Messy Nessy Chic, a site for offbeat stuff

Perhaps the best way to describe Messy Nessy Chic is in the words of its creator, Vanessa Grall: It's a blog about "the offbeat, the unique and the chic." Vanessa, the Nessy of the blog's title, is a 28-year-old British expat who relocated to France three years ago and now writes her musings in a "cluttered little room with a view here in Paris . . . or sometimes from the little cafe downstairs."

So what will you find at Messy Nessy Chic? A lot of interesting, sometimes fascinating posts you're unlikely to run across in traditional newspapers, magazines or blogs. For instance, there's "The Town That Is Literally Living Under a Rock," about Setenil de las Bodegas, Spain, where many houses and shops are built into and beneath the rock walls of a gorge.

Or, you can view a 1956 letter from the Museum of Modern Art, telling a young Andy Warhol, thanks, but no thanks, on his offer to donate his drawing "The Shoe" to the museum. There's a post bemoaning glitterati F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald's final resting place, "near a highway surrounded by concrete strip malls" in Rockville, Md., while another looks at the Clone Factory in Akihabara, Japan, which uses 3-D printing to create scarily real-looking replicas of human heads, then places them on doll bodies. Not only are the posts fun, you'll learn something, too.