popular culture

Another winner from Grumpy Eleanor of Aquitaine: I love the disclaimer on the source page: Yes, I know her costume is not historically accurate – she was a commission and was specifically requested *not* to be! To be clear, I in no way blame the maker for this.  He orContinue Reading

After a quick debate, I decided to file this under religion. I don’t always have to be scholarly.

I am fairly well versed in occult symbols since I wrote my masters thesis on the subject. I don’t expect other people to know them…and neither do script writers. If you see symbols being used in a TV show like Supernatural, they are pretty much always a random collection ofContinue Reading

The Angel Castiel

It took me a long time to get into Supernatural. Its first few seasons primarily centered on a monster-of-the-week, and the two main characters were, quite frankly, not terribly dynamic. It was described to me early on as a darker Buffy, but I could never see it. In season four,Continue Reading

This TV show makes the historian in me weep. To me, Sleepy Hollow typifies all the wrong ways of writing alt-history. The writers came up with a story by grabbing a literary figure, bringing him into the present, rolling both into the apocalyptic predictions of the Book of Revelation, andContinue Reading