Boh

Well, I couldn't find any of the pictures that were taken at Paestum, so here is just some blog I've roped myself into. I think the camera with the pictures got sent home with our shipment, but that's not important, what is important is that we leave this country in 1 week(s). Only one week left in this crazy/awesome country, it's a very bittersweet feeling indeed.

Mos def drove the Amalfi coast the other day, it was in the mondo (Ford Mondeo), but it was an extremely gratifying experience nonetheless. We took a couple random roads because yolo. We eventually stumbled upon a part of the coast that I didn't remember and it was the best part by far (driving wise). We were the only car on that part for the most part, until a bus got in front of us which would normally be a nightmare situation on a road like this, but not on the Amalfi. The bus was absolutely mingin on this road and I had to actually start trying in order to keep up with it.

Stock photos FTW

Boxson Chronicles III

*The creatures are no longer catlike, just normal humans*

The two people began the long trek back to Timothy's hut. Jack held on to Timothy's hand, tears in his eyes. He was scared and alone. All that he had known had been torn away from him by the bandits. They destroyed his home and killed his parents.

***

Three months earlier...

"Run. Run as fast as you can and don't look back. I will be OK," The older figure said, crouching, weapon in hand. And then he kissed his only son, Jack. 

"What if you die?" the child whispered.

The man looked at his son and gave him a hug. He knew this was the last time he would ever see his son. 

"I love you" he said to Jack. He gave his child a final kiss on his forehead, and pushed him out of the hole in the back of their hut. As he did so, the vicious monsters who had once been men rushed in, eyes blazing with hatred and insanity. Jack's father had no hope of survival. He glanced out of the small opening in the back of his home and let out a single tear along with a smile. 

"You will do great things, my son" he said to himself. And then, darkness.

Jack ran. He ran so long and so hard that his feet were bleeding. He continued until he couldn't anymore. He fell to the ground and began weeping. He couldn't hold it in anymore. The pain overtook him and the small child went to sleep. He dreamed only of pain and felt lost. He was alone.

When he awoke, he looked around him. He had never seen this place before. He didn't recognize anything; not the waterfall and creek, the huge trees or the large cement structures of old. Now, he was truly lost.

Jack looked around and began climbing the small cliff where the waterfall was located. When getting to the top, he discovered a small cave behind some uplifted roots of one of these massive trees. It looked protected.

This is where I will live, the child decided.

 Over the next few months, he live off the land, hiding from all who passed his secret cave. He had lost any trust he had in humanity. They were all monsters. They killed his family. He was alone in this world.

Boxson Chronicles II

Mere seconds after pushing the large red button on his desk a large flash of light was seen in the distance. Dr. Boxson knew that this meant that no one within the rather sizeable blast radius of approxiamately 18,000 kilometers would even stand a chance of survival, not even the people that most would consider innocent and blameless, but Dr. Boxson pushed away any feelings of remorse as he double checked that all the blast doors were in fact secured.
The blast ripped through the city below him, screams of panic were quickly snuffed out by the almost instantaneous wave of death and destruction radiating from the bomb located in the plains of southern Oklahoma. Skyscrapers crumbled before the might of the explosion, the earth itself seemed to tremble with fear as its inhabitants lives were abruptly cut short by the masterfully created bomb of Dr. Boxson.
~    *    ~
 The bomb itself was somewhat of a marvel of modern science, able to wipe out any and all organic matter with minimal destruction to earth's crust all while being able maintain a massive radius of dissolution. This was the exact bomb that Dr. Boxson devised for the Department of Defense and the very same one that was condemned too powerful for any one faction to have posession of. Before word of the existence of such weapon of mass destruction ever reached the rest of the it was sentenced do be completely dismantled and disposed of. The creator of the bomb, Dr. Boxson, and several other high ranking scientists were put on this task. Dr. Boxson, being a faithful and patriotic american, knew that what he was about to do would go against everything he'd once stood for, but he had to think about his slain family. He continued on with his utterly detestable plan. Dr. Boxson quickly dispatched the other scientists on his team and stole away with his creation to another secure facility in southern Oklahoma where he synced it to a wireless detonator that he had stored in his bomb shelter. that he designed shortly after the plans for his explosive device were completely mapped out.
Dr. Boxson had gone dark, he used his prototype jetpack to retire to his specially fortified safe house, which had become locally known as "The Space Needle," until the time came when he had the strength to push the button that would end his suffering and begin the rest of the worlds.

1.3 megapixels

Just the other day all of us (Deetles, me, mother and sister) went to Castel Sant'Elmo while Erik and and Amber were in Venezia.

A spectacular view of the greater Napoli are from atop one of the castle walls.

