Redoubled

by Warren Esby

  I made a mental note to ask Mayor Riley, if he’s still alive, to consider renaming Charleston, Chipping Charleston, now that he had turned it into a Cruise Terminal. I think that such a fundamental change in a city’s purpose should result in a new name being assigned, don’t you? We ended the day taking a walk down Broadway. Broadway is a very picturesque town in the middle of the Cotswolds and is a tourist attraction for Brits who can’t afford to go to New York City but want to tell all their friends they just got back from a vacation where they had gone for a walk on Broadway. And we didn’t see any knights on Broadway either, even though I seem to remember that there was an old song by the Bee Gees about them being there. I can’t imagine that they would have been singing about the Broadway in New York since the United States doesn’t have any knights.

  We went back to Oxford, or Thamesford as I sometimes like to call it, because I couldn’t find anyone who knew what the name Thames means, although I suppose it could have been the name of someone’s ox, and we had a very nice meal at a Chinese restaurant near Gloucester Green that had a real Chinese sounding name. We did this to be fair and balanced and unafraid about eating the food of our sometimes enemies.

  Speaking of the way the English name things, they also try and hide the names by pronouncing them in a way that you don’t understand. Gloucester is a simple example. It looks like it should be pronounced glow cess stir, but it is pronounced gloss stir. Towcester is pronounced toaster like the appliance you use to toast your bread, and Bicester is pronounced bister and rhymes with sister and Leicester is pronounced lester, and wouldn’t it be funny if you had to take your sister to Bicester to meet her boyfriend Lester from Leicester. The Brits just refuse to acknowledge the cess part of their words. They just remove them from all the words and discard them.

  And then the thought occurred to me that maybe since the words cesspool and cesspit indicated places where refuse was dumped, the Brits felt all the cess part of the words should be discarded into one of those places. Or maybe after they took out all the cess part of words, they needed someplace to put them and invented the words cesspool and cesspit. And they didn’t take just cess out of words. They liked to take out other parts of other words and shorten or slur the resulting word as a result. Everyone knows that English chauffeurs are often called what sounds like Chumley but is really spelled Cholmondeley, and who wouldn’t want to change that name. And Beauchamp is pronounced Beecham. And then they slur their words like when they pronounce Saint John, sin gin. Now gin, to some, may be a sin, but so is pronouncing Saint John that way, unless you are under the influence of a lot of gin and considered by some to be in sin.

  The next day we went to one of the most famous ancient sights to see in Merrie Olde Englande. We went to Stonehenge. Now what in the world is a henge, I wanted to know. We didn’t have any in the United States as far as I knew. Well, I found out that a henge is a Neolithic structure consisting of a round or oval bank with an internal ditch which may contain a stone circle or timber circle. At least that’s what the Wiki says. Stonehenge is the most famous of the henges although there is also a Woodhenge. I don’t know if there are any brick henges or adobe henges or plastic henges. You never hear about them. On second thought, the gift shop was filled with plastic henges that you could buy as a souvenir.

  In addition, I learned that there is a Mt. Pleasant Henge. I bet you think I’m pulling your leg. I know you don’t believe me, do you? Well, it’s true. Very few people outside of England and maybe very few people in England as well, know that there is a Mt. Pleasant Henge in Dorset. And Mt. Pleasant Henge, just like Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina, is not a mountain either. In fact it is in a valley. Who ever heard of a mountain in a valley? I told you the English are strange. Mt. Pleasant Henge is higher than Mt. Pleasant near Charleston, but only a few hundred feet higher. Who ever heard of a Mountain being only a few hundred feet high? That’s not even a hill, especially if it’s in the valley and the valley itself is a few hundred feet above sea level. Now Mt. Pleasant Henge is near a town called Dorchester which is also in the valley and can flood when the river Frome overflows its banks. Whoever heard of a mountain flooding, unless Noah built an ark on it? Although the Dorchester in England near Mt. Pleasant Henge is a market town, it was not named Chipping Dorchester for reasons that I don’t know. But just like Mt. Pleasant Henge in Dorset, the Mt. Pleasant in South Carolina is not too far from a town called Dorchester.

