ShmoopTube

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Gulliver's Travels, a la Shmoop I'm so glad you're here! I've been looking

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for an audience for my vacation photos...

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I always wanted to travel, so when business was slow, I shipped to sea with the navy...

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I rarely make long stories short, but I'll do it just this once. The voyage was doomed

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and I washed up on shore to find myself bodily restrained by little people.

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No, that’s from my backpack tour across Europe…I mean really little people...fairy-sized

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folks called the Lilliputians<<lily-poo-tee-ens>>.

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I thought I was going out of my mind, but they were real, all right. They kept me for

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a while as their prisoner, but eventually they succumbed to my charms…

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…and even used me as a weapon of mass destruction in their war over boiled eggs. Don't ask.

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However, when my Lilliputian enemies, who were small but nasty, plotted to blind and

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starve me…

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…I took an early check-out and sailed back home on a Gulliver-sized boat.

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The problem was, home felt pretty tame after that. So I shipped out again, and this time

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I was marooned in Brob-ding-nag, land of giants. …

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It wasn’t so bad there, unless you count the animal attacks...

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…evil court jesters...

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… and being paraded around like a toddler at a beauty pageant.

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It was almost a relief when that eagle carried me back out to sea. Boy, was I glad I invested

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in that GPS…

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When I got back this time, my wife strongly discouraged me from traveling again.

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Out of respect for her wishes, I waited over a week before planning my next trip.

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One pirate attack later, I was again on my own in a boat. Even worse, now I had to cancel

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all my credit cards. Luckily, I was able to hitch a ride on the flying island of Laputa...

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<La-poo-tah>

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Laputa turned out to be full of real brainy types.  

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Everyone was seriously boring, though, and a little...how shall I say it...eccentric?

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I was antsy to get out of there, but I had a layover between voyages, so I opted for

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a little excursion to visit the necromancers at Glubb-dub-drib. I had them conjure up a

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bunch of dead Europeans, and a few other favorites...

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One more sidebar to Lugg-nagg, land of the creepy old people who never die, and it was

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back to the wife and kids, my darling little...what were their names again?

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By now you know how this goes...I went off on another adventure, and wound up dumped

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on a beach somewhere.  This time I ended up in a land where humans were ruled by their

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horse overlords, the Houyhnhnms <win-Nims>.

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The enslaved Homo Sapiens were called Yahoos… not named after the search engine.

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I had a nice long chat with the Master Horse, and I told him all about my homeland.  He

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didn't have much good to say about our nasty habits like war and greed, though.

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In fact, the Houyhnhnms were pretty fabulous all around. I was so happy with them, I cried

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when they asked me to leave.

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But I found a ship, again, and went home to my yahoo wife and yahoo kids, again.

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They don’t understand me like my horse buddies do.

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So here I am, a homebody, stuck in Yahoo-land. The government wants directions to my ports

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of call, so they can launch invasions…

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…which is such a Yahoo thing to do.

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