 More shots from the same wall, the church of something-or-other below us, in case you were wondering and Vesuvio in the distance.

 Here is yet another shot in super high, 1.3 megapixel def, but this one has a 15-25 degree rotation to the left.

 More towards the underbelly of the castle and yet still very far up in the building itself.

Finish off with these chumps chilling on these sweet cannons.

Pizza Stone

Quick blog about the stones first pizza here in Italia.

Not terribly long after arriving Deetles and I dropped down to Manfredi (a pizzeria right downstairs from us) for some authentic, Napoletana delicacies.

 Slicing into our spoils that we obtained from the downstairs realm. 

Look at these chumps ^

  Well, I guess we're eating in this picture, cause, you know, eating.

A very delicious margherita pizza in the foreground here with the mildly superior specialty pizza of Manfredi, The Manfredi, which consists of fresh tomato sauce, mozzarella di bufala, diced tomatoes and a ricotta stuffed crust. Needless to say, all was quite top, (except for this blog).

Boxson Chronicles I

Dr. Boxson was a depressed man. He was but a small man made entirely of cardboard and far too little of it at that.

Dr. Boxson was never appreciated by anyone. People never noticed him walking down the street. They just kept on walking, often breaking his possessions. But that was all about to change. He would be noticed, and people would experience the loneliness that he had lived with his entire life. He had been devising a way to force this upon every single individual on this planet.

Dr. Boxson moved silently over to his desk. He picked up the photographs of his past family. They had been murdered by those beasts who inhabited the Earth. He looked into his dead sons eyes. He looked happy; they all looked happy. Dr. Boxson had not experienced this feeling since that dreaded day. He smiled, and released a single tear.

The box man continued and cleaned off his desk. He eyed the red button in the corner of the desk. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

 "Today was the day" he decided. It had to be done. Those monsters had taken all that he had ever loved. He Took one more breath and pressed down on the button. There was a silence and then a loud flash of light. The world would never be the same.

Hundreds of years later...

"Hey, is anyone there?" The catlike hominoid creature whispered.

There was a rustle in the cave. The catlike creature looked into the darkness and saw two reflections.

"Hey, its safe. I am not here to hurt anybody." 

A much smaller creature crawled out of the shadows and into the light. It was another catlike creature. 

"Hey, what's your name? Mine is Timothy." The larger being said.

"My-my name is Jack," the small one replied.

"Where are your parents?" Timothy asked.

"They- they were killed" Jack said.

Timothy thought for a second. "Do you have any family?" he asked, fearing the answer.

Jack said, sniffing "No."

Timothy took little Jack's hand and they walked away from the cave toward the hut that Timothy called home.

To be continued...

The Horsemen

I am going to come up with a short story for one of these horses and I'll leave prompts for the other two so that you, the reader (if it so pleases you) can create your own story for them in the comments on Facebook. If it works, maybe I'll do another blog if not, it was totally your fault that it failed and you will be held eternallty responsible for my new thursday format.

 

 It was the final inning of Carl's tennis round when...

 

 

 

 

This, is Captain Blackeye of the wildly successful short story, "Blackeye's Vase."

The reason he has been portayed as a horse-man is because in the time that this statue was molded the horse-head was reserved for all traitorous scum such as pirates also, he actually had the head of a horse. As for the man standing beside him, the only confirmed crew member of the Appaloosa (the name of the ship) and his head is missing because Blackeye believed heads that did not bare the resemblance of a horse were unnecessary and overrated, as it turns he was right, he had the highest functioning crew of any pirate sailing the reasonably-high seas.

The reason this statue has been erected in such an urban shopping environment is because this particular store was crafted using many integral parts of The Appaloosa; Blackeye's lucky blue steering wheel and one of the portholes from the captains quarters.

 

These special jockeys from ________ rode ________ and their events involved...



Assisi/ A Little Bit of Gubbio

This is a blog heavy laden with pictures so I figure, if a picture is worth a thousand words, I have a college graduate length paper right here and that is why only a brief description will be following each photo.

 

To start off, here we have our first church of the journey,

 the one with a giant, golden figure atop its steeple.

 This is a different place and as you can hopefully see, this one has no golden figure.

A small overview of the Assisi area with a few chumps in it.

A two story church, complete with an ongoing

 mass and an old man ranting in the adjacent piazza.

 Hard to go wrong with ye olde carousel, especially with 17+ year old children on it (from our group of course).

Here is the previous church from a different angle, pretty spiffy.

A rather large castel atop a hill.

 Instruments of epic proportion inside the afore mentioned castel.

Also inside the castel was this very

 Minecraft-esque tunnel stretching from the main body out to what I assume is a watchtower of sorts.

