Friday, October 26, 2018

Happy Friday, everyone! Just dropping in for a quick few links before heading off into the lands of vacation.

From Zazoo: Banksy’s shredding painting prank didn’t go quite as planned. 

Also from Zazoo: San Francisco rents are so high that service workers can’t afford to live there…which leads to some creative setups.

Green-Wood Cemetery, one of my favorites, is putting on Border Crossings: This and Other Worlds the weekend of November 2nd. If you’re in the NYC area, check it out; it looks amazing.

Have a safe and spiffy Halloween, everyone! See you soon.

Wednesday, October 24, 2018

Hello! It's sort of dangerous out there. Stay safe, everyone.

If you haven't visited Retronaut in a while, please do so - they're posting many capsules, all of which are great.

 Also great, in a Brutalist sort of way, are these war memorials in what once was Yugoslavia.

Tuesday, October 23, 2018

Hi everyone! Try a Neural Horror Picture show this spooky season, courtesy of AI Weirdness!

(Learned a lot about AI last week at Internet Librarian, so this fits in well.)

Friday, October 12, 2018

BONUS POST!

I found this on Twitter, and apparently this is originally from Facebook, but I couldn't track down the origin:




I am pleased to report that my Young Adult Book would be "Love, Book Club, and Other Things That Are Better in Space."

Meanwhile, my husband is equally thrilled that his book would be titled "Love, My Butt, and Other Big, Round Things."


Happy Friday! Next week, I will be at the Internet Librarian conference (say hi if you see me), then I will be back, and then we’re taking a few days to celebrate Halloween properly. The upshot is that Folderol will be super erratic from now until the end of the month. On to the links!

From Julie: Stephen Hawking’s final scientific paper has been released. 

From Zazoo: A look back at Margaret Thatcher’s homophobic Clause 28, thirty years later. Bonus: Here’s Boy George’s “No Clause 28” song.

From Cassandra: Look to the nuns for leaders in the resistance movement. 

Also from Cassandra: What happened to the night children? (This needs to be a song title.)

Stay safe, everyone! Back soon.

Thursday, October 11, 2018

The always fascinating Public Domain Review took a look at Count Stenbock, a poet and contemporary of Oscar Wilde and Yeats. I’d never heard of him before, but he led quite the decadent life, apparently.

Anne Thériault’s latest entry on the Queens of Infamy is up, and I learned that Catherine de Medici kept a whole hidden cabinet in the walls at Blois. Talk about home décor inspiration!

The LA Review of Books interviewed Aimee Mann about her favorite writers, both past and present. 

Why is Nepal’s flag so different? Well, part of it has to do with (lack of) colonization. (Insert Eddie Izzard’s bit about flags here.)

Wednesday, October 10, 2018

Best of luck to all those in the hurricane’s path; it looks scary as all getout. 

Also scary, back in the day, was working as a cemetery guard. Apparently quite a few men suffered from “tombstone madness.” 

A Rothschild baroness collected skulls, which are now part of a museum exhibit. Perfect for the spooky season.

Tuesday, October 09, 2018

Have petroglyphs shown the way to a lost Indian civilization? Some archaeologists think so!

Via Tom and Lorenzo, the 2018 World of Wearable Art, and its award winners, is as mind-blowing as always. Take some time and explore, it’s worth it!

Monday, October 08, 2018

Not to start off the week with bad news, but…the planet has some bad news. 

(Here’s the full report, if you like.)

In other news…Tolstoy once inspired a whole “back to the land” movement of sorts, and one farm still survives, in a unique way.

Friday, October 05, 2018

Happy Friday, and hail to our new empress, who pulled a thousand-year-old sword from a lake. She’s only eight years old, but her name is Saga and she can’t do any worse than what we have now, right? 

From Cassandra: Confessions of a (sixth generation) mortician. From my days as the partner of a mortuary college librarian, this sounds about right.

Have a safe and spiffy weekend, everyone. See you next week.

Thursday, October 04, 2018

OK, everyone, I am going to Internet Librarian very soon, and I am going to make a concerted effort to be social and extroverted and join events and all that good stuff that is supposed to expand my comfort zone. (I say this now, from the remove of ten days or so. But still, I am going to try!) So wish me luck, and if you have any suggestions, send them my way.

Wednesday, October 03, 2018

Today: Spooky music! More specifically, here are 31 great spooky albums to listen to and/or track down, depending on your current music library, brought to you by Diabolique Magazine. (Special bonus: One of the contributors is our friend Heather Drain!)

Tuesday, October 02, 2018

Hi all. It’s October, finally, and that means we can be properly spooky. One way to begin is with Bob Freeman’s annual Occultober! 

However, there’s real life horror unfolding in Indonesia after the recent earthquake and tsunami. There are a myriad of ways to donate and help, but here are a few. Please help out if you can.

Monday, October 01, 2018

OK, let’s start another week. Here are some links, before the world gets too wound up again! 

Hollywood has a retirement home for cast and crew members, and it has its own TV channel with original programming by and for the residents. (This is a really great story, I highly recommend it.) 

Remember the attempt at combining board games with VCR tapes? It didn’t really go too well, and Tedium explores why. 

More AI weirdness: Here are some “common objects” as imagined by an AI network. It’s very good at dogs! Not so much with clocks or people, although the clocks look like something out of an amazing steampunk movie.

There are hundreds of gorgeous miniatures depicting Islamic science. Most of these are modern fakes. Why? Well, it’s a long story.