Hey look! It’s another place to spend entirely too much money! I need to stop finding these.

Fivehands Curiosity Shoppe specializes in “strange medical devices, Victorian oddities, macabre and dark antique items, scarce erotica, bones, cemetery, occult and more. Strong focus on a dark design element is key.” If Morticia Addams decided to open an antique store, it’d probably look a lot like this.

They don’t appear to have a brick-and-mortar location, so sales are handled through their Etsy shop. Some of their pieces like this Victorian humidor are (for obvious reasons) fairly spendy, but they have other items like this vintage cast-iron candle holder that are wonderfully appealing and shouldn’t blow your budget.

In addition to the shop they’ve also got a Tumblr site, blog, and Facebook page where they discuss some of their acquisitions in more detail. There’s also a main .com site which is rather sparse, although it does include a small gallery of interesting items (I particularly lust after the Victorian dissection kit).

If you’re looking to build a collection of unusual vintage items, this is a great place to browse.

I ran across the Mosser* terrarium in an otherwise-unremarkable collection of decorations for an office cubicle and quite like the spare, simple design.

A bit of googling turns up a number of other moss terraria, such as this one at Uncommon Goods, housed in a recycled wine bottle. They also sell what they call “decorative terrarium creatures,” although I think we might have fundamentally different ideas about what constitutes a “creature.” There’s also Twig Terrariums, which sells a number of more-elaborate styles featuring several varieties of moss. (They also offer lockets, but those appear to use preserved lichen instead of live moss; a locket terrarium would be neat if you could pull it off, though.)

Fortunately, it’s also easy (and cheaper!) to make your own. To make a moss terrarium in its simplest form all you’ll need is a container, a hunk of moss, and something to park the moss on: It doesn’t really need dirt, but it needs something to hang on to.

The container can be just about anything: A glass jam jar, a lidded cake stand, an erlenmeyer flask, or a fish bowl. You can also get much fancier (and commensurately more expensive).

You can purchase moss online at places like Moss Acres, but you can also collect it in your back yard or in an abandoned field. (Some tutorials suggest collecting it from public parks or similar areas; I don’t know about other countries, but US laws tend to be pretty strict about collecting any kind of natural material from public lands.) Wherever you get it, make sure to harvest only a small amount from any particular patch so that you don’t destroy the rest of it.

You can also choose from a wide variety of substrates. If you want to use soil, something a bit on the acidic side such as peat-moss potting soil is a good choice. You can also use rocks, aquarium gravel, bark, or similar substances; you can encourage growth by painting the substrate with a bit of plain yogurt or buttermilk and then pressing the moss down on top.**

And, of course, you can get much fancier. Search for “moss terrarium tutorial” to find lots of suggestions such as the ones here, here, here, and here.

Care is easy: Keep it out of direct light and mist it with water occasionally. Moss is a particularly good choice of plant if you have a brown thumb, because it’s quite hardy and requires very little care. The association with spooky, overgrown places is just a lovely bonus.

*That link goes to a placeholder page; as of this writing, the Etsy store where they actually sell the product is down. The referring article listed the price as $26 US.

**Side note: An easy way to get rustic-looking mossy flowerpots is to toss a hunk of healthy moss into a blender with some yogurt or buttermilk and then paint the resulting slurry on the outside of terra-cotta pots. Mist occasionally until the moss takes hold.

Ouija Board Lunchbox – No source, but something similar might be DIY-able with decoupage.

Tea for the Morbid – Pinterest pinboard which is relevant to our interests.

Mega Lego Skeleton – Instructions for making a giant cardboard version of the little Lego guy.

Romulan Ale Recipe – Instructions for a high-octane “official” version of the blue beverage from Star Trek. Mentioned here because the page also lists a drink called a “Cloaking Device,” made with absinthe.

OmniCorp Product Line – Promotional video for the Robocop remake. (If you put “viral video” in the title I believe federal law prohibits it from actually going viral.)

P.G. Wodehouse – A rather wonderful random quote generator.

Day of the Dead Corkscrew – Neat calavera-themed metal corkscrew.

DIYFluffies – Etsy shop specializing in plush patterns and kits, including adorable dragons and monsters.

The Things – Short story which revisits The Thing from the monster’s viewpoint.

I Has a Sweet Potato – This link is 100% goth-free, but it’s just one of those things that cracks me up.

Metal folk-art nichos are a common part of Dia de Los Muertos shrines for the dead, and usually display either religious icons or photographs of the deceased person being honored.

