I love Halloween! I have more spooky home décor for both inside and out than I do all the other holidays combined. Curious about how Victorians celebrated Halloween, I did a little digging… pun intended. After a bit of research, I discovered I come by my love of All Hallows’ Eve honestly. Halloween made its […]
The beginnings of our 26-letter alphabet are shrouded in the mists of time. The same is true for most other types of writing, like Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and Chinese. But three writing systems were actually invented by specific individuals, and went on to be used by thousands and sometimes millions of people. What better way […]
By Arlys Holloway & Vaughn Treude Our model: Arlys Endres, photo by @ In our extended celebration of Valentine’s Day, we’d like to summarize some of our research about love in Victorian times. We’ve learned some interesting and sometimes surprising facts. The Victorian period, which is defined by Queen Victoria’s long reign as monarch of […]
The other day I was speaking with a friend about how conservative writers feel they’ve been marginalized by leftists and are trying to change that. He remarked, “What do left and right mean in science fiction? Certainly what is considered liberal and conservative now will change in the future.” This was an excellent point, which […]
My readers may have noticed that although I often write articles about historical anniversaries, I didn’t do anything topical this Monday for Martin Luther King Jr’s Birthday. That’s because I limit myself to events that happened at least a century ago, and Dr. King was born in 1929. On the following day it occurred to […]
Today is the 13th of the month, which got me thinking about numeric superstitions. In the west, we commonly think of 13 as unlucky. I’ve seen speculation that this was because of the Biblical Last Supper, with Jesus plus the disciples making 13. Somehow that made Judas unlucky number 13. As a consequence, many multi-story […]
Today I’m posting some pictures I took on Friday in downtown Glendale, AZ, with all the trees lit up. Every year around this time they have a festival called Glendale Glitters with vendors selling foods like hot chocolate and caramel apples. We had thought the vendors would be there on Friday night, but they weren’t; […]
