Travel Blog: News and Briefs
What We Loved This Week: ‘Crazy Heart,’ Spring and the Photos of the Year
by World Hum | 03.19.10 | 4:18 PM ET
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Yahoo! BuzzIn Praise of Jet Lag
by Michael Yessis | 03.19.10 | 1:27 PM ET
James Parker makes the argument for basking in its uselessness.
Because really, if you’re not lagged to a standstill, how can you tell that you’ve gone somewhere? This is, in a phrase I intend to copyright, “the wisdom of jet lag.” Let us not back away from it, superstitiously warding it off with rituals and hygiene. Let us rather embrace jet lag. As a positive: a rich and naturally achieved state of philosophical disarray. And as a negative: a refusal, by the ever-sensible organism, to keep pace with inhuman modernity.
Travel Movie Watch: ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ Trailer
by Michael Yessis | 03.18.10 | 2:43 PM ET
The movie version of Elizabeth Gilbert’s blockbuster travel book “Eat, Pray, Love” comes out this summer. The trailer was just released:
In December, World Hum contributor Liz Sinclair reported from the set in Bali.
Photos: ‘London for Loners’
by Michael Yessis | 03.18.10 | 2:33 PM ET
We’ve seen what Los Angeles looks like without traffic. Here’s what London looks like on lonely Sunday nights.
High-Speed Rail in Australia?
by Michael Yessis | 03.18.10 | 12:47 PM ET
Only if the country gives up its “national can’t-do mentality,” says Clive Dorman.
Paris in 26 Gigapixels
by Eva Holland | 03.18.10 | 12:16 PM ET
Zoom from a cityscape right down to street level in this amazing browsable image. (Via Kottke)
R.I.P. Alex Chilton
by Michael Yessis | 03.18.10 | 9:15 AM ET
The singer-songwriter behind Big Star, the Box Tops and classic travel song “The Letter” died of a heart attack in New Orleans. He was 59.
The greatest tribute song to Chilton has already been written, by Paul Westerberg:
Taking the Pulse of the Irish Pub
by Michael Yessis | 03.17.10 | 3:44 PM ET
Just in time for St. Patrick’s Day, the Los Angeles Times checks in on the state of the Irish pub. Verdict: Still struggling in Ireland, still ubiquitous around the world.
And it’s still one of the Seven Wonders of the Shrinking Planet.
Early Images of Singapore Saved From Bonfire
by Michael Yessis | 03.17.10 | 11:38 AM ET
Good catch to whoever rescued “Views of the China Seas & Macao Taken During Capt. D. Ross’ Surveys by M. Houghton” from the flames. The book contained some of the earliest known drawings of Singapore, dating back to 1819. It was just sold at auction by the unnamed seller to an unnamed buyer for £43,000. (Via @roncharles)
Bars vs. Grocery Stores, Mapped
by Eva Holland | 03.16.10 | 1:11 PM ET
Flowing Data offers up a map showing that some parts of the U.S.—we’re looking at you, Wisconsin—have more bars than supermarkets. Equally interesting? Spotting the areas on the map that seem to have precious few of either. (Via @julia914)
A Collection of Cross-Cultural Food Rules
by Michael Yessis | 03.16.10 | 11:48 AM ET
The Atlantic’s Lesley Freeman Riva compiles some folk wisdom:
By food rules, however, I mean more than simple, health-oriented precepts about eating your veggies and avoiding any cereal that turns the milk magenta. I mean those weird bits of food lore passed down unquestioningly from generation to generation: the strange taboos and enthusiasms that are often radically different from culture to culture, like the Japanese prohibition against combining clams and clementines, or the deep-rooted Italian conviction that cucumbers make you burp.
R.I.P. Peter Graves
by Michael Yessis | 03.15.10 | 3:36 PM ET
The prolific actor who played Captain Oveur in “Airplane!” died of a heart attack Sunday. He was 83. Graves almost turned down the role in one of the greatest travel movies of all time. From the New York Times obituary:
But he was appalled when his agent sent him the script for the role of a pedophile pilot in “Airplane!” (1980). “I tore my hair and ranted and raved and said, ‘This is insane,’ he recalled on “Biography” in 1997. Some of the role’s lines (“Have you ever been in a Turkish prison?”) looked at first as if they could get him thrown in jail, never mind ruining his career. He told his agent to tell David and Jerry Zucker and Jim Abrahams, the director-producers, to find themselves a comedian. He relented when the Zucker brothers explained that the secret of their spoof would be the deadpan behavior of the cast; they didn’t want a comedian, they wanted the Peter Graves of “Fury” and “Mission: Impossible.”
Those lines are now movie classics. Entertainment Weekly honors Graves today with Peter Graves-y things to say today.
I’ll let his work speak for itself:
How to Remap the World
by Michael Yessis | 03.15.10 | 2:03 PM ET
Parag Khanna believes eliminating arbitrary borders and redrawing the world map in the next ten years is a “moral, economic and strategic imperative.” His guiding star? The European Union.
Leaders seeking to respond to the global economic and underemployment crises should take a lesson from the world’s most successful instance of a subordination of arbitrary borders: the European Union. The E.U. is the world’s most peaceful multinational zone and its largest economic bloc, combining 27 countries, 450 million people and a $20 trillion GDP. The solution to the hundreds of lines that scar our political geography is to physically build the lines that connect people across them. If we spend just 10% of what we do on fighting over and defending borders on transcending them, the next decade—and the decades beyond—will be better than the last.
The success of the E.U. benefits travelers, too. World Hum contributor Eric Lucas explains.
What We Loved This Week: Moose Spareribs, ‘America’s Worst Driver’ and Rick Steves in Iran
by World Hum | 03.12.10 | 5:56 PM ET
Photo by Wayne Curtis Eva Holland
I loved having moose spareribs for dinner last night. I ate some muskox from a few hundred miles north over the holidays, but this was my first taste of the local wild game. Delicious!
Libya’s Tripoli Airport: Airworld, It’s Not
by Jim Benning | 03.12.10 | 3:28 PM ET
REUTERS/Louafi Larbi We write a lot about Airworld and the notion that, beyond the security gates, the world’s airports are becoming more alike by the day. But a nice story in Reason about a press junket to Libya suggests that Tripoli’s airport retains its unique, uh, charm:
When the BBC reported that “at Tripoli’s ultra-modern airport…you could be almost anywhere in the world,” I expected at bare minimum a Starbucks, a fake Irish pub, and (this is the ultra bit) a bank of vending machines dispensing iPods and noise-canceling headphones.
Well, perhaps we came through Libya’s spillover airport, its Midway or Stansted, because this is “anywhere in the world” only in some mad, dystopian-novel sense. Available for purchase are Egyptian gum, cheap watches celebrating 40 years of the Libyan revolution, and glossy magazines with Hugo Chavez on the cover.
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