Valentino's Vanity

The Game of Star Wars Collection

Created by Doctaword (www.andrewtranart.com)

Woodlands: Custom Kanto Wooden Map

There is a new map in the excellent Woodlands series from Neutral Ground, the digital woodshop based out of New Orleans, Louisiana! Designed in collaboration with illustrator Daniel Mackey, this particular map details the the colorful Kanto region from the world of Pokemon which we all know and love. Check out the full map description and details here.

Every map is laser-etched on hand-selected maple ply that measures 18-½" wide by 14" tall, with a keyhole slot on the back for hanging, available for sale only at the Neutral Ground Shop. You can follow them on Twitter or Facebook for more updates on this excellent series.

Compared to a star, we are like mayflies, fleeting ephemeral creatures who live out their whole lives in the course of a single day. From the point of view of a mayfly, human beings are stolid, boring, almost entirely immovable, offering hardly a hint that they ever do anything. From the point of view of a star, a human being is a tiny flash, one of billions of brief lives flickering tenuously on the surface of a strangely cold, anomalously solid, exotically remote sphere of silicate and iron.

THEY TRIED TO WARN US!!!

Breaking news: The United States has fallen and the dark lord Satan now walks the Earth.

The Supreme Court today ignored the pleas of fundamentalist Christians and legalized gay marriage across the nation. Little did they expect that doing so would unleash the devil from his thousand year banishment to the pit of hell.

“We fucking warned you,” said Pastor Fred Phelps of Westboro Baptist Church, “We warned you this would happen and now the country is ended and the devil now reigns triumphant over the souls of the innocent.” Scientists are uncertain how exactly the legalization destroyed the nation or cast open the gates of hell, but reports suggest that one of the first marriages, Jessica Foss and Bertha Denuve, was most directly to blame. It seems that the couple, having been together for 57 years, kissed to seal their marriage at long last and the gay waves produced by that legal display of affection resonated at the same frequency as the demonic seal of Choronzon, the abyss of nothingness.

As a blood ocean sweeps the globe and flying flame scorpions torment the sinners, this reporter can’t help but think, “What if we had only listened to these rampaging buffoons who claimed this would happen. We should have known that their insane, bigoted and idiotic ramblings would come true.”

Authorities are recommending that everyone still alive get a tattoo of the number 666 on their foreheads so they’ll still be allowed to buy food. They also recommend worshiping the beast of seven heads and ten horns (3 are on its butt) that has risen from the ocean, for who can make war with it?

Pray for the globe, those of you left behind, pray for forgiveness, and never forget: It was the Supreme Court that allowed people who loved each other to be wed, and that is what ended the world. The fools!

Illuminated editions of Tolkien’s trilogy are extremely rare, with most extant copies dating to the 14th and 13th centuries. Each copy had to be hand made letter by letter by monks. A single copy of the series could take up to ten years to manufacture.

This Eye of Sauron is an uncommon page, most pages having minimal illustration such as this leaf from a 1447 edition detailing the meeting of Denethor with Pippin and Gandalf:

As you can see, the text is also illegible, as Tolkien wrote the first edition of Lord of the Rings in Latin. Even The Hobbit was not translated into English until 1801 when the “Septuagimli” was constructed by the Council Clive of Staples-Lewis. Also notable from pre-printing-press editions of Lord of the Rings is the original title of the series, “Brevis imagine ambulat homo multus.“ which translates roughly as, “The short guy walks a lot.”

The original title of The Hobbit, “Ludaei suscitaverunt et draconi qui avidos“ was also abandoned when political forces during the French Revolution changed the Messiah to a Wizard, the Devil into a Dragon, and the Jews into Dwarves. These changed were not mandated for the trilogy proper, though the character of Gollum was originally meant to depict Pope Boniface VIII.

The Incan stonework is famous for it’s large stones (some over 100 tons) that fit so precisely together that “not even a knife could be inserted between the joints.”

How the Incans were able to transport these massive building blocks and handled is something we don’t quite understand today. What we do know is that the cutting marks on some of the stone blocks are very similar to those found on the pyramidion of the unfinished obelisk in Egypt.