another late night post

One of these days, Alice, I'm going to write a blog post while it's light out. Then I'll punch you to the moon and Keighl will probably be mad at me.

Anyway. Last weekend we went to Warwick Castle, Stratford, and Oxford. Everyone who came got to experience the awesomeness that is Tim Kidd, my Interrelationships professor, and his strangely formal-and-British obsession with gruesome, prolonged deaths. This time it was of a nobleman of Warwick Castle, stabbed twenty-something times with a penknife (blade about half an inch long), who lasted about a month before his festering wounds carried him off. I know how long a penknife blade is because Dr. Kidd brought along an old-fashioned penknife as a story prop, along with a normal jackknife so we wouldn't be confused as to what we thought "penknife" meant. Anyway, after that talk we walked around Warwick Castle and surrounding town for a few hours.
I'm apparently incapable of taking a picture of any structure without the sun dashing behind it and making it look all spooky and silhouettish.

There we go.

Anyway, Warwick Castle is pretty much everything you'd expect from a castle - big, made of stone, parapets and arrow slits, two portcullises (portculli? portcullen?) in case of Rancor-attacks, and an abundance of peacocks.



Yeah, I'm not sure what they're doing there either. Maybe they're one of those secretly delicious foods that only people who live in castles can afford to eat. Like unicorn spleen, or the Golden Rutabagas of Atlantis.

Also at Warwick they had a freaking tall tower.

Here I'm looking pretty pleased with myself because I'd just conquered all the land you see behind me. It was actually easier than it sounds- the land was only occupied by a single hobo and his pet dead cat, and I conquered him by stealing his plastic shopping bag of worldly possessions, also pictured. The contents of the bag had not been investigated at the time of the photo; they were later discovered to consist of a 3-year-old map of the Paris Metro, five single socks (none of which matched but were mysteriously hand-numbered), and a dead fish (which was presumably to be fed to the dead cat).


Unfortunately for Alyssa, that steel bar wasn't attached to the wall nearly as securely as it looks, and seconds after the picture was taken she tumbled over the parapet to what would have been certain death, had she not landed on the prostrate figure of a sulking hobo, killing him instantly.


I suggested to Tim that it might be a little insensitive to carry on touristing only minutes after Alyssa had fallen to an apparent demise, but he insisted that he had come here to get a picture of a Gothic tower growing out of his head and he was "going to bloody well do it so take that camera and get snappy, Wangboy!" My attempts to point out that the term "wangboy" had a meaning other than the racist one he had intended were lost in his repeated order of "clicky clicky!"

On the way out of the castle we were pleasantly surprised to discover that Alyssa was not dead. She had, however, been incarcerated in the traditional fashion for damaging the tower's parapets and murdering the town hobo.



At this joyous discovery I was moved to burst into song much as one would in a musical. Tim locked himself in another stockade in hopes that I would go away and people would stop staring in our direction.


It was to no avail, however, as I continued singing for several hours at him, and would have continued if the local police hadn't recognized the bag I was carrying as belonging to the deceased hobo. We managed to escape to the bus just in time.

More stuff happened that weekend, but it's late and I have to get up tomorrow. We're going to Paris. Wheee! I'll catch you up on that and other stuff probably Monday.

Still shameful

So I recall saying something like once I had Internet I'd be posting more often. Obviously that was some sort of lie.

Anyway, hopefully this will get me more into the habit of posting. I was about to apologize that there was still no "Here's what I did in London!" post b/c I should go to bed so I can get up early tomorrow, but I figure that actually posting a (truncated) version of that will probably take about the same time. So let's see what pictures I can dig up.



This is Westminster Abbey. We went on a tour of it last week, and they don't let you take pictures inside it, so that's all you get. Inside are a lot of dead people, names of other dead people, pillars, a few chairs, chandeliers, and stern British clergy.

Oh, before that we went on a walk around St. Paul's Cathedral. We stopped in that place in the movie "Closer."


Sweet.

Ok, yesterday we went to the Tower of London. I'd been there briefly with the flatmates, and it is apparently impossible to take a picture of the place without it looking ominous enough to house an evil scientist with a multisyllabic surname.

See? Night or day, the place looks like it needs lightning striking it and clouds of bats encircling it. Maybe a few dragons for good measure. I originally wanted these pics to be side by side but I can't figure out how to make it do that right now, so I'll just fill the space with this crap that you just read. Anyway, I guess the creepy image goes pretty well with the fact that there was a buttload of torture and murder that went on in this place, but there's also a few none torture-related things here. Bling, for one. They keep the Crown Jewels here, pretty much the largest collection of shiny rocks and really heavy metal objects in the world. They've got the largest diamond in the world on a stick (when Americans see it they just want to complete the process and deep-fry that fucker). There's a solid gold punch bowl large enough to comfortably drown two or three reasonably annoying toddlers in. That, my friends, is luxury.

There are a few other things there, like giant ravens, but it's getting late and we're going to Stratford tomorrow. Seeing Richard III, having a few dozen tours, Warwick Castle, Oxford. Should be an interesting time. Anyway, sleep now, more non-posting later.