caught using fingerprint evidence.

From doorstop to Stone of Destiny.

The time a man flew a B-47 under the Mackinaw Bridge.  Maybe.

In search of Hetty Green's heirs.

The first guidebook for American tourists.

A fake lawyer who won a real case.

The areas where WWI never ended.

The long-time mistress of Wilkie Collins.

An eccentric entrepreneur.

Why do we stop finding new music?  (Although I think most pop music made nowadays is unbearable, I do now listen to a lot of classical and Early Music, which I never did in my younger days. So I'm not sure if this article's premise is correct.)

A woman's mysterious death.

The New York City Army Cats.

A husband's revenge.

Science explains the "Pharaoh's curse."

The murder of a young woman.

That's all for this week!  See you on Monday, when we'll look at a bizarre case of a missing person and a murder.  In the meantime, here's some early Nilsson.

2 comments:

  1. Very interesting account of the 'pharaoh's curse'! Penguin Books, ah... I recall receiving their catalogues in the 1970s, and buying many books from them. Sigh. The 'dark watchers' in California seem like mirages to me - distorted figures in mist? Much like what ships at sea might come upon. It's funny that the capelobos wasn't documented until the 1920s. Could it be a new myth, generated by some specific story? And I rather like Baron Munchhausen. I always envied his life: an adventurous youth, retirement at 40 and another half-lifetime of leisure. Without riding cannonballs. (By the way, the link to an 'eccentric entrepreneur' leads to the Wilkie Collins story whose link is above it...)

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