I do like Christmas on the whole…. In its clumsy way, it does approach Peace and Goodwill.  But it is clumsier every year. 

~E.M. Forster

Thanks everybody who entered the steampunk haiku contest. Voting for your favourite steampunk haiku is over and we have a winner.

It is Giada M. with

Clock-Work-Cuckoo-Clown
Steam-Cyber-Space-Ship-Circus
Err-And-Iron-Punk

To see all entries, please go to the entries page.

Congrats, Giada! I will contact you by email to get your shipping address and to find out your choice of steampunk book from The Book Depository.

Many thanks again to Kristi from Northwyke Creations and to Fox Chapel Publishing who generously sponsored the contest with a beautiful Steampunk lapel pin from her Etsy shop and a copy of Art Donovan’s “The art of Steampunk”.

All entries for the steampunk haiku contest are up now. Check them out and vote for your favourite haiku!

 

It is October and the Steampunk challenges is coming to a close. Would you like to take on another Steampunk related creative challenge?

Enter the Steampunk haiku contest!  The winner will receive a gorgeous lapel pin created by Kristi from Northwyke Creations, a print copy of “The art of Steampunk” by Art Donovan from Fox Chapel Publishing and a Steampunk book of his/her choice.

For all the info about the contest please go to the Steampunk haiku contest page.

It’s time for another “Quizzical Monday”!

Question:

Today it is about poetry. Who are the three great masters of Haiku?

Leave a comment with your answer. Then, to see whether you got it right,  click on "Show" below.  As usual, there is nothing to be won, this is just for fun! Thanks for playing

Today I am combining Thursday 13 with Paris in July and found thirteen quotes about Paris.

Image by Dimitri B from flickr.com

• If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a movable feast. ~Ernest Hemingway
• America is my country and Paris is my hometown. ~Gertrude Stein
• When spring comes to Paris the humblest mortal alive must feel that he dwells in paradise. ~Henry Miller
• In Paris they simply stared at me when I spoke to them in French. I never did succeed in making those idiots understand their language. ~Mark Twain
• Of course I have played outdoor games. I once played dominoes in an open air cafe in Paris. ~Oscar Wilde
• The best of America drifts to Paris. The American in Paris is the best American. It is more fun for an intelligent person to live in an intelligent country. France has the only two things toward which we drift as we grow older—intelligence and good manners.  ~F. Scott Fitzgerald
• [Paris] is dirty. It has pigeons and black yards. The people have white skin. ~Albert Camus
• To have one’s mother-in-law in the country when one lives in Paris, and vice versa, is one of those strokes of luck that one encounters only too rarely. ~Honoré de Balzac
• Nowhere is one more alone than in Paris … and yet surrounded by crowds. Nowhere is one more likely to incur greater ridicule. And no visit is more essential.  ~Marguerite Duras
• Whoever does not visit Paris regularly will never really be elegant. ~Honoré de Balzac
• To err is human. To loaf is Parisian. ~Victor Hugo
• …the whole of Paris is a vast university of Art, Literature and Music…it is worth anyone’s while to dally here for years. Paris is a seminar, a post-graduate course in Everything. ~James Thurber
• Paris is the only city where you can step out of a railway station —and see, the Seine with its bridges and bookstalls, the Louvre, Notre Dame, the Tuileries Gardens, the Place de la Concorde, the beginning of the Champs Elysees—what other city offers as much as you leave a train? ~Margaret Anderson

 

To see what other Thursday 13ers write about today, visit Thursday 13.

I went to the Big Picture Blog yesterday and discovered they have a color challenge going right now. I haven’t done any challenges in a long time but figured I could give it a go and practice some collage as well while I’m there.

The only rule was to use soft blue as the background, that sounded easy enough. I had planned to use a certain haiku that I found at the Haiku Forge for a long time and this was a good opportunity. If you don’t know the haiku forge, you should definitely check it out. Great haiku to be found and great web design as well.

The image of the girl was so small that I could only create an ATC with it, everything else would have been too big for it. I was looking for a sleeping woman actually, but couldn’t find any cool vintage image of one. If you ever come across one, let me know, please!

