Weekend reads with a little bit of something for everyone

I have manticores, codebreakers, bartitsu, airway beacons, folklore, diners, movies and much more in this latest collection of links presented for your education and enjoyment.

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  Messy Nessy Chic: "The Forgotten Giant Arrows that Guide you Across America." The Lighted Airway was an U.S. flight-navigation aid used in the 1920s and 1930s for cross-country airmail routes. It eventually consisted of about 1,500 beacons to help guide pilots. Each beacon location included a large concrete arrow pointing in the proper direction.
The Messy Nessy Chic article includes some terrific photos of what remains of some of these beacon locations. Most of them, of course, are long gone now. The website Zhanna's Survey Marks contains a list of the beacons in the Western and Eastern United States, which makes for a wonderful starting point for any intrepid archaeologist who wants to seek them out. There are some beacon locations in northern Pennsylvania that might make for great road trips for Joan and I. Before we even get to those, though, we might try to see if there's anything left at the sites that apparently existed in the Glen Rock and Dover areas of York County. If we find anything, we'll be sure to post photos!
• The Atlantic: "How to Fight Like a Victorian Gentleman" by Charlie Townsend
• The Telegraph: Obituary for Mavis Batey, "a Bletchley Park codebreaker whose Enigma breakthrough proved crucial to the success of D-Day"
• The Denver Post: "As feds crush ivory in Denver to curb poaching, Kerry offers $1M reward to stop elephant killing" by Bruce Finley
• Indiana Daily Student: "The end of the Waffle House" by Jessica Contrera (very nice piece of college journalism)
• Smithsonian.com: "There Are 58 Versions of Little Red Riding Hood, Some 1,000 Years Older Than the Brothers Grimm’s"
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  Medievalists.net: "Top Ten Monsters of the Middle Ages" (including manticores, the Blemmyae, and the one-large-footed skiapodes)
• Quail Bell Magazine: "New England Folklore: A Mohegan Witch Story from 1904"
• The New York Times: "Swan Song Too Hawkish for Some: Hayao Miyazaki’s Last Film, ‘The Wind Rises,’ Gets Complaints" by Brooks Barnes. (And see this review of the movie by Kenneth Turan of The Los Angeles Times.)
• Reanimation Library: "Bureaucracy's Playthings," an obsessive look at the aesthetics of old filing systems by Shannon Mattern

Finally, I don't share many videos, but here is Keith Olbermann's recent sweet tribute to Norman Lloyd on the occasion of his 99th birthday.