Happy Friday and happy long weekend to those of us in the US! It’s time for the annual fireworks craziness here. And now, some random links!

Baby names for England and Wales! Oliver and Olivia are the most popular, which seems like this will lead to schoolroom confusion in a few years.

Bloomberg has a great interactive piece on the periodic table. 

From Kensie: It’s never too early to start planning for Halloween! (Seriously, it’s only two months away. We’ve started already.)

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

Thursdays! Arthur Dent was right, I can never get the hang of them. Fortunately, Julie has come to the rescue with a great link about a newly discovered skull which challenges the linear evolution theory. Go and explore!

So. Er. While the world continues its bizarre turning, we continue with some links.

A newly discovered hoard of coins leads to a discovery about a Norman-era tax scam! 

Speaking of, Potosí, the “city of silver,” had its own authenticity issues. 

In the 1930s, someone came up with a solution to the difficulties of parallel parking. 

Let’s take a look back at the resurrectionists, specifically Burke and Hare, who made a living off the dead.

Today’s links are brought to you by this Metafilter post about mallwave, in which someone likens the nostalgia for the malls of the ‘80s and ‘90s to “American hauntology,” and wow, are they ever right. The whole thread is great, with links to treasures like Midnight Television, the work of Mark Fisher, the Dead Mall series on YouTube, and The Midnight, a current band trying to recapture a bit of that sound. Go and immerse yourself!

Happy Monday, everyone!

Literature/language: Do you speak Internet? Gretchen McCulloch has written a book about the ever changing lingo online, and it’s getting a lot of attention. 

Architecture: Hooray for the “ordinary” architecture, bringing a little color to everyday life. (I love the bird castle shown in the article.)

Architecture Part 2: It’s back to school season, and the IKEA hackers are hard at work tweaking products to meet their needs, like this brilliant idea of using children’s furniture to create a home office. 

Visual art, in a sense: DarkSky shows weather maps both current and historic, and their maps show the worldwide temperatures.

It’s a Friday Links Extravaganza!

From Julie: Bread has been baked using ancient yeast. Apparently it tastes amazing!

From Zazoo: “Lizzo has a new flavor of Absolut! Absolut Juice, of course...”

From Cassandra: What kind of role model are you? I got Mr. Rogers. I presume it’s the puppets.

From several sources: A squirrel attended a Twins baseball game on two consecutive nights. Way to go, squirrel!

Via AI Weirdness: Let’s have neural nets name the new XFL teams. I would LOVE a team named the Wombatz.

Tedium looks back at the social networks we’ve used. Is it time for a revival? (As someone still blogging after 19 years, I say sure, why not.)

Texting has weirded capitalization norms for a while. Now it’s affecting popular songs! 

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

Time for one of my favorite things: names! What’s In a Name is a great interactive tool showing American names between 1918 and 2018. This is even more comprehensive than the Social Security database. (Also, my name was most popular in 1947. I thought it would be earlier than that.)

Meanwhile, the Reddit genealogists are discussing the most unique names they’ve found in their research. (Preserved Fish! Bwahaha!)

If you’re more into colors than words, here’s an interactive display of book covers over the past 11 years, grouped by similarity. You can search for books within the display, too…I think. I tried it and my browser crashed, so proceed with caution.

For the historians: Check out the Casebooks Project, showing medical records from 1600s astrologers! Yes, really! The prescribed treatments are…quite something.

Did you hear about the Miskatonic University’s expedition to Tunguska? No? Well, there’s a Kickstarter that can tell you all about it. 

Behold the heavy metal cowboys of Botswana! They look awesome.

In 1973, a computer at MIT predicted how our civilization would end. Um. It’s happening rather soon. 

Many thanks to Nicole for sending this great video of the earth’s rotation and the Milky Way. Wow.

Occasionally I raise the idea that time isn’t linear, and Bunny tells me that’s bonkers. But look! Here’s someone else asking if time has a set direction! 

Also, in somewhat related thinking, what sort of gait is best in life? Ambling, apparently?

Due to short-lived technology, future historians will most likely look upon this age of the internet in total confusion.

Good morning and happy(?) Monday…

Literature: Was John Steinbeck a spy for the CIA? Signs point to yes! 

Art: The Metropolitan Museum of Art has an analytical chemist on staff, showing that art and science can coexist successfully.

Random: Behold, a YouTube channel dedicated to squirrel obstacle courses. This is the perfect antidote to Monday.

We’ve made it to Friday!

From Bunny: Have you heard about the TV head guy? He has a TV for a head and is putting TVs on porches. It’s true!

From Satori: A kid found a mammoth tooth while on vacation in Amish country. My Amish country source reports that an entire woolly mammoth skeleton was once discovered there, and suggests Woolly Mammoths as a new mascot name for the local teams.

Also from Satori: Murals and basketball courts don’t mix, evidently. 

From Zazoo: Two male penguins are hatching an egg together! 

From Cassandra: Have you ever stopped to think about how subversive The Wizard of Oz really is?

From local news: There’s a new roller coaster coming to town, and it looks rather impressive. 

And finally: Serena Williams vs. drones. Who would win? (Hint: it’s not the drones.)

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

A great article in the LA Times spotlights their outpost of the Free Black Women’s Library, which started in New York and pops up in various places around the nation.

UNESCO has added several new World Heritage properties, including Frank Lloyd Wright’s work!

The true website we need in these challenging times: The Pigeon Movie Database. Does what it says on the tin. Fantastic.

I had no idea there was a site dedicated to Fortean Ireland. See, you can learn something every day! 

Closer to home, an “unknown bipedal creature” was seen last week near Spooky Librarians HQ, evidently.

Speaking of monsters and whatnot, check out Ray Harryhausen’s restored monsters! They’ll be at an exhibit in Scotland next year.

Will we ever get to Mars? Maybe, but not to stay, according to this analysis. So much for Cowboy Bebop coming true. Bah.

Hello! Today I’m pointing you to the Nonument Symposium, which took place in June and was dedicated to “the hidden, abandoned, and forgotten monuments of the 20th century.” The good people of We Make Money, Not Art went to the symposium and have two mega-posts about it, full of fascinating photos and links. Check it out if you can.

Hello and happy Monday!

Literature #1: Was John Keats a graverobber? Some believe he was, and have laid out their arguments.

Literature #2: Behold the literary tattoos of the New York Public Library staff! Check out the comments for additional contributions.

Music #1: Every Noise At Once is a digital music map that plays samples of each genre – over 3,300 of them. Check out the links at the very bottom of the page, too, for more amazing data sets like Every Place At Once. 

Music #2, sort of: Iron Maidens Laundry, at your service!

Happy Friday, everyone. Thanks again to everyone who sent in links!

From Cassandra: Marcus Aurelius on life and death. 

Also from Cassandra: Poetry in today’s America is just as vibrant and important as it’s ever been.

Also also from Cassandra: Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women explores modern desire. 

From Julie: The Milky Way is warped and twisted. Just like us!

Also from Julie: Below the streets of Paris lies an old Knights Templar stronghold. 

From Holly: Das Auto, meet Depeche Mode. 

From Zazoo: The Dark Crystal trailer is out! 

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

Hi there. We lost my mother-in-law on Friday, so we've been offline a lot, trying to get everything (and ourselves) together. We'll be back tomorrow with Links from Others (many thanks to everyone for sending them in) and then be back to semi-normal next week. Thanks.