Whenever there is a big holiday... and I'm here in Europe, I always feel a nearly palpable sense of anticiptation... followed by a slight dissapointment.

Today (25th), is the Feast of the Annunciation. It is exactly nine months before Christmas day.. and people say they were recondite in Late Antiquity!

It was once a great holiday all over Europe. In fact, it was New Year's Day in the West (hence tax day is April 6 which is Annunciation by the Old Calendar)... Our New Year was Sept. 1....

But for all that... nothing. Just another day. I know, I know... I should have gone to listen to Evensong at St. Pauls (I should do that regardless)... I just sometimes wish I was in London 1406 instead of 2006.

??/??/? 0rz Nam fuit ante Helenam cunnus taeterrima belli
causa. . .

"You fit the profile exactly of a suicide bomber with a nuke."

That is what a middle aged man told me today on the stairwell at King's. Now I've been the fist guy to discount any suggestion of pervasive racism among the Brits. Anti-Catholic? Sure... But I've generally dismissed any complaints by Chinese or Subcontinenters as oversensitive whining.

In any event, this guy fit the profile of a professor, which I assume he is. Granted I was wearing a scoufia... but it's still cold... and a lonsdale gym bag... but isn't lonsdale supposed to be nationalistic and National Front and all that stuff? I'm even clean shaven. Granted I somehow have gotten dark over the past few weeks, as noted by BP... How I manage that in the UK is beyond me. Unless I'm cloistered in my cell, I'm going to look like Pancho Villa. I may as well accept that that if people aren't going to call me "Taco" and tell me to go back to Mexico, they are going to say I fit the profile of a suicide bomber.

But what exactly IS the profile of a suicide bomber? I mean, if the guy REALLY thought I had a nuke, he should have tackled me and taken my bag. Maybe he was too intimidated if I'm diesel enough to carry a nuclear bomb up the stairs in one hand. But if *I* really thought someone was going to kill thousands of people, I would do something about it.. if I didn't have evidence of that, I would keep my mouth shut.

I came up with lots of witty responses to him after the fact, but at the time the most disconcerting thing I could think to do was smile and wink. To be honest, it didn't REALLY register what he said until he had walked away.

Having given it further thought, I think there are MANY MANY potential suicide bombers around. After all, it is Great Lent, and I see people eating meat everywhere I go. I never see anyone cross themselves before a meal. People eating with their right hands only.... :-O All grave threats to Christendom!

I could take it even deeper. One could blame the British for much of the current wave of Islamic fundamentalism. While, I don't think anyone deserves to get blown up on the tube, the Brits are in a sense reaping what they sowed. Let me explain: To maintain their colonial empire, the British quite often whipped up Islamic religious feeling.

They did this for a variety of reasons. For one thing, while Russians could always claim to be protecting Orthodox Christians, and the French could claim to be protecting Catholics... there were no native Protestant populations in Asia. In another example, the Brits often sided with Muslims against Hindus in India (though in some areas the other way around) in order to keep the Hindus, who tended to be the lower classes, in line. Had the British not looked after the Muslims there, the violence at partition would have been a schoolyard brawl compared to what was coming (so in this case it may have inadvertantly been a good thing). The Brits even often sided with the Turks against the Greeks, Bulgarians, Russians... at least when Disraeli was in power. Perhaps most shocking, they unleashed a guy called Amir Abdur Rahman Khan in eastern Afghanistan who forcibly converted all the pagans there. The district went from being called Kafiristan (land of infidels) to Nuristan (land of light)... This was to keep the Russians out of India.

Geez the British did so much for Islam, I should write a book about the era and call it Queen Victoria: Amir al-Muminin.
Alright, I'm overstating the case for effect, the British were looking out for number one, and they certainly didn't favor Islam on principle, nor did they favor it in all circumstances.

The bottom line is that I'm irritated that some smarmy Brit called me a terrorist because my skin is a little darker and I wore a sock hat.


Though on the upside, an elderly woman (one of the original council flats residents) came to the door today, and though she didn't believe me that the bike chained to the railing outside the door wasn't mine, proceeded to warn me that some "colored blokes, were pinching them last night." So at least I'm white enough not to be a bike thief.

I went with Mario (the Bulgar with the Italian name) to Winchester 4 weeks ago. Bizarrely, though it's only about 2 hour away, the train ticket is over 20 pounds! It's the medieval capital of England though (analogous to Toledo in Spain) and so I had to go (though I will spare you the full history).

These are the barracks where US soldiers stayed during WWII. Believe it or not, the water in the fountain was frozen over!


This is the famous great hall





This is the 12th century Norman cathedral... I never get tired of these.



It's the longest gothic cathedral in Europe.

Jane Austen is buried here...

Didn't she write a book or somthing?
Who cares about that
When there are ACTUAL medieval tiles to see:

But the real highlight is this High Medieval quire. Very few of these survive, and considering that Cromwells troops rode their horses IN this church and smashed all the windows it's amazing this one did.... it has exquisite knights,

Dragons,

I don't know who this guy is... one of the workmen? a scribe?

There are also monkeys and lions and maidens... but the REALLY cool thing............. is the Green Man. No one knows who he is, but he appears in German pagan (and obviously Christian) art, Byzantine mosaics, and even Persian manuscripts! Perhaps he is some sort of proto-Indo-European deity, or perhaps some specific meaning. But he's in the cathedral... you can identify him here because his moustache forms huge tree branches:
Here he is in his more primal incarnation:

And like all other major cathedrals, the relics of the main saint were destroyed by Henry VIII... and the shrine is gone:
In this case it was St. Swithun (ok, I'd never heard of him either):
Also in Winchester is the Great Hall, all that remains of the old royal palace. In it is "the round table". It is actually a forgery commissioned by Henry VIII to try and impress Emperor Charles V (who stopped by for a visit)... but Chuck wasn't fooled because he noticed the painting of Arthur looked a lot like Hank himself!
Later, it was used as the local courthouse. Walter Raleigh was tried there... and it was used until the 70s when a hideous modern addition was added to it:
Of couse, these doors that the Windsors added are pretty hideous in their own right:I wanted to go to the bishop's palace
But it was:
So I walked out to the monastery hospital where they still give free beer and bread to travellers. I was told that the walk inspired Keats and Tennyson. Well, you can judge for yourself, but you'll forgive me if I don't produce "Ode on a Grecian Urn" after seeing this:



Ok, the pictures don't really capture how ugly it was... but it was pretty desolate as far as I was concerned... Like Indiana in the winter. We DO have James Whitcomb Riley though...
So I get to the hospital...
and my beer??? But noooooooooooo.

Misssissippi Chinese food is almost as funny as Tennessee Halal Chicken





I'll leave you with Alfred... he WAS one of Englands greatest kings and he did unify (more or less) the country... even if the name Alfred doesn't particularly exude machismo these days:

First things first, by popular request here is the faux-hawk in all it's glory: I must say that much like baseball to Tony Perez, it's been bery bery good to me.

And to demonstrate how I really can find ANYTHING to do except study (I need to be put in a blank white room containing only my books and the lux light), here are some pictures of a fox outside of the library:




So I spent about 45 minutes feeding him rather than reading the letters of Leo the Synkellos like I was supposed to be doing. I associate foxes with the countryside and henhouses, but they must be urban pests feeding on trash, because this is one of the most highly urbanized areas imaginable. I guess maybe now I will believe people's stories of coyotes in Chicago and wolves in Muncie..

15/00/00 Χονδροκoλος!!!!!!! 0rz

Shrove Tuesday... Where are my pancakes!!!!!!

I'm not properly experiencing life abroad here!

??/??/? 0rz