This is what I've come to think of as the Crazytown Apartments: It's where Shobhit lived for one week before his roommate, whose name I still don't know (her cat's name is Dr. Watson), physically assaulted him. I asked Shobhit to give me the full story while he was riding the subway with me from the airport to our hotel. This is how he tells it: First off, the woman never respected Shobhit's space. More than once she walked into his room in the middle of the night while he was sleeping. According to Shobhit, she was usually drunk. I can't remember what reason she had for this (nor can I remember if Shobhit even said she gave one), but she flip-flopped again and told him she wanted him to leave. Shobhit told her he needed to sleep and they would discuss it the next day. Shobhit had a class of some kind to attend the next day, and went to that before coming home to find his roommate drunk and combative. It got to the point where she literally started taking his stuff off shelves in the kitchen and throwing them to the floor. Now, this is where thinks get sort of murky, because Shobhit has not been explicitly clear about what transpired in this specific moment. At first he said he shoved her and she fell to the floor, which I said could be a real problem for him if he struck first in any way. It seems his use of the word "shove" may be a mere byproduct of his speaking English as a second language; when pressed, he said he just tried to move her away from him as she invaded his personal space, and because she was drunk, she fell to the floor. And then she started hitting him, including a punch to the crotch. Whatever happened or however it happened, she was clearly out of control, to the point that Shobhit called the police. She started hitting him around the head while he was on the call. It was very soon after this call to the police that Shobhit called me at work, shocking the shit out of me and making me worry a great deal.The police arrived about twenty minutes later, and that was when they said they couldn't do anything about her being drunk in her own home, and advised him to find somewhere else to stay that night -- hence my booking his room at the Lotus Hotel for the night before I arrived (which was the night after the day of the assault). When this picture was taken, it was two days later. Shobhit wanted to try and come back to get his stuff. I was very reticent about tagging along for this excursion, and had hoped just to stay outside. On the other hand, I figured if something happened, it would be best for me to be a witness. Well, at first she wouldn't let us in. Shobhit had already come the day before but found the one of the door's two locks that she never gave him a key for locked. She was home now, but rambling at him through the closed door like the crazy lady she clearly was. The only specific thing I remember her saying, because she could clearly see me through the peep hole standing at the other end of the landing, was, "Hey Matthew he smokes!" I found this amusing and actually chuckled at it. Ultimately, Shobhit had to call the police again to get in to get his stuff. The woman had actually tried to tell him he'd never get back inside the unit again.

The stone in the foreground is the "slaughter stone", so called because archaeologists and antiquarians have lurid imaginations and the rock contains deposits of iron ore. We are standing a little off the axis of Stonehenge, with the head stone, over which the midsummer sun just about rises, a little way behind us. The discovery of Stonehenge's alignment with the midsummer sun begins in 1740 with William Stukeley's Stonehenge: A Temple Restor'd to the British Druids. Stukely follows Plutarch's observation that the Ancients built their temples to face the rising sun; his Druids were Patriarchs, so it made sense that they would emulate the Temple of Solomon and so forth (which he assumed was also aligned with the sunrise) when building Stonehenge. Stukeley was a big fan of the Druids, but this created a dilemma--the Druids were incredibly smart, and the exactitude with which Stonehenge is constructed reflects this smartness ("the exactness with which the Druids set their works, and the uniformity of their variation, make me believe this variation was not the effect of chance or negligence"). However, for smart people, the erection of huge stones for the simple purpose of marking where the sun will rise appears clumsy ("the Druids were too good astronomers and mathematicians to need so mean an artifice: nor does it correspond to the quantity precisely enough"). So he flip-flopped, and suggested that while it was roughly aligned with the midsummer sun, Stonehenge's actual alignment was with the precise magnetic north pole. He got round the fact that it didn't actually align with magnetic north by explaining that the magnetic pole oscillated.