 

 

 

 

 

To finish it off, here's Steve holding the modern worlds most impractical camera.

 

Monday Update

As I'm sure all three of my regular readers have seen, I done been slacking on my blog, but for good reason or rather I have good excuses for doing so. Anyways, now I gotta do a Monday update as well as my usual Tues and Thurs posts.

Last week sister and I went to the Faulkner's for a few days whilst the rents were at a business something-or-other, had good times over there, played some vimleogames, watched a couple Predators and best of all, had some slicious meals made by Mrs. Faulkner. The Predator movies were terrific, Ryan and I watched the first one on our first night and it was pretty epic, except for the part where Carl Weathers died. The second one was fantastic, a Predator gets to LA (I think) and runs rampant amongst the local gangs while Danny Glover disobeys orders like a son in order to chase after the Predator. In the second movie the Predator has some new weaponry for better disposing of gang members with and he uses these to raid a crimelords home where the crimelord is being killed by some Jamaicans. When the Predator shows up he absolutely wrecks all the Jamaicans and then takes off through the glass roof, shortly after this ordeal Danny Glover bends a few direct orders to investigate the penthouse where he and some other blokes find the only survivor of the whole massacre.

I've gone into probably more detail about this movie than I should have for a blog chronicling my stay here in Italy so I'll go ahead and stop now and just leave you with this picture.

Calamities I

So apparently, yesterday a building partially exploded just down the street from us. We were told that there was a gas leak or something along those lines and it combusted which ultimately resulted in the calamity you see in the pictures below.

 

 We were informed by some people that there were multiple fatalities and others said that there weren't any at all. All of Riviera di Chiaia was shut down for the clean up of the building rubbish and instead, Via Partenope was opened up.

The next  two catastrophes I don't have pictures for.

The other day the Citta della Scienza burnt down, I'm not certain the cause of this but I assume it was accidental. Luckily, before it burnt down we were able to visit it and "steal" some hujangus basilco leaves.
This last incident isn't quite so disastrous as the previous, it's more just something we happened upon on the way home today. A man was sitting on the sidewalk and not 50cm in front of him there was a puddle of the brightest blood I've ever seen. I think what happened was his foot was run over or something similar.
Just another week living here in Napoli.

Valemememtimes

Time for some slightly more in depth retailing of the Vamlemtimes party at the Bracken estate.

Showed up early because that's how we roll, brought our party supplies to the top floor of the beach-view monolith and then everyone that was present, including ourselves, went to ye olde beach for some good old fashioned sand arting. After several masterpieces were created the other 2/3 of the purple brigade rolled, but unfortunately one of them was not in the proper attire, needless to say, he was temporarily shunned. A few more sand drawrings were completed the whole party shifted back to the Bracken residence for some crafts and on the way up Ryan and Austin had to race the elevator up six floors, it was brutal but we won.

Everyone instinctively congregated in the kitchen for some eats, at which point the candy quantity guessing game begun. I lost every time, end of story. Below you can see the product of the party's craft time, moustache creation.

Ryan with his sammichstache being used for eyewear. We were all supposed to make moustaches for our partners, but I was too proud of mine to let it go and you can see why in the picture directly  beneath Austin Thornberry.

 After moustaches were completed and candy guessed the party shifted once more, to the living room, where we exchanged valentines and wiled away our remaining time with musical duets and Ben Harper.

This is the less awesome version of our farewell picture, you can take it up with Alyssa if you want to see the raw, uncut version.

Last Week's Happ'nings Recap

Right off the bat, Vamlemtimes day party, parkouring around some rocks to get onto the beach, made some sand drawrings, the other member of my purple brigade arrived at the party. Went upstairs, ate some eats, guessed some candy amounts (lost erry-one), made some killer moustache kookies and then ate said kookies. Moved that partay to the living room, busted out the ol' Ovation, jammed out some classic rock, received valentines from all, didn't bring any valentines, like a bwaoss. End Thursday.


Went to Ryan's, lykuhbawsz, played some PS3 for acres, ate some killer sausage soup crafted by Mrs. Faulkner and then hit up the church in Bacoli for some prime ride finding. Rode with Stefano to the bowling alley which happened to be right next to our home, inefficient as (your four letter word of choice here), bowled an 82 or some impossibly high score like that, stood in the weakest hurricane of all time, bought some candy bars and soda. Drove to a kebapp eatery, had some slammin' kebab, drove to Ryan's, almost watched a movie, fell asleep. End Saturday.



Here are some penguins, because penguins kick the pillars in!

