The Soviets filmed The Hobbit in 1985. They include some of the songs.

Needless to say, if you watch this you have nobody to blame but yourself. But it's still not as bad as at least two of the three Peter Jackson films.

Fantasy birding: sadly nothing to do with simorghs or war shrikes or the like. Valuable tool for education and public engagement, or yet another death knell for our relationship with the non-human world? I have my suspicions, but I'd be happy to be wrong.

First gold digging ants, now Egyptian shipbuilding: Herodotus vindicated again.

Lambing season!

As an aside, the piebald lambs like this flecket are noticeably friendlier. Another data-point for the domestication/neoteny theory.

Shetland markings. Warning: rabbit hole.

Nordic-related miscellany:

• Dating the Eldgjá eruptions (the largest flood basalt eruptions in historic time) with methods including the Icelandic Book of Settlement and Deeds of the Saxons*
• 3,400-year-old beads in Danish graves were made by the same glassmakers used by King Tut 

 *(Inspired by this collection of aerial images of the Eldgjá flows)

You know what limited this sort of thing in the past? Dueling.

The world of young-adult-fiction Twitter, or YA Twitter, is a very intense place, prone to constant callouts and opinion-policing, particularly on matters of identity and social justice. And things seem to have only gotten worse since Kat Rosenfield wrote the definitive article about this subculture for Vulture, "The Toxic Drama on YA Twitter" in 2017.

Death by wallpaper

SHADOWS FROM THE WALLS OF DEATH, printed in 1874 and measuring about 22 by 30 inches, is a noteworthy book for two reasons: its rarity, and the fact that, if you touch it, it might kill you. It contains just under a hundred wallpaper samples, each of which is saturated with potentially dangerous levels of arsenic.

Ars enecat, vita brevis, hmm?

Portmanteau generator

A winvention (yes, one of its own).

Crocheted wire anatomy