Travel Blog: News and Briefs
‘If You Take Photos of His Food, Grant Achatz Hates You’
by Michael Yessis | 03.30.10 | 1:28 PM ET
So tweets Jason Wilson, regarding this blog post about Alinea chef Grant Achatz’s feelings toward people who photograph the famously photogenic food in his Chicago restaurant.
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Yahoo! BuzzSchrute Farms: Fake Destination Still Garnering Fake TripAdvisor Reviews
by Michael Yessis | 03.30.10 | 12:19 PM ET
Faux Schrute Farms debuted on TripAdvisor in 2007, right around the time that Dwight Schrute, the ninja-loving paper salesman on the U.S. version of The Office, mentioned it on an episode of the series. Like many, we had a little fun with it at the time, then forgot about it.
Turns out the fake page still exists and it has more reviews than “many major Manhattan hotels.” From the New York Times:
Many reviewers add their own funny flourishes, enhancing the show’s mythology: Mandy Pyszka from Milwaukee, who stumbled upon the TripAdvisor site while searching Google for Dwight Schrute quotes, raved about the beet pudding.
Carla Harrington of Fredricksburg, Va., was surprised to find 82 percent of reviews recommended Schrute Farms. “I thought about what it would feel like not to know them as TV characters but to really go to this B & B,” she said in an interview. Her one-star slam called Dwight “an overbearing survivalist who appears to have escaped from the local mental asylum.”
Aerogram Love, Continued
by Michael Yessis | 03.30.10 | 11:03 AM ET
The latest to weigh in on the disappearing aerogram: Dickon Edwards.
I’ve been buying up packs frantically, in order to beat the price rise. Other people stockpile petrol and tinned food: I stockpile stationery.
After all, who sends airletters in 2010? A smattering of collectors, a few pensioners who won’t touch a computer, and defiant retro-stylists like myself. But I have a letter-loving friend in Australia who writes back, on the pretty pictorial aerogrammes the country still issues, and exchanging Facebook Wall posts with her just doesn’t lift my heart in the same way.
(Via @evanrail)
Top Four Reasons Why Soichi Noguchi is the Coolest Astronaut Ever
by Jim Benning | 03.29.10 | 5:21 PM ET
4. The Japanese astronaut has been posting amazing photos from the International Space Station of Earth via Twitter—the Telegraph has collected a dozen of them here.
3. He has posted videos on YouTube from space, including this one looking down on Madagascar:
2. He recently became the first space traveler to make a sushi roll in space. Behold the feat—and what a salmon roll looks like in zero gravity:
1. He has the coolest Twitter handle ever: Astro_Soichi.
‘Fly Girls’: ‘Contrived Connivances’
by Eva Holland | 03.29.10 | 1:28 PM ET
Slate television critic Troy Patterson takes down the new reality show:
[Y]ou will need to stow your aesthetic judgment in the overhead compartment to enjoy “Fly Girls,” which parades the usual nonsense ... The Fly Girls’ trumped-up arguments are processed beefs. Their romantic travails are as inconsequential as the shabby guys they’re trysting with. The show fails to exploit the comedy-of-errors potential inherent to flight-attendant narratives, the coming-and-going-and-getting-laid-over farcical possibilities explored by classic texts from “Boeing Boeing” to “Three’s a Crowd.”
The Los Angeles Times’ Robert Lloyd is similarly unimpressed. Variety piles on.
The World’s Freshwater, Mapped
by Eva Holland | 03.29.10 | 12:14 PM ET
National Geographic has a cool interactive graphic that lets you view the world’s freshwater reserves by category—permafrost, wetlands and so on—or all at once. Good stuff. (Via @Marilyn_Res)
The Casino Carpets of Las Vegas
by Michael Yessis | 03.29.10 | 11:07 AM ET
This slideshow will wake you up on a Monday morning. Chris Maluszynski’s photos are the subject of a New Yorker Talk of the Town piece, which probes why Las Vegas casino carpets are so gaudy.
Theories abound about why casino carpets look the way they do. The camouflaging argument makes sense—the more curlicues, the less noticeable the dirt and Coke and vomit. But Christine B. Whittemore, who runs a blog called Carpetology, believes that the carpets’ primary function is psychological. “A lot of the busyness of the patterns may be about keeping people active, as too much relaxing may not inspire gambling,” she said. “You also have to be careful not to use the same pattern on stairs as you do on flat surfaces, because of how the brain processes depth.” Recently, Whittemore took a tour of Steve Wynn’s new Encore hotel. She recalled, “There’s some carpet in this delightful little café-bar area, and what comes to mind is Marc Chagall—the idea was the butterfly, the metamorphosis, the dream.” The butterflies flutter over a scarlet grid. Whittemore went on, “The head designer explained that red is a good-luck color in many Asian cultures.”
David G. Schwartz has more on the subject, and more photos.
