ClicksyPicsWiggle animations and more!

A very cool fire animation:

Check out one of  Violetsunset’s albums with a great vintage collection here.

The Vanished Hand has a good variety of history items, photos, poetry, and some great music and links.  Check it out here.

This is pretty cool, from the AP:

ALBANY, N.Y. – Years before leading his vastly outnumbered troops to their doom at Little Bighorn, a young George Armstrong Custer was described as accurate in math.

Nearly 30 years before his March to the Sea laid waste to a large swath of Georgia, William Tecumseh Sherman was deemed a “fine energetic boy.”

And two decades before he would earn the nickname “Stonewall,” Thomas J. Jackson’s dreams of a military career got a boost from a man who would help start the Civil War.

Those are some of the tidbits gleaned from more than 115,000 U.S. Military Academy application documents being posted online for the first time by Ancestry.com. The Provo, Utah-based genealogy website said Tuesday that the information can be viewed for free starting Thursday — Veterans Day — through Sunday.

After Sunday, it will cost $12.95 a month for unlimited access to the West Point records and the website’s more than 100 million military documents, company officials said.

Read on…

View a great assortment of modern wiggle animations at Schillr.com here.  Be sure to check out the other tabs at the top.  Great site!

From History.com:

1865 – Abraham Lincoln

Ward Hill Lamon, a close friend of the president’s, wrote down what Lincoln told him on an evening in early 1865: “About ten days ago I retired very late…,” the president told Lamon. “I soon began to dream. There seemed to be a deathlike stillness about me. Then I heard subdued sobs, as if a number of people were weeping. I thought I left my bed and wandered downstairs.

“There, the silence was broken by the same pitiful sobbing, but the mourners were invisible. I went from room to room. No living person was in sight, but the same mournful sounds of distress met me as I passed alone…I was puzzled and alarmed.

“Determined to find the cause of a state of things so mysterious and shocking, I kept on until I arrived at the East Room. Before me was a catafalque, on which rested a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments. Around it were stationed soldiers who were acting as guards; and there was a throng of people, some gazing mournfully upon the corpse, whose face covered, others weeping pitifully.

“‘Who is dead in the White House?’ I demanded of one of the soldiers. ‘The President,’ was his answer. ‘He was killed by an assassin.’”

Read the entire article here.

RICHMOND, Va. –

Two Civil War-era dolls thought to have been used to smuggle medicine past Union blockades were X-rayed Wednesday, disclosing hollowed papier-mache heads that once could have contained quinine or morphine for wounded or malaria-stricken Confederate troops.

The 150-year-old dolls, dubbed Nina and Lucy Ann, were likely packed with the drugs and shipped from Europe in the hope that Union troops would not inspect toys when looking for contraband, a museum official said.

Nina and Lucy Ann were taken to VCU Medical Center from their home next door, The Museum of the Confederacy, to see if the contours inside their craniums and upper bodies were roomy enough to carry the medicines.

The conclusion: yes.

The next step could be forensic testing for any traces of the drugs.

Continue reading…

There’s probably a totally rational explanation.  I sure wouldn’t know what it is.  At about 0:49 into the video, she is clearly talking.  Weird!

Here’s an article from Yahoo! news blogs about an early photograph of humans that was discovered.  The image is blurry, but those are no doubt people!  I like the yahoo blogs, they are good at linking sources and showing images in the articles.

I had to pull myself away from the site to post it. This is a site that primarily sells original stereos, however their gallery is excellent.  Lots of categories to choose from, be sure to check out the humor images.   I’d kill to go to England and dig through this collection!

Thank goodness for the evolution of cool and comfortable clothing.  Several great old beach images here.  #16 looks suspiciously like bathing machines, but the clothing suggests perhaps a later era.