Posts Tagged ‘Queen Elizabeth I’
Making it…
The San Mateo County Event Center (aka “behind where the old Bay Meadows was”) comes alive this weekend–whirls, clangs, roars, flame spouts… It’s this year’s Maker Faire— an event that your correspondent heartily recommends. Readers will see such delights as…
Playable Table-top Pong
“What would the classic game PONG be like, if it were liberated from the cathode ray tube? To find out, we constructed this ‘real world’ version that you can try.”
From Evil Mad Scientist Labs (whom readers will recall)
and…
(also known to readers) photo: Laughing Squid
and…
The Apocalypse Puppet Theater
“We shall perform “So I Married a Seamonster- The Sordid Tale of Capt. Smitty” upon our bicycle-drawn traveling puppet theater, The Apocalypse Stagecoach. This show features bunraku puppets, original songs, and our Sababtini column wave machine.”
And so much more! (Readers in other locales, check for events near you.)
As we prepare to be amazed, we might recall that it was on this date in 1536 that Ann Boleyn was beheaded, ostensibly for adultery, treason, and incest. Historians doubt the charges: while Ann had borne Henry VIII the daughter who would become England’s Queen Elizabeth I, three subsequent attempts at producing a male heir had resulted in miscarriage; at the time of Ann’s arrest and execution, Henry had already moved on to Jane Seymour.
Ironically (or, given the Tudor family karma, not), it was on this date 32 years later that Queen Elizabeth ordered the arrest of (her first cousin once removed) Mary, Queen of Scots.
Please, Dad! Please read the one where the plague victim gets caught in the hurricane and is crushed by a tree…
From the ever-illuminating Ten Zen Monkeys, “The Most Depressing Children’s Books Ever Written“… Consider, for example, #5:
Andrea Patel, a Massachusetts schoolteacher– and pastry chef, and musician– represents the earth as a big blue circle of tissue paper, then writes “One day a terrible thing happened,” as a big red splotch appears on that circle.
“The world, which had been blue and green and bright and very big and really round and pretty peaceful, got badly hurt.
“Many people were injured. Many other people died. And everyone was sad.”
Then she tries explaining terrorism to children — using more tissue paper collages. There’s a tornado, an earthquake, and a fire — all bad things that happen naturally. “But sometimes bad things happen because people act in mean ways and hurt each other on purpose,” she writes. “That’s what happened on that day, a day when it felt like the world broke.” Then there’s a picture of the pieces of the world blowing away and drifting across the blank whiteness of the next page…
The book was finished within weeks of the September 11 attacks, and Patel donated all the book’s proceeds to a 9/11 charity, but the whole exercise is still a little disturbing. People fumbled for the right response to the terrorist attacks, and in the end, this is probably Patel’s most inadvertently honest sentence.
“This is scary, and hard to understand, even for grown-ups.”
One should steel oneself, then find them all here.
As wonder whatever became of Tom Terrific, we might recall that it was on this date in 1584 that Sir Walter Raleigh was granted a Royal Patent by his Patron Elizabeth I to colonize Virginia.
Meetings with Remarkable Men…
The Edgerton Digital Collections project celebrates the spirit of a great pioneer, Harold “Doc” Edgerton, inventor, entrepreneur, explorer and beloved MIT professor– a site for all who share Doc Edgerton’s philosophy of “Work hard. Tell everyone everything you know. Close a deal with a handshake. Have fun!”
The Edgerton Digital Collections are worth a visit for a variety of reasons; Doc Edgerton’s life was remarkable; his work, extraordinarily impactful– and his story, full of resonant lessons. But if for no other reason, readers should click through to see the collection of photographs taken with the strobe technology that Edgerton pioneered; e.g.,
As we marvel at motion stopped, we might curtsy in the general direction of London, as it was on this date in 1559 that, two months after the death of her half-sister, Queen Mary I of England, Elizabeth Tudor, the 25-year-old daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, was crowned Queen Elizabeth I at Westminster Abbey in London. The Virgin Queen presided over the accession of England to primacy as a global power, ruling until her death in 1603. (As readers may recall, while this is the anniversary of Elizabeth’s coronation, she actually acceded to power two months earlier, on Mary’s death.)
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