- Teenage penguins.
- When rock ‘n’ roll dreams don’t come true; what happened to the 80s metal bands that didn’t make it?
- Buzzfeed’s Mental Health Week features have all been really fucking good.
- This V&A game to design your own 18th Century wig has provided me with a heap o’ fun this week.
- The reclusive, doll-collecting copper queen of Fifth Avenue. Aka another stone-cold hit from Collector’s Weekly.
- The queens of Botswana’s metal scene.
- I heard a rumour there was a lesbian jazz bar underneath the Ham Yard Hotel in the 1920s. I don’t know how this happens, but one Google later and I ended up on a weird and wonderful blog that namechecks – who else – Elizabeth Ponsonby. Still unsure about the bar, but the post certainly makes Ham Yard sound like a fun place to be in the 20s.
- And on that subject, I was thrilled to see a biography of Ma Meyrick is finally in the works.
- I’m fairly certain everyone has read this by now, but this piece on how Twitter helped Megan Phelps question and ultimately leave Westboro is great.
- Prince doing a cover of Creep is amazing. (Via Ben Kay)
- “If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.” This New Yorker piece on what to leave out is one of my favourite bits of writing this year. (And of course that quote is Hemingway. Of course.)
- Always a link to Laura’s brilliant Christmas playlist at this time of year.
- And one to mine as well, I guess.
