Salutations, traveler of The Internets! Welcome to William's Bloody Hell, so named after our founder, Sir Bloody William.
He is seen in the likeness above in a rare, 19th century woodcut. This
image was rumoured to have been
commissioned after a bout of unpleasantness
in the White Chapel district of London. Do enjoy your stay and peruse our many, varied offerings, much of which cannot be found elsewhere!
::Today's soundtrack: Static X "Cold" ::
For everyone living in the Northern hemisphere, it is now smack dab in the middle of winter. This includes me, of course.
As a life long resident of New England, I am used to having snow banks as high as an elephant's eye running along the streets and walking to work in temperatures so cold the snot in your nose freezes. This is typical January-February weather up here in the Northeastern United States. Which is one of the reasons I find it odd and absurd when other places completely freak out over small amounts of snow. A few years ago we had snow fall which accumulated to four feet in four hours, and I trudged off to work like always. London gets two feet of snow and the whole city freaking shuts down! This is a major metropolitan city! Ground to a halt over two feet! Nevermind when a place like Los Angeles gets two inches and they don't know what to do! You don't even need a plow for two inches! What's the problem? I've heard there are even places which have been known to cancel school over the measly two inches of accumulated snow. Let me tell you something about growing up in New England: They did not cancel school for anything, let alone anything to do with snow. I do believe that after 13 years of attending public schools (including kindergarten), they cancelled school about four, maybe five times tops. But then this was ages ago when I was young. I heard that a couple years after I had graduated some kid actually got frostbite walking to school because it was so goddamn cold out that now they are a tad more liberal at doling out cancellations. The pussies! What's a little frostbite? Like you needed that pinky toe! I always felt that when you enrolled in public school where I lived they ought to issue you a free set of snow shoes because you were going to need them just to get there.
Living in such a cold region, it is always very easy to "spot the Southerners" as they are completely unprepared for how horrifyingly cold it can get. Example, driving up for a visit in February without a window scraper. Rookie mistake. Also, we locals have a keen sense for the moment the temperature rises half a degree above freezing because that is when we break out our summer short pants. That may be a slight exaggeration, but after months of twenty degrees Fahrenheit or lower, once it hits forty-five it's like summer time, and many go out without even jackets on. You can always hear the out-of-towners marveling at the man pumping his own gas in short sleeves when it's "only" fifty out. Yeah, if it's over fifty and you've got a turtleneck and a fleece pullover on, you're not from around here.
When it comes down to it, I prefer the cold weather to the hot weather. When I had my exotic Caribbean vacation a few months ago, it was so hot I thought I was going to pass out. When it is cold outside, at least you can add comfy layers, whereas there is only so much clothing you can shed when it's too hot. I found it weird when my sun glasses would fog up when I left my air conditioned hotel room for the sweltering outdoors, when I'm used to them fogging up when I come in from the cold. Also, I don't really care for it when it is so hot out that you can sit completely motionless and still be relentlessly sweating your ass off. How can the locals stand it??
But I guess that's how it is: warm weather residents don't know how to handle the cold and cold weather people don't know how to handle the hot. But I got to say, when it comes down to it, I think I could live in a hot climate without air conditioning better than a hot climate person could live in New England without heat in the winter. Just sayin'. Yeah, we're hardcore.
William the Bloody (cold hearted)
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