via the Guardian by Ashifa Kassam in Langdon, Alberta
Many Albertans have never actually seen a rat. Photograph: blickwinkel / Alamy/Alamy
Alberta is one of the world’s only places without a breeding population of rats – thanks to skilled pest controllers and a take-no-prisoners approach.
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via the OUP blog by MICHÈLE MENDELSSOHN
Oscar Wilde, photographic print on card mount, circa 1882, by Napoleon Sarony. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
After Oscar Wilde graduated from Oxford, he moved to London and fell into unemployment and although he tried his hand at different jobs he couldn’t find any stable source of income. However, he did become friends with some of the celebrities of the day and attracted the attention of the caricaturist of Punch magazine, which eventually brought him to the attention of theatre promoter Richard D’Oyly Carte.
In 1881, D’Oyly Carte offered Wilde the opportunity to travel to the US as the advertisement of the Gilbert & Sullivan operetta Patience or Bunthorne’s Bride, which was the sensation of the day. This proved to be a pact with the devil as the operetta made fun of Wilde and people who cared about art. Nevertheless, on Christmas Eve 1881, a 27-year-old Oscar Wilde wrapped himself in a fur cloak, boarded the SS Arizona at Liverpool, and set off to the US for his 50 date lecture tour across the country.
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via About History
The colonies of Italy are a combination of European and overseas territories of Italy in relation to Italy, which in the 19th and 20th centuries were colonially dependent on this metropolis and sometimes called the Italian colonial empire.
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via ARts & Letters Daily: Nana Asfour in the PARIS REVIEW
HILMA AF KLINT, GROUP IX/SUW, THE SWAN, NO. 17, 1915
In 1905, the Swedish female artist Hilma af Klint began cleansing herself, in preparation for a series of artworks that would be executed at the directives of someone named Amaliel. More than a century later, those paintings would force a rewriting of the history of abstraction. According to the notebooks the artist left behind, Amaliel was one of several guiding spirits who spoke to her from above (and within), instructing her and even leading her hand. During her lifetime, at the behest of the spirits, af Klint produced more than one thousand works, but they remained largely within the confines of her studio. Even though she toiled as a commercial artist, painting portraits and landscapes, she exhibited only a few of the abstract paintings and drawings she created. She worried that the world wasn’t ready to see them, and when she died in a tram accident, in 1944, at the age of eighty-one, her will ordained that they not be shown for at least another twenty years.
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via Boing Boing by Seamus Bellamy
Discovering how Salty Road makes their freaking delicious taffy has weakened my resolve to stick to my diet. The only thing saving me is that I'm currently in Canada, putting the company's confections well out of reach.
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via Big Think by Evan Fleischer
- There might be hope for our oceans, thanks to one clumsy moment in a coral tank.
- David Vaughan at the Mote Laboratory is growing coral 40 times faster than in the wild.
- It typically takes coral 25 to 75 years to reach sexual maturity. With a new coral fragmentation method, it takes just 3.
- Scientists and conservationists plan to plant 100,000 pieces of coral around the Florida Reef Tract by 2019 and millions more around the world in the years to come.
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William Dudley Pelley and his Silver Shirts were just one of many Nazi-sympathizers operating in the United States in the 1930s
via Arts & Letters Daily: Jason Daly in Smithsonian.com
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William Dudley Pelley, Silver Shirt leader, pictured as he appeared before Congress. (Bettmann)
When Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany in January 1933, an American named William Dudley Pelley believed the Führer’s rise was the fulfillment of a prophecy revealed to him by the spirit world in 1929. It was a sign, he thought, ushering in his own ascent to power, and he announced the creation of the Silver Legion, a Christian militia dedicated to the spiritual and political renewal of the United States. Jesus, Pelley reported, even dropped a line to say he approved of the plan.
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via the New Statesman by Nina Caplan
Would a few sips have made her a more tolerant ruler?
KEVIN MALLETT/GALLERY S
In Sanlúcar de Barrameda in Andalusia, high above the Atlantic coast, a pale stone castle shines in almost perpetual sunlight. En route from one cool, dark sherry bodega to another, my imagination was caught by a sign declaring it the place where Queen Isabella of Castile (1451–1504) first saw the sea.
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via Interesting Literature
‘To My Excellent Lucasia, on Our Friendship’ is one of the best-known poems written by the mid-seventeenth-century poet Katherine Philips (1631/2-1664). Philips lived through the English Civil War (and wrote a poem about the execution of King Charles I), and was married at the age of 16 to a man some 38 (yes, thirty-eight) years her senior. ‘To My Excellent Lucasia, on Our Friendship’ is addressed to Anne Owen, one of Philips’ closest female friends.
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via Boing Boing by David Pescovitz
Yep, the Beatle was tripping balls. Specifically, he had just taken a hit of DMT with famed 1960s art dealer Robert "Groovy Bob" Fraser.
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