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Benjie Franklin had a great fall, and all the king's horses and all the king's men ...

Boston Reddit reports on the demise of the statue of Ben Franklin in front of Old City Hall during yesterday's winds.

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Wow!

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/fOyH32k.jpg)

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IMAGE(http://www.msnbc.com/sites/msnbc/files/2013/04/80211310.jpg)

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They don't teach you this in our schools, but Ben used to be the only US member of a British sex club that held its meetings in an underground chalk mine in the British countryside.

Look up the Hell-Fire Club.

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I had heard about that as well.
He was quite the ladies man and the women in France loved him.

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Sex club? I don't think I would name my sex club "Hell-Fire"...sounds like an infection...

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FWIW Wikepedia states BF may have attended club meetings in 1758 "as a non-member", and his attendance may have been spy-related.

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They seem to lay claim to Ben being a member in all of the literature there. There's a whole panel at the beginning of the caves detailing Ben's interactions with the club and down in the cave itself, they have a wax figure of Ben chatting with Dashwood using a taped audio loop.

I don't know the veracity of Wikipedia's sources, but I'll go with the cave's restoration sources for now.

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The Wikepedia entry cites a 2008 History Channel episode of a series called "Cities of the Underworld". So admittedly not a very strong reference. Will do some more digging if I can find the time. But I am only too happy to add West Wycombe to my list of places to visit!

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It's not a very expensive attraction, which is good because it's not a very large cave/mine. The info inside is definitely interesting, but somewhat limited (the "Nun's Poem" about halfway down on the left is hilarious). Read the dining hall description of the monk holes as well. Also, the cream tea in the shop/cafe was pretty decent. If you exit the cave and go up to the church/mausoleum up on the very top of the hill, you get a nice view of the area in all directions. But other than it being one of a billion little English villages, I wouldn't say there's much other reason to go to West Wycombe (if you google for West Wycombe, the Cave homepage comes up before the Wiki article for the town itself, for example).

If you had an extra couple hours to burn on your way driving up the M40 from London to Oxford (or if you wanted to avoid driving through Slough on the M4 on the way to the Uffington White Horse or something), I found that someone from the Boston area would find it interesting to see the connection to Franklin, anyways. There are definitely better and worse ways to spend a few hours in the UK though.

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Cream tea.....

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Removing duplicate post

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HELEN LOVEJOY: They were having S-E-X in front of the C-H-I-L-D-R-E-N!
KRUSTY: Sex Cauldron?! I thought they shut that place down!

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A concussion protocol for statues?

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