Breakfast Links: Week of February 20, 2012

Served up fresh: our weekly offering of Breakfast Links! Our favorite links to other blogs, web sites, pictures, and articles, collected for you from around the Twitterverse:

• To catch a thief – self-help against highwaymen: http://bit.ly/zf5QrV

• F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1923 earnings. His advance for The Great Gatsby is at the bottom: http://twitpic.com/8lxmn1

• Laura Bassi, 18th c woman who succeeded in a man's world: physics. http://bit.ly/xT17T2

• Which meal of Marie Antoinette's would you be willing to eat? http://bit.ly/y5lU2C

• Mermaid furniture: Social associations of the different styles used in the interiors at Kedleston Hall: http://bit.ly/xxhKRK

• Poets & Pugilists: Byron & his fellow Romantics' love affair with bare-knuckle boxing http://bit.ly/AppKwB

• “When the Pancake Bell rings, we are free” – Elizabethan snippets on Pancake Day. Recipes included! http://bit.ly/yFtM7k

• Metropolitan Museum of Art opened to the public for the first time 140 years ago this week. Learn more: http://met.org/zJKbTb

• In honor of Presidents' Day: The Tale of the Wandering Washington http://bit.ly/xtWmNw

• What were a young French woman's options "Without a Dowry" in Paris, 1883?: http://bit.ly/xTJm6U

• Wonderful postcard/photo archive: Miss Ripley's WW1 nurse album (a bit of written history) http://bit.ly/x55VBC

• Menu of final lunch on Titanic to sell for £100,000 at auction http://bit.ly/z0IibF

• Hilarious, esp if true: The 'Cork Rump' as life preserver, 1770: http://bit.ly/zKEh9P

• Washington Pie, thrifty dessert of left-overs, served in 19th c Wash DC bakeshops & boarding houses: http://bit.ly/wN19RX

• Peek-a-book painting of 16th c Venetians canoodling in a gondola: http://bit.ly/zClRG6

• So many are so young! Sleeping soldiers from WWI-Vietnam: http://bit.ly/x0mRUt

• Average writer day: (at least according to John Galsworthy) "Trying not to fall asleep in chairs.....1/2 hour" http://twitpic.com/8nc9l7

• William Craig Marshall's Itinerant Traders 1804: http://bit.ly/yQKB30

• The Potocki palaces, magnificent homes to Polish nobility: http://bit.ly/zoAO5L

• A 12th c church in Elkstone, Gloucestershire with its own pigeon loft in the tower: http://bit.ly/zEmPf4

• The food-myth of George I as the "Pudding King": http://bit.ly/wb06Pf

• Love the recreation of candlelit dining at Attington Park: Regency Banqueting Splendour: http://bit.ly/wyOmpp