Tourists and neo-druids alike flocked to Stonehenge at daybreak today to mark the summer solstice (here's BBC video of the revellers; here's a photo gallery).
And that provides an excellent excuse to post YouTube clips from what film? You guessed it! Enjoy!
Here's the hilarious aftermath of the Stonehenge concert debacle (skip ahead to the 2:50 mark to avoid overlap).
And now some other stuff. First of all, the pagans aren't down with the whole Stonehenge thing. From the BBC:
A group of pagans have celebrated the summer solstice at Barry Island rather than Stonehenge - because the town's beach offers convenience and quiet.
A group of devotees took the train to the seaside resort usually associated with bucket and spade holidays to mark the passing of the year's longest day.
Their sacred ritual of dance and music finished with them leaping a bonfire.
Organiser Kim Huggens said Barry Island was as "sacred to us at that moment as Stonehenge is to the druids." ...
Ms Huggens, 24, who has just finished a masters in religion at the Cardiff campus, said the location was a mutually convenient destination for the worshippers with work commitments.
She said beforehand: "For us, every part of nature is sacred. It really doesn't matter where we do our ritual.
"There's quite a nice beach and we can light a fire, which is an important part of the ritual.
"The police let us go about our business and we can go and have a barbecue."
Devotees were taking an item which was "a symbol of their personal power" to be placed on an altar made of driftwood or rocks, said Ms Huggens.
After forming a sacred circle, there would be a procession to the sea "to give offerings of food and biodegradable things to the ocean to be carried out in to the world".
'State of ecstasy'
The chanting, singing, music and dance around the camp fire aimed to induce a "state of ecstasy" and finished with people leaping the bonfire, in the same way the sun reaches its zenith.
She said: "It's a bit of thanksgiving to all the energies that have helped us and it's a request for these energies to stay in our lives as a positive force."
"It's quite a spontaneous thing. The solstice is a time of liveliness and joy."
The university's pagan society describes itself as "a group of diverse individuals who all share similar views and interests in the occult, pre-Christian religion, Earth-based religion, New Age topics, and magic".
The group's website says the organisation does not "try to evangelise or convert" people to paganism, adding "as far as we're concerned diversity is beauty".
The Guardian had this offering:
A survivor of one of the most audacious invasions of Stonehenge has turned up in time for this week's solstice celebrations, more than 40 years after all the perpetrators were believed to have perished in a fire. As archaeologist Julian Richards prepared to exhibit his extraordinary Stonehenge collection at Salisbury museum, including snow shakers, Victorian guide books, 1920s admission tickets - 6d (2.5p) for adults and 3d for children - and some of the dodgiest T-shirts ever screen-printed, word reached him that Bruce Bogle was ready to come out of hiding.
At first light one morning in 1966 the custodians of Stonehenge arrived to find 12 life-sized stick men, made of wood with painted Beatles mop-top hairstyles, sprawled across the stones. In one of the most elaborate japes executed at Stonehenge, the figures were held in place by cords and sacks of sand thrown over the stones. The Bogles all had neatly painted names, beginning with B, including Brian, Beatle, Boris, and Bruce.
As the horrified site guardians prepared to sweep them away to a bonfire, a schoolteacher, Austin Underwood, arrived and took the only photographs of the scene. What only emerged recently, through a conversation with his widow Mary, was that he rescued a Bogle on the roof rack of his car, which has been an asylum seeker in the family garage ever since.
Bruce Bogle has joined Richards's exhibition of Stonehenge memorabilia, which includes faked first world war postcard images of Zeppelins and biplanes buzzing the stones. His favourites include a sign scavenged in the 1980s, reading "Press pass holders and Druids only", and a Spinal Tap picture disc from the spoof rock movie, in the shape of the great trilithons. He hopes Bruce Bogle may flush out his creators, never identified. "They must now be in their 60s or even 70s - it would be wonderful if this exhibition inspired them to come out and own up at last."
The constant questions that confront the enquiring mind are: Who put the stones there? When? And why? Over the years the answers have included Geoffrey of Monmouth's theory that it was a cemetery for the Britons treacherously slain by the Saxon warlord Hengist; Inigo Jones's suggestion that it was set up by the Romans; the notions that it was the focus of a Druidic cult, that it was the work of Phoenicians, the Vikings or the Ancient Greeks; even that it was a Buddhist temple.
John Lubbock, the 19th-century gentleman polymath who later became Lord Avebury and coined the term 'cave man', sagely considered that, in the face of Stonehenge, 'it is wiser to confess our ignorance, than to waste valuable time in useless guesses'.
In late May, there were reports that Stonehenge is the site of an ancient cemetery.