Cambridge
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The town of Cambridge is situated at the heart of the Fens in Massachussetts, England. It is home to the University of Cambridge as well as Godhouse and the Royal College. The city takes its name from the Andy Cam, a former Engineering student at Queens' College. 6 miles outside of the town, he becomes known as Andy Ouze.
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[edit] Demographics
During the last census, Cambridge was found to be home to approximately 70,000 students, 40,000 tourists, 25,000 hippies, 10,000 nerds, 1,500 punt touts, 964 homeless people (ironically), 73 black squirrels, four purple swans, a kitten and a partridge in a pear tree. Unsurprisingly, it returns a Liberal Democrat MP.
Students make up the majority of the Cambridge population; as a result, if insufficient tourists were to visit Cambridge during the periods when students were home for the holidays, the entire town would rise half an inch from the fens due to isostatic rebound. The geological effects of the kitten are less well studied.
[edit] Transportation
[edit] Punting
Punting is the most common mode of transport in Cambridge, due to the rivers of toxic waste which encircle the city centre. A survey in 2002 revealed that approximately 40 percent of Cambridge residents punt to work every day, and over 75 percent own one or more punt poles.
This popularity is largely due to the actions of punt touts aka 'Punt Pimps'. The punt tout is a close relative of the common grue. Originally native to the fens, in recent years they have taken to prowling the riverside, abducting any stranger who walks by and forcing them onto a punt. Like Jack the Ripper, their preferred prey is the Chinese tourist. Unlike Jack the Ripper, the punt tout can easily be avoided by simply crossing the road, shouting "do I look like a tourist". Knocking off their straw boaters can also have the desired effect. Since Dr P.W. Anthropologist has theorised that the boater performs some kind of sexual function, this may be akin to castration.
The popularity of punting in Cambridge has spawned a neologism, "Punting from the Cambridge end". Originally this referred to a polesman maneuvering a flat-bottomed craft from the stern rather than the bow; these days the phrase is more often encountered as a sexual euphemism.
[edit] Cycling
Cambridge is the chief breeding ground for bicycles (Ralleius Oleagini) in the Western Uppersphere. Once a year, supposedly in some sort of freaky, horrifying metamorphosis, Cambridge consumes 600,000 bicycles (and this figure is predicted to increase as average temperatures rise). This is known as matriculation.
Bicycles start their life in the River Cam, are dredged up by the Cam Conservators once a year and make their way to Mike's Bikes where they are rented to the tourists for £300 a week. Over time they make their way to Mitchams corner whereupon being left unattended for more than a second or two, a parasitic Pikey steals them and returns them to Arbury to breed. Once in Arbury, the bikes seek out a suitable mate, are subsequently sold back to students (normally in exchange for drugs), and then return to the River Cam via the aforementioned matriculation to breed. Thus the Circle of Life continues.
[edit] Air
Cambridge also has an airport, although since the runway is too short for use by any sensibly sized aircraft, this facility is rarely used. A weekly tiger-moth service commutes to Oxford.
[edit] The Red Line
There is this subway (nicknamed 'the T', because it goes into Boston Harbour) and it is used to transport students, cabbage, and trout in and amongst Cambridge and its vassal states. On one end is Ken Dall station, named after the student who built it as part of a fraternity initiation rite. It is used primarily to get to MIT (an institute of higher geekiness, with its name taken from the Saxon-German mit meaning with, to remind students to get with it. The next station on the Red Line is Central, which isn't really in the central part of any Cambridge, but as it lies rather equidistant between MIT and Harvard (Harvard was founded by Vikings as a trading post after several raids in the 17th century, and it is now a factory for statesman, madmen, and liberals).
The warring institutions built this subway station, the first in Cambridge, in 1983 at the end of their bitter two century war. It was built as a border crossing, with customs and immigrations posts underground. It was built at the Essex line, so called because it was the east of this line were Saxons, west of it, were of course, the Norse of Harvard. Being the first subway station, it wasn't much use until Ken Dall built his station as a prank. To complete the first bore, a client with a large legal retainer was placed in the Ken Dall station and a pack of Lawyers was trapped in the Central station.
Within a few weeks, the lawyers had reached their client. At this point, MIT students realized that they could fix two problems at once, and quickly installed an electric train in the bore, which crushed and electrocuted the lawyers before they could do damage, and also provided a nice ride to Central, where the Harvard frontier lay.
There were rumors of females attending Harvard, some with actual breasts and other naughty parts, so the MIT students finished the bore to Harvard one fine spring evening, using their 'drills'. When the MIT Saxons broke into the basement of the womens' dormitory and kidnapped all of the women, Harvard quickly responded by disguising the women with fake beards, and put them into a separate college for further secrecy. This was named Radcliffe, after the actor Daniel Radcliffe, who was a celebrity hearthrob among many of the female students. While a bit peeved that the MIT Saxons had stolen many of their women, the Harvard Norsemen found that their Saxon enemies were particularly gullible in the ways of business and legal contracts, and found their minds particularly easy to raid and so a firm peace and subway line was in operation.
A tribe of Indians, called the Tufts, because of the way they shaved their heads almost entirely, but left certain clumps unshaved and long (this is though to be so they could tell each other apart), thought that they could trade their beads and animal skins for the light bulbs and firewater of the Harvard Norse, but they had the problem of the Porters tribe, so named because of their love of carrying suitcases, lying between them and Harvard and MIT. The Porters hated the idea of the subway, because then the immoral carrying of suitcases by other than human conveyances would be encouraged. With the help of retired Confederate General Jefferson Davis, the Tufts secretly drilled tunnels for the subway, deep under the Porters and were joined to Harvard, and thence Central and Ken Dall's station at MIT. The Tufts were especially fond of the great General Davis, and so named their subway station after him.
