Melbourneblogger

Crocodile Dundee was the second-highest-grossing film in the U.S in 1986, and stood as the highest-grossing non-U.S. film ever at the American box office. There is a strong consensus that the film relied heavily on outback stereotypes that do not represent most modern Australians, who largely live in coastal cities. Contemporary critical commentaries pointed out th...

Frank Lloyd Wright (1867) was born in Wisconsin. His Welsh preacher grandfather, Richard Lloyd Jones, crossed the Atlantic in 1844 with his wife and children, settling in a fertile part of the Midwest near Chicago, a landscape with a lasting influence on Wright's work. Wright's apprenticeship with prominent Chicago architects served him well. In 1889 at 22 h...

Europeans had dreamed of a Central American canal for ages; even Pres. Ulysses Grant sent 7 feasibility expeditions. As tra­v­­el and trade in the Western hemisphere increased, a canal became essential. To sail from At­l­­an­tic to Pacific, ships sailed Cape Horn, the treacherous South Amer­ica tip. A New York-San Francisco trip took c21,000 ks!

Tron Kirk/Church was commissioned in Edinburgh by King Charles I from Scot­t­ish architect John Myle, as part of the plan to upgrade Edinburgh to city status. And it seems that the timing was critical. King Charles was try­ing to impose an Episcopal structure onto the reluctant Scottish Church. This was just after the bishopric designation of Edinburg...

François Marie Arouet (1694-1778) was the son of a treas­ury of­ficial. In 1704, soon after his mother’s death, Arouet was sent to the Jesuit Collège Louis-le-Grand in Paris for 7 years. He wrote poetry and performed in plays in Latin and French and when Arouet left Coll­ège at 17, the lad wanted to become a writer. Having already planned a law career for his son, ...