Did you know that cute baby bats are actually known as pups? What a blog, eh? Informative AND adorable!
Pop back next month for a brand new and totally gratuitous gif 🙂
Posted in Gifs, tagged baby animals, Baby Bat, Bat, Bat Gif, cute, Cute Bat, Fluffy, gif, gifs, humor, Humour, Nature, video, Videos, Watch & Listen on June 28, 2014| 3 Comments »
Did you know that cute baby bats are actually known as pups? What a blog, eh? Informative AND adorable!
Pop back next month for a brand new and totally gratuitous gif 🙂
Posted in Art, Lego, tagged Art, Arts, Lego, Lego Apple, Lego Banana, Lego Bicycle, Lego Creations, Lego Elvis, Lego New Orleans, Lego Skulls, Lego Twilight, Nathan Sawaya on June 26, 2014| 2 Comments »
Amazing Lego picks every month at Lily Wight ~ The Arcade of Arts & Arcana 🙂
Posted in Wheel of The Year, tagged 2014, Culture, Events, History, Inspiration, Life, Lifestyle, Litha, Longest Day, Midsummer, Mythology, National, Nature, Photography, Spirituality, Summer Solstice, Wheel Of The Year on June 24, 2014| 2 Comments »
Updated 24/06/2014
The ancient seasonal calendar – known as The Wheel Of The Year – has reached Litha (meaning “wheel”) also known as The Longest Day, Midsummer and The Summer Solstice.
Litha marks the height of the sun’s powers at the middle of the year before the inevitable shortening of daylight hours.
Midsummer has been observed since Neolithic times. It held special significance to the Scandinavian, Germanic and Anglo-Saxon people and is still celebrated throughout The Northern Hemisphere today.
Litha was a time to urge the growth of crops in the hope of a plentiful harvest. A wheel would be set on fire and rolled downhill to “warm” the fields, a practice first recorded two thousand years ago.
Golden-flowered Midsummer plants, such as Calendula and St. John’s…
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Posted in Books, tagged 2014, Arts, books, Charles Kingsley, Culture, Facts, History, James Harrison, The Victorian Age, The Water Babies, Trivia, Writing on June 17, 2014| Leave a Comment »
Updated 17/06/2014
Here at The Arcade of Arts & Arcana we are not ashamed to trawl kids’ books for fascinating factoids. Here are few of our findings…
*Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital opened in 1852. If you scroll down the sidebar you will find a link to Children With Cancer UK, this site’s nominated charity 🙂
*Edward Jenner helped to wipe out smallpox in just 40 years when free vaccinations became available in 1840.
*The bell residing in the Houses of Parliament clock tower was cast in 1858 and named for building supervisor Sir Benjamin Hall. Big Ben of course.
*Building ships from steel instead of heavy iron was a very good idea.
*Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies (1863) influenced Parliament to pass the Chimney Sweeps Act. The use of children as sweeps was finally stamped out in 1875.
*Today southeast…
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Posted in Books, tagged 2014, Anne Rice, Arts, books, Fevre Dream, Fiction, Game of Thrones, George R R Martin, Interview with the Vampire, New Orleans, Review, Reviews, The Vampire Chronicles, True Blood, Vampire, vampires, Writers, Writing on June 14, 2014| 2 Comments »
Updated 14/06/2014
It takes a writer as bold as Game of Throne’s George R.R. Martin to pen a Southern Gothic vampire novel just three years after the publication of Anne Rice’s genre-bending Interview With The Vampire.
Martin’s Fevre Dream includes plenty of Rice’s familiar tropes – such as setting, era and two bickering immortal dandies – but Fevre Dream has less romance and more grit, as though two writers used the same remit to inspire very different tales.
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Posted in Books, Victoriana, tagged Arts, books, History, John Guy, Pre-Raphaelite, Prince Albert, Victorian era, Victorian Life, Writers, Writing on June 9, 2014| Leave a Comment »
Updated 09/06/2014
All these amazing facts have been borrowed from the Snapping-Turtle Guide, Victorian Life by John Guy.
*The average life expectancy for a Victorian city-dweller was a measly 40 years!
*At the beginning of Victoria’s reign (1837) 20% of the population lived in towns. By the end of her reign (1901) this figure had risen to 75%.
*Beer was less than a penny a pint causing problems with drunkenness… especially amongst children.
*This was probably because both boys and girls wore dresses until they reached about five years old.
*Thomas Edison didn’t just invent the phonograph (1877) he suggested talking-books for the blind.
*The Railway Age created affordable travel for all and inspired that Great British pursuit: a day-trip to the seaside!
*Victorian Artists and Poets reacted against The Industrial Age by incorporating romanticised Myths, Legends and The Natural World into their work. (Click the…
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Posted in Books, tagged 2014, Arts, books, Denied, Fiction, Horror, Nosferatu, Pat Brien, Review, Reviews, Vampire, vampires, werewolf, Werewolves, Writers, Writing on June 5, 2014| Leave a Comment »
Updated 05/06/2014
Pat Brien’s Denied is a refreshingly old-school vampire yarn that owes more to Hammer era Dracula than Twilight style teen romance (cheer or boo here as you prefer).
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