Quotable

"Do not consider any vice as trivial, and therefore practice it; do not consider any virtue as unimportant, and therefore neglect it." - Chinese maxim

Favorite Actress Showcase #4: Mena Suvari

Mena Suvari is among the most beautiful and talented actresses, she rose to fame in 1999 with two big hits, American Pie and American Beauty. Before that she had had small parts and guest spots in a number of movies and TV shows, including two episodes of Boy Meets World. She has appeared in many wonderful roles including Loser, Sugar & Spice, The Musketeer, Stuck, and guest starring roles in Psych and The Cape. Most recently she's been cast in a pilot for a comedy show titled Happy Valley and has returned to the American Pie movies with American Reunion.

Literature Pick #15

The House on the Borderland

by William Hope Hodgson

Powerful, Evocative, Mysterious. First published in 1908, this is a true literary masterpiece of supernatural horror.

Paintings of Caspar David Friedrich

The wanderer above the sea of fog

Chalk Cliffs on Rügen

Winter landscape with church

Mountain Landscape with Rainbow

Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) is among the greatest artists in history, his paintings show the power of Romantic art to evoke grandeur and awe by attesting to the sheer beauty and vastitude of nature.

Quotable

"Amongst all possessions knowledge appears pre-eminent. The wise call it supreme riches, because it can never be lost, has no price, and can at no time be destroyed." - Hitopadesa

Literature Pick #14

The Thirty-Nine Steps
By John Buchan
First published in 1915, this is a masterful spy adventure thriller set right before the breakout of World War I. This is the first of five novels featuring the heroic protagonist Richard Hannay, a man with a certain knack for stumbling into trouble and then miraculously escaping it. I also recommend Alfred Hitchcock's 1935 movie version, even though it does differ significantly from the book.

Quotable

"One of the deepest and strangest of all human moods is the mood which will suddenly strike us perhaps in a garden at night, or deep in sloping meadows, the feeling that every flower and leaf has just uttered something stupendously direct and important, and that we have by a prodigy of imbecility not heard or understood it. There is a certain poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of having missed the full meaning of things. There is beauty, not only in wisdom, but in this dazed and dramatic ignorance." - G. K. Chesterton

Paintings of William Stanley Haseltine

Arco Naturale, Capri

Morning LIght, Roman Campagna

William Stanley Haseltine (1835-1900)
Haseltine was one of the best American artists, he was a master of landscape art and is one of the legends of the Hudson River School style of art.

Santa Maria della Salute, Sunset

Mt. Aetna from Taormina

Quotable

"They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night."
Edgar Allan Poe - Eleonora (1841)

Orion the Hunter

Orion the Hunter

from Leiden Aratea
by an unknown artist

Leiden Aratea is a 9th century AD illuminated copy of an astronomical treatise by Germanicus, who based his work on Phaenomena, an ancient Greek poem about the constellations written by Aratus, who himself based his work on a lost work by Eudoxus of Cnidus, a student of Plato.

Literature Pick #13

The Sky Trap

by Frank Belknap Long (1901-1994)

From the July 1941 issue of Comet, this is a wonderfully imaginative and exciting work of science fiction.

Favorite Actress Showcase #3: Danielle Fishel

Danielle Fishel played Topanga Lawrence on Boy Meets World, one of the greatest television shows ever made. More recently she has been the host of The Dish on the Style network, a channel I don't even have, luckily there're clips of the show on Youtube. The show is like The Soup but with a much hotter host. Danielle is stunningly beautiful and should be getting way better acting roles.

Deer Among Red-leaved Maple Trees

Deer Among Red-leaved Maple Trees
by an unknown artist
10th century Chinese painting - ink and colors on silk.

Jean-Honoré Fragonard art

Rinaldo in the garden of Armida

by Jean-Honoré Fragonard

This painting is based on Torquato Tasso's epic poem Jerusalem Delivered. Fragonard (1732-1806) was a French Rococo artist, he painted this work circa 1763.

Literature Pick #12

The Talkative Tree 

by Horace Brown Fyfe
From the January 1962 issue of Worlds of If, this is an imaginative science fiction story.