With a pack of impatient dogs barking that they’re ready to go, travel through Greenland on a dog sled, a mode of transport that is thousands of years old.

If you’ve ever wanted a cabinet with secret compartments — and we’re talking about a lot of secret compartments here — then you’re going to like videos from the Extravagant Inventions: The Princely Furniture of the Roentgens exhibit that was at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art (October 30, 2012–January 27, 2013).

One of the finest achievements of European furniture making, this cabinet is the most important product from Abraham (1711—1793) and David Roentgen’s (1743—1807) workshop. A writing cabinet crowned with a chiming clock, it features finely designed marquetry panels and elaborate mechanisms that allow for doors and drawers to be opened automatically at the touch of a button. Owned by King Frederick William II, the Berlin cabinet is uniquely remarkable for its ornate decoration, mechanical complexity, and sheer size.

In addition to the Secretary Cabinet above, there’s also a writing desk, a rolltop desk, and an automated Marie Antoinette music player.

via Doobybrain.

Commuters in Grand Central Terminal will encounter a new obstacle to making the train on time this week: 30 dancing horses.

It’s part of “Heard NY,” a site-specific performance by the Chicago artist Nick Cave, in collaboration with dancers from the Ailey School. Mr. Cave, known for his Soundsuits— costumelike sculptures that make noise as they move — has created the life-size horses out of colorful raffia. Each fits two dancers and rustles like a corn field when the herd “grazes” in Vanderbilt Hall or suddenly breaks into choreography, set to live percussion, steps from the main concourse.

The idea was to produce a dreamlike vision worth stopping for, Mr. Cave said, as people are rushing through the terminal. “You’re stopped in your tracks,” he said, “and then you do get on the train and you get home. How do you share this, how do you describe — just imagine, coming into Grand Central and you run into 30 horses? That’s when it becomes this transformative moment.”

From The New York Times, via @LauraTitian.

Filmmaker Maarten Koopman’s animated series of famous paintings, imagined piece by piece from some new perspectives.

Shown: Pieter Bruegel’s The Tower of Babel, Vincent van Gogh’s Bedroom in Arles, Salvador Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory, Claude Monet’s Nympheas, Piet Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie-Woogie, and Johannes Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring.

Thanks, @chrishiggins.

Lindy Hoppers Al Minns and Leon James have been seen dancing to the Charleston in a viral Daft Punk version, but this is the original that shows what it would have been like to watch them perform on television in the 1950s.

Minns and James were a well known for their performances at Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom in the 1930s and 40s. You can watch them break down the Shim Sham here and the Shimmy, Snakehips, and the Lindy Hop here on the DuPont Show of the Week in 1961: