Destination: United States
Budget Tips from the Twitterverse
by Eva Holland | 03.02.09 | 12:13 PM ET
Well, the Daily Beast may have declared that Twitter jumped the shark this week, but that didn’t stop me from collecting a few good travel tips and deals from the micro-blogging site—all in 140 characters or less, of course. NewYorkology notes that the Restaurant Week that won’t die has been extended yet again. The Snow Junkies offer up 54 ways to get discounted lift tickets in March. Jaunted points out that a round-the-world ticket from Virgin Atlantic can now be had for less than $3,000 (and asks: “Who’s in?”), and finally, in more good flight news, Conde Nast Traveler’s Wendy Perrin writes: “Experts I’ve been interviewing for my May column for @CNTraveler say airfares to Europe will remain supercheap throughout the summer.”
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Yahoo! BuzzR.I.P. Paul Harvey
by Michael Yessis | 03.02.09 | 10:20 AM ET
The radio legend joined me on many a road trip, filling the wide-open spaces of the U.S. with what the Washington Post calls his “authoritative baritone voice.” I rarely took a long drive without tuning in a crackling A.M. station and hearing Harvey deliver “the rest of the story.” Among the noteworthy achievements of his broadcasting career: He apparently invented the word “skyjacker.” He was 90.
Morning Links: War Hotels, the Solas Awards and More
by Michael Yessis | 03.02.09 | 9:06 AM ET
- A major snowstorm in the eastern U.S. has disrupted travel throughout the country.
- GlobalPost began a five-part series about the favorite hotels of war correspondents.
- NPR says the “stimulus puts high-speed rail on the fast track.”
- Rome’s mayor announced an unorthodox way to fight “violence and thuggery” in the city. (via @theroadto)
- What can modern cities learn from slums?
- World Hum contributor Eric Lucas is dumbfounded that nobody tells the truth about Las Vegas.
- Some travelers are feeling guilty about traveling at all in this economic climate.
- Thailand thinks you’ll want to visit the country more if it has a signature cocktail. So it created the “Siam Sunrays.”
- Congrats to the winners of this year’s Solas Awards. David Torrey Peters took the grand prize for best travel story of the year.
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What We Loved This Week: Food Tours, Traveling Through the Harper’s Index and More
by World Hum | 02.27.09 | 5:03 PM ET
Bakhat Singh in the Moonlight Our contributors share a favorite travel-related experience from the past seven days.
Michael Yessis
The searchable Harper’s Index. The magazine has been delivering pithy factual tidbits since 1984, and now you can search through all of them online by topic. Here are the 90 matches in my search for items about travel. One of my favorites comes from 1990: “Amount the U.S. Air Force spent this year to study the effects of jet noise on pregnant horses: $100,000.”
Joanna Kakissis
I’ve always wanted to host my own YouTube cooking show, because doesn’t the whole world really want to see me make my secret baklava recipe to the beat of “Chains of Love” by Erasure? But I doubt my show would ever be as awesome as the sensational “Cooking With Clara,” which features Great Depression-era recipes by 93-year-old Sicilian-American Clara Cannucciari.
Global Warming Tourism: The Rising Sea Level Slideshow!
by Joanna Kakissis | 02.27.09 | 3:37 PM ET
Florida’s Key West as well as the Maldives, Tuvalu and the islands of Pate and Ndau in the Lamu Archipelago off the Northern coast of Kenya are among eight places that rising sea levels due to climate change will soon make uninhabitable, according to a provocative slideshow at Treehugger.
I hope this doesn’t start a trend in “climate-change cruises.”
Tweet Revenge: The Tale of Gary Vaynerchuk and the Mondrian
by Alexander Basek | 02.27.09 | 12:26 PM ET
Is there no quadrant of the web untouched by internet impresario Gary Vaynerchuk? In a video posted to his site on Wednesday, Vaynerchuk (host of Wine Library TV and a new media keynote guru, for those of you who haven’t heard of him) told a cautionary tale about the Mondrian in South Beach. In short: Gary Vee went to the hotel’s bar expecting to party—because the Mondrian has a party rep—and the house turned on the lights around 1:30 a.m., booting Gary (and friends) upstairs to their rooms. Normally, the tale would end there, but Gary’s pal tweeted the event, and someone immediately responded that they were not going to stay at the Mondrian after hearing the tale of woe. The power of Web 2.0! Right?
