Monday, July 27, 2009

The road from Heaven to Hereford

Apparently, hat tip Kali, there is an article about Wales in the current edition of "Mental Floss".

Linda Rodriguez reports that "in Wales, teens loiter in castles, men outrun horses, and reality TV shows are about coal miners. Wales may be a part of the U.K., but it's got a culture all its own."

That, frankly doesn't begin to cover it. See The Bank Manager and the Holy Grail: Travels in the Weirder Reaches of Wales -
Here is the story of Kaiser Wilhelm's holiday in a small Welsh spa town shortly before the outbreak of the Great War, and of the Welsh waxwork museum largely peopled by countless effigies of Prince Philip discarded by Madame Tussaud's. There is the true story of how a project to ensure the survival of the Welsh language came to involve the translation of pornographic novels, and the equally true story of how Kurt Cobain came to meet Courtney Love - in the one nightclub in Newport, South Wales. And there is the utterly baffling tale of how the Holy Grail temporarily came to be in the safe keeping of the manager of Lloyds Bank in Aberystwyth.
That said, a free LLAP Goch lesson to anyone who can get me the Mental Floss missive.

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