Just When You Think You're Safe

Many of you are aware of my feelings for Iceland at the moment. There is no love lost between us and I would venture to say I am approaching a deep level of hatred for that little island. In fact I have big plans to become the Empress of Svalbard someday and when my chance comes I will unleash a full scale attack on Iceland. By that I mean begin a series of strategical paintball battles and color them unhappy. Yes, someday they will pay for the trouble they have caused me.

In case you missed it, the ash cloud of destroyed dreams, after a brief vacation over the Atlantic, has begun to drift over southern Europe. All of Spain, Morocco, and parts of Scotland, Germany, and Italy have closed their airports and the mysterious predictors of the ash movements have said it will soon be moving to Turkey. As of now I'm sticking to my original plan which is to go to London Saturday, from there Istanbul on Wednesday, and from there back to Rome on Friday, just in time for my flight to exotic New Jersey on Saturday. But of course whatever the ash wants, the ash does, so my plans could be completely different depending on whether or not I can perfect my telekinetic powers in order to move the ash to outer space and let the zombie aliens deal with it. I'll keep you posted.

Concerned

Italians are supposed to be ahead of us in the fashion world by 2 years, correct? So why is it that they seem to be 20 years behind?

I have seen way too many hammer pants than are good for the environment in general and my eyesight specifically. How do they walk? What is their escape plan if there is a sudden zombie uprising? They're not going to be able to run anywhere. Perhaps I should surround myself with people wearing these pants in order to distract the zombies while I escape. Good plan, except my eyes would suffer tremendously.

Also have you met the puffy jacket? Well have you seen the Italian version? Can you please tell me why that is acceptable? Some people even belt them. What is the point of belting a puffy jacket? I saw one the other day, and I really wish I had taken a picture of it because it was puffy, purple, shiny, and I kid you not, faux snakeskin!

Please Italy, these trends were never meant to make it to the light of day for another decade. Put the pants and the jackets in the rag pile and we'll pretend this never happened.

What Kind of Zombie Tour is This?!

On Saturday, we went to San Sabastiano Catacombe Here is a picture of St. Sebastian, the martyr (zombie?) they named the place after:
It was built of a Roman necropolis (center of death) but was renamed a dormitory by the Christians who believed it sounded better. It is 7 miles of winding passages lined with nooks convenient for interring dead bodies of Christians, of which there were 68,000. None of the nooks had bodies in them when we went down there because as our tour guide explained they were removed in 1978. I find this suspicious. Were they really removed or did they march out in a zombie army? I voiced this suspicion to my nearest companion and thus ensued a whole tour of zombie jokes. We did not encounter any zombies, but the tour guide did not leave us comforted.


At one point we were in a chapel under there where Christians would worship secretly and in the middle of one of his rants the lights went out and we were in total darkness. This was my thought process: "ZOMBIE ATTACK! Well I don't hear any grunting, screaming or limping this must just be part of the tour" But then the tour guide started to scream really loudly "WHAT IS HAPPENING?! WHAT IS HAPPENING?!" And my gut reaction was not to run for cover, but to start laughing uncontrollably. Now, this wasn't a zombie attack, but for future reference I will be a god companion to have with you during one, because I will obviously too overcome with terrified laughter that I will be eaten first, you're welcome. It turns out the lights were on a motion sensor and all we had to do to fix the problem was run aorun din a frenzy. After that little blip the tour guide shuffled us along to the next area and completed the tour in the church above ground.

I thought about asking for my money back because I didn't get to see one zombie, but you can't win them all. The only real question is why was Johnny Depp in the chapel at the end?: