I’ve posted lists of beer, wine, and spirits with helpfully creepy names before, but since I keep finding new ones it’s probably time to issue an addendum. These are all great additions to any party with a spooky theme, not to mention making a memorable hostess gift.

The estimable xJane pointed me to two wonderful items: Dearly Beloved wine (a Trader Joe’s exclusive with great bottle art), and KAH tequila, artisanal tequila that comes in hand-painted calavera bottles.

Absolut has just released Absolut London in a limited-edition bottle featuring a rather gritty London street scene illustrated by Jamie Hewlett (co-creator of Tank Girl).

Mistress of the Dark Elvira has launched a personal label with Elvira’s Macabrenet. The same cellar that carries her label also has a number of other offbeat wines, including Rockabilly Red, Cardiff Giant, and Film Noir.

Crystal Lake Wine is a label blessed by Adrienne King, the actress who played the only survivor in the original Friday the 13th movie. The bottle artwork depicts the end of the movie, where the tattered Alice rests in a canoe just before Jason leaps out of the water.

Elk Creek seasonally offers Bone Dry Red and Ghostly White. Owen Roe produces Sinister Hand, and indeed it is. Ed Hardy (Ed Hardy makes wine?) has a whole line of Tattoo-themed labels, including a neat Sangria with a very happy skull.

Ash Hollow has a collection called “Legends,” featuring Headless Red, Four Horsemen, and an upcoming label called “1882” (which doesn’t ring any bells for me, but here’s Wikipedia’s list of events for that year; Jesse James’ death, maybe?).

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My wedding ceremony began with the words, “Mawwiage. Mawwiage is what bwings us togethaw today,” so it’s safe to say that I have a soft spot in my heart for The Princess Bride. This year is–Egad!–the 25th anniversary of the movie’s release, and The Alamo Drafthouse theater chain in Austin is celebrating by wining and dining its patrons.

They partnered with the Helms Workshop design group to create artwork for two Bottle of Wits wines (Inconceivable Cab and As You Wish White), which will be available only in 2012. The wines will be debuting on Valentine’s Day, as part of the drafthouse’s specially-themed dinner.

Items on the menu include an MLT (thinly-sliced smoked mutton, roasted tomato, and arugula on rustic bread); the Screeching Eel Salad (crispy ale-glazed eel on local greens with a blood orange vinaigrette), Seared R.O.U.S. (NY strip steak, which is totally cheating*), and “miracle pill-sized” Twue Wuv Twuffles. You cannot fault their attention to detail.

For those of you in the Austin area, ta-da! Now you have Valentine’s Day dinner plans. For everybody else, there’s certainly no reason why you couldn’t put together a similar menu at home. The cute wine bottles won’t be available, but if you’re feeling particularly ambitious you could mock up something similar in your favorite graphics program and paste it over the label on the wine of your choice.

Sit down with a few friends, pop in the movie, and enjoy an evening of fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, and miracles. Nothing says “party” like shrieking eels.

*Especially when nutria meat is widely available.

I’ll be adding this to the ever-growing list of Things I Wish Had Been Around When I Was a Kid. Trackers is Portland-based “outdoor education” organization that teaches skills like wilderness survival and environmental education. They offer classes for both adults and kids, and one of the latter is the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense Training Camp, a.k.a. “Hellboy Camp.” Kids aged 9-17 learn survival skills, investigation and forensics, and how to use “gadgets of the occult” such as EMF detectors.

Find out if you have what it takes to join an elite team of paranormal investigators combating the forces of darkness from all across the globe. We immerse you in tactical training of all forms, including survival skills in any environment (both earthly and non), martial arts and self-defense specific to praeternatural entities, hand to hand weaponry (we train foam swords, bows and more) and forensic investigation. All these key skills that every agent must have, plus you are steeped in the history of our Bureau and legacy of paranormal research.

Does that sound awesome, or does that sound like the awesomest thing ever?

Fortunately, they also offer some other cool-sounding programs with both kid and adult versions, including Zombie Survival Training and a very Lord of the Rings-esque Ranger wilderness training course.

Mad props to their marketing department; these sound like loads of fun.

