This is the circuitous tale of a unicorn, a fox, a stack of notebooks, and the strange way that life can connect the dots for us when we least expect it. Unicorns have followed me around since high school, wheedling their way into pictures and stories – sometimes when I’d rather they stayed in hiding.... Continue Reading →

Originally posted on Facebook: Okay. I'm way late with this, and have seen only those last few tell-tale moments of the episode in question, but ... "Introducing John (freaking) Hurt as the Doctor"?!??!! Are you (freaking) kidding me? Are all my efforts to resist getting sucked back into this fandom utterly doomed? Perhaps I should... Continue Reading →

Created the other night when I was in a mood to cut, paste, and tweak for ridiculous amounts of time. Feel free to swipe.

More Thomas Paine art. I love what can happen to photos of engravings once you start fiddling with them. Of course, once I start fiddling, it's hard to stop ... First, the original eighteenth-century piece (anonymous from about 1791, based on a work by "Peel of Philadelphia"): Then, several rounds of messing with said original... Continue Reading →

I have almost no idea how I created the graphic below. I started by pasting a thumbnail of William Sharp's famous Thomas Paine engraving over a random snapshot that I took of sunlight filtered through some trees, and then ran the collage through several rounds of tweaking on Picasa. I came up with several images... Continue Reading →

"What do you mean, 'Academic Warrior-Queen' isn't a job title?" (Mind you, I only look like this on days when I bring the sword in to work.)

Every now and then I run across something I wrote “back in the day” which causes me to wonder whether I or the world have changed all that much over the course of the last ten (or fifteen or twenty) years. The following rhapsody to Thomas Jefferson, the Constitution (as I then understood it), and... Continue Reading →

This line from Paine's Rights of Man leaped out at me the other day, so I made a little graphic for it. The portrait is by Matthew Pratt.

From The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, a favorite piece of mine since the 1980s. It really should be read in full to get a sense of Blake's contrarian philosophy and complex mythos. The style is probably unlike anything ever written in the eighteenth century -- poetry and prose cut together in a way that... Continue Reading →