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Cabinet of Chic Curiosities
Category / Life is Messy

13 Things I Found on the Internet Today (Vol. DLXI)

1. Once upon a time, you could ride a train right through the orange groves in Southern California The Super Chief was one of the named passenger trains and the flagship of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway. The streamliner claimed to be “The Train of the Stars” because of the various celebrities it carried between Chicago, Illinois, and Los Angeles, California. Florida had one too:…

What’s Up with all the Lady Parts in Medieval Prayer Books?

Let’s say you’re flipping through a medieval Christian prayer book (as you do), and suddenly you come across a curious illustration amongst the prayers and psalms of something that looks unmistakably like female genitalia. A scolding voice in your head tells you to get your mind out of the gutter. But you wouldn’t be alone.…

13 Things I Found on the Internet Today (Vol. DLX)

1. The real urban jungle: how ancient societies reimagined what cities could be They may be vine-smothered ruins today, but the lost cities of the ancient tropics still have a lot to teach us about how to live alongside nature. Not only did societies such as the Classic Maya and the Khmer empire of Cambodia…

When Big Brands were Getting High in the Seventies

In the late 1960s and 70s, America’s big corporations could see the psychedelic writing on the wall and they knew they had to do something. A wave of psychedelia was taking over pop culture and the LSD-infused hippie aesthetic was huge. The influence of drug culture on some of the most iconic brands saw everyone…

Behind the Façade of Potemkin Villages

Who wouldn’t want a library or a museum named in their honour? A namesake to remember us by long after we’re gone. But we can’t all be so lucky with our legacies. Case in point: 18th century Russian military leader and lover of Empress Catherine the Great, Gregory Potemkin, whose name would come to define…

13 Things I Found on the Internet Today (Vol. DLIX)

1. Cano’s Castle “After first building an underground potato cellar on the site, the castle began in 1980 when Cano built a steam room above the cellar, and took improvised shape as found materials presented themselves over about twenty years.” Born in 1948, ‘Dominic “Cano” Espinoza’s enlisted in the US army in 1968 and, upon…

Berlin’s Curious 1920s Polar Bear Craze

Once upon a meme, Germany had its own precursor to the internet’s LOLcat – in the form of a life-sized fake polar bear. As the story goes, some time in the early 1920s, two (actual) polar bears arrived at the Berlin Zoo and became the talk of the town. Families came from all over the…

Paid for their Tears: The Peculiar Profession of Professional Mourners

The business of death is one as old as time. Today the market size of global death care services is valued at over $100 billion annually and it’s expected to double in the next decade too (an increase attributed to more demand for lavish funerals). But there’s a lesser-known “service” of the industry which those…

Ask Me Anything: An Internet Q&A with the Guy who was Swallowed by a Whale

You might have caught the story about a lobster diver from Provincetown who was swallowed by a humpback whale off Cape Cod last week – and lived to tell the tale. The idea of swirling around inside the jaws of the ocean’s most legendary creature conjures up all sorts of aquatic childhood fables, from Moby…

13 Things I Found on the Internet Today (Vol. DLVIII)

1. You can now Sleep at the Palace of Versailles Set within the gates of Versailles, Le Grand Contrôle was built in 1681 by Jules Hardouin-Mansart, Louis XIV’s favourite architect and an icon of French classicism. The grandiose building once played host to Europe’s political and cultural elite, from ambassadors and artists, to musicians, writers…
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