Crime Doesn’t Pay (But It Sure Can Be Funny)
by Jenna Schnuer | 02.27.09 | 10:39 AM ET
Feeling mad love for Small Town Misfit and BeeNews.com. They’re two of the best stand-ins around for those times you can’t indulge in the ultimate on-the-road entertainment: a gander at a community newspaper’s police blotter while drinking a cup of coffee at the local diner.
Morning Links: Walking on Broadway, Fees for Airline Toilets and More
by Michael Yessis | 02.27.09 | 9:43 AM ET
- New York City plans to turn parts of Broadway into pedestrian malls.
- The inevitable Coldplay reference comes only four seconds into this video about that ice music festival in northern Italy.
- Are the “taste police” out to get German bakers?
- The literature of men in boats vs. women in houses. (via Arts & Letters Daily)
- Here’s the latest Carnival of Cities.
- Happy belated 90th birthday, Grand Canyon National Park. (thanks for the reminder @evaholland and @AlisonSWellner)
- The economic downturn has boosted Peace Corps applications and the number of financial types snowboarding the Alps.
- Mule drivers in period costumes need TSA security clearance, too! So Boing Boing started a contest to create mule-driver TSA IDs.
- Will passengers soon need to pay to use the toilet on Ryanair? Just how ridiculous can the carrier get?
- Finally, this is fun to say: Sassy the Sustainable Sasquatch.
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The Detroit Dilemma
by Sophia Dembling | 02.26.09 | 9:32 PM ET
A number of years ago, I worked with a woman who was originally from Detroit. She loved her hometown and missed it terribly. I can’t remember her name, but I vividly remember the glow on her face when she talked about the city she’d left behind and to which she vowed to return someday.
I know, right? Hard to believe.
Yet Detroit has a draw, even if it’s a sort of pity vote. Friend and fellow writer Margaret Littman, also has a passion for the city. She says, “I love Detroit’s architecture and public art and wide boulevards. But more than that, I love that Detroit is such a microcosm of America: boomed thanks to ingenuity and innovative and now struggling with what to do next. Plus, I’m a sucker for an underdog.”
Playing Chicken in San Francisco
by David Farley | 02.26.09 | 3:25 PM ET
Chickens for pets and meat? Civil Eats checks out the “urban hen” trend happening in San Francisco. Like most people, I’d have a hard time killing something I’ve been taking care of for a while, but at the same time, knowing where your meat (and eggs) are coming from is a good thing. I once got flack from animal-rights people over a story I wrote about taking part of a pig killing in the Czech hinterlands. It’s true: it wasn’t pretty, but my critics missed the main point: raising your own animal and killing it yourself seems a lot more ethical than supporting factory-farming.
‘World’s Brainiest Tour Operator’ Now (Sort of) Affordable
by Eva Holland | 02.26.09 | 2:36 PM ET
For all the high culture addicts out there, good news from Arthur Frommer: British tour operator Martin Randall Travel has been spotted advertising in Harper’s, which means, as Frommer writes, “that tours with profound intellectual content will henceforth be marketed to the American public; the ‘dumbing down’ of travel may be significantly slowed through this effort.” The guidebook mogul figures the shifting exchange rate, which has made Britain much more affordable for Americans in recent months, is behind the unprecedented stateside marketing effort. The tours still aren’t for shoestringers—the all-inclusive packages hover around 300 pounds per person per day—but, as Frommer notes, they’re cheaper than comparable college alumni tours, and thanks to the sliding pound they’re within easier reach than ever.
