A Whoopee! Yahoo! Weekly Link Round-Up

 

I did some checking Monday. The last time I left the property to go anywhere non-medical related (or for two measly haircuts) was JANUARY 31.  So this week when Denis and I were in the Jeep heading west, I may have looked cool, calm, and collected as befitted a woman of my years, inside I was bouncing up and down in my seat like a two-year-old. Why? Let me tell you.

Denis and I gave this a great deal of thought. He was tired of never going anywhere but work (and those two measly haircuts), and he knew I had to be going absolutely stir crazy, but we both take COVID-19 seriously and didn't want to take any unnecessary risks. After talking it over several times, we decided that an outing to the Wildlife World Zoo was in order. The place is huge, and when we'd visited pre-COVID-19-- always at mid-week and at mid-day-- there had never been any problem with hordes of people. (Needless to say, I wouldn't touch the place with Paul Bunyan's barge pole on the weekends!)

We went, and we had an absolute blast. It was just what we needed. You know what this means, don't you? Photographs! In fact, I need to do some more work on them, so I'll leave you with the links and with photos showing Denis and me in all our masked-up splendor; he in his meerkats and me in my lemurs. (Everyone on the zoo staff loved them.) 

Enjoy the links!

 

 

►Books & Other Interesting Tidbits◄

• How the New York Times' Best-Seller List comes together.
• A newly digitized logbook documents life and death on a slave trading ship.
• Stolen first editions by Galileo, Newton, and others have been discovered beneath the floorboards of a house in Romania. (This sounds like something from Mission: Impossible!) Here's the article from The Guardian.
  
• Craig Johnson on uniting the Western and the art heist novel.
• Author Richard Osman: All British people are potential murderers-- that's why we love our mysteries.
• Author Rachel Howzell Hall on the art of disappearing.
• Good movies as old books: 100 films reimagined as vintage book covers.
• The true story of the case Ruth Bader Ginsberg argues in On the Basis of Sex.
• Appledore beats COVID-19 to keep its book festival alive.

 

►Channeling My Inner Indiana Jones◄

• The Coventry Doom, an amazing fifteenth-century mural, remained hidden in plain sight for centuries.
• Britain's oldest graffiti has been found at a Roman fort.
• The wreck of a seventeenth-century Danish warship has been found in the Baltic Sea.
• Millennia-old cookware may be the key to recreating ancient cuisine.
• A trove of twenty-seven sealed sarcophagi have been unearthed in Egypt.
• Deep in the swamps, archaeologists are finding how fugitive slaves kept their freedom.
• The sunken pirate city of Port Royal, Jamaica. Arrrrrrrgh!
• Human footprints found in Saudi Arabia may be 120,000 years old.
• The SS Cotopaxi vanished in the Bermuda Triangle and has finally been found 95 years later.
  

 

►Channeling My Inner Elly Mae Clampett◄

• Toxic algae caused the mysterious widespread deaths of 330 elephants in Botswana.
• If you need some cute, watch this duckling fall asleep while wearing a flower hat.
• Nine animal names that are also verbs.
• This sleeping cat knows how to become one with a Japanese Zen garden.
• A desperate cow asks a man to help her retrieve her newborn calf from the other side of the fence.
• The official trailer for My Octopus Teacher.
• A cheetah mom's playful moment with her smiling cubs was caught on camera.
• Thousands of migrating birds have dropped dead across the southwestern U.S.
• Yellowstone tourists stumbled across a rare wolf pack sighting.
  

 

►Crafty Little Gems◄

• A Canadian artist collaborates with working bees to create a unique embroidered honeycomb art.
• Disney and Pixar characters made out of food.
• Realistic felted wool cat heads and tails in frames.
• A unique "Nail the Hammerhead Shark" crochet pattern.

 

►Fascinating Folk◄

• The women who shaped the past one hundred years of American literature.
• How Irène Joliot-Curie's Nobel Prize-winning discovery saved millions of lives.
• The new, nicer Nero.

 

►The Happy Wanderer◄

• Photographs from the last quiet places on Earth.
• Open a new window somewhere in the world.
• Stephen King's house.
• The house that inspired Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights is for sale.
• Photographs capture eerie skies that cloaked the Bay Area in an orange glow.
• The power of a small town setting for murder mysteries.
• True West's travel guide to exploring the Old West.
  

 

►I ♥ Lists & Quizzes◄

• Twenty-one incredible nonfiction books.
• Twenty-four books Broadway stars are currently recommending.
• Can you guess the novels based on their protagonists?
• Can you sort these fictional characters into their proper species?
• Sixteen of the most perfect murders in crime fiction.
• Vincent van Gogh's favorite books.
• Five great books about con artists.
• Seven deeply moving books about immigration.
• Eighteen maps of the United States that astounded the list maker.

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! And don't forget to curl up with a good book!