Jade Varden Official Blog

Though not as flashy as Shakespeare or as strange as Lewis Carroll, Geoffrey Chaucer contributed much more to the English language as a writer than both of them put together. He is called the Father of English literature and is single-handedly responsible for creating nearly 2,000 words that we use today. He was the very first person to be interred at Westminster in the famed Poet’s Corner and his stories were so good, Heath Ledger and the future Vision actor starred in an adaptation of his work about 600 years after he wrote it. What’s ironic is that the author best known for the Canterbury Tales never made a single cent off his writing. The Merchant of London Geoffrey Chaucer was born into the merchant class into rather fortunate circumstances. His father was a successful vintner, winemaker, and he worked for the crown for most of his career -- even when the crown changed heads a few times during the tumultuous Hundred Years’ War. Remembered today as one of the great writers and stud...

There are fashions you wear every day that are so ordinary, so innocent and so simple, you would never think they all began from very violent military origins. Khakis Khaki is a color but it's used so frequently in pants, the word "khaki" alone is enough to describe a pair of paints in a nondescript, light brown sort of color that has become the uniform of customer service representatives around the world. It's a color that has been used to make everything including pants, from home furnishings to curtains. You can even get khaki car paint. Today, khaki is associated with the most benign fashion and decor. It's downright boring, vanilla, run-of-the-mill. And yet, this color has a rather violent past. The year was 1846 and the British military had been occupying India for about 70 decades. The British, being British, wore heavy wool uniforms in bright red, the same kind of stuff they were wearing when they fought the colonists in America in the 1770s. And frankly, ...

The might of the Egyptian pharaohs continues to resonate throughout history, with many of their names remaining famous and highly revered even centuries after the fact. Egyptians concerned themselves with preserving their bodies, their spirits and their legacies for all eternity…and in many respects, they succeeded. But the legend of the Egyptian pharaohs isn’t so much a gift of the gods as it is the result of very well-thought-out propaganda campaigns, clever lies and positively brilliant marketing.   The Divine Birth of Queen Hatshepsut Hatshepsut was probably the first female pharaoh of Egypt to rule the kingdom in her own right. And in a patriarchal society like ancient Egypt, this was a tough task. She did many things during her time on the throne to show that she was capable of being the leader of the empire and had many works of art created that would depict her this way. Many pharaohs linked themselves to the gods in various works of art. Hatshepsut really drove this point ...