  Dorchester in Dorset is inland from a place called Weymouth, and Weymouth is on the coast of Southern England. Now here’s where I think the people who settled Charleston got it wrong again, and the people in Boston got it right. Boston, Massachusetts has a Dorchester nearby, and that Dorchester has a Weymouth not too far from it, and that Weymouth is also on the coast. Now Boston doesn’t have a Mt. Pleasant nearby, because Boston is also on the coast and knows that the area cannot be called Mount anything. But it does have a Mt. Pleasant Avenue between it and Dorchester. That avenue doesn’t go anywhere but it might have at one time. It might have gone to someplace they were thinking of calling Mt. Pleasant, but they thought better of it and named it Roxbury instead. Now bury, in case you didn’t realize it, is just another name for boro, or burgh, or borough, etc. They tend to use bury a lot around Boston in addition to borough. They have a Sudbury and a Shrewsbury in addition to Duxbury and Roxbury where, I believe, the dux play on the rox. The shrews may do that as well. I hope you are paying attention, and I haven’t confused you like I tend to confuse myself a lot.

  Chapter 24

  Now it is my opinion that the English who settled Charleston didn’t realize that with Dorchester and Mt. Pleasant nearby, they should have named Charleston, Weymouth. I think that the reason they forgot to do it was that they had all spent too much time in the hot sun of Barbados before they came to Charleston and forgot all about the geography of England and what they were supposed to name places when they got to America. They could have ended a lot of confusion right from the beginning about where Charleston was supposed to be located and just left it in West Virginia and not had to consider renaming the one in South Carolina, Chipping Charleston to distinguish it. Maybe it’s not too late to rename Charleston, South Carolina, Weymouth. I think I’ll give Mayor Riley that name to consider as well as Chipping Charleston when I get back. On second thought, Charleston seems to be replete with double Cs like College of Charleston, Citadel Cadets, Carnival Cruise Line, Charleston Chew (a kind of candy not tobacco), Crossing the Cooper (sometimes called the Cooper River Bridge Run) and now Chipping Charleston. Carnival Cruise Lines could have a slogan that says “Cross the Cooper on a Carnival Cruise to Chipping Charleston.” That would be a real winner for a cruise company that sailed the Cs or the seas if you prefer the classic spelling and not the current texting version. But what should they do about Weymouth? Well, I think they should rename Folly Beach, Weymouth. Why persist in using the name Folly to continue advertising the fact that the beach there was a big mistake. Finally, I should mention that there is also a town near Boston called Charlestown, but they had they decency to spell it differently, and correctly I may add, because it is a town and not a ton no matter how heavy King Charles had been.

  Getting back to all the Cs associated with Charleston, the College of Charleston even chose a mascot, the cougar, which starts with a C. The University of South Carolina was not as courageous, which I think is the same word as cougarish but with the R and the G exchanging their positions in the same word route, which means “not a coward.” South Carolina’s mascot is the Gamecock. They could have courageously called themselves the Carolina Cocks, and sometimes they do that unofficially, but they went with the more circumspect Gamecocks. And in doing so, they are being very sexist and likely to get in trouble with the political correctness police. I mean, the women’s sports teams are also known as Gamecocks. Shouldn’t they have been called the Gamehens?

  In actual fact, to really be politically correct, they should have done what the political cor
rectness police made them do with the word chairman by making everyone change that name to the neutral or neutered chairperson. I think they should change the name Gamecocks to Gamefowls, and I believe that may be in the works. The Carolina Gamefowls would be a unique name, instantly recognizable, and would not get anyone into trouble with the political correctness police. It would be a real success unless the players took their new name to mean they had a license to foul during the game. But they certainly know that those two words that sound the same are spelled differently and mean different things, or do they? That differentiation may be so advanced in modern sports culture that it is only taught in graduate school these days, long after the average college athlete has completed his or her formal or informal education as the case may be.

