via The National Archives Blog by Louise Bell
Women who were working as part of the goat section (catalogue reference: MUN 4/671)
By 1916, steel companies were beginning to complain about the shortage of supplies of limestone being supplied to them by Buxton Lime Firms. The firm said that this shortage was due to the lack of workmen left at the company – by February 1916, over 600 of their men had joined the Army.
Accordingly, like many firms in Britain during this period, Buxton Lime Firms employed women. There does not seem to be very much information about this undertaking, except for a few notes scribbled on the back of the wonderful collection of photographs that we have of women working there.
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via Stephen’s Lighthouse
Getting a job can be tough, but what if you were a fictional character? How could you even imagine getting an imaginary job?
findcourses.co.uk, who help professionals find relevant courses to help develop more skills, have made a fun piece creating CVs for some of the fictional world’s greatest characters: Professor Trelawney, Jesse Pinkman and Gandalf to name a few.
See if you’d ever employ any of them by viewing their CVs here
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via Interesting Literature
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle discovers the extraordinary meetings of famous writers
J. D. Salinger met Ernest Hemingway. Ernest Hemingway met Ford Madox Ford. Ford Madox Ford met Oscar Wilde. Oscar Wilde met Marcel Proust. Marcel Proust met James Joyce. Some of the most famous writers of the last century met each other, but they also met the great and good from beyond the literary world. And the not so great and not so good. H. G. Wells, for instance, met Josef Stalin.
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via Boing Boing by David Pescovitz
Darth Vader only appeared on screen for 34 minutes yet is the most visually iconic character of the original trilogy. Nerdwriter's Evan Puschak explains why.
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via Arts & Letters Daily: Nicky Woolf in NewStatesmanAmerica
Barack Obama in the Oval Office
Throughout his presidency, Obama read ten letters from US citizens every day, slipped to him in a purple folder.
On election night, 8 November 2016, Amanda Bott of Rochester, Washington, wrote an email to President Obama. “Tonight I’m crying tears of sorrow,” she wrote. “I’m crying for my beautiful country with its beautiful ideals.” It was an expression of fear sent into the ether, but one that reads like a message between old friends. “How did we fall so far?”
The email, published as part of Jeanne Marie Laskas’s To Obama, was one of tens of thousands sent to the president every day, a mass of raw communication both vast and at the same time deeply, often uncomfortably intimate. Obama read it. Throughout his presidency, he read ten letters every day, slipped to him in a purple folder. People wrote to Obama on the best or the worst days of their lives. They wrote to berate him, praise him, or to beg him for help. Some wrote just for the heck of it.
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via the Guardian by Lisa Margonelli
A termite mound – and cheetah – in Namibia. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo
In July 2008, I rented a small yellow car in Tucson, Arizona, and drove it south towards Tombstone. My passengers included an entomologist and two microbial geneticists, and I was following a white van with government plates carrying nine more geneticists. We also had 500 plastic bags, a vacuum flask of dry ice, and 350 cryogenic vials, each the size and shape of a pencil stub. We had two days to get 10,000 termites.
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via the Big THink blog by Frank Jacobs
Mind-boggling as it is, some of the world's roundest countries are also some of the most rectangular ones.
Take look at a map of Turkey and you'll have to agree: it’s a curiously box-shaped country. Why is the wrong question. Like most international borders, Turkey's are the result of geopolitical accident, not of aesthetic or geometric design. A more pertinent query: How rectangular is Turkey? Is it, perhaps, the most rectangular country in the world?
Continue reading (I found the maths involved absolutely fascinating.)
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via About History by Alcibiades
The Pyrrhic War (280-275 BC) was a series of military conflicts involving the Greek states (Epirus, Macedonia and the city-states of Great Greece in Southern Italy), Romans, Italic peoples (primarily Samnites and Etruscans), and Carthage in the composition of various political alliances.
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via Boing Boing by Andrea James
There’s more at the link
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via Interesting Literature
The best poems about kissing
Love is, of course, a perennial theme of poetry, and even the erotic and the sensual are amply covered in the annals of English verse. But how about something like kissing? The task we’ve set ourselves this week is to find five classic poems about kissing, or sharing a kiss, or stealing a kiss, or ‘kisses’ of some kind or another. We hope you like them.
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