A Place To Read A Book And Write A Letter: Assisi

I have found that people come to Italy for many different reasons: the architecture, the fashion, the wine, the lawlessness, et cetera, et cetera. (are you supposed to use two et cetera's?). I can only look at architecture so long before I realize it's all the same; I've never been one for fashion and I'm not yet one for wine, and although I do enjoy a good, no-holds brawl time and again, I have not yet really capitalized on the unpatroled dark side streets.

I have read a lot. And I have written a whole lot of letters. So I suppose that the reason I came to Italy was to find a pretty place to read a book and write a letter (I actually came to study, but, you know, et cetera, et cetera). And so this weekend I began my research.

Virginia, Emily, and I left Perugia for Assisi on Friday. Assisi is a small town built on a hill, most famous for spawning some sort of animal rights activist for all I can tell; I can't read latin. But I can tell you that if that was what my town was famous for, I wouldn't advertise it.

None of the streets go straight. They all double back, making little headway against the elevation. We took a bus all the way to the top, and then (in all seriousness) we illegally entered the ruins of a castle and I scaled one of the ramparts. Then I ripped my shirt and answered the Call of the Wild. And only one part of that story is true. Which? YOU decide.

From the illegally entered ruins we could see the whole town: it's all made out of the same white and pink stone, which makes it look like one big Franciscan compound. A deep fog rolled in from my right (that's the best I can do, in terms of cardinal directions), like a high tide. The city looks like what Perugia used to: clean, green, and open. No graffiti, et cetera, et cetera.

Going down is easy: the streets are all sloped. The hard part is figuring where you are, as all these streets are lined with multi-use buildings, and covered in the type of fog that causes shipwrecks. It all added to the ambiance, I think. Or at least it added to my definition of ambiance, because I'm still not sure what it is, exactly.

Overall, I award it 1300 moose, which is David Fish's equivalent of a gold star. And I operate on the David Fish standard.

Comprehensive SciFi Rundown

Steve, my apologies. It's been a good deal over a week now, and you've had no updates. So I'll give you the Cliff Notes version.

Heroes: HRG dies, HRG comes back to life, Mohinder is a terrible field operative, secret or not, Kristen Bell was mishandled as a child (ambiguous?), West is now creepy in a winning sort of way, and Adam Morton is trying to kil everyone...but that's kind of obvious.

Mass Effect: Greatest story ever told (yes, Jesus appeared), shortest Bioware game ever told (if you hold the run button continuously), worst vehicle combat ever experienced. Okay, that last one was not true, I just put it in there for purposes of flow.

Battlestar: Admiral Cain was a lesbian, Commander Adama was the person to discover the organic Cylon project, the Cyclon's god is actually destroyed by an American nuke. Or Caprican, but those two are basically interchangeable.

Specifics, you say? Heroes is steadily climbing upward. There's only two episodes left, and since the series has done nothing but gain steam, I'm assuming that the series finale is actually going to be in 3D, like Beowulf, but this time it will actually grab you but the throat and make you cry tears of black that kills the rest of your housemates. I have to say Battlestar was kind of a letdown. It was pretty much two episodes put together, and if these two episodes occurred in season, they would have been spectacular. However, since I've waited six months for this, and have carved "RAZOR" into the floorboards under my bed, I'm kind of ticked that nothing amazing happened. In all seriousness, I expected a revelation of series finale caliber, some sort of dramatic irony that we could carry into the fourth season, which we know, yet no characters do.

I have declared that Thanksgiving from now on will be called ThanksMassEffect. My Monday night happened just the way I planned it, and, wouldn't you know it, the batteries and Arizona Iced Tea lasted until Friday, when I finally defeated Saren and the Reapers. Using my comprehensive knowledge of video games (I own three) I will rate this game 956 moose out of a thousand possible moose (if you didn't know, the Moose Grading System, or MGS, is the next big thing in terms of scales. It's all the rage in Europe). Pluses: great story, great graphics, American; minuses: short game, a very bad vehicle, a few accents.