Crafting for Cheapskates has a dynamite tutorial for making “tin” nichos out of disposable aluminum baking pans. The instructions are super-easy, with lots of suggestions for optional embellishment, plus work-arounds for those of a less-artistic bent.

Nichos are often on the colorful-shading-into-garish side, so in addition to the paint/nail polish the tutorial suggests you could also glue on sequins, fake jewels, or bits of metallic fabric trim.

These are cheap and easy enough that you could experiment with a range of shapes and decorations, and they’d make an interesting group craft too: Invite some friends over for dinner and altar-making. It’d also be a good project for kids; you could cut the basic shapes in advance and let them etch lines and dots with something blunt-ish like a ballpoint pen. (Particularly with kids, the intent doesn’t have to be “honoring a dead thing” so much as “paying homage to something you love.”)

Set them up in a shrine, hang them on your wall, or mass them on an end table. You could even make small ones and use them as holiday ornaments.

I would like to propose legislation which will require that certain websites post a prominent Time Sink Alert banner: If you’re likely to hit the site and get lost for two hours, it should warn you in advance.

The Museum of Ridiculously Interesting Things would bear such a banner, along with a sub-head indicating particular risk to those of us with darker leanings. The first page alone includes tiny coffins found in a Scottish cave, vintage advertisements for leeches, and a dozen photos of a shirtless Picasso.

Their About page elaborates:

The Museum of Ridiculously Interesting Things is not a physical place, but an online collection and discussion of the art, objects, ideas and history that contemporary curators, artists and critics find deeply, genuinely, thoroughly, RIDICULOUSLY interesting. It is a slightly tongue-in-cheek anthology of the marvellous, bizarre, exciting, intriguing and inspiring things of the world, paired with conversation around contemporary art and its institutions.

You can find jars of pickled moles and toast embroidered with a fried egg. There are taxidermied seagulls with guts made of pearls, vintage mug shots from New Zealand, and straitjackets embroidered by asylum inmates. Thank goodness the site is fairly new or I’d still be stuck there.

(There’s also the occasional nude photo, so the standard NSFW caution applies.)

It probably goes without saying, but the blogroll on their sidebar is full of additional neat stuff. If you’re looking for a collection of ridiculously interesting things, this is definitely the place to go.

(Hat tip to Cookie)

Here’s a thing you might not know existed: Doorbells that you can load with a sound file of your choice.

Just like a phone ringtone, you can use your favorite sound effect, song, or movie clip, and change it as often as you like. That means that your doorbell can scream like the one in Murder by Death, or say, “You rang?” like Lurch. (If you don’t think that’s hilarious, you may be on the wrong blog.)

There are a number of manufacturers, and prices vary significantly. The cheapest that I could find is Honeywell’s My Chime, followed by Swann’s MP3 DJ Doorbell. Other options include Kakadu (a UK vendor, although I take mild exception to their assumption that the customer is male), YourBell, iChime, and The Tommyknocker, which wins the “best name” category.

This would, obviously, be a splendid novelty item for Halloween, but there’s no reason why visitors shouldn’t be treated to banshee wails or rattling chains year-round. I’ve wanted a screaming doorbell for years, and there’s no way I’m going to limit its use to one day a year.

We find these suckers in the house constantly, and it’s likely that so do you. I’ve been squishing them with extreme prejudice, but apparently they deliver enough of the old ultraviolence on roaches and other less-desirable guests that I might turn a blind eye to them from now on. As Maggie at BoingBoing relates:

Originally native to the Mediterranean, they now live … everywhere. (And please, feel free to imagine these buggers speaking in comic, stereotypical Italiano-Greek accents from now on. God knows I will.)

Somnia Romantica – Some lovely Victorian mourning-inspired clothing.

The Nails of Sauron – This may be my favorite manicure idea ever.

Alternatives to Nickleback – Some excellent snark from the Boise Weekly’s entertainment section.

Music for the Zombie Apocalypse – Apparently the Apocalypse will be set to classical music.

A Softer World – The sentiment amused me.

Mischief Boutique – Splendidly surreal Etsy shop specializing in costumes for rats. If your pet rat is hankering for a hoodie or wants to dress like Tinkerbell, this is the place for you.

fab ciraolo – Artist who mashes up old and new pop culture, resulting in things like Dali in a Vampire Weekend shirt and a rather hipster Edward Scissorhands. (Somewhat NSFW)

Vintage Gothic Dessert Table – Stunning setup for a wedding reception dessert table; it’d be appropriate for any fancy party.