  After returning to Oxford from Stonehenge, we all went to bed early. Anya and I went to bed “after” as we usually did. And the morning after, after “after” and after breakfast, we all went to a meeting arranged by Ben and Edy with two members of British MI5, the members of British intelligence that Ben and Edy were coordinating our activities with. They gave us their cards. Their names were George Featherstonehaugh and Davis Fotheringay. I always try to pronounce someone’s name when I first meet him or her because I’ve been told that when you pronounce them out loud you remember them better. However, as I did this, they both chuckled and then told me the correct pronunciation. Featherstonehaugh was to be pronounced “Fanshaw” and Fotheringay was “Fungee.”

  So now we had a Fanshaw and a Fungee to team up with us. I thought that may have been their undercover names, but they weren’t. They were their overcover names. It turns out that those names are spelled differently than they are pronounced like so many other British names. I realized I would have to figure out another way to try and remember which was which since they looked similarly nondescript and had names that weren’t pronounced the way they were spelled. I decided to use horse language to remember them by. Fungee’s name ended in gee which means right in horse language, and Fanshaw’s name ended in haw, which means left in the same language. It turned out that Gee was a lefty and Haw was a righty, so I had to abandon that idea and get used to calling them Fungee and Fanshaw after all. Oh well.

  Ben and Edy had found an ice cream store called George and Davis Ice Cream Café within walking distance, wouldn’t you know it, and we all met there. Do all ice cream chains that are started in college towns have to have the names of the two founders like Ben and Jerry’s in the United States and George and Davis in Britain I wondered. Ben, Edy, Fungee and Fanshaw all had a George and Davis. Bet you thought I was going to say George and Davis had a George and Davis, didn’t you? But just like Ben and Edy, they liked their ice cream. Anya and I, just having finished a large breakfast, passed, on the ice cream that is. Fun and Fan filled us in and gave me some technical papers to read. Dong was collaborating with someone at a nearby university. It was and it wasn’t Oxford. It was a local university called Oxford Brookes University.

  Oxford Brookes University had formerly been called Oxford Polytechnic and was not part of the University of Oxford and not considered as prestigious as the upper echelon of British institutions under the encompassing name of Oxbridge. What is Oxbridge you may ask? Just as in the United States, certain prestigious institutions are held in greater respect than others are, and probably more so than they should be. England has Oxford and Cambridge which are often referred to as Oxbridge in the same way that we in the United States refer to certain eight prestigious universities as the Ivy League. And Oxford Brookes University is not part of Oxbridge. It is another entity entirely. It is like comparing Penn State, which is a good school, but not an Ivy League school, with the University of Pennsylvania which is in the Ivy League.

  And then it struck me. Oxbridge, that is. That was the name they should have been using for London all along. I mean, the oxen wouldn’t have had to ford the Thames or swim across it either. They could just walk or trot across it (or jog if they have a mind to) and not have to get their hooves wet, unless it was raining which it often does in London or Oxbridge, just as long as they crossed it on the left side of the bridge. And I bet that bridge would not have fallen down if it was called Oxbridge instead of London Bridge and had been built with the idea that a lot of oxen would be crossing it. Also thinking about Oxbridge and Cambridge, Cambridge got its name because it was a place that people crossed the river Cam, apparently by bridge. So maybe Oxford was the place where people forded the river Ox as it was called back then and not where oxen forded the river Thames as that English driver told me.

  The English just don’t make any sense with the way they name things, apparently. There is the old saying that “only mad dogs and Englishman go out in the noon-day sun.” Apparently the madness with the way they name places suggests that they must spend time in the noon day sun as a requirement before naming a town. And that explains all the mistakes made by those Englishmen who spent time in the hot noon-day sun of Barbados before coming to South Carolina to name the new towns there in the same maddening way. They didn’t do that in Barbados where the Barbadians had the good sense to name their capital Bridgetown and not Fordtown or Swimtown. They must have named it during the night and not in the noon-day sun.

