Another Snowy Day at the Overlook Hotel
Oh man, this sucks. We're supposed to get about a foot and a half of snow tonight. It's also the coldest day of the winter so far (it was -4°F this morning, without the wind chill). I'll be stuck inside all night, so I'll likely be posting extensively tonight.
I heard this story and I had to laugh. One inch of snow caused the entire Raleigh-Durham area to shut down. The people there aren't used to it, so apparently it was a disaster. I went to school in Greensboro, NC for a year, which isn't far Raleigh, and the people there would freak out over the least bit of flurries too.
They handle the roads a lot better up north, but we definitely have our share of jackass drivers. My favorites are the SUV drivers who don't realize that four wheel drive doesn't help you stop when you're on a sheet of ice. There are so many people who've bought SUV's over the last few years because they're trendy. Most of them don't understand that the four wheel drive is helpful for not getting stuck, not for going 70 miles an hour on a snow blanketed road.
The safest thing to do in this crap is to sit home with some movies, PS2, coffee, wine, etc. I'm off to watch Taxi Driver now...
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...still stuck inside. Watched the movie. I forgot how awkward the first half of the movie is. It starts so slowly, until at a certain moment where DeNiro's character just starts getting creepier and creepier. It's such a weird movie.
At any rate, I am Charles VI of France:
Which Historical Lunatic Are You?
From the fecund loins of Rum and Monkey.
You are Charles VI of France, also known as Charles the Mad or Charles the Well-Beloved!
A fine, amiable and dreamy young man, skilled in horsemanship and archery, you were also from a long line of dribbling madmen. King at 12 and quickly married to your sweetheart, Bavarian Princess Isabeau, you enjoyed many happy months together before either of you could speak anything of the other's language. However, after illness you became a tad unstable. When a raving lunatic ran up to your entourage spouting an incoherent prophecy of doom, you were unsettled enough to slaughter four of your best men when a page dropped a lance. Your hair and nails fell out. At a royal masquerade, you and your courtiers dressed as wild men, ending in tragedy when four of them accidentally caught fire and burned to death. You were saved by the timely intervention of the Duchess of Berry's underskirts.
This brought on another bout of sickness, which surgeons countered by drilling holes in your skull. The following months saw you suffer an exorcism, beg your friends to kill you, go into hyperactive fits of gaiety, run through your rooms to the point of exhaustion, hide from imaginary assassins, claim your name was Georges, deny that you were King and fail to recognise your family. You smashed furniture and wet yourself at regular intervals. Passing briefly into erratic genius, you believed yourself to be made of glass and demanded iron rods in your attire to prevent you breaking.
In 1405 you stopped bathing, shaving or changing your clothes. This went on until several men were hired to blacken their faces, hide, jump out and shout "boo!", upon which you resumed basic hygiene. Despite this, your wife continued sleeping with you until 1407, when she hired a young beauty, Odette de Champdivers, to take her place. Isabeau then consoled herself, as it were, with your brother. Her lovers followed thick and fast while you became a pawn of your court, until you had her latest beau strangled and drowned.
A severe fever was fended off with oranges and pomegranates in vast quantities, but you succumbed again in 1422 and died. Your disease was most likely hereditary. Unfortunately, you had anywhere up to eleven children, who variously went on to develop capriciousness, great cruelty, insecurity, paranoia, revulsion towards food and, in one case, a phobia of bridges.
posted by Skrambled Egghead Reborn @ 1:15 PM
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