Y/N by Esther Li Penguin Random House, 2024 [ #23 Out of the park on first at-bat: A debut ] Update on Authors Watercooler Reading Challenge 2024. I wasn’t getting anywhere with my paranormal pick, The Death of the Necromancer by Martha Welles. Who, unknown to me when I picked it in January, also wrote the …
Wonderful Tonight by Patti Boyd and Penny Junor Three Rivers Press, 2007 I’ve got a soft spot for rock and roll biographies. I must have consumed 50+ over the years, including those of bands. It’s not so much understanding the musicianship that attracts me as getting to know the real people behind the songs that …
In this post I’ll showcase some pieces of fan art I didn’t get around to last year or have found since then. Like the two fluffy yaoi romantic fantasies below. Jimbert of course.
Once you start looking for Led Zep references, you find that there’s no shortage of how the band’s visual iconography spawned homage over the years. Take this logo for a vanity record label created by jokester Les Claypool of the American band Primus. For comparison, LZ’s iconic “Icarus” logo, with its Art Nouveau typeface, is …
Here’s another topic carried over from last year’s Led Zeppelin May, which I wanted to get to then, but didn’t: the band’s influence on popular culture over the years. First, take this quartet of demon-like monsters from the manga and later anime Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure. The four are named, respectively, Page, Jones, Plant, and Bornnam …
I had such a fun time doing Zeppedee-doo-dah May last year that I thought I’d revisit it. There were a number of items I had wanted to post back then but found the month ended way too soon. This pun-filled list of spells and magic items was one of them. Led Zeppelin Spells and …
I’m sure you’ve seen it on someone’s t-shirt: a roughly drawn smiley face with X’s instead of eyes and a protruding tongue. Together with the word Nirvana in its distinctive, elongated typeface – the font is Onyx, a popular one in the early 1990s – the effect on the viewer is striking. Right away the …
The Storyteller by Dave Grohl HarperCollins, 2021 [ # 19 Like a novel, only real: Creative nonfiction.] Dave Grohl’s The Storyteller is not the usual kind of rock and roll autobiography whose arc most often goes from rags to riches with a side tour into addiction. Instead it’s a series of short vignettes that illustrate …
You could just as well call these the Upper Midwest states, but I think Great Lakes states is more picturesque, as they do border lakes Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, and Ontario. And for a unifying theme I could have gone with ice fishing and mighty forests and Paul Bunyon, or, conversely, big city blue-collar life …