keef dot org shows no signs of lethality or psychosis

This conversation discusses the fable of The Anesthesiologist and the King of Foxes, which is one of my Horrible Little Fables series; if you haven’t read it, you probably should before you read this. My conversation partner is Bill, who thoughtfully created the illustration for that fable.

Here we go.

Bill: The real moral of this story, I think, is that you should just shoot all animals with broken limbs.
Keef: ahahahaha! Sounds good to me.
Keef: OH FUCK IS THAT A TALKING FOX (blam!)
Bill: Let’s write an updated script for Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner about a talking fox.
Keef: ahahahha!
Keef: IS BESTIALITY EVEN LEGAL IN WISCONSIN, DEBRA?
Keef: I’M SORRY HONEY I JUST CAN’T CONDONE THIS
Bill: Since you’ve been researching foxes, I’ll leave it up to you to come up with an appropriate racial slur for them.
Keef: I WON’T HAVE MY DAUGHTER SHACKING UP WITH A GODDAMN VULPER
Bill: I like the sound of that!
Keef: IT WAS BAD ENOUGH WHEN YOU STARTED WEARING THAT FALSE TAIL TO HIGH SCHOOL HONEY
Keef: REMEMBER HOW THE BOYS ALL CALLED YOU HULPER?
Keef: I HATE TO SAY IT BUT THEY HAD A POINT
Keef: SEPARATE BUT UNEQUAL, THAT’S WHAT I’VE ALWAYS SAID
Bill: oh god, she’s a furry too?
Keef: haha! Mostly, it’s a way to slip in the gross degraded version of the slur. “Human vulper,” see.
Bill: DON’T LET THE DOGGY DOOR CATCH YOUR ASS ON THE WAY OUT
Keef: ahaha! YES!
Keef: HONEY COME GET YOUR BOYFRIEND’S SHIT OFF THE LAWN
Bill: BEFORE HE EATS IT
Keef: heehee
Keef: I HOPE YOU DON’T EXPECT ME TO SET A PLACE AT THE TABLE FOR THAT THING
Keef: OKAY HONEY I PUT RED’S PENNE ALLA VODKA IN A BOWL ON THE FLOOR I HOPE THAT’S OKAY
Bill: haha
Keef: WELL NO DEBRA I DIDN’T FUCKING KNOW THEY’RE STRICT CARNIVORES! FUCK ME FOR NOT KNOWING THAT! GODDAMMIT!
Bill: Was there any violence in Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner? Because FOX HUNT!
Keef: ahahahaha man, you’re getting dark. I guess we’ll need to get Bobcat Goldthwait to direct.
Keef: He gets our voicemail and is like “Goddamnit. You make one movie where someone bangs an animal from the Canidae genus…”
Bill: haha. I wonder where the Animal Rights people will land on it?
Keef: That all depends on whether or not the family learns to love and accept the fox by the end of the movie.
Keef: If it ends with a fox hunt, I’d suspect they wouldn’t be fans.
Bill: I figure we can turn the fox hunt scene into a homage to Predator.
Keef: Is the fox the Predator, or that weird faux-Indian fellow?
Bill: I think the Fox is Jesse Ventura. We’ll establish that he’s a Sexual Tyrannosaurus early on.
Bill: That actually just means you have itty bitty arms and a monster dong.

When I prepared for the London trip, I asked a few people who had been there recently, or who had spent a lot of time there, or had read a lot about it to give me their opinions of Things Not To Miss. I went to many of them, and they were all completely delightful– from the British Museum to Hampton Court to just walking along the Thames for an afternoon.

Utterly delightful.

This isn’t about that stuff.

One of the people I asked was my old friend Tanner, who’s gone a few times in the last decade or so, and he had this to say:

I would highly recommend taking an afternoon to amble down Fleet Street, hitting pubs. If you start at St. Paul’s and head west, you can convince yourself that you’re not just hitting pubs, but also seeing historic London. Like The Old Bell Tavern, a Christopher Wren built pub. Then The Old Bank of England, which was the building under which the tunnel exists that The Butcher of Fleet Street used to move bodies from the Barber Shop to the Pie Shop. And The Old Cock, that Samuel Pepys wrote about. Then on to the Old Cheshire Cheese, and read the articles on the wall about the death of their famous Swearing Parrot. From there, you just a block or two from the Thames, and the Temple station. Or, continue down the Strand, and check out King’s College ‘n’ shit.