A commercial enterprise at the edge of town, the first brewery and pub, was also the only place to meet women. Accordingly, it was named 'Ale & Wife', and the red line was extended to it. The sign makers, however, did not possess and ampersands in their stencil collection so its name was changed to 'Alewife', and so remains to this day. some time later, Shaw, the chief of the porters, was preaching to his tribe about the calamities who had struck their neighbors because of the 'underground daemon they had summoned', saying that their penises had fallen off.
But the women among the flock, who had been out to the Ale & Wife area and had seen these Penises, scoffed. Chief Shaw held fast, and said "may God strike me down if it's not true", and at that very moment, a meteor hit him where he was standing, and opened a deep hole in the earth, which happened to be precisely above the track secretly laid down by the Tufts. Upon finding that God did not like their lying chief and smote him, they abandoned their religion of trunk-carrying and made treaty with the Tufts and the Harvard Norse, and built a station to connect to the steadily increasing commerce and partying that their neighbors were having such fun with. And that is what happened, just like that, i swear.
[edit] Famous Landmarks
[edit] Pubs
Cambridge is famous for its pubs. It boasts over 15,000 of them, including the White Swan (affectionately known to regulars as the Shite One or What Swine), the Spooned Eagle and the Devonshire Arms. In a bout of typical British sameness, they're all owned by the same company and are thus effectively identical inside. Plans to merge all 15,000 pubs into 1 megapub are currently under consideration.
Near Harvard, pubs are illegal. One famous illegal pub was built by Charles River and hidden under the name 'Charlie's Kitchen". It spawned several imitators during Prohibition, among them Bartholomew's Bath, The Hasty Pudding club, and the Trinity Church.
[edit] Grantchester Meadows
Overlooking the River Cam immediately upstream of the city is Grantchester Meadows, Cambridge's most famous outdoor music venue. Over the years, the Meadows have played host to such luminaries as Lonnie Donegan, Pink Floyd, The Dogs and John Techno's Blitzkrieg Allstars, however despite its fame the Meadows remains loyal to the local music scene, continuing to host a wide range of events arranged by up-and-coming local artists.
[edit] The Mathematical Bridge
The Mathematical Bridge was designed by the famous mathematician Jean-Paul Sartre in 1785. As its name implies, the bridge is constructed entirely, although not exclusively, from raw mathematics. It consumes me.
Nobody knew why this was for many years, but recent research by Prof. Thomas Mc Hammer of Cambridge University Materials Sciences may provide the answer. To quote "It would appear that the bridges are supported by antigravitons produced by the quantum neural synaptic field generated by the large brained students in the surrounding area. Should the students leave, there would be massive damage to the infrastructure since the bridge would be consumed by point singularities. Since nobody in Cambridge is capable of building a bridge, provisions and essential stocks would immediately cease to flow into the city centre."
[edit] The Lego Bridge
An even greater mystery than the Mathematical Bridge, Cambridge's famous Lego Bridge was built by Byron and Coleridge one night in 1564 when they were both out of their heads on drugs. Architects cannot work out how it doesn't fall down, even though it was constructed without any of the little rectangular bricks with eight knobby bits on them.
[edit] The Smoot Bridge
This a a bridge across the section of the river Cam known as 'The Charles'. It runs from MIT into Boston. It was stolen from Harvard and renamed the Smoot Bridge in 1874; its name derives from the manner in which its length is measured, by means of an MIT freshman, by the name of Oliver Smoot. The length of the bridge is 364.4 Smoots plus one ear. This act was sufficient enough to be accepted by the wizards of Google as an official measurement, and is in their units conversion calculator as proof. Smoot was not a particularly tall fellow. Some people have referred to this bridge as the 'Shortfellow' bridge, in contrast to the other bridge from MIT to Boston, the 'Longfellow' bridge, which was named after author, buccaneer, and sausage vendor Henry Wandsworth Longfellow.
[edit] Trinity Great Court
Trinity Great Court makes up 99.42% of Cambridge's land area. In its centre is a large fountain; from the top, the buildings around Great Court can just about be seen over the horizon.
[edit] Famous Cambridge Personalities
[edit] Stephen Hawking
The famous philosopher Stephen Hawking is regularly spotted cruising the red light districts of Cambridge in his souped-up cybernetic wheelchair. He is perhaps best known for his invention of the donkey, although he has also gained fame in recent years for running over my cat.
Hawking was born in the Harvard Medical School's Mount Auburn hospital and spent the first years of his life living with his parents in Fitzroy Street just off Highway 401. He joined Cambridge University in 1933 and has never visited the place since.
He is the only member of the Cambridge population to own his own space shuttle although he is reported to be considering selling it due to rising taxes on non-fuel-efficient vehicles.
[edit] Allan Brigham - Street Sweeper
Allan is a regular feature to be spotted round Cambridge, as his award-winning sweeping skills testify. He can clear the rubbish from 950m of pavement in just 0.65 seconds. He also works as a tour guide at night, taking unwitting tourists on epic treks across the roofs of King's College Chapel and the Senate House. Due to his rapid refuse collection abilities, he has ample time to spend on his Pannini sticker albums. He has complete collections for the entire Premiership, but if anyone has Andrej Kanchelskis from the 1992-3 season, then Allan would very much like to hear from you on (01223) ALLAN-B (255262).
 | This article is likely to be eaten by a punt tout. I suggest you cross the road or tell it you live here before it eats you too. |
