A Bless Us, Everyone Weekly Link Round-Up

Not much to say this week, probably because I'm thinking too much. But I will let my silence be your gain. Just one photo, and you can get right down to the links. How's that?

It didn't dawn on me until just now that it looks like I have a murderous collection of teapots. How perfect for a crime fiction lover!

All the Very Best to You and Yours from Denis and Me!

►Books & Other Interesting Tidbits◄

• Dame Judi Dench backed a bid for £650,000 for a Brontë "little book", then read the outcome of the auction.
• "Only a quid": A woman was recently reunited with her childhood book in a museum shop. 
• Author Erica Wright talks about the perks of living in a haunted house. 
• J. W. Ocker's first day as a crime scene cleaner.
• The state of the crime novel: a roundtable discussion with crime authors.
• Cookbooks are so much more than recipes and photographs.
• What do authors really think of film adaptations?
• How to haul a book collection across an ocean.

►Channeling My Inner Indiana Jones◄

• A lost Renaissance masterpiece was found hanging above a woman's hot plate-- and it sold for $26.8 million.
• The bizarre 77,000-year history of beds.
• A "witch bottle" filled with teeth, pins, and a mysterious liquid was discovered in an English chimney.
• The world's oldest pearl is pink and proof of Neolithic trading.
• Thieves rammed into a medieval French cathedral, making off with a trove of relics. 
• The world's deepest shipwreck is a World War II destroyer lost in the Philippine Sea.
• Divers have discovered a fully intact medieval sword in an underwater stone.
• Found: a prehistoric bead-making factory town off the Florida coast. And another article about it from the Smithsonian Magazine.

►Channeling My Inner Elly Mae Clampett◄

• Canine archaeologists are sniffing out 3,000-year-old graves in Croatia.
• These beautiful blue turkey-like birds have tiny brains and huge social networks. 
• Texas's retired police dogs no longer have to be sold or euthanized.
• Rare footage of an ocelot in Arizona shows what could be lost by the border wall.
• A cheetah sees a photographer napping under a tree and decides to join in.
• A rare image of two sleepy hazel dormice taken in a Cornish woodland.
• Villagers knit jumpers for Indian elephants to protect the large mammals from near-freezing temperatures.
• A cheetah has given birth to a giant litter of seven cubs.

►Fascinating Folk◄

• Stuart B. Schimmel, the elusive Spanish forger.
• The women who helped build Hollywood. 
• Music journalist John O'Connell on why he tracked the influence of one hundred books on David Bowie's music.
• Why hasn't Harriet Wilson, the first black female novelist, been given her due?

►The Happy Wanderer◄

• China's "dragon escalator", the world's longest outdoor escalator.
• The "Wizard Rock", a one-ton boulder, was returned to the Prescott National Forest in Arizona following a brazen theft. 
• Faulkner House Books: shop for books in the New Orleans house where William Faulkner once lived.
• I wouldn't mind paying a visit to the old ghost town of Shakespeare, New Mexico.

►I ♥ Lists◄

• Quirk Books would love to Frankenstein these books together.
• Lisa Black's list of five scary movies with invaluable lessons for crime writers.
• Seven crime tropes we really could do without.
• Five things you probably didn't know GPS could do.
• Sixteen tweets English majors will feel personally attacked by.
• Thirteen reading tips from Theodore Roosevelt.
• Six legal thrillers with essential social messages.
• Ten must-read crime books set in the American West.

That's all for this week! Don't forget to stop by next Friday when I'll be sharing a freshly selected batch of links for your surfing pleasure.

Have a great weekend, and read something fabulous!

Happy New Year!