Jirka Väätäinen, a student at Arts University College at Bournemouth, United Kingdom, is working on beautiful, realistic photos of women who resemble Disney princesses like Snow White and Tiana. These are photo manipulations. I haven’t read how much of these are the result of Photoshop work (or a comparable program, if there is one) or photo preparation with the model, clothing, etc.
Poetry of the World
Yesterday was World Poetry Day (somewhere). You probably knew this already. I had to learn by reading blogs (so sad). Crooked Timber celebrates here. (via Books, Inq.)
Flying Blind, by Max Allan Collins
This one’s a heartbreaker.
Yet another Nate Heller mystery from Max Allan Collins here. Flying Blind is all about the disappearance of Amelia Earhart. I’ve always steered clear of the Earhart business myself, because I don’t much care for stories where the girl dies (though I’ve written some, come to think of it). Most of what I know about the Earhart mystery came from an old episode of Unsolved Mysteries, and this book actually fitted in pretty well with the speculations on that show.
This story starts in 1935, when Chicago private eye Heller is hired by Earhart’s slimy husband, P. G. Putnam (of the P. G. Putnam and Sons publishing house), to be her bodyguard on a lecture tour. She’s been receiving threatening letters, Putnam says (although there’s some suspicion he created them himself, to garner publicity). Privately, he asks Heller to find out if Earhart is having an affair. Though he feels guilty about it because he despises Putnam and likes Earhart, Heller agrees to do the job. He ends up having an affair with her himself. Continue reading Flying Blind, by Max Allan Collins
Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Never Let Me Go”
Dale mentioned a dystopian novel I’ve wanted to get into, but I haven’t remembered it often enough to hunt down in a library or bookstore, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go
The Key to Understanding the White House?
Perhaps this is the key to understanding what’s been happening in the White House for the last several year.
For more on what’s in the White House library, which can only hold 2,500 books, read this.
“How does it feel
How does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone ?”
“The Year of the Warrior” vindicated. A little.
When I wrote The Year of the Warrior, I took a historical gamble. I included among the buildings at Sola farm, where the hero lived, a heathen temple.
That may not sound too audacious, but in fact I was flying in the face of all the research I’d done on Viking life. In book after book, I’d read that historians believed there were no temples in the Norse religion; that religious ceremonies were performed either in the open air or in the chieftain’s home.
But Adam of Bremen, in his history of the bishops of Hamburg, insists that there was a temple at Uppsala, Sweden. And having a small shrine just seemed right to me, so I put one in the story.
And now this, from the Archaeology News Network:
Located at the site of Ranheim, about 10 kilometers north of the Norwegian city of Trondheim, the astonishing discovery was unearthed while excavating foundations for new houses and includes a “gudehovet” or “god temple.” Occupied from the 6th or 5th century BCE until the 10th century AD/CE, the site shows signs of usage for animal sacrifice, a common practice among different peoples in antiquity. Over 1,000 years ago, the site was dismantled and covered by a thick layer of peat, evidently to protect it from marauding Christian invaders. These native Norse religionists apparently then fled to other places, such as Iceland, where they could re-erect their altars and re-establish the old religion.
I love being right. It doesn’t happen very often.
One thing that puzzles me is that the article suggests that similar temples have been discovered outside of Norway. Why has no one told me about this?
Velcome To Dystopia
Dystopia is that disturbing place where some of your friends say you are headed in a handbasket, and everyone’s talking about it with the movie debut of The Hunger Games this weekend. So what’s your favorite or most respected dystopia?
Robert Collins has a good list of ten in The Guardian.
Shane Dayton of Listverse has his own list of 12 (with some natural overlap).
What do you think?
Breendonk
Europeanne writes about her trip to Fort Breendonk, once a Nazi concentration camp north of Brussels. What will keep abuse like this from happening here? Are we at risk of entertaining ourselves into a stupor that will allow evil men to go unchecked in America?
“If this is war…”
Author Sarah Hoyt, who was kind enough to let me post on her blog not long ago, hit one out of the park yesterday, with an outstanding post entitled “War is Hell,” which addresses the currently popular accusation that conservatives are waging war on women.
War is where the enemy decimates your numbers – like, say in China where abortion is killing mostly females.
War is where you are kept from learning – like in most Arab countries, where women have restrictions placed on their education.
War is where your houses are burned, your children taken away into slavery, your goods looted, and you are dragged away in chains.
In the United States, right now, women have preferential treatment – by law – in any company that gets federal funds (which heaven help us, right now, is most of them.) Women live longer than men. Cancers that affect females get more money and more attention than those that affect only men. Women have the right to be sole deciders on abortion, and if they decide to keep the child and make the man pay, he pays. (This by the way is a complete reversal of the “penalty” of sex which used to fall mostly on women.) And if he doesn’t pay, he goes to jail. Divorce courts award custody to mothers overwhelmingly. Oh, and in college campuses, women outnumber men.
If this is war it is war on men. And I’ve had just about enough of everyone who claims otherwise.
Read the whole thing.
Seven Daily Sins
Jared Wilson’s Seven Daily Sins: How the Gospel Redeems Our Deepest Desires