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.

SITE messynessychic.com

DESCRIPTION An aggregation of unusual information and pictures

TARGET AUDIENCE Those tired of run-of-the-mill websites

BOTTOM LINE Out of the ordinary in the best sense