The Iditarod: Worth the Work It Takes to Follow It
by Jenna Schnuer | 02.26.09 | 1:13 PM ET
Photo by Jenna Schnuer. For spectators, dog mushing is a hard sport. There’s no loop de loop on a race track. There’s no back and forth on a court. Once the dogs go by…they’re pretty much gone. Dog mushing as spectator sport takes patience, dedication, and a lot of reading (internet and newspaper updates of days-long races are key). But just one dose of a race, one chance to watch it in person, to see the connection between the mushers and the dogs and, quite simply, you’re sunk. It gets in you.
The Hutton Hotel: A Green Hotel Frenzy, Southern-Style!
by Alexander Basek | 02.26.09 | 10:17 AM ET
Currently in a soft-opening phase—the property just opened its doors last week—downtown Nashville’s Hutton Hotel is one of the most eco-friendly properties in the Southeast. Unlike a lot of other ostensibly green hotels with a program where they don’t change your sheets very often and that’s all they do for the environment, the Hutton bristles with technology that makes it greener and more efficient for the hotel. (In other words, it saves them money so, presumably, there’s oopmh behind it).
Inside, the Hutton is awash in bamboo—a highly renewable wood—on the floors and on the walls. The hotel even has a program in place to reduce waste from tiny plastic bottles for bathroom amenities, as well as dual-flush toilets. There’s also sexier amenities like media hubs for your electronics, digital controls for the shower so you can set a specific temperature and television displays in the lobby that turn into mirrors when they’re switched off. The hotel’s worth checking out because it cleverly slots into the Nashville hotel market; less upmarket than the deluxe Hermitage, but without the swarms of conventioneers that overrun Opryland every weekend. I, for one, wouldn’t mind digital shower controls of my very own, though I’d settle for real water pressure in my apartment as a close second.
Morning Links: A Wordy Map of St. Petersburg, the Joy of L.A. Traffic and More
by Michael Yessis | 02.26.09 | 9:38 AM ET
- New Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano says yes to body scanners.
- World Hum contributor Tim Patterson chronicles the struggle of the Kachin people of Myanmar.
- USA Today looks at “what might be the most endangered airline in the USA.”
- NPR has an interview with the world-traveling ethnographers from The Linguists.
- Happy 450th birthday Pensacola, Florida.
- Matthew Polly goes to St. Petersburg, Russia, in Slate’s latest Well-Traveled.
- This map of literary St. Petersburg was created using lines from Russian writers about St. Petersburg. (Via The Book Bench)
- Daniel Fox aims to shoot more than 100,000 digital images from around the world for the Wild Image Project.
- The Freakonomics blog is in the midst of a six-part series about the facts and fiction of Los Angeles Transportation. I find it compelling, though maybe I’m just looking at the gray skies here in D.C., waiting for winter to end, daydreaming about my upcoming trip back home.
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Tweeting for Kimchi Tacos
by Julia Ross | 02.25.09 | 2:43 PM ET
I’ve always envied the whole L.A. taco truck subculture; if I lived out there, I think I’d probably overdose on all the spicy goodness. Now that I’ve heard the story of the Kogi taco truck, I’m really jealous. Launched in November, the truck has gained an avid following for its fusion of Korean barbecue and traditional taco/burrito fare (imagine topping juicy carne asada with soy-sesame chili). But what’s really making news is the owners’ unusual marketing approach, which involves Tweeting the truck’s expected location a couple hours ahead of arrival, setting off a taco-minded flash mob.
According to the Los Angeles Times, the operation has become a “social networking juggernaut,” drawing between 300 and 800 people at each stop, with waits of up to two hours (Kogi staff play Japanese reggaeton to soothe the crowds). Even more interesting, it’s a bicoastal effort: Kogi’s public relations maven, Alice Shin, writes the Twitter feed and blogs about the truck’s doings all the way from New York. There’s a Flickr photostream, as well.
All I can say is: cool. I’d fly to the left coast just to check this out. Meantime, I think we need to send a certain World Hum coeditor up to L.A. on special assignment. Jim?