When I started going to Regency events I looked for tutorials on how to do a Regency hair style. Most of them were for ladies with long hair. My hair is no longer than my shoulders and has been shorter than this. I’ve learned that with a sufficient number of bobby pins, I can approximate a Regency hairstyle.

Here is a slideshow of how I go about it.

I am very pleased to announce that next year, I will be attending the 39th ConFusion as the Special Guest of Honor.  The line up looks like it is going to be great fun. The Pro GoH is Charles Stross, along with editor GoH Scott Edelman and Fan GoH James Nicoll.

And there will be puppets. Oh yes.

Mark  the dates January 17-20, 2013 on your calendar.  I’ll see you in Troy, Michigan.

I have to thank Madeleine Robins for pointing out that the carriages in French and Belgium at this point were called dilligence. By the way, if you have not read her truly excellent The Sarah Tolerance Mysteries, allow me to recommend them. If Jane Austen writes comedy of manners, Madeleine Robins writes mystery of manners. It’s an alternate Regency, good mystery and a thoroughly charming heroine who is an Agent of Inquiry.

And now, here is how the dilligence appears in Glamour in Glass.

Despite the charming name of France’s national system of carriages, the dilligence was too crowded for comfort, and the views out the windows— though of unfamiliar scenery— were only glimpsed by twisting one’s neck. The dilligence exchanged passengers at inns, crossings, and stables so that they had an unending variety of new travel companions.

Despair!

(Hat tip to Two Nerdy History Girls)

Enjoy the master classes by Bogie, Bette Davis, Carole Lombard, Claudette Colbert, Errol Flynn, Claude Rains, Kay Francis, Edward G. Robinson, Jane Wyman, George Brent, Merle Oberon, Patricia Neal, Mickey Rooney and more.

They still teach most of this today.

You’re a geek, too, right? I thought so. Nothing particular gave you away, just the fact that you hang around here made it a good bet. Which is why I thought you’d like to know about Geek Seekers. My friend Monte Cook is putting together a webseries with Jen Page which promises to be hilarious and occasionally informative.

Check out the video they put together for Kickstarter.

See? It appeals to all your geeky instincts, doesn’t it. Consider becoming a backer?

Today’s preview does not contain a description of the dress, but the circumstances in which one would wear such item.

The January wind whipped off the coast and lifted sails and skirts alike. Despite the chill, Jane stood at the rail of the Dolphin, feeling as if a series of stays were releasing their laces with each length they moved away from the shore.

So what does one wear aboard a ship? A carriage dress like this would meet your needs while traveling.

For the past several years, we have been trying — as typewriter collectors — to identify the typewriters on the shelves in Richard Castle’s office. Yeah, the fictional character in the show Castle. I was pretty sure we were looking at a Royal and an Underwood, but not certain. Even then, which models?  In the most recent episode, there were two shots that were clear enough that we actually could get screen shots.

What? You didn’t think that Rob and I were that geeky?

Please…

First up is the one closest to the door. The rounded front lead us to think that it is likely a Royal from the late 30s or early 40s as does the powder finish.

There’s a line of chrome detailing across the front that points to this being a Royal KMM. There’s a chance that it could also be the Remington-Rand Model Seventeen, which had a similar curved front profile and chrome detailing.

The telling detail?

The carriage return swoops up on a Royal and down on the Remington.

So, Rob and I feel pretty darn confident that this is the Royal KMM from 1941. It is noted for being the machine in which Royal introduced the Magic Margin system.  It’s a workhorse of a machine and there were a lot of them.

My question — if it is an Underwood — is why would the wealthy Richard Castle, collector, writer, and geek have such a fairly run-of-the-mill machine? Why not a Blickensderfer or a Daugherty Visible or a Columbia Bar-lock or a Franklin 7? What is it that makes these typewriters special? Maybe who wrote on them.

The other typewriter is stumping us.

The scoop in the front made me think it was probably an Underwood and there seems to be the gold detailing of a classic #5. The problem is that silhouette which makes it look like the platen is very far forward with a giant base behind it.

We’ve looked at other machine’s with a similar scoop, like the Fox, Remington, Victor, and even a couple of Woodstocks. Nothing seems to have a similar back end.

Of course, it could be screen distortion, since I’m grabbing this off of a YouTube video. I’ll have to wait for the next time they show one of these. Still, inquiring minds want to know.

