The inspiration for this week’s cartoon is of course Stonehenge (click here for a picture of Stonehenge).

I visited Stonehenge in the mid-70’s during my time in England.  It is a magnificent monument located in the English county of Wiltshire.  If you ever have the opportunity to visit it, by all means do so.

I was working in London with Ken Taylor, the head of our international operation.  Ken is a fine gentleman in every respect and another Brit I have the privilege to call friend.  We were developing a world-wide foreign buying system for one of the largest retail department store operations in the United States at the time.

I worked with another local friend, Steve, in the computer center, and we were prone to hit the pubs after hours.  On one of these pub evenings, Steve and I decided to drive from London to Stonehenge very early that weekend so we could see the sun rising through the stones as the ancients did.

It was another fine example of pub induced creativity.

Being on a company expense account, and well fortified by Guinness, I toyed with the idea of renting a Ferrari for the trip and went so far as to call for the rental rate.  It was a screaming $50 a day, big money in the seventies and a sad comment on how far the dollar has fallen in the intervening years.

Outside of the extreme creativity it would of taken on my expense account, (I hope the statute of limitations has expired on this thought process) I finally decided against this clearly rational transportation choice for a rather noble reason.

That is to say that they drive on the other side of the road in England, and I thought it would be criminal to risk wrecking a Ferrari on the trip.  So I rented a more conventional car with a much lower rate and let Steve do the driving.

We rather groggily left the Selfridge hotel in London around 3:00 AM and made our trip.  The effects of our pub induced planning took their toll and as the sun was rising, breakfast became a greater necessity than seeing sunrise though the stones at Stonehenge.

Nonetheless, we got to the monument and made a day of it, taking a great deal of pictures and thoroughly enjoying the place.

I saw those pictures not long ago and noted that Stonehenge had not aged nearly as much as I have in the intervening years.  By all means click here for a picture of Stonehenge. I would show you the picture of me as well, but true to form, can’t seem to find it now that I need it, probably a misplaced victim of my latest relocation to Orlando.

So back to this week’s cartoon, there may be a few … hmmm … historical distortions.  For starters, Stonehenge was probably used more as a calendar than a clock, but I bet you already got that one.  And it was built around 2500 BC, while the last Neanderthals, who actually had nothing to do with Stonehenge, died out around 25,000 years ago.

Ummm … also note the Pterodactyl thing flying in the sky which is a ginormous bird without feathers (which flies in the face of bird definition).  The last Pterodactyls flew about 65,000,000 years ago.

So the time span goes roughly from 65,000,000 years to 4500 years ago all in one cartoon.

This is perhaps a bit of a stretch, although I have read that the Creationist show humans riding dinosaurs in their museum, so no doubt I’m on safe ground here.  Safe or not, I artfully duck behind the protection of poetic license, although I’m not so sure what poetry has to do with all of this.

Suffice it to say there was this monument created a long time ago, and people being people, probably had opinions about it.

No doubt there were skeptics among them — especially the ones dragging all those big rocks around.

Just think about that the next time you have a bad day at the office (chuckle).

J. Daniel