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Archive for June, 2014

Cute Baby Bat ~ Gratuitous Gif Of The Month

Posted in Gifs, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 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 🙂

Cute Baby Bat Gif

 

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More Lego Creations By Nathan Sawaya

Posted in Art, Lego, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on June 26, 2014| 2 Comments »

Apple
Alfred Hitchcock
Bedroom
Bee
Bicycle
Big Bear
Twilight
Robot, Lost Planet (Capcom)
Courage Within
Elvis
Hawk
Nathan Sawaya with Milk And Cookie
New Orleans
Pop-Up-Book
Reflection
Skier
Skulls
Solar System
Van Gogh Starry Night

Amazing Lego picks every month at Lily Wight ~ The Arcade of Arts & Arcana 🙂

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Litha, The Summer Solstice ~ The Beginner’s Guide To The Wheel Of The Year

Posted in Wheel of The Year, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 24, 2014| 2 Comments »

Lily Wight

     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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More Victoriana At The Arcade Of Arts & Arcana

Posted in Books, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on June 17, 2014| Leave a Comment »

Lily Wight

     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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Game Of Thrones Meets American Gothic

Posted in Books, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 14, 2014| 2 Comments »

Lily Wight

     

     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.

     Martin pens marvellous prose in any genre, he is descriptive but never dull and poetic without being florid.  He has a knack for authentic, character-crafting speech and an ability to make even the driest detail fascinating so readers will come away with a new love and comprehensive understanding of life as a Mississippi steamboat captain even if…

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Victoriana At The Arcade Of Arts & Arcana

Posted in Books, Victoriana, tagged , , , , , , , , , on June 9, 2014| Leave a Comment »

Lily Wight

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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Access Denied!

Posted in Books, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 5, 2014| Leave a Comment »

Lily Wight

     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).

     
     Brien does an admirable job of honing and reinvigorating gothic folklore by finding ingenious and refreshing ways to reconnect disparate vampire archetypes.
   
      Monstrous Nosferatu and brooding immortals share an intriguing new evolution and the inclusion of werewolves takes the tale to new levels of adventure, mystery and page-turning excitement.
   
     The novel has two distinct parts, the first  – which acts as an extended prologue – is quite different in tone and location to the latter.  It’s a bold structural move, as readers may prefer one part of the book over the other, but Brien’s commitment, combined…

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Dracula The Un-Dead. Bram Stoker Lives!

Posted in Books, Reviews, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 3, 2014| Leave a Comment »

Lily Wight

Updated 03/06/2014

     Despite obvious extensive research and the Stoker seal of approval belated Dracula sequel Dracula The Un-Dead is a wasted opportunity which panders to modern tastes instead of keeping faith with the original vampire classic.

     Dacre Stoker and collaborator Ian Holt throw in everything from Elizabeth Bathory and Jack The Ripper to The Titanic creating a convoluted yarn which, although fast paced, struggles to find themes and focus.

     This sort of  Victorian Gothic Alternative History, or Literary Re-imagining, has been done far more successfully before by author Kim Newman whose Anno Dracula series is both effortless and ingenious in its use of similar settings and characters.

     The Un-Dead reads more like a sequel to Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula movie and when Dracula intones to Mina’s son “I am your father!!!” you may just die…

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