There has been talk of late about a certain Halloween Ball having a 1950s theme to it. Having pondered that for a time, considered the idea, and mulled things over a bit, I’ve been looking for something that might fit the bill… This might be something to consider I think.

This is called the Devil Made Me Do It Pencil Dress snd it consists of the dress alone and nothing else. I found it on a single site for $40 US.

I do rather like the dress, and I will admit that a lot has to do with the model, the necklace, bow, and her hair. The combination really looks nice and I think it really works together extremely well.

The pattern on the dress itself I think isn’t over the top or makes it look tacky. Really if someone isn’t paying attention the pattern really just fades out a bit, almost becoming secondary to the dress itself.

I don’t happen to have a wig, or a bow at the moment… But I will be thinking over this idea quite a lot I think…

It’s good to find something that gives inspiration really…

I’ll give this four out of five pitchforks.

We’ll see where this takes me…

Tera

June calendar page, 16th c. J. Paul Getty Museum, MS Ludwig IX 16, f. 6r

 "The regiment for the time of Summer, June, July, and August. The shepheards in summer been clothed with light gowns and single, their shirts and sheets that they ly in be linnen, for of all cloath it is the coldest... and they eat light meats, as Chickens with veriuyce, young Hares, Rabbets, Lettise, Purselain, Melons, Gowrds, Cucumbers, Peares, Plumbs... They drink oft fresh water when they be thirsty, save only at dinner and supper time, and then they do drink feebl green Wine, single Beer, or small Ale. Also they keep them from over great travell, or over forcing themselves, for in this time is nothing grievouser than chafing. In this season they eschue the company of women, and they bathe them oft in cold water to asswage the heat of their bodies enforced by labours. Alway they have with them sugarcandy or other Sugar whereof they take little and often." 

The Shepheards Kalender

Hovertext: Someday, alien intelligences will come and wonder why we thought hoarders were the crazy ones.

Hovertext: At least tell me it only works in computer models!

Rewrite to avoid click here.

I find myself linking to this article about why your links should never say click here for links on the web that I thought I should just get it down for easy reference. The solution, generally, is to rewrite your sentence. For more about writing for the web, click here. Only joking, check out more tips about writing for the web.

Also see: Omit unnecessary words, use styling instead of colons, cognitive overhead and the best writing is rewriting. 

It was a hot, sunny Sunday in Pierce County, Wisconsin – one of those places outsiders might think of as “the Middle of Nowhere,” but others call “home.” The unseasonable warmth made for a delightful kind of early summer day to bring flowers to the graves of relatives, if that’s your sort of thing.

Judith and her sister are the sorts to bring flowers to grave sites. Their mother started them at a young age. And now, for the first time, they brought flowers to their mother’s site.

A century ago, people picnicked at graveyards, Judith tells me.

These places make me terribly uncomfortable – a position I hold to be perfectly rational and tenable. Daughter, Age 7, agrees.

As Judith and her sister walked Daughter, Age 7, around the Rock Elm Cemetery, looking for relatives, I wandered a bit on my own, more self-consciously ill at ease with the concept of mortality than normal. (Which is saying something).

Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted a headstone on its own, beneath the shade of a couple of small juniper trees. I’m not sure what drew me to it, but its dates gave me pause:

HOWARD PATTERSON
JAN. 5 1891
NOV. 8 1918
Co. G. 16th INF A.E.F.

…the grave of a 27-year old American soldier who died, three days before the end of the war. At Sedan? Or of other injuries?

— John Kovalic (@muskrat_john) May 29, 2016

Howard Patterson, a 27-year-old of Maiden Rock, Wisconsin, had apparently died while serving with the 16th Infantry (sometimes known as “The Big Red One”) of the American Expeditionary Force in France…three days before the armistice.

Just one of those chance encounters that puts a timeless perspective on so much.

— John Kovalic (@muskrat_john) May 29, 2016

The American Legion had placed a flag at the grave, but in contrast to the other plots around the cemetery, there were no other flowers, no trinkets.