  Fun and Fan told us that Dong had been followed since he arrived. He had rented a flat on the Banbury Road near Summertown and spent most of his days with a Dr. Woolfardisworthy, pronounced “Woolsey,” who was working with retroviruses. They didn’t really understand the science but knew that Woolsey was partially funded for his work under Dong’s grant from the National Institutes of Health, another government entity funding programs of unknown dubious value with unintended consequences such as potential mass destruction as well as potential financial destruction. They had wanted to talk to Woolsey but had waited until I arrived to join them since they weren’t scientists and didn’t know what was going on. They didn’t know if Woolsey knew Dong’s connection to Al Qaeda, but they did know that Woolsey was from a very old British family, and nothing in his background suggested he would be working for Al Qaeda, but one never knew. They had made an appointment for us to meet with Woolsey that morning. Anya and Edy and Ben decided they would walk around Oxford to see the sights while we had the meeting.

  The meeting went well. It turned out that Woolsey was using his retrovirus technology to combine some genetic information provided by Dong into his retroviruses so that when the experimental animal was infected with the retrovirus, as the virus reproduced it would also express, that is produce, whatever the genetic information supplied by Dong would be coded for, like an apoptosis inducing factor. Woolsey said he didn’t know what the genetic information was because Dong said it was proprietary. I asked how he was getting it into the experimental animals and he told me it was by intra-peritoneal injection. Woolsey didn’t think that Dong would be doing anything that was dangerous since he was working on pigs, not humans for his experiments, and humans didn’t get pig diseases like scours.

  So I asked him about swine flu which did seem to infect humans, and his face turned white as he realized the implications. He indicated that Dong had taken some syringes filled with the injection material Woolsey had made for him and planned to go to a pig farm he had contracted with somewhere in Yorkshire to test them out. I asked if he had any additional samples of the material and he gave me four 10 ml syringes filled with the material complete with the needles needed to do the injection. I gave two of the syringes to Fun and Fan to give to their people for analysis and kept two to give to Ben and Edy to send to our laboratories in the United States. Woolsey said they were very stable and didn’t need to be refrigerated. Fan and Fun did tell Woolsey that they expected him to continue working with Dong and supplying him with the material he had contracted for, but not to tell him that he was under suspicion.

  Chapter 25

  As I thought about all of this later and read more about flu vaccines and retroviruses and immunization, I realized that Dong was probably i
nfecting a lot of white blood cells in the same way that the HIV virus, which is a retrovirus, can infect white blood cells, the very kind of cells that respond to an infection or an immunization. Now when someone is administered a vaccine, the immune cells are primed and circulate throughout the body in order to detect whatever infecting agent they have been vaccinated against. If, for example, the vaccine is a flu vaccine and the infecting agent is an influenza virus, then when those cells detect the presence of the influenza virus, they are activated and reproduce in great numbers and destroy the virus. However, when activated, if they are also genetically engineered to produce and release the apoptosis-inducing factor all over the body, then the vaccinated individual will not get the flu but will begin to self-destruct. For his present pig experiments, Dong was using intra-peritoneal injection to get the retroviruses inside his test animals, but one would not use intra-peritoneal injection as a preferred route of immunization of humans since it was a seldom used and painful route of administration. Dong was only using that route of immunization in the experiments they had done so far to test the potency of the genetic construct. There was a much better way to do it.

  Now certain flu vaccines are administered intra-nasally like FluMist and Fluenz. They are live attenuated viruses and are sprayed into each nostril to stimulate the immune system instead of using conventional injection. I realized that Al Qaeda was actually not going to rely on conventional administration by injection, but instead prepare a flu virus that contained the retrovirus that was genetically engineered to produce the apoptosis inducing factors and that could be intra-nasally administered in an aerosol spray.