I’m gonna do something different this week. Religious sects! Christian ones specifically. There are, and were, dozens, and hundreds, of these. A lot of them arose in the early days of the Catholic Church when it was spreading rapidly and there was no central authority to set the dogma in stone. Thus we get Gnosticism, …
Clement Moore’s version of Santa’s reindeer team was not the only one. Children’s author L. Frank Baum, known for his Oz series, offered a competing version: A team of ten (!) named Flossie and Glossie, Racer and Pacer, Reckless and Speckless, Fearless and Peerless, and Ready and Steady. The names used a rhyming, alliterative style …
In my original plans for this post I wanted to generate some names for new members of Santa’s flying reindeer team, but instead I went down a rabbit hole of Christmas canon. For example, much of our (meaning American) ideas about Santa Claus came from poet Clement Moore’s work “A Visit from St. Nicholas” which …
It Rhymes With Takei by George Takei and Harmony Becker (artist) Adapted by Steven Scott and Justin Eisinger Penquin Random House, 2025 [ #1 Year of the Snake: A book published in any of the Chinese Years of the Snake: 2025, 2013, 2001, 1989, etc. ] Since I didn’t get into my Howdy, stranger (a …
Cavaransies have existed for thousands of years along trading routes in India, the Middle East, and North Africa. They provided travelers a place to eat, rest, and restock their supplies. Usually they were set at intervals along the road, the spacing calculated by the time spent in a typical day’s travel. Many of them were …
Since reading The Lost Gospel I became of a mind to create some mythical Biblical peoples. Like, you know, the Sodomites, who famously gave their name to the art of buggery. Everyone who took a bible class, even as a small child, knows that story: evil Sodom and Gomorrah are to be destroyed by God …
In the previous two posts of this series I’ve concentrated on the lighthearted (back then) wink-wink smirk-smirk types of covers that sold “adult” — or those that were marketed as adult, even if they were rather tame — SFF novels. Though these might be considered sexist today, there was a humor to them, an idea …
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