M.J. Rose

These are just fantastic!

Cold War dollhouses from the Socialist paradise of East Germany

(Dangerous Minds)

“The Flickr user diepuppenstubensammlerin (the name means “the dollhouse collector”) has a remarkably wide-ranging and detailed series of galleries documenting dollhouses from Germany, with many of the sets pictured dating from the 1950s through the 1970s. The set pictured here came from a company called VEB Grünhainichen, if I understand correctly, and it was in East Germany, in fact on the border to what was then called Czechoslovakia.

The notion of children playing with dollhouses that have this kitschy wallpaper and kitchen tiles or tasteful/chintzy furniture of indubitably modern design. All you need is a Trabant driving by outside or the tones of the Klaus Renft Combo emanating from the hi-fi system and the picture is complete…”

For the rest, click .

In case you missed this before, or did not have a chance to see the pictures, here’s a bit on those discoveries made at Stonehenge last year. (Not that we mystery-minded folks were ever all that surprised by this news!)

Archaeologists Have Made An Incredible Discovery At Stonehenge

by George Dvorsky (io9)

“Using powerful ground-penetrating radar, investigators working around Stonehenge have detected a trove of previously unknown burial mounds, chapels, shrines, pits — and most remarkable of all — a massive megalithic monument made up of more than 50 giant stones buried along a 1,082-foot-long c-shaped enclosure.

This news is unreal — and it’s resetting virtually everything we thought we knew about Stonehenge. Just a week after finding out that Stonehenge was once a complete circle, archaeologists from Birmingham and Bradford universities, and from the Ludwig Boltzman Institute in Vienna, have shattered the image of Stonehenge as a desolate and lonely place…”

For more on this, and pictures, click here.

We are constantly both amused and amazed by the fact that reality is consistently proving to be even more magical than magic. As science progresses, the schism between the known and the unknown, the impossible and the provable, becomes smaller and smaller…

From Science Alert,