"...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, March 4, 2016

Weekend Link Dump



This week's Link Dump is brought to you by the Demon Cats of the High Seas!







What the hell is whistling in Oregon?

Watch out for those haunted lighthouses!

Watch out for those killer cameras!

Watch out for those toothsnatchers!

How Napoleon escaped from Elba.

That time Johnny Cash was nearly killed by an ostrich.

An early "Cargo Cult."

A horrific 19th century family murder.

19th century examples of animal grief.

Turns out the deepest part of the ocean is one noisy place.

A "barbarous" 18th century murder.

Damn right, crows are smart.

The strange death of the strange Nikola Tesla.

A handless, legless artist.

The Michelangelo of Caricature.

Speaking of caricature, here are some of Napoleon.

The astronomer whose mother was an accused witch.

Danish soldiers quarrel in 17th century Yorkshire.  It doesn't end well.

How Dr. Crippen wound up on the wrong end of the first modern manhunt.

There are no words, indeed.  "This is how the world ends..."

A pugilistic Hercules.

A look at Georgian romance and marriage.

How a slave came to rule an Arab sheikdom.

A Scottish noblewoman, businesswoman, and warrior.

The movie that ticked off Dwight Eisenhower.

The sound of 500-year-old English.

How murderers were once used to cure warts.

The Victorian illustrations of Kate Greenaway.

The Doll Shop Spy.

Ben Franklin, London intellectual.

The mysterious death of a 17th century female art teacher.

Benjamin Disraeli's Hughenden.

Marie Antoinette's flowers.

Pluto has a moon with stretch marks.

Photos of 1960s Moscow.

Medicine made of sunbeam and beetle wings.

The history of the Ouija board.

The Danville treasure hoax.

The more Fortean aspects of the Lindbergh kidnapping case.  (Personally, I think Hauptmann was innocent--which is perhaps the most Fortean twist of all.)

18th century VD.

A kind-hearted Scottish werewolf.

English mesmerism.

A mysterious ancient religious relic.

A new translation of the Pyramid Texts.

The tradition of Leap Year proposals.

Charles Dickens and exploding bustles.

Broadway's "worst play ever?"

Broadway's "Cat Congress."

A Napoleonic fortune-teller.

The last Viking raid.

Mrs. Tyler dreams a dream.

Date night in 1980 San Francisco.

The ghosts of Contadora.

John Dee's maddeningly magical maths.

Step into the YouTube time machine and take a tour of ancient Rome:



Sorry if you've already encountered many "Boy vomits up his own twin" stories today.

Let me also offer apologies if  "Boy has intestinal mouse" tales are old hat to you.

And, of course, you've probably seen a million "Neurian snake-hating werewolves" posts.

This Week in Russian Weird:  How about a visit to a Siberian beach?  In February?  Oh, and they're looking to nuke asteroids, too.

And, finally, the gang behind Twitter's hugely popular #FolkloreThursday hashtag recently launched a companion website!  Check it out.

And so we say farewell to this week's Link Dump.  See you on Monday, when we'll be talking haunted furniture.  In the meantime, goodbye, so long:



2 comments:

  1. I like Kate Greenaway's illustrations. The people in them always had a timeless quality to them, as if they lived in a tranquil 18th century from a fantasy story.

    And the story of the slave who became ruler of a province isn't so unusual. Slaves rose to become chief ministers from time to time in the near and middle east. The Mamelukes of Egypt were a caste of slave-warriors, who, in the words of one modern edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, ;hacked their way to the throne' over two centuries. I figure when the usually clinical Britannica uses such a phrase, the period under discussion must have been, at the least, colourful.

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  2. I liked that parrot, speaking Latin and Greek, in addition to vintage English. I think it as speaking archaic Spanish, as well. The parrot is clearly smarter than me. How ironic, it still looks like dinnertime for my cats.

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