(via BoingBoing)

The Voynich Manuscript has been described as “the world’s most mysterious manuscript.” It appears to date from around the 15th Century, nobody is sure where it came from, and and it’s written in an unknown language which has so far proved impossible to decipher.

Written in Central Europe at the end of the 15th or during the 16th century, the origin, language, and date of the Voynich Manuscript–named after the Polish-American antiquarian bookseller, Wilfrid M. Voynich, who acquired it in 1912–are still being debated as vigorously as its puzzling drawings and undeciphered text. Described as a magical or scientific text, nearly every page contains botanical, figurative, and scientific drawings of a provincial but lively character, drawn in ink with vibrant washes in various shades of green, brown, yellow, blue, and red.

Based on the subject matter of the drawings, the contents of the manuscript falls into six sections: 1) botanicals containing drawings of 113 unidentified plant species; 2) astronomical and astrological drawings including astral charts with radiating circles, suns and moons, Zodiac symbols such as fish (Pisces), a bull (Taurus), and an archer (Sagittarius), nude females emerging from pipes or chimneys, and courtly figures; 3) a biological section containing a myriad of drawings of miniature female nudes, most with swelled abdomens, immersed or wading in fluids and oddly interacting with interconnecting tubes and capsules; 4) an elaborate array of nine cosmological medallions, many drawn across several folded folios and depicting possible geographical forms; 5) pharmaceutical drawings of over 100 different species of medicinal herbs and roots portrayed with jars or vessels in red, blue, or green, and 6) continuous pages of text, possibly recipes, with star-like flowers marking each entry in the margins.

Theories on its origin and purpose have ranged from “pharmacopoeia by Roger Bacon” to “hoax perpetrated by Wilfrid Voynich.” Nobody is sure what it is. (Of course, there’s always xkcd’s explanation.)

Happily, the Yale University library has posted high-resolution scans of the entire manuscript. In addition to simply being interesting to leaf through, the illustrations and text are a wonderful source of artistic inspiration. The letters have a delicate, Tolkien-esque feel to them, and the illustrations range from intriguing to really peculiar. And if you’re into cryptography, you can try your own hand at deciphering the mysterious text.

(via BoingBoing)

I’m a big fan of cemeteries, so I was pleased to discover the Cemetery Club site. Its tagline is, “Where cemeteries come to life and cemetery fans come together,” and although it’s somewhat on the sparse side content-wise, it’s got some good resource links and information about things like tomb rubbings.

It’s also home to Epitaphs, an online magazine devoted to old cemeteries. The magazine accepts submissions, so if you have an article, photograph, or book review this might be a good place to get some exposure.

The site owner also maintains a couple of relevant pages on Facebook, one for the magazine and one called Grave Book which features, “Headstones, Cemeteries, Abandoned Buildings and Haunted Houses.”

If you’re fond of graveyardy things–and if you aren’t, you’re definitely on the wrong blog–go check ’em out.

(via The Gothic Tea Society)

You guys, have I mentioned how very, very much I love the Internet? There’s a site called 8tracks, whose tagline is “handcrafted internet radio,” which allows users to create their own music mixes and share them online. So you can search on tags like horror or cult soundtrack or Halloween and find things like this mix curated by ghoulnextdoor.

Each track displays a link to purchase it on iTunes, which is handy if you find something you really love. The service also has apps for iPhone and Android, so you can listen to it anywhere.

As with any free service, there are limitations, including the ability to skip more than a few tracks in a given time period. (On the other hand, it’s, y’know, free.)

I’ve already found a bunch of music that I believe I need to add to my collection. Check it out!

George R.R. Martin writes about food in his A Song of Ice and Fire books. A lot. A whooole lot. So the obvious thing to do is to re-create every dish mentioned in the series and then blog about it.*

The Inn at the Crossroads is taking a very scholarly approach to the subject, carefully reading the descriptions of the foods and then reverse-engineering them. They use a lot of Medieval cookbooks and techniques, so even if you don’t read Martin the site is worth a look as a period cooking resource.

They’ve also got recipes for interesting foodstuffs like grilled snake and honey-spiced crickets, which should appeal to the more adventurous. They generally provide information on their sources, so if you’ve ever wondered where to procure rattlesnake meat, you need look no further.

