A Ho-Hum Weekly Link Round-Up

There's so little going on here at Casa Kittling that it makes me yawn. The only thing out of the ordinary is my wading through hundreds of folders and thousands of photos and videos in order to gather together everything I have in which one of my dearest friends appears. I'll put all I've found on a flash drive and give it to her youngest daughter. Who knows? She might see a side of her mother she's never seen before because her mother had the worst sense of direction, and what she'll see on this flash drive is her mother as an adventurer out in the middle of nowhere with Denis and me.

Speaking of Denis, here's something else I found in my search: a photo taken the day he became an American citizen. (Denis is the one with the shiny head.)

Time to mosey out to the corral. Head 'em up! Moooove 'em out!

►Books & Other Interesting Tidbits◄

• Virtual author events are the next big thing. (The cynical part of me says that they're also money-savers, so unless these virtual events don't bring in book sales, we're probably going to see a lot more of them.)
• Drive-in theaters are coming back in style for a socially distanced world. (When I was a kid, you'd go to the drive-in on Friday or Saturday nights. Now I'll stay home with my large screen TV and surround sound.)
• What do famous people's bookshelves reveal?
• Covidiots? Quarantinis? A linguist explains how COVID-19 has infected our language. 
• A cleverly designed brass "hygiene hand" tool that acts as a substitute for human hands on public surfaces.
• Anthony Hopkins delights fans as he plays piano for his cat in self-isolation.
• The real story behind The Sound of Music is far more depressing than the film.
• Netflix commits $100 million to help actors and crews thrown out of work.

►Channeling My Inner Indiana Jones◄

• Oddjob's deadly hat from Goldfinger turns up on Antiques Roadshow.
• The mysterious desert towers of Uzbekistan's lost civilization.
• The secrets of Bethlehem's controversial Pools of Solomon have been unlocked.
• A 1,000-year-old English mill has been rushed back into operation to meet demand. 
• What Rome learned from the deadly Antonine Plague of 165 A.D.
• After the fire, a Chinatown museum sifts through what survived.
• Stone tools reveal that humans survived a volcanic super-eruption.
• The coded couture of antique lacework. (The examples shown are stunning.)

►Channeling My Inner Elly Mae Clampett◄

• Researchers have noticed a change in mountain lion behavior during this pandemic.
• Dogs are being trained to sniff out COVID-19. 
• How the stunning scarlet macaw came back from the brink. 
• Crows aren't bad omens (but they may be the criminal masterminds of the bird world).
• At a Kentucky farm, champion Thoroughbreds live out their retirements.
• To silence wind turbines and airplanes, engineers are studying owl wings.
• Twelve great writers on twelve great American birds.
• Your butterfly photos could help Monarch conservation.

►Mother Nature Responds to COVID-19◄

• Incredible pictures show flamingos flocking to Mumbai amid India's coronavirus lockdown.
• Tonka the Great Dane cheers up senior citizen center residents during the coronavirus safety containment.
• With humans in lockdown, animals flourish.

►The Happy Wanderer◄

• Take a virtual tour of the Smithsonian American Art Museum's Humboldt Exhibition.
• Sixty-eight cultural, historical, and scientific collections you can explore online.

►Fascinating Folk◄

• Philadelphia will memorialize Dinah, an enslaved woman who saved the city's historic Stenton House in 1777.
• Christie, Sayers, Allingham, and Tey: celebrating the Crime Queens of the Golden Age. 
• Celeste Ng, Ann Patchett, Min Jin Lee, and others on the books that bring them comfort.

►I ♥ Lists◄

• Twenty artists' visions of Alice in Wonderland from the last 155 years.
• Eleven comedy mystery movies you can stream tonight. 
• Ten of the best novels about France-- that will take you there.
• Ten novels about moving.
• Fourteen enormous crime books.
• The fifty greatest rock memoirs of all time.
• A sense of dread is the key to dark fiction, and these five women have mastered it.
• The seventeen dumbest fashion trends in history.

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.

Stay safe. Stay healthy. Practice social distancing by curling up with a good book!