If you aren’t familiar with SOPA allow me to show you this handy video which explains what it is and why it is bad for the internet. More specifically, why it is bad for you. SOPA stands for Stop Online Piracy Act. While I believe that content creators should be paid for their work, this bill is not the way to go about it. It will cause far more problems than it will prevent and the potential for abuse is large.

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

If you prefer your information in text, Gizmodo has a good primer on SOPA.

Or you can have this amusing song “The Day the LOLcats Died.”

So… in support of the anti-SOPA protest, my site will be dark tomorrow from 8am -8pm. More importantly, I’m writing a paper letter to my representatives.

(By the way, if you are a WordPress user, I’m using the Stop SOPA plug-in to go dark.)

My husband is working on a video project and searching for normal folks who embody informal science.  He would love to find a woman and/or ethnic minority.  Also, while the subject need not live in a rural setting, their story must be relevant to rural life – the target audience is small towns and rural communities.  The subject’s biography should display practical science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

In other words:

Neutrino detection is OUT.  Formulating and baking your own adobe bricks with a solar-powered kiln to build a bunker to store your collection of home-distilled agave spirits based on the recipe you translated from an 18th-century German travelogue citing an Anasazi folk tale is IN.

Do you have any ideas? Use the form below to send them directly to Rob.

To the person who sent me the “Mr. Darcy proposal scarf” from Etsy, thank you. It is cozy. I’ve never received wearable fan mail before.

I found the etsy shop that it comes from, but am resisting the urge to email the shop owner and ask who sent it. My feeling is that if one wishes to remain anonymous, that wish should be respected.

It has a quote from Mr. Darcy’s first proposal in Pride and Prejudice. “In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.”

The website says:

The famous words from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice are handwritten by me, and screen printed by my husband. The image of the text is printed in silver on both ends of a long, charcoal grey jersey scarf.

-100% Sheer Jersey cotton, very soft and comfortable

via Mr Darcy proposal scarf by Brookish on Etsy.

In Shades of Milk and Honey, when Jane first sees the professional glamourist, Mr. Vincent, she describes him as, “Tall, and very broad of chest. His hair was chestnut and curled about his head like Bacon’s portrait of Jean- Baptiste Isabey.”

In Glamour in Glass, we see him again.

His brown curls were tousled in the fashionable wind- swept look which so many men struggled to attain, but which came naturally to him.He swept his hands through his hair so much, knotting them in place while he thought, that it was permanently dishevelled.

Note the word wind-swept? It is one of three places I knowingly cheated with the language. That word does not get coined until 1932, but the description for the hairstyle from the period was… not particularly helpful to a modern reader.

Would you have known what I meant by the “frightened owl” hairstyle?

Hey, there’s a quiz about Shades of Milk and Honey over at Goodreads. How well do you remember the book? It’s only ten questions long!

Take the Shades of Milk and Honey quiz.

Animals and plants, round two! We begin this episode with examples where we think people did their flora and fauna wrong, or poorly, or at least in ways we can poke easy holes in. Our examples include:

• Pitch Black
• Twilight
• Avatar

And then we get tired of negative examples, and talk about The Mote in God’s Eye.

We then attempt to brainstorm some flora and fauna on our world of mutagenic meteor dust. Pizza-trees, armored buffalo, fire-dandelions, and more… and that’s before we even get started populating the coast, and Brandon calls can-of-worms on the project and hands the brainstorming to you, the listener.

via Writing Excuses 7.3: Fauna and Flora » Writing Excuses.

Today’s visual teaser for Glamour in Glass is another room in Carlton House.

After the overt glamour of the ballroom, the Blue Room seemed positively staid, though it was appointed in the best manner. The walls were covered in blue damask, which matched the upholstery. Gilt frames bordered the walls, with cleverly rendered oysters on the half shell in each corner. By the very absence of glamour, the Prince Regent displayed his taste and means here as much as in the ballroom, because everything from the elaborate carpet to the massive crystal chandelier was real.

Real gold gilded the arms of the chairs. Real candles stood in the sconces instead of fairy lights, so rather than the faint glow of glamoured light, the room truly was bright and airy.

The only glamour in the room adorned the ceiling, which had a glamural of sky and clouds drifting in a simple repeating pattern. The clouds circled the chandelier so that the crystals would not catch and diff ract their glamoured folds. The effect seemed one part dance, one part storm— very like life at court itself.