24 July 2024
I posted this Amelia Earhart text and image on my Facebook Profile on 24 July 2018, Earhart's 121st posthumous birthday, and I am re-posting it here on her 127th posthumous birthday:
Today, 24 July 2024, is the 127st birthday of Amelia Earhart (1897–1937),
America's so-called "Flying Sweetheart" who mysteriously vanished somewhere in the central Pacific Ocean during an attempted transpacific flight in 1937. Since then, numerous theories about what happened to her have received "breaking news" media coverage: For example, in March 2018 there was a report that her "bones" had in 1940 been discovered on a remote coral atoll in the western Pacific, but, as usual, it had a drawback: "The bones have unfortunately since been lost, and so cannot be analyzed" — meaning no DNA analysis, if possible.
Over 40 years ago, I wrote an article for a Guahan (Guam) newspaper about the various crackpot, lamebrain, and screwball theories about Earhart's unexplained disappearance. I ended the article with these words which are still true today: "What really happened to Earhart, her navigator, and her aircraft, may never be known. Despite books by aviation sleuths, a long list of disappearance theories without any solid documentation, and cuckoo psychics allegedly telephoning Earhart's winged spirit (dial her plane, Electra 10E), no one knows what happened to her. No reliable documented evidence relating to her disappearance has ever been discovered. The truth about Earhart's disappearance, in my opinion, is unromantic and short on mystery: Earhart's airplane crashed in the open sea, far from land, and alive, or maybe dead on impact, she sank with her navigator and her airplane into the deep dark depths."
Perhaps the best The End comment regarding Earhart's fate is Porky Pig's memorable words at the end of cartoons (Looney Tunes) in the late 1930s: "Th-th-that's all, folks!"
Illustration: The photograph shows Earhart in pilot's headgear. I have inserted from my postage stamp collection an 8-cent U.S. postage stamp — airmail, of course — issued in 1963. It shows Earhart and her aircraft. Beside the stamp I have added a stylized drawing of a compass rose — an old-time navigation instrument — clipped by me years ago from an old Pacific-area map for tourists. Earhart photograph credit: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.
22 April 2024
Because the flamingo is a memorable bird in Alice's Wonderland adventures, I have a large flamingo computer file. I like this public-domain, close-up photograph of a flamingo, which I posted on my Facebook Author Page on 10 July 2023. In Wonderland, Alice holds an upside-down flamingo that she plans to use as a croquet mallet, which is unacceptable to the bird and today would be labeled "animal cruelty." However, in the book, Alice only holds the bird and does not actually strike a croquet "ball"
(a live hedgehog) with the bird's head.
In my Alice in Wonderland trivia ebook The Royal Rule of Jam, I have a trivia unit devoted to the flamingo titled "The Crowd-Loving Water Bird of Wonderland." I have added to the photograph a drawing of Alice holding an upright flamingo, drawn by John Tenniel (1820–1914), the original English illustrator of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865). Image credits: Raw Pixel (flamingo) and the New York Public Library Digital Collections (Tenniel's drawing).
5 April 2024
In the late 1980s, I enjoyed my magazine travel-writing assignments in New Zealand, especially the scenic views of white clouds, which the early Māori, New Zealand's indigenous inhabitants, also enjoyed, naming their picturesque homeland after white clouds — Aotearoa, land of the "long white cloud." I especially like this public-domain photograph by a German photographer of a New Zealand lake, mountains, and "long white cloud," to which I have added an ebook cover and a graphic of New Zealand's flag in the shape of a kiwi, the country's national bird. In the New Zealand section of my text-only Amazon ebook, Beneath the Mountain of Birds, I have a unit titled and subtitled "The Mountains of Misty Water: Silent Landscapes of Lakes and Fiords." Image credit: Pixabay.
28 March 2024
I like this public-domain illustration made by a Mexican level designer ("part artist, part game designer, part storyteller, and part engineer") depicting Alice in Wonderland's well-known tea party. It shows Alice, the Hatter (aka Mad Hatter), and the March Hare. The fourth member of the tea party, the sleepy Dormouse, is not shown. In The Royal Rule of Jam, my illustrated Amazon Alice in Wonderland trivia ebook, I have a Japanese-related unit titled "The Tea Party Without a Host." Image credit: Pixabay.
