Best Of MetaFilter

Bats like living in churches for a numbers of reasons, though their presence can present problems. Hence the Bats in Churches project, focused on the UK, and as highlighted by paduasoy's post!

Check out this neat tool made by MeFite robintw: the British Placename Mapper and it lets you search for British place names that match certain queries. So you can find all places named 'churchill’ or 'royal' in their name. Sadly, nothing seems to be named 'biscuit'.

Come watch this documentary on the British Ritual Year of 2019, which showcases 20 local traditions across the Britain. Long and fascinating, well worth the time!

The Houses of Parliament (Effect of Fog), Claude Monet

You are a man of guile, means and influence in Victorian England and you know what orders to give to get the following done. You want to have a patient kidnapped from a hospital and secretly installed with people you trust. We're helping Omnomnom abduct(?) liberate(?) a gent from a British infirmary in the 1800s. What could go wrong?

Histories by Aldaron (cc by)

paduasoy posted "English Historical Fiction Authors," a group blog that has been going since 2011, where researchers and novelists post about British history. "There are posts about wool and war, Schools of Gardening for Ladies, beds and bugs, aspirin, theatrical censorship, magazines, tours of Ruthin and Snowdon, slipcoat cheese and posset, subversive fairy tales, and The Learned Pig," and more linked selections. Lovely.

Judith: The First Crowned and Anointed Queen of Wessex... At Twelve Years Old

My aim with my newsletter is to eventually have written a biography of every single woman we know existed in England between roughly 500 and 1100: Wobbuffet posts historian Florence H R Scott's excellent and accessible "Ælfgif-who?" collection, with links to each entry so far.

Photo by Dina Litovsky

The co-ordinates are: 53.136107, -0.222877 ♰; Where the Amish go on holiday ⛱; Life on the Slow Train: Views of a Vanishing China 🛤; The Castles of Wales 🏰

A Woman in Winter Clothing, 1644 by London Metropolitan Archives

In a question about mask-wearing in Restoration-era England, verstegan answers with fascinating details and sources.

I hear you by Gustav Klim (cc by)

Warrnambool's wombat; NESS not NEZ; Commensalist Lorax; HAMMACHER SCHLEMMER!; Beano of Dundee; Painswick nibbles, pub butty & more; Fox Amoore Stitches; Feierabend, et al; Chicken Diapers; Dada à la Dupré; Epithelial Scutoids; Imperiled Achoques.

The Queen Attacks by malias (cc by)

Queens, Queens, Queen, Spider, Spider Queen.

Open the door! by Alex Grech (cc by)

JohnnyForeign on his family's brush with an infamous caper: I "never understood the significance of the incident until many years later when my mum explained that we'd entered through the garden to avoid the crowd of journalists..."

FGR: Belly by bloody marty mix (cc by-nc-nd)

The oldest use of the f-word has been discovered, dating the word some 165 years earlier that had ever been seen. It appeared in the name "Roger Fuckebythenavele"

and in the dream-jobs-you-never-knew-you'd-kill-to-have department, litlnemo offers, "I teach a class on dirty surnames (yes, really) and this one so has to go into my list. Those medieval English people were not the most delicate of speech, let's just put it that way."

In other deep thoughts on names and other things, MCMikeNamara asks, Has Axl Rose ever commented on the fact that his stage name is an anagram for "oral sex"?