Still in England

I'm staying in a town called Newark-on-Trent, which is a fairly nice place
that has a pub for every single person in the town. Some of them are
traditional pubs where only one or two people are leaning over their pints.
Others are modern sports bars that just happened to be built into 100
year-old buildings. I walked into the oldest pub in town, which dates
from the 16th century, and it was Karioki night. Some guy was doing
a high pitched version of AC/DC's Hell's Bells. He was terrible,
but gets an A for effort.

[placeholder for pictures when I figure out how to load them to blogger]

The town also has a castle, or the remains of one that dates from the 12th century. It was where King John died, and later was a royalist holdout during the Civil War. The protestants never captured the castle, but after the roundheads won they demanded to have the castle razed to the ground, but the townspeople only destroyed half the castle before stopping. So the curtain wall facing the river and two towers are still standing.
I'm sure the townspeople got tired of tearing down the castle right about the same time as they had rebuilt all the town's buildings with stones from the castle.

I did the tour of the castle remains, it's pretty interesting to look out from the battlements, and feel how much it must have sucked to have to stand guard there. It's mid April, and the temperature this weekend was right above freezing, with occasional snow.

The TV isn't too terrific over here. only 5 channels, and the only news is the BBC. Seeing how anti-american the BBC is, I'm sure the spit content of my food is pretty high. The news is laughably slanted, any mention of climate is followed by "George Bush rejected Kyoto, it's his fault."

I was glad to see Tiger win the masters, when they asked him if 10 majors is a long dryspell,
he said:

"Ten majors is not that long," Woods said. "Some guys go oh-for-life."

heh.

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