Biltmore House features a 70-foot-high banquet hall, the “Winter Garden” (right of front doors), a 10,000-volume library, the “Observatory” (top of center tower), a 70,000-gallon
indoor swimming pool, and the “Halloween Room” (basement).  As well as a two-lane bowling alley, where servants would set up pins by hand and even return the master’s balls.
        
All of these grotesques could be admired from his lordship’s bedroom window, so it seems that he had a thing for breasts, given that six of
the eight are so endowed but only one is, by all appearances, female.  As always, click on (or touch) any hermaphrodite to see a larger version.
        
Decorative stone covering the top of an elevator shaft.  To put things in perspective, this is what would explode in slow motion if Willy, crazy as an outhouse rat, crashed his
Wonkavator through the roof here—while Charlie craps a green brick and Grandpa Joe has chest pains—shooting high into the sky, like some webpage background image.
        
In the South, the woolly bear caterpillar (Pyrrharctia isabella, for all you entomologists out there) is believed to be a harbinger of spring.  This specimen, on a piece
of verdigris copper flashing, can see its shadow, so folklore says that there’ll be another six weeks of cold weather.  Something like that.  Or six more photographs.
        
At bottom is a decorative spout, or true gargoyle (closely related to gargle, for all you etymologists out there), that channeled rainwater away from the façade, where it was
disgorged, falling precipitously to earth.  But this created sinkholes below, one of which, I imagine, swallowed up a wall-eyed scullery maid—poor depth perception—in 1896.
        
Was going to say, “You can lead a man to water, but you can’t make him
drink.”  Then I thought better of it.  You can lead a man to drink, however.
        
When I first stumbled on the scene, thought that it was either a prairie dog town or a bunch of cypress knee lamps without their shades.
        
One of my fondest childhood memories is when, on a cold winter night, I knocked on my grandmother’s bedroom
door, and she opened her big stinking cedar chest to get me an extra quilt.  I can still smell that stinking cedar.
        
A footbridge, o’er the ol’ spillway.  I was channeling Bob Ross a little
here—if he had just snorted crystal meth off the blade of a hunting knife.
        
The footbridge again, as reflected in Lane’s sunglasses (geotag:  if there’s a pond
below, shaped like Texas, then this picture was taken in the Oklahoma Panhandle).