Browsing: Arts & Entertainment

A Brief History “Fragment of a Novel” (1819) is an unfinished vampire horror story written by Lord Byron (1788–1824).  The story, also known as “A Fragment” and “The Burial: A Fragment”, was one of the first in English to feature a vampire theme.  The main character was Augustus Darvell.  John William Polidori (1795–1821) based his novella The Vampyre (1819) on the Byron fragment.  The vampire in the Polidori story, Lord Ruthven, was modelled on Byron himself.  The story was the result of the meeting that Byron had in 1816 with Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) where a “ghost writing” contest was…

A Brief History “The Vampyre” is a short work of prose fiction written in 1819 by John William Polidori (1795–1821).  The work is often viewed as the progenitor of the romantic vampire genre of fantasy fiction.  The work is described by British educationalist Christopher Frayling (born 1946) as “the first story successfully to fuse the disparate elements of vampirism into a coherent literary genre.”  This work was published before January 1, 1923 and is in the public domain worldwide because the author died at least 100 years ago. Digging Deeper: The Story Extract of a Letter from Geneva “I breathe…

A Brief History “Dracula’s Guest” is a short story by Irish author Bram Stoker (1847-1912) first published in 1914, two years after Stoker’s death, and now in the public domain.  It is widely believed that “Dracula’s Guest” is actually the deleted first chapter from the original Dracula manuscript, which the publisher thought was superfluous to the story. Digging Deeper: The Story When we started for our drive the sun was shining brightly on Munich, and the air was full of the joyousness of early summer. Just as we were about to depart, Herr Delbruck (the maitre d’hotel of the Quatre Saisons,…

A Brief History On June 28, 1997,  shocked referee Mills Lane stopped the heavyweight championship fight between “Iron Mike” Tyson and Evander “The Real Deal” Holyfield because Tyson had bit off a chunk of Holyfield’s ear. Digging Deeper Tyson is known to be erratic, with a checkered past that included juvenile offenses, jail time for rape (convicted 1992), another jail stint (assault, 1998), domestic violence and getting a tattoo over his face the day before a fight, causing the fight to be cancelled.  In one fight he would not stop punching his opponent when the fight was over and ended…

A Brief History Legendary fighters Ken Shamrock (age 51) and Kimbo Slice (age 41) will battle inside the Bellator cage on Friday, June 19, 2015 in a historic match-up! Digging Deeper In one corner, we have Ken Shamrock, who, despite his age,  looks like an action figure.  A member of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) Hall of Fame, Shamrock was the first ever UFC Superfight Champion.  He also had the longest fight in UFC history at 36 minutes.  In professional wrestling, he became the World Wrestling Federation’s Intercontinental Champion.  Of course most of his accomplishments are from the 1990s and…