I wanted to find out more, and a quick internet search brought brought me to the history of the 16th, which saw its fair share of action in France, for an American unit:

Arguably the regiment’s most gallant action was the grueling drive that liberated the little village of Fléville in the Argonne forest region on 4 October 1918. This feat was significant in that the 16th Infantry was the only regiment in the entire First U.S. Army to take its main objective on the first day of the Meuse-Argonne Campaign. The 16th Infantry also participated in the 1st Division’s final drive of the war when the division attacked to seize the city of Sedan.

Men of the 16th Infantry rush into Thelonne under shellfire during the advance on Sedan, 7 November 1918.

With the help of folks on Twitter (Michael Kinyon, in particular), we tracked down the cause of death, discovered amongst a list of Pierce County casualties:

Patterson, Howard, 27, Maiden Rock; pvt 1cl 16inf; U. S.; k by explosion of hand grenade (accident) Nov 8, ’18.

(Skimming through the roster, the sheer number of deaths due to pneumonia is staggering.)

French refugees watch the regiment march through the Bois de Boliers near Sedan 9 November 1918 – the day after the death of Private Patterson.

Almost a hundred years ago, three days before the armistice, thousands of miles from home, 27 year-old Private, First Class Howard Patterson, of Maiden Rock, Wisconsin, died in an accidental hand-grenade explosion.

There’s little I can say right now that won’t seem trite at best, or clichéd at worst. But I would urge everyone to listen to the Hardcore History podcast’s magnificent six-part series on Word War I, “Blueprint for Armageddon.” Dan Carlin’s narrative is both gripping and sobering. Certainly, it gave me a new understanding of the horrors of this most hideous of wars.

God bless, Howard Patterson, of Maiden Rock, Pierce County, Wisconsin, one casualty – one story – out of millions.

-John

Phoenix trees.

Trees that live on after toppling and that can create new trees from branches of the original with their own roots and everything. Not to be confused with nurse logs which are dead fallen trees that provide a great environment for new trees and plants to grow in. When the original finally decays you end up with a neat straight line of trees.

Since rainbows are caused by the refraction of the sunlight by tiny droplets of rainwater, what would rainbow look like on Earth if we had two suns like Tatooine?

—Raga

A planet with double suns would have double rainbows.

Or rather, quadruple rainbows. Our rainbows here on Earth are already double rainbows—there's a second, fainter bow above the main one. You can't always see this second rainbow, since the clouds need to be just right, so people get excited when they see one.

The area between the two rainbows is darker than the area outside because raindrops reflect light more strongly in certain directions. That region has a name, by the way—it's called Alexander's dark band.

The first and second rainbows are the only ones you can see easily, but there are actually many more bows beyond those two, each one fainter than the last. Rainbows are formed by light bouncing around in raindrops, and the different bows are formed by different paths the light can take. The main rainbow is formed by the most common paths through the droplet, and other paths—where some of the light bounces around in more unusual ways—make the fainter second, third, fourth, and even fifth rainbows.

Usually, only the first and second rainbows are bright enough to see; it was only in the last five years that anyone took pictures of the third, fourth, and fifth rainbows.

Rainbows appear on the other side of the sky from the Sun, so to figure out what a double rainbow would look like on a planet with two suns, we need to figure out where the suns usually appear in the sky on that kind of planet.

There are planets with two suns out there, although we didn't know that for sure until recently. Double-star planets come in two main varieties:

In the first kind of system, the two stars are close together and the planet goes around them far away. This kind of planet is called a circumbinary planet. In the second kind of system, the two stars are farther apart, and the planet orbits one of them[1]Not necessarily the bigger one. while the other stays far away. This kind of planet is called [the other kind of planet].[2]I'm sorry, I've just never learned a good word for these.

If you lived on [the other kind of planet],[3]Sorry. the two Suns would spend most of the year in different parts of the sky. Depending on how big they were, they may also be very different in brightness. If you were orbiting the larger star, the smaller one might be no brighter than the Moon,[4]Which would still be bright enough to cast a rainbow! or even look like an ordinary planet or star.