Emergenza

The Emergenza concert in Napoli was a great experience, I'm not usually a concert kind of person but it was awesome seeing people I knew up on stage. The other bands were a little bit on the loud side, especially the metal band, but it was all around pretty good music. Not to sound biased at all, but I think that Oak & Willow (Gruppo di Marco e Vincenzo) were the most unique and easy to listen to of the three bands I heard play.

 

The reason why there is a very small portion of a drumset in front of them is because Marco played, sang and did the kick while Vincenzo played bass, did backing vocals and played the cymbal.

 Both of them did magnificently, Marco's singing was wonderful and coupled with clean acoustic sound of both their instruments was a terrific combonation.

All of their music, as far as I know, was written and

composed by the two of them. Although Vincenzo was playing extraordinarily, I don't believe it fully showcases his talent as a bassist. That just my honest opinion and I'm sure others might disagree, but that's how I feel. All in all it was a great time had by all and I would love to see them play again sometime before we leave.

The Cirkus I

Better late thane never, but here is the tale of my first ever experience at a circus of any sort.

I was certain of what to expect, but I went into it with an open mind and turned out alright. The night started with all of us sitting in the tent for a solid hour or so waiting for the show to start and being in Italy, I wasn't expecting the show to start anywhere near the scheduled time, but to my great surprise it started not 5 minutes after it should've.

The opening acts were all fine and dandy, Moira came out in her little Beetle 1100 or 1300, drove around for a spell and proceeded to retreat back into the bowels of the big top, not to be seen again for the remainder of the night. I don't perfectly recall all of the acts or which order they were in, (pixtures eventually) but the acts that presently stand out in mind I will share in moderate to below average detail.

Act 1≈ A phenomenal juggler took the ring and did some rather incredible feats with spheres, smaller spheres, bowling pins and some weird boomerangs. The spheres were quite entertaining because while he juggled 3 or 4 he had two others that he "juggled" by popping them out of his mouth (tis difficult to explain). The bowling pins had their own set of challenges that seemed very difficult but were made to look easy by this juggling connesieur. Sadly, there were no chainsaws being juggled. The boomerangs were tossed about in very lengthy fashions that I won't explain because it would ruin the magic! Also, I want to fit in more than one act on this blog.

Act 2≈ The giant spinning thing. This object and act cannot even bee described in words, you'll just have to wait for pictures.

Act 3≈ The big cats, everyone's favorite every time. All these tigers start sauntering in the ring and they all slowly take their positions on their respective chairs arranged around the ring. For the most part the trainer just made them do basic stuff, like stand up, run around, things like that, which is a feat in itself, just getting those tigers to get up on the chairs was enough for me. The show continued, the trainer kept getting after the young, white tiger for being a lazy cat and eventually all the tigers were sent back to their cages, save for two of them. The two remaining animals were required to sit upon a modified Moto Guzzi with a sidecar and ride around on it. This took a lot of coaxing on the part of the trainer, he had to keep riding around the ring and stopping to try and get these lumbering beasts to join him on the Guzzi for the final portion of the act. Approximately 5 or so minutes passed of him baiting the tigers before they would sit on the bike so he could end the show. The tigers did eventually ride a couple laps around the ring on the Guzzi so the trainer was able to send them back to their cages with their "friends."

There are still plenty of acts I didn't put on here, but rest assured, I will once I have acquired sufficient pictures.

The Peeps

This was the first get together of the afore mentioned "peeps" here in Napoli.

Massive shoutout to Alyssa Bracken for chronicling our shenanigans throughout the city.

 Above we have what appears to be Ryan and Austin chillin' on the train ride into Napoli.

 

Shortly after leaving Amadeo Station we

 happened upon some stairs which I later discovered were a much faster way to our appartment. These were the best stairs for sliding on.

 We made short work of the trek back to the appartment and hen proceeded to rock out on the ol' Ovation for a while. I played, Austin played some and so did Alyssa. Here at base camp we figured out what exactly we were going to do with the day and once that had been decided we were off.

First stop, the wall along Via Partenope. We cut through the park across the street to get here at breakneck speed.

A lovely shot of the rocky coastline of Via Partenope.

A ground level shot of a rooftop plaza near Castel Dell'Ovo.

 This was about halfway up the Castel where it was windy in much excess and my hair was being quite unruly.

 Here we have Ryan very near the highest point we could attain by legal measures with the beautiful coast in tow.

The tumult of the sea crashing against the Castel walls far below.

This would be all of us studs atop the Castel.

 Fun fact, we were all, with the exception of Alyssa, discussing in great detail, Mario cart and other such nintendo titles.

Lastly we have a very over used bottle of prosecca a the bar we stopped at on our way back to the appartment.