Credits: Background: Oscraps collab, Lace: Amy Martin, Moon and stars: Jeannie Papai, Girl image: flickr by chicks57, Moon image: flickr by penguinbush, frame: Audrey Neal, Constellation brush and grunge overlay: Michelle Coleman, Stitching: Syrin

 

I felt like looking around for quotes about tattoos today. My selection:

• I always look for a woman who has a tattoo.  I see a woman with a tattoo, and I’m thinking, okay, here’s a gal who’s capable of making a decision she’ll regret in the future.  ~Richard Jeni
• Beauty is skin deep.  A tattoo goes all the way to the bone.  ~Vince Hemingson
• The universality of tattooing is a curious subject for speculation.  ~James Cook, 1779
• Not one great country can be named, from the polar regions in the north to New Zealand in the south, in which the aborigines do not tattoo themselves.  ~Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man
• A man without tattoos is invisible to the Gods. ~Iban Proverb
• It’s a good thing they hurt, otherwise every pussy in the world would have one. ~Jack Rudy
• The only difference between a tattooed person and a person who isn’t tattooed is that a tattooed person doesn’t care if you’re tattooed or not. ~Sign often seen in tattoo shops
• Reason #7 For Not Getting a Tattoo: People will know you are running your own life, instead of listening to them! ~ Sailor Jerry Collins, tattoo artist
• Every officer in the British army should be tattooed with his regimental crest. Not only does this encourage esprit de corps but also assists in the identification of casualties. ~Field Marshal Earl Roberts
• Tattooing is about personalizing the body, making it a true home and fit temple for the spirit that dwells inside it. ~Michelle Delio
• Getting a tattoo should hurt. It’s a rite of passage. ~Jenna Jameson
• A tattoo is an affirmation: that this body is yours to have and to enjoy while you’re here. Nobody else can control what you do with it. ~Don Ed Hardy

And the last word goes to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe…

• Painting and tattooing the body is a return to animalism.

 

To see what other Thursday 13ers write about today, visit Thursday 13.

 

Image of tattoo arts festival in Pattaya, Thailand by Binder.donedat at flickr

Today I am looking at quotes about breakfast. I am not a big breakfast lover, so you should not be surprised that most of the quotes give it a somewhat negative spin. 

Still, enjoy!

• A kiss and a drink of water make but a wersh breakfast. ~Scottish proverb
• O lovers! Be careful in those dangerous first days! Once you’ve brought breakfast in bed you’ll have to bring it forever, unless you want to be accused of lovelessness and betrayal. ~Milan Kundera
• My wife and I tried two or three times in the last forty years to have breakfast together, but it was so disagreeable we had to stop.  ~Winston Churchill
• There is a vast difference between the savage and the civilised man, but it is never apparent to their wives until after breakfast. ~Helen Rowland
• In England people actually try to be brilliant at breakfast. That is so dreadful of them! Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast. ~Oscar Wilde
• Laugh before breakfast, you’ll cry before supper. ~English proverb
• Breakfast is a notoriously difficult meal to serve with a flourish. ~Clement Freud
• People who insist on telling their dreams are among the terrors of the breakfast table. ~Max Beerbohm
• Never work before breakfast; if you have to work before breakfast, eat your breakfast first. ~Josh Billings (Henry Wheeler Shaw)

• I never drink anything stronger than gin before breakfast. ~W. C. Fields

• The difference between ‘involvement’ and ‘commitment’ is like an eggs-and-ham breakfast: the chicken was ‘involved’ – the pig was ‘committed’. ~Unknown

• All the older people who are thriving have stayed physically active — there are exceptions, and everyone knows someone who smoked two packs a day and had a few social beers with breakfast every morning who lived to be 85, but you have to assume that this won’t be you, … ~Anne Lamott

• DEJEUNER, n. The breakfast of an American who has been in Paris. Variously pronounced. ~Ambrose Bierce

To see what other Thursday 13ers write about today, visit Thursday 13.

Image of breakfast table by Pinot & Dita at flickr.com 

Her name probably popped into my head because of that book I started some time ago but never finished because it just couldn’t hold my attention – “Becoming George Sand”. Besides, two days ago it was International Women’s Day and George Sand was a woman after my own heart, non-conformist and with views rather unusual for her time.

 

 

 

 

• He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life.
• I have no enthusiasm for nature which the slightest chill will not instantly destroy.
• I regard as a mortal sin not only the lying of the senses in matters of love, but also the illusion which the senses seek to create where love is only partial. I say, I believe, that one must love with all of one’s being, or else live, come what may, a life of complete chastity.
• Admiration and familiarity are strangers.
• I ask the support of no one, neither to kill someone for me, gather a bouquet, correct a proof, nor to go with me to the theater. I go there on my own, as a man, by choice; and when I want flowers, I go on foot, by myself, to the Alps.
• My profession is to be free.
• Nothing resembles selfishness more closely than self-respect.
• The capacity of passion is both cruel and divine.
• The beauty that addresses itself to the eyes is only the spell of the moment; the eye of the body is not always that of the soul.
• Masterpieces are only lucky attempts.
• All of us who have time and money to spare, travel — that is to say, we flee; since surely it is not so much a question of travelling as of getting away? Which of us has not some sorrow to dull, or some yoke to cast off?
• We cannot tear a single page from our life, but we can throw the whole book into the fire.
• The truth is too simple: one must always get there by a complicated route.

To see what other Thursday 13ers write about today, visit Thursday 13.