A Monday Night Digression

Bus stations at sunset can be difficult places.
Solitude
I hear the colors of solitude run down my bare arm. I close my hand and tear slender moons in my palm as old scars wax from white to red in the damp chill.
I hear the colors of solitude flow over the scratched glass. I lean against the [...]

Artist of Legend

There are numerous artists of the Victorian era represented in the halls of Three Graces, but perhaps none appears as much as Edward Burne-Jones. In fact, the only artist who appears in the master bedroom is Mr. Burne-Jones.
I have long respected his composition, sense of style, use of color and dramatic flare. Recently a creation [...]

Digression on the Balcony

Again, dangerous dreams…
The Feast
An abandoned feast was laid before me last night, in white and silver.
Damask supported marble pillars, wine sparkled in blue crystal, tables shifted and shook in the fading moonlight. So much seemed so familiar, so much seemed so strange. Gleaming trays heavy with delicacies adorned fine linen…unstained, untouched, unseen, unknown.
I stood alone [...]

Laughing Past the Graveyard

Sometimes an article is simply too hilarious tobe expected to be in good taste…and some things are simply too horrible not to laugh at them.
After all, the more we hold these people up to appropriate ridicule, the safer the world will be…or something like that. Anyway, enjoy this week’s Ask the Jihadist column from The [...]

Crossing Sinai

It is a complex and difficult concept to be a Jew in Christian culture. Certainly a minority amongst the wasps, but a different sort of one then Blacks or Hispanics or Asians..an outsider insider really. There is so much that you tend to be excluded from automatically, much of it by choice. So many basic [...]

South of the Border

I have come to enjoy being exposed to different sorts of music of late, beyond my normal diet of adult alternative, rockabilly, darkwave and death metal. One that has been introduced to me by my own dear Kirawill has been traditional Mariachi.
Like so many things of that nature, Mariachi is not only a joy filled [...]

Worth a Thousand Words

I always love a good historical mystery, or a question concerning art scholarship..and the following story features both. Few people who are not directly involved realize the twists and turns and dramas that are involved in art scholarship, especially when it involves matters of historical record or prestige.
On top of such dramas, the earliest days [...]

The Young and the Corseted

When we think of love in the age of Victoria, we think of repressed passions, proper formal marriages of convenience, with the occasional extreme decadence in the shadows. However, very few of us have any practical knowledge of what romance was really like in the period. Was it so very different then such things today?
Recently [...]

Apple to the Head

Our society has tended to lionize men of science.  Inventors, thinker, innovators have risen enormously in our esteem from their lowly beginnings. To a secular world, these men are the prophets, the messiahs that will lead us to a better future. An amongst that pantheon of cerebral heroes, there are few names that loom as [...]

A Blogtempest in a Blogteacup

Drama and the worlds online tend to go together like celery and peanut butter, and that seems to be doubly true here in Second Life. It seems that there is a need for controversy in many of us, a hunger for something to be righteously and earnestly upset about. This roiling discontent finds it’s expression [...]

Anybody Need a Chair?

A good chair is hard to find, and from the sound of it, this one is a pip. Furnishings, like anything I have found, tend to take on the feel and personality of their owners or frequent users. Therefore the possibility of purchasing the writing desk and chair of Charles Dickens is too amazing a [...]

Tatooine Raiders

Several weeks ago I posted to these pages an introduction to the amazing work of a mad genius known as Sillof. In a nutshell, what he does is he takes typical, mundane “action figures” and somehow transforms them into personal visions of extreme coolness.
The work I featured previously depicted a Steampunk re-imagining of DC Comic’s [...]

Failed Digression

A long, long weekend.
Invocation
I spoke the words, of love and loss and their oneness, just as she had written them down for me.
Just as she had bidden me to do in that last heedless, hurried talk.
I made the signs, traced the sigels in the air.
I threw the bones, counted the runes.
I marked the passage of [...]

A Levantine Dream

It has been a week for fascinating history…none, at least for me, more so than the following bit of pseudo history. A practice which I have long admired and enjoyed is Counterfactual History, the practice of taking a kernel of the past and seeing how it might have developed along different lines. This for me [...]

American Empire

It is rare when I will risk straying to close to politics in these pages, working from the assumption that regularly wallowing in sex and religion is more then enough to keep the villagers with their pitchforks camped around my castle. However, every once and a while I come across an article that is so [...]