Giant spider stalks Liverpool
Commuters arriving at Liverpool's Lime Street station on 3 September were greeted by a 50ft (15m) high mechanical spider clinging to a nearby redundant office block.

The 37-tonne beast heralded the start of a five-day piece of street theatre as part of the Capital of Culture year.

Medieval map casts new light  on Britain
You are looking at the oldest surviving map of Britain, dating from around 1360. And, give or take a bit of poetic licence north of the border, it's startlingly accurate.

There are the Severn, Thames and Humber, the loop of the Wear in Durham and the Thames estuary, all easily recognisable.

Jedi Church planned for Anglesey
A Jedi church is set to rise in Anglesey in Wales,  if the plan of two avid Star Wars fanatics pushes through.

Brothers Barney, 26, and Daniel  21, Jones said hope that other "devotees" will join them.

The brothers, who wish to be addressed as Master Jonba Hehol and Master Morda Hehol respectively, plans to deliver include sermons on The Force, light sabre training, and meditation techniques.

Row over Potter's Museum reaches High Court
Mention Potter's Museum, in Bramber Sussex, to adults of a certain age and you will generally get a squealed response. The macabre Victorian collection of 6000 stuffed animals, by Sussex taxidermist Walter Potter, many dressed up as nursery rhyme characters, was a place of magic to thousands of children throughout the 20th century.

Sold by Potter's descendants in the late 1960s, the collection ended up at Jamaica Inn in Cornwall until it was auctioned off in  2003.

A late bid by artist Damien Hirst to buy the entire collection for £1m was rejected by auction house Bonhams. Bonhams are now being sued for compensation by Mr and Mrs Watts, the collection's former owners after the final auction made around £500,000 of which the Watts received £336,000.

First ever grotto found under Palatine Hill
Startling news from Rome - the original Lupercale cave, built by Romulus, under his palace on the Palatine hill in Rome, may have been found by archaelogists.

A remote control camera lowered into the cave, over 50 feet below the hill revealed a crypt shaped ceiling decorated with shells and marble with a she wolf relief ("lupa") in the centre.

UPDATE 18 February 2008

“Palatine Cave not Romulus grotto” says Professor Filippo Coarelli - Read more in full article by clicking on subject line here

Wet Wet Wet
We spent the day at the Folly Fellowship's Summer Garden party, in driving rain, at Pelham Place in Hampshire. The highlight of the day was to be Vernon Gibberd's new grotto folly for the owner, Damon de Laszlo.  

You punt along a short stretch of water, duck into a tunnel and then dismount into a grotto. You exit using hand-holds in a vertical climbing wall to emerge in a Chinese pavilion at ground level.  

So we were all looking forward to it.

Groping in a Fog
"Blind Light" is one of several unsettling installations at the new Antony Gormley exhibition at the Hayward Gallery. It consists of a large semi-transparent glass chamber lit by fluorescent light and filled with thick clouds of steam. On entering, the visitor is instantly enveloped in a soft, grey fog, an opaque sea mist which renders visibility impossible.

Also as part of his new exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London, 27 life casts of the artist have been sited on top of buildings around London and on Waterloo Bridge in an exhibit called "Event Horizon".

A Surreal Experience
"Surreal Things" the new exhibition at the V&A, starts with a theatrical flourish as you enter the exhibition through red velvet theatre curtains to find yourself in front of a hand painted fantasy stage set by Gorgio de Chirico, commissioned by Diaghilev for Le Bal in 1929.  

The Changing Face of Hounslow
One surprising feature of Hounslow is how much of its 1930s art deco architecture has survived, albeit with new store fascias. Take a walk down the pedestrianised London Road in the town centre and you will see several striking examples including the bus station, the underground station, the former cinema now a Summerfields store and Boots in an art deco store once familiar throughout the UK as the home of Burton menswear.

Rate My Turban - website
"I noticed most Sikhs living outside India have a pretty boring turban life," says Ash Singh, the founder of RateMyTurban.com.  

"I wanted to showcase turbans as an art form and try to revive the majestic roots of turbans".

Check it out at our link.

Brits go crackers at Christmas
Christmas crackers are an integral part of British Christmas celebrations. No Christmas meal in the UK, formal or informal, public or private, is considered complete without a ceremonial cracker pulling session by the diners before they sit down to eat.

Clever People, those Sumerians
The Iraqis weren’t always the bloodthirsty religious fanatics we see nightly on our television sets.

Back in the 4th millennium BC, Mesopotamia roughly equivalent in geographical spread to modern Iraq, extending into Persia (now Iran) was home to the civilization of Sumer.

Among their inventions were one of the earliest forms of writing, the Cuneiform script, and the Ziggurat style of building, still in use today.

How Dixie got its name
The name Dixie was first heard not in the South,  but in New York City in the 1850s. The name appears in a minstrel song written and performed by Dan Emmett, a man from Ohio who imitated the language of black slaves in the South.

Farewell Mr Frisby's shop
Once all butcher’s shops were like this – the black and white tiled floor, daily strewn with fresh sawdust, the veined marble display slabs, the dark brown mahogany cash desk, the cast iron safe in the corner, the white tiled walls, crazed now with age, decorated with a blue relief of grazing cattle.