The Facial Features of French Explorers

Before Americans ruled America, French explorers ran rampant across the land, seeking, discovering, naming, and harming. We celebrate the leading figures of this movement and their defining facial characteristics.

Idiots' Books :: Your Bucks Stop Here!

(via NOTCOT.ORG)

It's a Swiss holiday!

Don't worry, T - I didn't forget. You just beat me to the punch on your own blog! (I'm SO ashamed.) But I've been thinking about you all day, swissy, hoping you're having a great one. x!

Everyone else, be sure to stop by swissmiss's blog today and wish her a happy, happy birthday!

It's like a library in a steamer trunk.

And since I love both books AND steamer trunks, I find this wickedly cool. Damn.

(Be sure to bounce around their site a bit. They have some other incredible compact product designs.)



Nils Holger Moormann :: Lese Lebe

Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo

It's a little maudlin for a start-of-the-year post, I know, but it's just too weird not to blog.



The Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo are a museum of the Sicilian dead. This unsettling collection of skeletons and mummified corpses, preserved in their everyday clothing, began in 1599 as a repository for dead friars but soon grew to include local luminaries. The bodies were dried and washed with vinegar. Some were embalmed. Others were allowed to decompose into mere skeletons. Some were carefully posed. Others were hung from the walls. Relatives paid annual upkeep dues to keep their dead loved ones properly propped up in desirable niches. The corpses of recalcitrant relatives were shelved in a less dignified manner. The bodies are catalogoued in seven halls: Men, Women, Virgins, Children, Priests, Monks, and Professionals. Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa is among the noted Sicilians entombed in the catacombs.


Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society :: Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo

Ringing in the New Year.

Happy 2007, everyone!

This seemed an appropriate first post for the new year. Peter van Jagt's "Bottoms Up Doorbell."


van Jagt, Peter Bottoms Up Doorbell for Droog