Ladies and Gentlemen, how could I not do that?

I came at it from the opposite direction– I started West and headed East, basically. The first place I saw was this one:

“Hot shit!” I thought to myself. “That’s one of the places that came highly recommended from Tanner!”

Rob and I went in and each got a pint. “Ah, wow, the sense of history,” I thought to myself. “Just imagine! I’m in a place that was built in 1538 and rebuilt in 1666 after the great fire! How amazing!” I sipped my beer. I looked around. “This doesn’t look like it was built in 1538 and rebuilt in 1666,” I thought. “It looks like it was built in the 1980s. Oh, shit.”

Sure enough. Less than half a mile away from Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, another bar had set up shop… and called itself The Cheshire Cheese. I immediately realized that I, a tourist, had just been bilked out of beer money by a bar that had been built and designed solely to bilk tourists. Fuck. What a rube I am!

At least I got two beers out of it.

I think we stopped somewhere else for a beer, but now I can’t remember and at some point taking beautiful pictures became secondary to drinking.

Then, down the street to the Old Bell Tavern, which had signs proudly proclaiming its allegiance with Christopher Wren. More beer! Tried to order food, but there was a leak in the kitchen. No food. More beer. Leaving this bar, we were confronted with a bustling mob of foot traffic, so we dodged sideways, planning to head down a side street.

One of the things that I love about London is the vast and amazing history. America has about four centuries of history that we’ve been taught about, but we don’t have the sense of a city being built on the ruins of itself for a thousand years plus.

While ducking down the side street, we stepped into a beautiful courtyard, and basically walked for a half mile in this weird, vacant, beautiful agglomeration of buildings and churches and topiary.

It was glorious.

Then, we found the real Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese.

Hot damn, that is what history feels like. The Old Bell was nice, but it had been overhauled and modernized. Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese had too, a bit, but it still was what I imagined a real old-school pub would be like– tiny ceilings to accommodate the apparently much-shorter people of half a millennia ago. Tiny windy corridors. Stairs leading to weird dungeon-y rooms.

It was fantastic.

More beer.

By this time, with all the beer and whatnot, we were pretty hungry, but the Old Bank of England was closed. I don’t rightly remember what the name of the bar was that we stumbled into, but it was another slice of history. I hadn’t had fish and chips yet, so I got those.

There’s nothing quite like eating incredible crispy fish and steaming chips (and even the mushy peas) served to you in a pub that is older than America. Historical fish and chips, ladies and gentlemen.

Here’s an excerpt from a sort of newsletter-y thing I wrote mostly for my own edification about taking a trip to London over Thanksgiving.

It was pretty awesome, you guys.

Here comes a random assortment of photos and stuff slash facts.

The way that the UK grocery stores handle bottle storage and baggage is nothing short of brilliant. In a city where a very small percentage of people own cars, and most travel by bus and trains, their solution to the problem of hauling around a large number of bottles is elegant and clever. The US needs to get on board with this.

Henry VIII apparently loved eating peacocks, which were a delicacy.

A thing that is interesting about the UK in the wintertime is that the sun sets around four PM, which is odd and a little unsettling, especially at first. On the plus side, they lit up Hampton Court Palace beautifully several hours before suppertime.

The “Full English,” with bacon, baked beans, tomato, egg, sausage, hash browns, mushrooms, and black pudding.

The Tower of London is home to a bunch of ravens, the “guardians of the tower.” There’s a legend that “If the ravens leave the Tower, the kingdom will fall.” These suckers were HUGE, too. I had no idea that ravens were this enormous.

Went to the British Library, to see an exhibition about Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination, a collection of artifacts and books about Gothic literature, art, and pop culture.

This is one of the maps of Transylvania that Bram Stoker actually used while doing research for the writing of Dracula. Research that he did at the British Library.

This is an engraving of a page from a 1700s English Travel guide, using as a basis for this engraving Julius Caesar’s Commentary on the Gallic War:

Also seen: a vampire hunting kit, Jack the Ripper’s original “Hello Boss” letter, a page from Exodus written in Greek from the 3rd century, original Leonardo Da Vinci sketches, the Magna Carta, original pencil hand-written lyrics to many Beatles songs, hand-written Mozart compositions, and on and on and on. Breathtaking stuff.