Lost & Shared: What I’m looking at this week #002
Curiosities, long reads, images and think pieces I’ve enjoyed this week
This is the second edition of Lost & Shared, for like-minded lovers of the esoteric, beautiful and absurd.
These are pieces that caught my eye in the mad froth of the internet.
Enjoy and please do share anything you’ve come across recently that you found interesting in the comments.
Here are my latest finds:
Dwile Flonking: 500 Year Old English Dodgeball With Pints and Rags
This is the most English English tradition I’d never heard of. Dwile flonking involves two teams. The flonker tries to fling a beer-soaked rag (dwile) at a team dancing round a bucket. Hit someone and they have to down a pint. Miss twice and you have to down a pint. There is no permutation, that I can see, where you don’t have to down a pint. There’s a lovely video here and an article below.
An Eerie Dry Cleaner’s, Abandoned Mid-Service
Lost Oddities | Exploration | Photography
I’m obsessed with these photos. Beautiful, haunting shots of an abandoned dry cleaner’s in the UK (the exact location is left a mystery by the author). All the clothes are still on their racks and there’s an old fashioned till and hand-painted signs. It’s as if the owners spontaneously combusted, mid-service. The images are so quiet and intricate and full of unanswered questions.
An Italian Tourist’s Photographs of America in 1966
Lost Oddities | Exploration | Photography
Mario Carnicelli won a photography competition in 1966. His prize was two cameras and a trip to America to take photographs of Chicago, Detroit, Dallas and New York. Incredibly these pictures weren’t published until 2010. As an Italian, he “imagined all this enormous wealth, but walking around there was also a lot of poverty”. Some beautiful observations.
The Breathtakingly Beautiful World of Slime Moulds
Lost Curiosities | Lost History | Read
Slime moulds are amoeba-like organisms that can combine into huge ‘super-cells’ to create extraordinary, extraterrestrial-looking patterns and colours. They thrive in dark, damp, rotting environments and, though intelligent, operate entirely without a brain. Like me after a spot of dwile flonking. These incredible macro shots from Barry Webb, capture their strange, other worldly beauty. Psychedelic eyeballs on sticks.
To finish off, an image from the photography archive. Shot on a bridge in Whitechapel, London:
‘I Overthink, Therefore I Over Am’
That’s it for now.
If you missed last week’s edition, you can find that here.
Please do share your own thoughts and discoveries below.
Love this post! I especially loved the slime moulds.. I have never heard of them.. fascinating!