I really, really enjoyed this book – plus I learned a lot of really interesting things about Tudor art and symbology! In 1572, the good looking and talented Nicholas Hillyarde paints the first of many portraits of Elizabeth I, England’s “Virgin Queen”. His ability to capture the likeness of his patrons make him famous and… Read more The Truth of the Line by Melanie Taylor
People tend to associate steam-powered machinery and railroads with the Victorian era (hence the science-fiction subgenre Steampunk), but the it was the Regency that actually gave birth to the new steam engines. One of the first successful steamboat launchings happened in Glasgow, Scotland on 4 January 1803. The ship’s name was the Charlotte Dundas, and… Read more Full Steam Ahead!
I remember sitting in Mrs. Gorin’s history class in 1988 hearing about the time a POTUS won in the Electoral College even though he lost the popular vote. I remember DISTINCTLY thinking, with the smugness only a Reagan-loving American teenager durring the Cold War achieve, that I was glad that wouldn’t happen again. It was… Read more Why the Electoral College Needs an Overhaul
Happy Halloween! We are now only a couple of weeks away from the US Presidential Election, which the whole world is watching with genuine terror lest Donald Trump become POTUS and get access to the nuclear codes. Since little is more horrifying than monsters and politicians, today is an excellent day to discuss the zeitgeist… Read more Monstrous Politics
I’ve always been intrigued by the Tunguska event. For those of you not in the know (i.e. anyone who isn’t a big ol’ geek like me), the Tunguska event was huge explosion on 30 June 1908 (Western calendar) in the skies just above the Stony Tunguska River, in Yeniseysk Governorate (now Krasnoyarsk Krai) Russia. We’re… Read more KaBoom
First, here is a few things you should now about the US federal minimum wage and the poverty level. The current federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour. A full-time minimum wage employee earns $15,080 annually. In 2012, the poverty threshold for a single person was $11,945. For a family of four with two children… Read more Just a Few Economic Facts You Should Have
I love the meme that goes around social media roughly wondering, “If May the Fourth is Star Wars Day, and the next day is Cinco de Mayo, then is the day after that the Revenge of the Sixth?” Ah, the pun is very punny. Notwithstanding the joke, some pretty bad stuff has gone down on… Read more The Dark Side and the Sound of Silence
The thing that drives me nuts about the multi-billion dollar dieting industry is that most of them know (based on multiple scientific research studies) that their approach does more harm than good … especially those that push “meal-replacements” or radically reduced calorie diets. It is healthier to be fat than it is to diet, particularly… Read more The Biggest Losers Also Lose Their Metabolism
Ever since North Carolina passed that ludicrous law demanding that people go potty in the bathroom that matches their birth-assigned gender my social media has lit up with posts in support of the law and posts decrying it. Some of the people supporting the law have a hatred of anything NOT heteronormal dripping off the… Read more Who is a Danger in Bathrooms?
Today is my darling husband’s fortieth birthday, and we took the kids out of school for a day to celebrate Sweet Babou’s big 40 properly. We drove up to the Indy Zoo and White River park to have some fun in the sun with our hun! We rented a quadruple-bicycle-buggy-thingy (its technical name, really) and… Read more Sweet Babou Turns 40 Today!