Art Abandonment – Facebook group which encourages artists to leave random works for others to find. An interesting idea, although there’s probably a fine line between “art” and “littering.” (via Cat)

10 Bizarre Bats You Won’t Want To Meet on a Dark Knight – A base canard. I might not want to snorgle all of them, but I’d happily meet them.

so there’s this girl named Oksana
who is sweet and kind and clever
and lives in a small house with her father
and her stepmother
and her stepsister
and already we can see right where this is going

OF COURSE Oksana’s stepmother doesn’t like her
and makes her do all the housework
and wear her stepsister’s old clothes
her stepsister is named Olena by the way
which sounds like a brand of margarine

somewhat unusual for this type of story
is the fact that the heroine’s father is alive and well
instead of nobly dead somewhere and unable to defend his daughter
no
he just doesn’t give much of a shit
parenthood fail

so one winter the snow is particularly bad
and Oksana’s family runs out of money
the story just presents this as fact
without stating the connection between deep snow and insolvency
so your guess is as good as mine

and to nobody’s surprise
Oksana’s stepmother insists that she be sent away
so her father
who is really whipped
takes her to a cottage deep in the woods
and says he’ll see her in springtime
when the money thaws out

and although Oksana is very frightened
she is also brave and resourceful
because when was the last time you heard a fairy tale
where the protagonist was an idiot
and totally unable to cope
that would be a very short fairy tale
because the protagonist would wind up as troll snacks
or be turned into a newt and NOT get better
or otherwise meet a messy end
let’s see Disney make a heartwarming movie out of THAT
woo tangent

anyway

so Oksana collects wood and builds a fire
and makes a snare out of branches and catches a snow rabbit
and digs under the snow and finds roots and berries to eat
and melts snow for drinking water
Oksana may be distantly related to Bear Grylls

when night falls Oksana lays down near the fire and goes to sleep
but in the middle of the night
there’s a knock on the door
man, the jehovah’s witnesses are everywhere
no wait
different story
there’s a knock on the door
and Oksana gathers up her courage
and a big stick
and answers the door
instead of doing the sensible thing and hiding in a closet until morning
fairy-tale protagonists may be plucky and resourceful
but they don’t have the common sense that god gave a doorknob

and there’s nothing there
and just as Oksana is breathing a sigh of relief
she looks down
and there’s a cow head on the doorstep
looking at her expectantly
as they do

so Oksana gasps and says “who are you?”
and the cow head says “I am Cow’s Head”
because it may be supernatural
but it is not very creative

so Cow’s Head says it is cold and hungry and would like to come in
and Oksana
whom we have already seen is a little light in the common sense department
says sure
and Cow’s Head asks her to lift it over the threshold
and place it near the fire
which she does
the story does not address how it made it to the front door and knocked if it can’t move

then Cow’s Head tells Oksana that it is hungry and asks her to feed it
which she does
and the story also does not address where the food goes
inasmuch as there is no stomach attached to the head
so use your imagination

and finally Cow’s Head wants to sleep
so Oksana covers it with her blanket
it is essentially the creepiest babydoll ever

Oksana falls asleep in the corner of the cottage
and when she wakes up Cow’s Head is gone
but where it had slept was a large trunk
full of beautiful clothes and gold and jewels

and at that very moment
her father appears at the door
having nutted up and come back to get her

so Oksana returns home
rich and happy
and soon marries her true love
and lives happily ever after

and as a postscript
the story notes that Olena decided to try the same thing
and went to sleep in the cottage
but when Cow’s Head showed up
she was too lazy to serve it
and when she woke up all her possessions had turned to dust

the moral of this story is when a disembodied cow head shows up on the doorstep at midnight you should make it comfortable

One of the wonderful things about the Internet is the freedom it gives niche businesses to reach a wider audience. A company peddling the odd collection of goods found at The Curio Emporium might not have enough appreciative customers locally to buy their coyote skull nightlights, brass telescopes, and Gorey parasols, and that would be a great pity.

Their stuff is wonderfully eclectic, ranging from taxidermy to corsets (I’m particularly taken with their Ripper and Halloween models), and their prices seem quite competetive. They do ship worldwide (with the usual exception of natural/taxidermy items), and their “free shipping” policy doesn’t appear to have a geographical limitation.

If you’re looking for an especially unique gift, or just want to drool on the merchandise, this is the place for you.