Travel Blog: News and Briefs
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.
Email to friend
del.icio.us
Digg
Facebook
Furl
Ma.gnolia
Mixx
Reddit
StumbleUpon
Yahoo! BuzzEarly 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.
Travel Posters: Pan Am in the Early ’70s
by Michael Yessis | 03.12.10 | 1:48 PM ET
This post on Eye Blog has a History Detectives feel, chronicling the history of a forgotten Pan Am Airlines advertising campaign from the early ’70s.
The effort to rebrand the troubled airline failed—eventually, so did the airline—but the designs are now celebrated. A few of the posters were recently featured in an exhibit at MoMA in New York. Check out a few below. They’re beautiful.
How Air Travel is Bringing Back God
by Michael Yessis | 03.12.10 | 12:29 PM ET
Roger Cohen has a half-baked theory:
I’ve noticed God is making a comeback. It’s not just all the craziness in the Middle East. Soccer players now look to the heavens when they score goals. Come on! A touchdown prompts skyward glances. This didn’t used to happen. It would have been considered loony. My theory is it must have something to do with air travel. Survivors of it feel compelled to search out a savior.
Why You Should Care More About Signs Than You Do
by Michael Yessis | 03.12.10 | 11:16 AM ET
Slate’s Julia Turner just concluded a terrific series about signs—Penn Station’s horrible ones, London’s plans for better ones, efforts to standardize exit signs, what GPS technology means for the future of signs and why signs are “the most useful thing you pay no attention to.”
For an example of the consequences of what happens when you don’t pay attention to signs while you’re traveling, just watch—shameless self promotion alert—America’s Worst Driver on the Travel Channel this Sunday.
Man Loses Job, Survives on Hotel Points and Frequent Flier Miles
by Michael Yessis | 03.11.10 | 4:42 PM ET
This week Jim Kennedy is at the Holiday Inn Express in San Clemente using United miles. The Orange County Register has a great package about his plight, including this audio slideshow:
(via Slatest)
Japan Airlines Flight Attendant Uniforms: Big on the Black Market
by Michael Yessis | 03.11.10 | 3:23 PM ET
You can probably guess for whom the uniforms hold a “mysterious power.” From the Times:
For decades, the crisp, no-nonsense outfits have appealed to male Japanese tastes. New Japan Airlines (JAL) uniforms have long been in demand in the local sex industry for customers keen on role-playing fantasies, while rare specimens that have actually been worn are hugely sought after by fetishists and are worth their weight in gold.
Countless shops will sell a very credible imitation for a few thousand yen, but the real thing can fetch a fortune. Historically, says Yu Teramoto, the owner of a specialist costumier in the Akihabara district of Tokyo, real JAL outfits have been virtually impossible for buyers to lay their hands on. However, the post-bankruptcy prospect of huge layoffs at JAL—especially among uniform-wearing air-crew—raises the prospect that former staff will attempt to sell their outfits for a profit.
One stolen uniform previously sold for about 11,000 pounds.
Mapped: The Hokey Pokey, an Omelet and Rumsfeld’s Iraq
by Michael Yessis | 03.11.10 | 2:09 PM ET
Last year Christoph Niemann rendered New York landmarks and experiences in LEGOs. Now he’s mapped “the most accurate routes for all occasions,” including the Hokey Pokey, an omelet and Rumsfeld’s Iraq.
Clever stuff.
Why Aren’t Students Reading Travel Books?
by Jim Benning | 03.11.10 | 1:23 PM ET
Students at all grade levels read a lot more fiction than nonfiction—think Mark Twain and J.K. Rowling. As Tom Kuntz points out in the New York Times, a recent survey found that of the top 20 books being read these days by high school students, only two are nonfiction.
Many observers are rightfully questioning why students aren’t reading more nonfiction.
Writes Jay Mathews in the Washington Post:
Educators say non-fiction is more difficult than fiction for students to comprehend. It requires more factual knowledge, beyond fiction’s simple truths of love, hate, passion and remorse. So we have a pathetic cycle. Students don’t know enough about the real world because they don’t read non-fiction and they can’t read non-fiction because they don’t know enough about the real world.
It’s a conundrum. But it seems to me great nonfiction travel narratives would be a perfect solution—or at least a start.
Travel writers often approach their subjects with what’s known in Zen as beginner’s mind. They write about places from the perspective of an outsider. They’re students of the world. Ideally, they take readers on a journey—a real adventure—that is fun and entertaining and, yes, educational.
I’m thinking of writers like Paul Theroux (“Dark Star Safari” or “The Old Patagonian Express”), Tim Cahill (“Road Fever”) and Bill Bryson (“A Walk in the Woods”), just to name a few.
Any other suggestions? What about a bestselling book like “Eat, Pray, Love”?
