Saturday morning/ afternoon, we went to Carcasson which made for a perfect day trip. Carcasson is a 12th century walled-in medieval town, with a castle. We took a tour of the castle, complete with overpriced audio guides. Refusing to accept that the price of the stupid thing you hold up to your ear so you can walk around and look like an idiot should cost as much as the tour itself, I decided we should split the cost of the audio guides. So I bumped the volume all the way up so more than one person could hear, and was able to look like less of a tourist as well as save some bones.Fun Fact: Castle invaders did not have boiling oil poured on them, this is a myth. Oil was too expensive to waste so they just had rocks thrown at them instead.
After the castle, we went to a cathedral. After not immediately being stuck by lighting from the hand of God himself when I crossed the threshold as I half expected to occur, I wandered around. It was
your basic Cathedral, high ceilings, stain glass windows, lots of Jesus, etc. Except for I did find what I can only describe as the virgin Mary in a cage. I don’t know why they had her caged up, but found this HILARIOUS. It looked like she was in a prison. Did she commit a crime? Were they worried she was going to escape? Did she know not to drop the soap? I had so many questions and no answers.
Then we got lunch and went to a torture museum. It was a bit cheesy and sorta a tourist trap, but did have a fair amount of torture devices. It had some basic torture machines- electric chairs, pull you apart machines, guillotines, chairs with beds of nails and some not so basic ones. The highlight of the not so basic ones would have to be what I like to call ‘the pain pyramid.’ The way that one worked was a lady who had been accused of being a witch was put on top of a pyramid, with said pyramid resting in her love box. Then she would have weights added to her legs, pulling her lower on the pyramid and ill leave you to figure out the rest.Also, none of the mannequins in the torture museum looked like they were being tortured or even having a bad time. Instead they came off as sexy. I think that
whoever found the mannequins bought them at a department store going out of business sale.Its hard to believe someone is burning at the stake when they are in full make up and giving you the come hither look when you expect them to look like they were chilling with the rats in prison before they arrived to their torture and should be screaming their faces off.The little town within the walls looked just like Disney world. Well, actually I guess Disney world looks like the town cause it was built 700 years later but whatever. T
his coupled with my ‘ it’s a small world after all’ experience the night before has taught me that the Disney Immagineers really get their things right. Anyways, most of the stores were closed because it is the off-season. However, the cookie and candy store was open. This wasn’t just regular oreos and chocolate chips cookies, being France these were artisan. I went in twice for the free cookie samples, and both times I practically ran out of there when I saw the glass cases full of truffles and other such chocolate delights so that I wouldn’t start dropping cash like Michael Vick when he sees new puppies.
1 comment:
Sara and Jamie,
Here's the real story on the QWERTY keyboard-from Wikipedia:
[quote]The QWERTY keyboard layout was devised and created in the 1860s by the creator of the first modern typewriter, Christopher Sholes, a newspaper editor who lived in Milwaukee. Originally, the characters on the typewriters he invented were arranged alphabetically, set on the end of a metal bar which struck the paper when its key was pressed. However, once an operator had learned to type at speed, the bars attached to letters that lay close together on the keyboard became entangled with one another, forcing the typist to manually unstick the typebars, and also frequently blotting the document.[1] A business associate of Sholes, James Densmore, suggested splitting up keys for letters commonly used together to speed up typing by preventing common pairs of typebars from striking the platen at the same time and sticking together. The effect this rearrangement of letters had on maximum typing speed is a disputed issue. Some sources assert that the QWERTY layout was designed to slow down typing speed to further reduce jamming.[2] Other sources assert the rearrangement worked by separating common sequences of letters in English. Ostensibly, the hammers that were likely to be used in quick succession were less likely to interfere with each other.[3]
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