I’ve been doing some mind-blowing research on sailing ships lately (that I might put together in another post someday). We usually consider steel-hulled steam or diesel turbine ships to be better and faster than the sailing ships of old. However, the only way that the world could have been discovered, mapped and settled was with sailing […]
A Cup of Tea…Anything but Simple. Read More »
Roy C. Sullivan must be the unluckiest man alive. He’s been hit seven times by lightning. On the other hand, he’s one of the luckiest men. He lived. There are hundreds of people struck by lightning every year, and the effects of being struck are never the same. From a lightning strike support group, the
Living With Lightning Strikes Read More »
This post ran seven years ago, so it has drifted deep into the archives. I thought I’d refresh it and bring it forward. –t. I’m almost afraid to mention Shakespeare. There is a whole generation of readers out there, including my kids, who had Shakespeare in Love shoved down their throats in English class at
Shakespearean Sonnets Revisited. Read More »
Like skyscapers going viral in Dubai, “tall” is a modern phenomenon. Man has grown four inches higher in just the last 100 years. If the cause was genetics, that would be a freaky-fast change, but the causes are actually far more prosaic: Better food, absence of disease, and a social preference for height, which makes
Tall Heroes In History? Hang on… Read More »
I’ve seen many pictures of women in third world countries carrying water. Buckets and jugs on their heads, or jerry cans in both hands, sometimes with babies strapped to their backs. I’m sure you’ve seen them, too. Thing is, not so long ago, everyone had to carry water from the nearest source, back to their
The wisteria tunnels of Japan actually look like the perfect place for the I-Love-You scene of just about any romance. The only problem is, I can’t think of how to get the loving couple in such a tunnel in the first place. It would have to be awfully contrived, because most often, both the hero and
In the first part of this long post, I described the long process involved in turning any type of fiber (wool, flax, silk, cashmere, cotton) into strands for weaving, to produce cloth, and how labour intensive it was in the past, when machines didn’t do all the work for us. All That Was A Woman’s
Making Cloth – Part 2 Read More »
Actually, Casualties of War has been available for pre-order for weeks…everywhere else. Amazon won’t allow pre-orders 90 days before the release date, so Kindle readers had to wait a bit. Now the wait is over. The book went up on to Amazon last week. He’s an action hero. She’s an Army Ranger. Who will save whom?
NEW Romantic Suspense — now available for pre-order on Amazon Read More »
Look Around You In a second, I’m going to ask you to lift your head up and look around your current location. I want you to take a quick tally of everything you can see that has a textile component. That is, any fabric, anything woven. Okay, take thirty seconds and have a look. …
Making Cloth – Part 1 Read More »
This post first appeared on the blog in March 2012. It was, alas, one of the final posts in a series I wrote about vampire powers. [The very last post in the series, if you’re curious, was “Vampire Powers – Holy Objects, Garlic“, in June of that year.] The earlier posts in the series were
Vampire Powers – Mental Domination. Let’s talk about it again. Read More »