Tatooine, in Star Wars, looks like it's probably a circumbinary planet. The two stars appear pretty close together in the sky and similar in color and size, so it seems reasonable to guess they're actually near one another, with Tatooine orbiting both of them. Two suns would create two overlapping rainbows. The main bow of the rainbow is a circle about 84 degrees across, centered in the sky exactly opposite the Sun.[5]This is why you never see more than half of a rainbow above the horizon. If the center of the rainbow were above the horizon, it would mean the Sun was below it behind you, so there wouldn't be sunlight to make a rainbow in the first place. The farther apart the two suns were, the farther apart the rainbows would be. If the two suns were 84 degrees apart, the main bows of the two rainbows would barely touch.

A pair of suns 84 degrees apart would be possible around [the other kind of planet], but not around Tatooine-type[6]If Star Wars had just used the other kind of planet, we could use its name for them and solve this problem. circumbinary planets. The reason is simple: A planet orbiting two stars can't get too close to them or its orbit becomes unstable. If it gets too close, the irregular tugging from the gravity of the two stars as they orbit will eventually cause the planet to crash into one of them or get flung out of the system.

For a system with two similar-sized stars, this "critical radius" is around six times the distance between the two stars.[7]This is a very rough number; it can range from four to eight depending on the exact arrangement. We've found a lot of planets close to that critical radius, which suggests that maybe they slowly migrate inward until they reach it and are ejected or destroyed. Strangely, we haven't found many big Jupiter-sized planets around binary stars in general; we should be seeing them if they're there, so the lack of them is a mystery. This means that the two suns would never get more than about 20 degrees apart in the sky:

This tells us that the two rainbows in a Tatooine-like system would always overlap.[8]Assuming the raindrops are made of water, or something with similar refractive properties. The colors would blend together where the bows crossed, and the dark bands would too.

I suppose doubling all the rainbows would also double the number of pots of gold at the end of each rainbow.[9]Come to think of it, do our rainbows have one pot of gold or two? I've never really thought about it. And it's not just pots of gold; I guess we'd need to rethink all kinds of rainbow references.

Overlapping rainbows would be beautiful, but definitely a lot more complicated.

diviningonkaren:

awitchandhersecrets:

crossedread:

thelittleslytherinprincess:

phookatheism:

alderwolfe:

nativewitching:

awitchandhersecrets:

Suggestions for liminal, in between spaces where we can hedge witch and open up to the spirit realm contacting us:

*in doorways
*at midnight or better, 3am
*truck stops
*at the turn of the season, between seasons
*crossroads

Additions welcome!

*abandoned train tracks
*hallways
*tunnels
*gateways
*hospitals - life, death, and birth

*foggy weather

*sunset

* Alleys
* Abandoned buildings/places
* Old Homes
* places where two different trees grow together into one tree
*places where sidewalks don’t quite fit together right.
*the median between roads
* old sidewalks cracked apart by tree roots
* places with lots of graffiti from lots of different people and times, all painted over each other
*trees that are growing sideways out of a cliff, defying all laws of physics. or a tree that got cut down, but the tree is still growing out of the stump
*overrun/wild gardens/lawns
*normally busy places (grocery stores, schools) when there is no one there (like at night or on a snow day)
*airports (airports, man. don’t even get me started on airports)
*pretty much anywhere that 1) people don’t go there/people used to go there but they don’t anymore
2) lots of people come and go all of the time, places of travel
3) places being reclaimed by nature, or places that have always been nature
4) unnatural places, places that don’t quite make sense but exist anyway.

Bus stops
Subway/train stations (especially at night)
Clearings in the woods
The edge of the woods
Hallways with lots of doors, if that makes any sense.

Being in these all makes so incredibly anxious

When one senses something they can’t explain, it can be anxiety-inducing. Once you know what is going on, can explain it with some cosmology logic, and learn to control it, being open or closed to it or turning that sense or magic on or off, that anxiety might go away. Might not. That sensation might be your body’s preferred mechanism for alerting you of the hedge, of the liminal space. I get a definite feeling of my stomach dropping in these places, just a hollow place opening up in my sternum. From there, I can freak out and get faster heart rate, increased breathing, dilated pupils, ears hearing every tiny noise, or I can say: “Not right now, you,” and focus on other thing in this world instead of the next.

I’ve noticed that back rooms, empty hallways, and quiter parts of school buildings, especially high schools, are very active spaces

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