Atlas Obscura

By Claire Booth

Every day, I look forward to what one particular, and peculiar, website has to offer me. It’s Atlas Obscura, and it’s the best thing in the world. Literally.

It finds the strangest, coolest, most unique things anywhere in the world and tells you about them. Which, as a curious person, is excellent. But as a writer, it’s priceless.

For example, yesterday’s “Place of the Day” was this:

http://www.atlasobscura.com/places/louis-xivs-globes

Twenty-foot globes commissioned by King Louis XIV of France in 1681. 

(Kristina D.C. Hoeppner/C.C. By-SA 2.0)

Wow.

And in case you’re worried that every place they show you is pretty, don’t be. Friday’s “Place of the Day” was this:

http://www.atlasobscura.com/places/hunterian-museum

Philosophical reading room, Hunterian Museum, London. 

Curiousexpeditions.org

Yikes. Looks like a horror novel waiting to be written.

Sometimes inspiration is hard to find. If you do the roughly the same thing every day, you might have already mined that vein of gold until there’s nothing left but some rock and a bunch of metaphorical holes that your spouse does not appreciate as the artistry they are.

If this is you, or if you just need new fuel for your daydreams, take a look at this site or sign up for the newsletter. If you “like” it on Facebook, you’ll also get links to stories from other sites, like newspapers, who’ve run articles on interesting quirky things. This week, it alerted me to the recently discovered piece of amber that contained the tail – complete with feathers – of a dinosaur.

Granted, the whole dinosaur-DNA-trapped-in-amber thing has been done. But … just imagine what else lurks out there in the vastness of the real world, just waiting to be turned into fiction.