Wonder women

I like to think that I am a trendsetter.

Steampunk dolls seem to be everywhere nowadays.

Doll designer Robert Tonner, who has obviously seen the steampunk light, is now offering Wonder Woman, Steampunk#1 for a mere $174.99.

• Dressed Tonner character figure™
• Face includes hand-painted details
• Fine quality vinyl and hard plastic
• Diana head sculpt
• 16” Heroic body
• Green painted eyes
• Black rooted saran hair
• Tyler skin tone
• Metallic blue faux leather bodysuit with navy blue attached skirt with silver stars and burgundy faux leather corset
• Gold faux leather lasso belt
• Silver faux leather gauntlets
• Silver and burgundy faux leather boots with gold stars
• Nude pantyhose
• Burgundy choker attached to the bodysuit with "W"
• Burgundy faux leather hat with gold trim and a burgundy star
• Gold vinyl goggles
• Stand
• LE 500

Wonder Woman is a fictional character, a DC Comics superheroine created by William Moulton Marston, who first appeared in All Star Comics #8 (December 1941).

Wonder Woman is also well known for the 1975–1979 TV series starring Lynda Carter. Carter went to high school with Momma's cousins!

What has Me excited is the doll's description as Steampunk#1. Who else is going to receive the steampunk treatment?

Sweet dreams are made of this

The first Zeppelin flight occurred on July 2, 1900 over Lake Constance in Germany. It was based on designs German Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin had outlined in 1874 and detailed in 1893. His plans were reviewed by committee in 1894 and patented in the United States on March 14, 1899.

It was largely due to support by aviation enthusiasts that von Zeppelin's idea got a second (and third) chance and would be developed into a reasonably reliable technology.

Given the outstanding success of the Zeppelin design, the term zeppelin in casual use came to refer to all rigid airships. Zeppelins were first flown commercially in 1910 by Deutsche Luftschiffahrts-AG (DELAG), the world's first airline in revenue service. By mid-1914, DELAG had carried over 34,000 passengers on over 1,500 flights.

After the outbreak of World War I, the German military made extensive use of Zeppelins as bombers and scouts.

The World War I defeat of Germany in 1918 halted the airship business temporarily, but civilian zeppelins became popular again after the War. Their heyday was during the 1930s when the airships LZ 127 Graf Zeppelin and LZ 129 Hindenburg operated regular transatlantic flights from Germany to North America and Brazil. (The Art Deco spire of the Empire State Building was originally, if impractically, designed to serve as a dirigible terminal for Zeppelins and other airships to dock.)

Sadly, the Hindenburg disaster on May 6, 1937 hastened the demise of the Zeppelin.

This Week in The Civil War: July 1, 1862

Battle of Malvern Hill

This week opened 150 years ago in the Civil War with the roaring finish to the Seven Days' Battle — that bloody, pivotal week of combat between Union and Confederate forces in swampy terrain outside Richmond, Va. The Battle of Malvern Hill on July 1, 1862, opened when Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee unleashed a flurry of brazen assaults on the virtually impregnable Union position atop the hill. Union forces commanded by Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan fired back, mowing down Southern soldiers trying to charge up the grassy slope toward them. All told, the Confederacy suffered more than 5,300 casualties in the day's fighting, defeated at Malvern Hill. But while the Union appeared to end the week of fighting on a strong note, McClellan was effectively withdrawing his massive army to the protection of federal gunboats on the James River. And soon he would be pulling out of the area entirely, cutting short his long-planned Peninsula Campaign and its aim of taking Richmond. Lee would soon return to Richmond a hero, lionized in the South for successfully defending the capital of the Confederacy from the Union onslaught. Lee later wrote that his true aim at the time was to crush the federal army as a fighting force. "Under ordinary circumstances the Federal Army should have been destroyed," he wrote. But he noted that Malvern Hill had afforded the Union army a "position of great natural strength" to retreat. And he said bad weather and the battle-weariness of his fighters stymied attempts to pursue the enemy army on its retreat. As The Richmond Examiner reported of the climactic week of fighting, Southern forces went into the battle "with coats off and sleeves rolled up, fighting like tigers."