Author: Anthony

The original Crystal Maze

I’m in Paris this evening, and have come home after dinner (I have an early train to Barcelona) to a bizarre but rather engaging French game show on France 2 called Fort Boyard. It’s a puzzles-and-physical-challenges show set in a real Napoleonic fort on a sandbank off the Normandy coast. Top that, Countdown!

It was, apparently, the original for the UK show the Crystal Maze, and I have to say it’s quite a bit better – as is perhaps shown by the fact that this is series 17!

Well, at least the US isn’t burning them. Yet.

A reminder for Dick Cheney from chapter 15 of

In the year 1487 there was a severe storm in Switzerland, which laid waste the country for four miles around Constance. Two wretched old women, whom the popular voice had long accused of witchcraft, were arrested on the preposterous charge of having raised the tempest. The rack was displayed, and the two poor creatures extended upon it. In reply to various leading questions from their tormentors, they owned, in their agony, that they were in the constant habit of meeting the devil, that they had sold their souls to him, and that at their command he had raised the tempest. Upon this insane and blasphemous charge they were condemned to die. In the criminal registers of Constance there stands against the name of each the simple but significant phrase, “convicta et combusta.”