And Finally, the Miniature Mouse Village of Your Dreams

Welcome to Mouseland, an adventurously cosy town where frogs take tea on lily-pads, mice set sail on miniature sailboats, and there are zero effs to give about anything in the real world that’s larger than a peanut. It’s the brainchild of Portland, Oregon-based author Maggie Rudy, who’s been making the mice for her children’s books…

The Story behind “Keep Calm and Carry On”

It’s one of the most recognizable posters in the world, an internet meme reinvented thousands of times over and yet do any of us actually know the story behind it? This excellent little video schools us on the origins of the wartime poster and how it was actually lost in history until 2000 when it…

20 Questions with the Real Woman Who Voiced Siri

Today, we meet Messy Nessy’s most unusual muse du jour: Susan Bennett, AKA the real Siri. In the early 2000s she did a hefty chunk of voice work for an intermediate company – unbeknownst that, years later, it would be used to create the personality of the iPhone assistant technology that dotes on roughly 500…

My Secret Paris Archive

I don’t like going to the Louvre. There, I said it. Let’s leave all those people to queue up for hours while we disappear to find a hidden Paris archive just a few streets away. We’re on the hunt for La Galcante, a clever little French wordplay on “galerie” and “brocante”. Tucked away in the…

Your “Keep Calm & Stay Happy” Weekend Playlist

Let’s make a pact this weekend. A move to keep calm, carry on (funny how that suddenly doesn’t sound so cliché again, right?), and remember to see La Vie en Rose. That’s precisely why I’ve whipped up a little “Keep Calm & Stay Happy” playlist for your pleasure and relaxation, filled with all the melodies…

Don’t Mess With the Jiu-jitsu Suffragettes

It’s Edwardian Era Glasgow, circa 1914, and the stress mounting in St. Andrews’s Hall is unbearable. Flocks of Suffragettes and policemen are waiting for the woman of the hour, Emmeline Pankhurst, to magically surface and fight against her own arrest — the tension is so palpable, you could cut it with a knife. Or karate-chop…

The Soviet Communist Origins of International Women’s Day

I’ve been informed that the way we celebrate Women’s Day in western society is a little bit weak compared to the way they do it in Russia– which might have something to do with the fact that the Soviets basically invented the holiday. Long before the world had International Women’s Day, Soviet Russia had ‘Working Women’s Day’, where it was first declared a national…

The First Man to Reach the North Pole was an African American Desk Clerk the World Forgot

“I think I’m the first man to sit on top of the world,” is not something many people can boast, especially if they lead perfectly normal lives, say, working a desk job in the city in relative anonymity. But for many years, that was the truth of Matthew Henson. In 1908, the unsung African American…

The Vault

The Real Life ‘Indiana Jones’ Was Just as Cool as You Think.

He said he “was born under a lucky star”. Yet, Roy Chapman Andrews, that good ‘ole American chaser of bandits, dinosaur eggs and lost civilisations, was always the kind of man who made his own luck. He charmed a generation of daydreamers with his stories of the Gobi desert — and that hat —and while there’s…

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And Now, Abandoned Dollhouses for your Inner Demon Child

Forget those twee little dollhouses from your childhood, we’re a tiny bit obsessed with the work of a truly twisted genius. Juli Steel is not your average miniaturist. A self-taught assemblage artist from Texas who goes by the alias of @TwistedCopperForest, like us, Juli has a weak spot for the forgotten and unloved things of…