What We Loved This Week: The Dempster Highway, ‘The Snail and the Whale’ and Paul Theroux
by World Hum | 03.26.10 | 5:33 PM ET
Eva Holland
I loved road-tripping the Dempster Highway from Dawson City, Yukon, across the Arctic Circle to Inuvik, Northwest Territories—and from there, driving the ice road to Tuktoyaktuk, a tiny community at the northern edge of the North American continent, on the shore of the Arctic Ocean. It was, without question, 50 hours of the most beautiful scenery—and the most isolating travel—that I’ve ever experienced. Here’s a shot from a couple of hours north of Dawson City:
The Seven Most Photographed Landmarks in the World
by Michael Yessis | 03.26.10 | 11:07 AM ET
As determined by a Cornell University study (pdf), they are:
1) The Eiffel Tower
2) Trafalgar Square
3) The Tate Modern
4) Big Ben
5) Notre Dame Cathedral
6) The London Eye
7) The Empire State Building
As far as I can tell, students at Cornell’s Department of Computer Science used data from Flickr to determine the images. I gave up all hope of trying to totally comprehend the analysis, though, when I came across this in the study’s text:
A Love Letter to the Window Seat
by Michael Yessis | 03.26.10 | 10:01 AM ET
Some evocative writing by Mark Vanhoenacker:
But for me, it’s all about the views, especially those entrancing last few minutes before touchdown.
It’s how the details of the world are summoned again, how gracefully scale and shadings resolve into trees and fields and subdivisions. It’s the steady, lyrical motion of a silvery wing over a new place—an entirely unique geography and history that appear simply and perfectly beneath you.
He nails the description of flying into Los Angeles at night: “The city looks like an ad for a computer chip, a kinetic vision of light and energy spilling over the continent’s edge.”
Bill Maher on Mexico: ‘Closed Until Further Notice’
by Jim Benning | 03.25.10 | 4:43 PM ET
Bill Maher’s “new rule” about Mexico cracked me up—even if I don’t believe travelers should avoid all of Mexico.
Helper Monkeys: TSA Has ’em Covered
by Eva Holland | 03.25.10 | 3:30 PM ET
Boing Boing has unearthed a set of TSA guidelines for the screening of service monkeys. See the comments for your fix of monkey-touching and poop-flinging jokes.
Map Envelope: ‘It’s Mail With a Sense of Place’
by Michael Yessis | 03.25.10 | 12:10 PM ET
The concept behind Map Envelope: Enter a location and add a message, and the site spits out a page with a Google Maps image in the form of an envelope. Write a note on the inside, fold it up, add a stamp and drop it in the mail. It’s simple. It’s brilliant. And, the first time I saw it earlier this week, I thought: It’s an aerogram for the digital age.
The second thing I thought: I wonder what Evan Rail thinks. Last May, he wrote a moving lament about the slow demise of ready-to-mail aerograms for World Hum. So I sent him a link and asked him what he thought:
I hadn’t heard of this before, but it’s a delightful surprise. This really is almost an aerogram, but customized, sort of like those special holiday aerograms put out by Royal Mail.
It’s mail with a sense of place.
I was surprised to see I could create a map envelope focused on my tiny square in central Prague. With high-quality satellite images, it’s kind of like “you can see my house from here.”
The big thing that traditional aerograms have as an advantage is that they include postage, which means you don’t have to search for a stamp. But if you could combine map envelopes with what the USPS calls PC Postage, which lets you “print the PC Postage indicia directly onto envelopes,” then maybe you’ve solved it. It sounds like a way for aerograms to continue even if the various international postal services no longer print them.
Tijuana Embraces its Touristy ‘Zonkeys’
by Jim Benning | 03.25.10 | 10:39 AM ET
Behold the zonkey. This poor donkey and others like it, painted with stripes to resemble zebras, have been a kitschy mainstay on Tijuana’s Avenida Revolución for years. Before drug-related crime frightened most tourists away—visits from the U.S. have dropped off 80 percent since 2001—many would pay a few bucks to don sombreros and pose for photos with the animals. It’s a ridiculous tradition that somehow endures.
And now, a new Tijuana basketball team playing in a regional Mexican league has embraced the painted zebras, calling themselves the Tijuana Zonkeys. They have striped jerseys and, yes, even cheering “Zonkeys girls.”
The team’s president told the San Diego Union-Tribune: “It’s a crazy, cartoonish figure, and in a way, that’s what the city’s all about. It’s a crazy, cartoonish city where everything is possible.”
He’s right about that.
Go Zonkeys.
Surfing the ‘Ultimate Wave Tahiti’: IMAX 3D
by Jim Benning | 03.24.10 | 5:16 PM ET
I love the occasional IMAX film for vicarious big-screen travel thrills, and I can’t wait to see this new one about surfing Tahiti’s famed Teahupoo. Here’s a taste:
