Tag: R.I.P.
R.I.P. Kurt Vonnegut
by Jim Benning | 04.12.07 | 11:32 AM ET
Vonnegut’s books have enriched our travels. On the long drive from L.A. to Las Vegas, we particularly recommend the audio version of “Slaughterhouse-Five.”
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Yahoo! BuzzR.I.P. Hal Rothman, Sin City Scholar
by Jim Benning | 03.01.07 | 2:37 PM ET
You don’t have to be an academic to appreciate the work of Las Vegas scholar and writer Hal Rothman, who died Sunday at the age of 48. In books like Neon Metropolis: How Las Vegas Started the Twenty-First Century and Devil’s Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth Century American West, he explored tourism’s powerful impact on Las Vegas and the Western U.S. “He didn’t dismiss it (Las Vegas),” said one UNLV professor in an obituary in today’s Los Angeles Times. “He understood that some people loved it, others hated it, and you had to take Las Vegas seriously as a subject for study.”
R.I.P. Ryszard Kapuściński
by Jim Benning | 01.24.07 | 12:26 PM ET
The acclaimed Polish journalist and author died Tuesday in Warsaw at the age of 74. This morning, Poland’s parliament remembered him with a moment of silence. Kapuściński is the author of “The Soccer War,” among other books, which ranked fourth on our list of the top 30 travel books of all time. We’ll have more on Kapuściński soon.
R.I.P. Art Buchwald
by Jim Benning | 01.18.07 | 12:08 PM ET
The famed humorist, who died Wednesday at the age of 81, got his start writing abroad. He once wrote a column called “Paris After Dark” that featured “scraps of offbeat information about Parisian nightlife” for the New York Herald Tribune. His goodbye video (“Hi, I’m Art Buchwald, and I just died”) is up on the New York Times website.
R.I.P. Bradford Washburn
by Michael Yessis | 01.17.07 | 7:12 AM ET
Photographer Ansel Adams called the mountaineer, mapmaker and photographer Bradford Washburn “a roving genius of mind and mountains.”
R.I.P. Momofuku Ando, Inventor of Instant Ramen Noodles
by Jim Benning | 01.09.07 | 1:31 PM ET
Oh instant ramen, how we love thee. You feed 100 million people a day, by some estimates. You have served as a worthy and affordable introduction to Japanese food for countless people around the globe. In much of Asia, you are standard dining fare on trains. And now, we learn you were invented by Momofuku Ando in 1958. Sadly, we learn, too, of Ando’s death at the age of 96 near Osaka, Japan. But we agree with everything Lawrence Downes writes in an eloquent tribute in today’s New York Times: “Ramen noodles have earned Mr. Ando an eternal place in the pantheon of human progress. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime. Give him ramen noodles, and you don’t have to teach him anything.” Too true.
Related on World Hum:
* Chinese Noodles Predate Marco Polo
Photo: jayceho, via Flickr. (Creative Commons License.)
R.I.P. James Brown
by Jim Benning | 12.26.06 | 5:14 PM ET
In honor of the Godfather of Soul, who died yesterday, we ventured deep into the World Hum archives and dusted off Anthem Soul, Rolf Potts’s dispatch about his encounter with “Sex Machine,” “Popcorn” and other Brown songs in a Syrian hotel. In its own modest, travel-centered way, we submit, it’s a fine little superbad tribute to Brown.
R.I.P. Jesús Blancornelas
by Jim Benning | 11.28.06 | 2:51 PM ET
The Tijuana journalist was fearless, and for all the right reasons. The New York Times and San Diego Union-Tribune remember him.
R.I.P. Stardust Hotel
by Jim Benning | 10.31.06 | 5:59 AM ET
Photo by heather0714, via Flickr (Creative Commons).
I spotted the guy in the ghoulish grim reaper costume, gripping his faux scythe, at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas Saturday night. He fit right in among the other Halloween revelers—the scantily clad nurses, the Top Gun pilots in their flight suits and reflective sunglasses, Richard Nixon and his entourage of Secret Service agents. But the grim reaper really should have been skulking several blocks up the strip at the Stardust, where death loomed like a hazy cloud of casino cigarette smoke. On Wednesday, the half-century-old hotel with the strip’s most iconic neon sign will close for good. The usual implosion will follow in several months, paving the way, as the Vegas hotel life cycle dictates, for a new megaresort.
R.I.P. Eric Newby
by Michael Yessis | 10.22.06 | 5:43 PM ET
Eric Newby, author of the classic travel book “A Short Walk In The Hindu Kush” and other works, passed away of natural causes Friday evening in Southern England. He was 86, and lived an adventurous life.
R.I.P. Anna Politkovskaya
by Frank Bures | 10.11.06 | 7:18 AM ET
A few years ago, I showed up at a small used book store in Portland, Oregon to hear a Russian journalist whose book A Dirty War had just come out. Anna Politkovskaya, who was murdered last week, was a thin woman with short hair and a fearlessness that few writers in the West could conjure. It was not long after Sept. 11, 2001, and we didn’t really know what the world was going to be like, or if we’d be able to travel around the world as we had before.
R.I.P. R.W. Apple
by Michael Yessis | 10.05.06 | 3:30 AM ET
Legendary New York Times journalist R.W. “Johnny” Apple passed away yesterday from complications of thoracic cancer. Apple, who made his name as a hard-hitting newsman, wrote mostly food and travel stories in recent years. Times editor Bill Keller wrote in a note to his staff that Apple wrote his last story for the Times—this story about 10 restaurants abroad worth boarding a plane to visit—from his sickbed.
R.I.P. California Map & Travel, Cody’s Books
by Jim Benning | 06.29.06 | 1:13 PM ET
Today, we pay our respects to two great California bookstores we’re losing or already have lost. California Map & Travel Center, the fine Santa Monica travel bookstore whose L.A. roots stretched back to 1949—an eternity in L.A.—recently closed shop. The small Pico Boulevard store was crammed with guidebooks, narratives and globes, and it sometimes hosted readings. I once saw travel editor and writer Thomas Swick read there on a book tour, to an enthusiastic audience. The store was profiled here in better days. The other big loss, of course, is Cody’s Books, an institution on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. The store, which stocked all kinds of books, will close July 11. Two other Bay area Cody’s locations will continue to operate, but it is the Telegraph Avenue store, a stone’s throw from the UC Berkeley campus, that is so beloved among book-lovers.
R.I.P. William Shurcliff
by Michael Yessis | 06.28.06 | 12:46 PM ET
The famed physicist was, among other things, the founder of the Citizens League Against the Sonic Boom, “a scientific clearinghouse that opposed the U.S. government’s development of supersonic transit,” according to an obituary in today’s Washington Post. Shurcliff emphasized the “sound pollution” of supersonic jets and, writes Adam Bernstein in the Post, was credited with helping to end the development of American supersonic jets and to limit supersonic flights from Europe to the U.S. Shurcliff also built kayaks, helped create military camouflage paint, co-edited an official history of the Manhattan Project, advocated for solar energy and documented atomic tests on Bikini Atoll. He was 97.
R.I.P. Bill Cardoso, the Writer Who Gave Us “Gonzo”
by Jim Benning | 03.12.06 | 1:43 PM ET
I’d never heard of journalist Bill Cardoso until I saw his obituary in today’s Los Angeles Times. In 1970, Cardoso congratulated his friend Hunter S. Thompson on an article Thompson had written about the Kentucky Derby for Scanlan’s Monthly magazine. The article was, Cardoso wrote in a note to Thompson, “pure gonzo.” Thompson grabbed the word “like a hungry dog and ran with it,” remarked his friend, artist Ralph Steadman.
R.I.P. Orlando Sentinel Travel?
by Terry Ward | 12.07.05 | 4:18 PM ET
It looks as though the Orlando Sentinel Travel section is history. The Orlando Weekly reports today that the Sentinel cut 54 jobs last week, including that of travel editor Jay Boyar, a 22-year veteran of the paper. Boyar told the Weekly that the Sentinel plans to include travel coverage in a feature section. He’s still in shock. “I feel a sense of panic,” he told the paper. “I have an 11-year-old son and I would like him to have medical insurance.”
R.I.P. Los Angeles Times Outdoors
by Jim Benning | 12.06.05 | 12:08 PM ET
The Los Angeles Times published its ambitious Outdoors section for the last time today. The paper launched the weekly section in September 2003 as a sort of Outside magazine for Southern California. It was a grand idea, and I was happy to contribute occasionally to its pages. Unfortunately, Tribune Co. has been making lots of cuts lately, and Outdoors was one of them. Editor Thomas Curwen offers a fond fairwell.
R.I.P. Rosa Parks
by Michael Yessis | 10.24.05 | 9:39 PM ET
The world’s most famous bus passenger passed away today. Parks, whose refusal in 1955 to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus to a white man sparked the modern civil rights movement, was 92.
R.I.P. Uli Dickerson
by Jim Benning | 02.25.05 | 11:39 PM ET
It’s not often that a newspaper’s obituaries page takes notice of the death of a flight attendant, but Uli Derickson had one extraordinary journey aboard a TWA flight that sealed her place in history. In 1985, Derickson was among the crew flying from Athens to Rome on Flight 847 when two Lebanese men hijacked the plane, leading all on board on a terror-filled journey across the Middle East. Through it all, Derickson worked to protect the passengers, shouting “Enough” until the hijackers stopped beating one man, and finding ways to protect the identity of Jewish passengers. Astonishingly, according to Jon Thurber’s excellent obituary in the Los Angeles Times, Derickson was targeted for her efforts long after the hijacking. “She returned to her New Jersey home with her husband, Russell, a retired TWA pilot, and her son, Matthew,” the article states. “But unfounded reports, including some in the mainstream news media, that she had given the hijackers names of Jewish passengers on the flight brought threats from extremist groups. When the truth about her efforts to shield Jewish passengers was verified, she received threats from others. The family relocated to Arizona.” In the late-1980s, Lindsay Wagner played Derickson in a TV movie about the ordeal, “The Taking of Flight 847: The Uli Derickson Story.” Derickson had been fighting cancer. She died last Friday at the age of 60.
R.I.P Hunter S. Thompson, Gonzo Traveler
by Jim Benning | 02.22.05 | 12:49 AM ET
The counterculture legend and self-proclaimed “gonzo” journalist who died by his own hand Sunday is being remembered for all sorts of contributions. I’ve yet to hear anyone describe him as a travel writer, but Thompson often wrote about travel in his unique style.