February Flowers - That's What I'm Talkin' About!

Hey, check out these pictures.  They were taken on February 25, 2017 in Washington, DC.  Amazing – look at the blooms!  It’s February for heaven’s sake!  I have a couple of thoughts, of course.

First, while a few of these pictures are pedestrian, I kinda like the ones of the Washington Monument and the tower of the Smithsonian Castle building.  Pretty badass photography, right?  Yeah, sure, except for those dudes who strolled into the picture right when I snapped and who I didn't notice until about 5 minutes ago.  Anyway, I like them and I hope you do, too. 

Next, let’s get the global warming thing right out here because the Washington Post surely did.  Is the Earth warming?  For sure, has been for the last 10,000 years or so since the last Ice Age receded.  I think that’s a good thing generally as humans seem to do better in warmer climates than colder ones.  Now, is springtime in February a sign of climate apocalypse?  Hell if I know, but damn, it was just a beautiful day out and can’t we enjoy it without some climate scold trying to make us feel guilty about it?  I mean, c’mon, it’s 70 degrees in February!  Yay!! 

OK, that’s it, I’m off of my soapbox.  Oh, but speaking of soapboxes, I was lucky enough to have to go to London on business recently, and stayed at a hotel right by the Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park.  At that location, if you want to do your blog orally, you truly stand on a soapbox (or some type of box – mine would be a container used to store ice cream) and spout off on whatever you want to talk about.  And people actually come to see and hear you.  It truly is oral blogging.

Anyway, I had a few extra hours between meetings to check out the London scene.  Yeah, baby!  We did lots of cool things, but I have a nose for finding cheesy stuff, and I located it at Harrod’s, the venerable London department store owned by Arabs selling a lot of beautifully overpriced stuff to tourists from all corners of the globe.  Anyway, they have this, well, shrine, to the late Princess Diana and her beau, Dodi Whateverhislastnameis, you know, the boyfriend who died with her while fleeing the true scourge of humanity, the paparazzi.  (You wouldn’t believe how much they hound rock bloggers – it’s truly unfortunate).

So I took some pictures.  I then backed them up on Google Photos.  But guess what?  Here they sit on my phone but I can’t seem to be able to get them to load on my Weebly blog as they aren’t jpegs.  So I’ll describe them instead, and see if you properly get the, well, picture. 

One is of a life-sized bronze statue of Diana and Dodi (from now on, Double D) dancing with each other.  Say what?  Yup, it’s right there in Harrod’s under an escalator in a sort of “what do we do with this space” area.  And it looks like they had just finished their ballroom dancing class because they weren’t doing the pogo or the patented BRP move of grabbing an ear with one hand, a foot with the other, and jerking that leg up and down all the while jamming around the dance floor looking like the coolest MF that ever walked the face of God’s green Earth.  Well, this statue made me laugh out loud, just like you would do if you ever saw me do the patented BRP dance move.

Onward to more Double D shrine stuff.  The other picture captures a marble alter of sorts which is sitting on a big elevated base of more marble about 12 inches high.  On the alter are two candles at either end in big holders that my Mom would love (very Catholic looking – hey if you interlock those candles and jam them up to my throat, you’ve got the Feast of St. Blaise, truly one of the odder things I experienced while doing time in Catholic school as a youth for a still yet undisclosed crime).  The candles have lovely flowers near their base, about the only non-weird thing here.  As you visually scan between the candles and flowers and toward the middle of the alter, there is a black pyramid.  It looks like a small architect’s model of the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas.  Hell if I know what is the significance of that pyramid.  Continuing, above the pyramid and hanging on the wall above the alter, are individual head shots of each D in the Double D couplet.  And each picture is in something like a ring, and the rings interlock.  Awww, how sweet!  They died driving to the mall while they were still in high school!   
   
How did we get here?  It was a nice damn day in DC and the next thing you know, I’m spreading rumors about a high schooler who died driving too fast and who Jan and Dean wrote a very famous song about called Dead Man’s Curve.  See?  It always comes back to the music, man!  That’s what this blog is all about, after all.

Ok, with that I urge you to avoid becoming so famous that you are hounded by paparazzi while hauling ass through Paris with your boyfriend.  I don’t ever, ever want to have to write a blog post about the cheesy and outright weird shrine about you under the escalator in a no-man’s land part of Harrod’s.  After all, the food courts are super nice and gorgeous and full of great stuff, and if you go to Harrod’s, that’s where you should really spend your time.  Chow, babies, love you so much it makes my cheeks hurt from smiling.