Too Much Photoshop!

I've been trying out Bing (Microsoft's counterpart to Google) and one nice feature of it is the daily-changing background image. But I'm afraid today's (see the Bing Image Archive if you look at this post outside the UK, or after today) really ought to be on HDR Disasters, if there is such a site. And if there isn't, I'm tempted to start it, with this as Exhibit A.

Organising a good Stag Weekend is like making love to a beautiful woman...

...if you consider yourself cultured you must do so in four pubs, a curry house, a bookshop and the Ashmolean Museum.

Operation swisstone's Stag Weekend went very well, even if I say so myself. As requested by the victim lucky groom-to-be there was no debauchery and indeed we even approached Cultured and Refined at times. About the only hitch was in the second pub - the Eagle and Child - which is indeed a terminal tourist trap and so we arrived to find that in fact we should have eaten in the Lamb and Flag after all. As it was we fended off lunch pangs with crisps and went straight to the cafe in the Ashmolean before wandering around the very impressive renovation.

Our first dose of culture down we headed for another Oxford hotbed of erudition: the Norrington Room at Blackwell's. The success of this was judged by the size of Blackwell's bags on the table afterwards in the Far From The Madding Crowd - a modern but nice pub that is just tucked away enough not to be full even late on a Saturday afternoon.

swisstone and I retired to our hotel to change into black tie, which he had insisted on for the evening phase of events. As we headed over to Chutney's Indian Brasserie I did express mild concern that we might be mistaken for members of the Bullingdon Club, to which T's response was that (a) if that happened we would just sing The Red Flag and (b) we looked more like refugees from a James Bond convention. A very tasty and filling meal then followed, with live entertainment in the form of the restaurant management dealing with an endless stream of hopeful diners - it's a good thing I booked a week in advance. Then off to the Turf Tavern for final drinks; we were indeed asked, as we headed across town, if we were on a Bond theme night.

Thanks to everyone who came, including nmg, coalescent, purple_pen, devilgate, gummitch, and others whose LJ names I forget. We all survived intact, and T and I even managed a leisurely wander around Oxford on Sunday (including another book-buying incident at the Lit Festival tent) before a final lunch meetup.

Oh, and various promises extracted of, um, interesting details for my Best Man's Speech. Yes, mission accomplished.