21 March 2024
I plan to post this image and text (below) on my Facebook Profile in the near future without the ebook-related sentences that are included in this text because this website is devoted to my ebooks:
After watching an episode on PBS's Nature about a male human's encounter with a sperm whale, I was reminded of my sighting of a sperm whale (Physeter macrocephalus) one evening in 1968 while onboard an inter-island ship (aka "field-trip ship") voyaging among the Pacific Ocean's
Marshall Islands, where I was assigned as a U.S. Peace Corps Volunteer.
During the ship's departure from Jaluit Atoll, I stood beside the railing on the ship's stern deck and watched the atoll's receding, oceanside shoreline. Suddenly, the sperm whale surfaced between the ship and the atoll. Its not-so-large left eyeball, about the size of a baseball, eyed the ship (and me) and then the whale quickly submerged, disappearing from view beneath the atoll's deep, oceanside waters. Sadly, we never met eyeball-to-eyeball again.
Years later, in the late 1980s, I visited Jaluit Atoll on a magazine-travel writing assignment and wrote about my visit in my Amazon ebook My Canoe Has No News. I titled the Marshall Islands section "Atolls of Sunrise, Atoll of Sunset," meaning Rālik, the western (sunset) atolls, and Ratak, the eastern (sunrise) atolls. Traveling in an airplane, not a ship, I did not see a sperm whale.
Illustration: I made this illustration from an assortment of public-domain images: a U.S. map of Jaluit Atoll, the flag of the Marshall Islands, a green sea turtle, a sperm whale submerging at sunset, and a red-haired mermaid riding a yellowfin tuna. (Yes, I like red-haired mermaids and I eat canned skipjack tuna, not canned yellowfin tuna.) Image credits: Pixabay, Wikimedia Commons, and PublicDomainVectors.
17 March 2024
I made this illustration for a future ebook promotional post on my Facebook Page. It is compiled from 10 public-domain images related to Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and one public-domain painting. The ebook cover is my Amazon Alice in Wonderland trivia ebook The Royal Rule of Jam. The blue background is from a painting by the Russian-born artist Joseph Schillinger (1895–1943). It is titled "Blue Gray Violet Wheel." Image credits: Raw Pixel and Pixabay.
14 March 2024 (First posted, in part, on my Facebook Profile on 16 October 2019.)
I am thinking today about Hawai'i's Princess Ka'iulani (1875–1899) who died young, age 23. She would have been a queen of Hawai'i if she had lived a longer life, and if, in 1893 (a few years before her death), the Hawaiian monarchy had not been illegally overthrown by a group of non-Hawaiian residents, including citizens of the U.S. who were aided by the U.S. military. This eventually led to annexation by the
U.S. of the Hawaiian Islands and later U.S. statehood.
Ka'iulani's home in Waikīkī was named 'Āinahau, meaning "land of the hau tree" — an indigenous Polynesian tree. The apartment building that I live in is built on the site of her long-ago Waikīkī home and is also named 'Āinahau.
In my illustrated Amazon ebook Royal Hawk and Spouting Water, I have a unit devoted to Ka'iulani titled "The Island Princess."
Illustration: A photograph of Ka'iulani taken in England, probably around 1892, where she had been sent to further her education — her father was Scottish and her Hawaiian mother was a member of Hawai'i's royal family in the late 19th century. She is wearing a Victorian-style dress with high collar and so-called "mutton-chop" sleeves. The photograph is from a late 19th-century book about Hawai'i. Using a Nikon camera attached to a copy stand, I photographed this book-published photograph years ago from a copy in a Honolulu library's rare book collection. Called hau in Hawaiian, the yellow blossom (inserted by me) is a species of yellow-blossomed hibiscus (Hibiscus tiliaceus) that may have been carried to the Hawaiian Islands centuries ago by the Polynesian voyagers who settled in this mid-Pacific archipelago, or hau seeds may have reached the Hawaiian Islands without human assistance by floating across the ocean. Because the blossoms last only one day, hau is often symbolic of the transitory nature of human life, certainly true given the short life of Ka'iulani. This hau print is from the 19th-century Hawai'i artist Isabella Sinclair's Indigenous Flowers of the Hawaiian Islands published in London in 1885. It is the first book published with colored illustrations of Hawai'i's flowers.
Name trivia: Ka'iulani in Hawaiian means "the royal sacred height."
