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The Klosterarchiv Einsiedeln (found via Mrs Deane) is a collection of beautiful old glass-plate photographs put online by a Swiss Benedictine Abbey. I don't speak German but there definitely seems to be a subsection scattered through the site, which you might call Monks Mucking About:
There are so many other beautiful and mysterious images on this site that I wish I could post the whole lot really.
Just back from a trip to Romney Marsh in Kent. It's near London but another world - the tip of it, Dungeness, is best known as the site of Derek Jarman's garden but is home to a whole isolated community of fisherman's shacks, makeshift homes and a tiny, sinister chapel, living on a shingle penisula with the hum of the nuclear power station. It's made even weirder by the fact that you get there on a miniature but fully working steam train, which takes you through the marshes past a lot of caravans and some 1920s sound mirrors out on to the shingle.
Romney Marsh is also used by the army for firing practice, so you come across one street built in the middle of deserted countryside. Malaria wiped out a large proportion of the population in the 19th century, particularly the women - hence the huge churches now serving tiny villages.
On the edge of Romney Marsh is Rye, which might seem like a twee tourist trap but is actually the epicentre of English eccentricity. It was fictionalised as Tilling in the Mapp and Lucia
It's an account of how the author befriended the birds around her Sussex cottage, and made a study of their psychology and individual characters. Her accounts of how blue tits and robins would fly up and communicate with her sound a bit mad, until you see the photos:
She describes an electrician coming to the cottage, and seeing the birds coming down to perch on her:
"His whole countenance seemed to alter, his face glowed, his eyes shone and he kept murmuring: 'How wonderful!' Then he said: 'But why shouldn't it be like that? It ought to be like that.'"
So it should. I plan to adjust my working methods to look more like this:
Actually it's a lemurine night monkey. They have 100 different calls and see in black and white. You can read more about their calls here, from the resonant whoop to the sneeze-grunt.
From Voyage autour du monde sur la fregate la Venus of 1840, at the NYPL, which is full of lovely pictures of more familiar creatures:
The Corning Museum of Glass seems to be full of the most unexpected things made of glass, from mechanical theatres:
to a squid:
There is Marie Antoinette sacrificing the heart of the nobility on the altar of the French republic:
a handsome drinking vessel commemorating the Treaty of Westphalia:
What they call a Passion Bottle, sold to pilgrims at the shrine to the Black Madonna of Liesse:
Also, the only way to serve boiled eggs:
... are the best. See here for evidence: Old World Webworm, Scarce Vapourer, Rusty Dot Pearl, The Drinker, Pine-Tree Lappet, Small Dusty Wave, Bird Cherry Ermine, Small Argent and Sable, Sharp-Angled Carpet, Drab Looper, Beautiful Golden Y, Canary-shouldered Thorn, Three-humped Prominent, Rosy Footman, Heart & Dart, Neglected Rustic etc...
Above: Rannoch Brindled Beauty