Being a history buff, I love to post old family photos, and I figured a military theme would be appropriate for Memorial Day. I come from a long line of civilians, however. Nobody in my family got drafted. As farmers, the food we produced was critical to the war effort. So I swiped some very […]
Today is the BICENTENNIAL of the birth of England’s famous Queen Victoria. Victoria reigned over the British Empire from 1837 to her death in 1901, giving her name to the Victorian Era. She was the first monarch to bear the title Empress of India. Her reign was longer than any of her predecessors until the […]
This is yet another entry I found in a “Best Steampunk Books” list that didn’t actually fit the genre. 14 , appropriately published in 2014, is a sci-fi mystery centered on a hundred-year-old apartment building in Los Angeles and the eccentric tenants that inhabit it. The main character is Nate, a thirty-something single guy who […]
The “fascinator”, a.k.a. “that little hat worn at an angle” is a staple of steampunk fashion. Typically worn by women, you may recall Damon Wayans really rocking the look in the “Men on Film” sketch in the classic TV show “In Living Color.” I was going through our steampunk props the other day when I […]
I discovered Neal Stephenson’s novel The Diamond Age, or a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer shortly after it was published in 1995. I’d read his preceding book Snow Crash and loved its anarchic spirit. By contrast, Diamond Age seemed stodgy at first as it centered on the prim and proper Neo-Victorians. As I read on, however, […]
Yesterday I saw the long-awaited and supremely-hyped superhero movie, Avengers: Endgame. It’s the finale of 22 (were there really that many?) movies starring superhero characters from Marvel comics, a cycle that began with Ironman in 2008. Of the six or seven I’ve actually seen, there were various levels of quality from awesome to “meh” but […]
Two of our most beloved young heroines hail from the Victorian Era – Alice of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865, Lewis Carroll) and Dorothy of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900, L. Frank Baum.) I grew up with their stories, but perhaps because they are such a part of our culture, I never thought about […]