The site is wonderfully engaging, even if you never make any of the recipes. Food geeks should definitely check this one out.

(via BoingBoing)

*Y’know, before the Internet, people with weirdly obsessive hobbies toiled along in obscurity instead of being able to share the fruits of their labor with the world. Those were dark times.

Let me warn you right up front not to click on these links unless you’ve got a couple of hours to kill.

Wonders and Marvels began as a tool for Holly Tucker’s “History of Medicine” class for Professor Tucker and her students to post articles and links of shared interest. Then other academics started posting their insights on various historical matters, then writers of historical fiction got involved, and at some point the whole thing exploded into “a place for specialists and non-specialists to revel in the stories of the past.”

You can read a bit of Machiavelli’s biography, see a list of interesting books about witchcraft, read about the death casts of Pompeii, and learn whether mandrakes really scream.

There’s also a lot of related media, like a Goodreads group, Facebook page, and Twitter feed.

With categories like “Magic and Witchcraft,” “Unusual and True,” and “Wondrous Facts,” this site is right up the dark history buff’s alley.

(via BoingBoing)

Now here is a truly wonderful repurposing of artwork.

The Peanuts Tarot is a riff on the standard Rider-Waite deck, with a lot of clever attention to detail. It’s (for obvious copyright reasons) not available for sale, but the full set of cards can be downloaded if you want to try and print them yourself.

A bit of googling turned up this 2002 BoingBoing post about the deck, where the artist is cited as someone named “Valerian.” His/her long-defunct site had a “Don’t sue me” page which offered this explanation for the project:

An absurd, heretical, really cool view of an ancient ritual of divination… This is a joke. Six-year-old suburban kids enacting adult emotions and situations, breaking them down and magnifying them into hilarious crumbs of childhood experience… ­ tragedy, pain, and measured triumph. With children as protagonists and innocent humor as the disarming tool, the emotions are simplified and magnified (as are the physical features of each cartoon drawing) and the exchanges between the children become both an ironic parody of adult emotions, and an impossibly close and meditative study of them.

Comments on a few other sites indicate that the artist’s plea against lawsuits was unsuccessful, which is a great pity. There should be some Cleverness Threshold whereby stuff like this would be permitted by reason of being really funny.

I like how well the various Peanuts characters and tropes are integrated into the deck, with baseball bats standing in for wands, Linus as the Hierophant, and Lucy as the High Priestess. (I think The Hanged Man is my favorite.)

You can download the deck from scribd if you have a Facebook account; if you don’t, there’s apparently a free trial scribd registration which allows you to download documents free for 24 hours.

(Hat tip to pdq, who finds all kinds of interesting stuff)

I didn’t encounter this site in time to do a pre-Halloween post, so consider this an extremely advance post for next year.

Take Back Halloween bills itself as “a costume guide for women with imagination.”

We love Halloween. We really love Halloween. We think it’s cool that there’s one day a year when people can dress up as anything they want. What we don’t think is cool is that increasingly women are only supposed to dress up as one thing: “Sexy _____” (fill in the blank). Sexy Nurse, Sexy Cowgirl, Sexy whatever.

Their aim is to provide other options, and they’ve got dozens of costume suggestions gleaned from history and legend. Why would you want to be “generic sexy witch” when you can be Ada Lovelace or Lizzie Borden?

Each costume idea page includes a capsule description of the woman it depicts, several reference photos, and suggestions for recreating the costume. Their resources are all no-sew and many are very fast and easy, which is a great boon to those who don’t have much time and/or advanced sewing skills (and, of course, if you have both, their ideas are still a wonderful jumping-off point for crafting your own costume). This means you can put together a costume as easily as buying something off the rack, without the worry of showing up at a party to find six other people wearing the same costume.

In addition to the main site, there’s also a companion blog and Facebook page. Since Inanna, Boudicca, Jane Austen and are all way cooler than any of the store-bought adult costumes I’ve seen lately, they’re definitely worth a look.

p.s. – I’ll be participating in the unfortunately-acronymed NaBloPoMo again this year, so there will be a post every day of November, including weekends. Can you hardly wait? I thought so.