Here in San Diego, we have a section of town called Old Town. Not because it’s particularly old, but because it’s old to us. See, here in San Diego, any structure more than 50 years or so is old. So whenever I get to travel to the east coast, I love getting a chance to see all the old(er) architecture. I think it’s something people from the east coast see so often, they forget just how beautiful it can be. During my time in Montreal, I loved walking around and taking pictures of the buildings built right around 1800 or so. My favorite parts of these buildings were almost always the gargoyles and grotesques ¹ lurking at the corners. I passed by Montreal’s Christ Church Cathedral on my first walk to work and was able to snap a picture of these guys.

It was to my surprise and delight then that on my first trip to Washington D.C. I would discover that our nation’s capital was home to a collection of these little guys as part of the National Cathedral. (more…)

As anyone with internet access who uses Google has probably figured out, today is Jules Verne’s birthday. His 183rd birthday to be exact. This man is one of the fathers of the modern adventure story. He wrote stories about traveling through air, into space and underwater before any of that was even remotely realistically possible.

And just in case you don’t know exactly what stories this man wrote, let me toss a few names out there for you. Journey to the Center of the Earth. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Around the World in Eighty Days. From the Earth to the Moon (which you may know better by the film version… that’s the one of the moon with that big bullet in its eye). He even had a book published in 1994 (thanks to being found in his safe by his grandson. Er… the book was in the safe that is, not Jules Verne) titled Paris in the Twentieth Century. It was a 1863 vision of what Paris would be like in 1960. And, scary enough, he’s pretty close (closer than Edison anyway).

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