Travel Blog: News and Briefs
Readings by World Hum Contributors
by Jim Benning | 10.16.06 | 2:42 PM ET
Two of our esteemed contributors will be out and about in the coming days and weeks doing readings. World Hum books editor Frank Bures will be appearing at the Wisconsin Book Festival in Madison on Friday. He’ll be reading his story from the new Travelers’ Tales collection What Color is Your Jockstrap? Funny Men and Women Write from the Road. Meanwhile, contributor Jeff Biggers will be doing readings from St. Louis to Los Angeles and beyond in support of his new memoir, In the Sierra Madre, which is based on a year he spent with the Tarahumara in Mexico’s Copper Canyon. For a list of all his appearances, click “Continue reading.”
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Yahoo! BuzzA Tribute to London’s Speakers’ Corner
by Michael Yessis | 10.16.06 | 7:35 AM ET
In Sunday’s Washington Post, Mary Jordon has a terrific feature on Hyde Park’s Speakers’ Corner—one of the inspirations for World Hum’s feature of the same name. “Once a place where the condemned were hanged—and perhaps, some say, because they were given one last chance to say a few words—the northeast corner of Hyde Park has since the late 19th century been sacred ground for free speech,” she writes. “There are other noteworthy patches in the 350-acre park—the Nanny’s Lawn, the Lovers’ Walk—but it is only here near Marble Arch where the unsung, along with legends from Winston Churchill to Karl Marx, have come to have their say.”
Japan’s “Freeters” Take Manhattan
by Michael Yessis | 10.16.06 | 6:40 AM ET
Freeters are “a Japanese version of slackers,” and according to a great story in Sunday’s New York Times, they’re escaping their home country’s societal pressures by running off to New York City to explore the arts. “In Tokyo bookstores, guides like ‘Finding Yourself in New York,’ and ‘The ‘I Love New York’ Book of Dreams’ fuel the fantasies of those [who] follow in [D.J.] Kaori’s footsteps,” writes Sheridan Prasso. “In an indication that a phenomenon has truly taken off, there’s a contrarian title, ‘Even If You Live in New York, You Won’t Be Happy.’” According to the story, more Japanese live in New York than any city outside Japan.
The World Hum Travel Zeitgeist: Triumph and Tragedy
by Michael Yessis | 10.13.06 | 8:02 AM ET
This week we’re paying tribute to literary feats, vintage air travel and the victims of tragedies in Moscow and New York. Here’s the Zeitgeist:
Best Selling Travel Book
Amazon.com (current)
Istanbul: Memories and the City by Orhan Pamuk
* Pamuk won the Nobel Prize in Literature Thursday, and it sent his travel book to the top. No similar bump for Peter Hessler’s Oracle Bones. After its nomination for a National Book Award, its Amazon ranking among travel books stands at No. 26.
Most Popular Page Tagged Travel
Del.icio.us (current)
Rick Steves’ Europe: Packing for Women
Most Viewed Story
World Hum (this week)
Fueling Desire
* The best story ever about jet fuel as travel aphrodisiac.
Most Read Weblog Post
World Hum
R.I.P. Anna Politkovskaya
Most Dugg World News Story
Digg (this week)
Aircraft Crashes into NYC Building
Most E-mailed Travel Story
USA Today (current)
Cabbies, culture clash at Minn. airport
Traveler Buzz Video
Yahoo! Current Traveler (today)
Vintage Airline Commercials
Most E-Mailed Travel Story
New York Times (current)
Pulled Pork, Pulled Corks in North Carolina
World’s Most Expensive Restaurant
Forbes (2006)
Aragawa, a steak house in Tokyo’s Shinbashi district
* The cost for one person to dine? $368. Yikes. Now, for the not-so-rich among us…
The Google “I’m Feeling Lucky” Button Travel Zeitgeist Search
Best budget restaurant in Tokyo
Got something that deserves to be included in next week’s World Hum Zeitgeist? .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
Electronic “Tagging” of Air Travelers Set For Trial in Hungary
by Michael Yessis | 10.13.06 | 7:17 AM ET
First came the news that passports will soon be embedded with radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips. Now comes word about “Optag,” an experimental tagging project at University College London that will assign RFID chips to all passengers at Hungary’s Debrecen Airport. “The basic idea is that airports could be fitted with a network of combined panoramic cameras and RFID (radio frequency ID) tag readers, which would monitor the movements of people around the various terminal buildings,” Project leader Paul Brennan told the BBC. He says tagging passengers would aid airport security. Needless to say, privacy issues are also a concern. If the tests are successful in Hungary, Brennan says the technology could be deployed in airports elsewhere in the world “within two years.”
First Printed Atlas Fetches $3.9 Million at Sotheby’s Auction
by Michael Yessis | 10.12.06 | 8:24 AM ET
The 1477 Ptolemy atlas was sold at Sotheby’s in London by the family of Lord Wardington to a private collector Tuesday. It’s one of two copies in private hands, and it was almost destroyed a few years back. From an AP story on the sale: “The atlas could have been lost, when in April 2004 a fire raged through the Wardington family estate. Local villagers formed a human chain and carried the books to safety, while over 95 firefighters tackled the blaze, saving the library.” Via Gadling.
Don’t be a Touron!: New Additions to the Travel Lexicon
by Michael Yessis | 10.12.06 | 7:48 AM ET
Daily Candy has posted another round of its excellent travel lexicon. Among the travel-related words suggested by the site’s readers: touron (n. tourist + moron. “Don’t even bother with the Louvre on a Saturday. It’s overrun with tourons.”), gabbin pressure (n. sense of obligation to chat to the passenger next to you during a flight. “I’m just recovering from gabbin pressure—I sat next to a real flight dependent.”) and, my favorite, travelanche (n. the state of affairs when one little thing goes wrong and then everything snowballs toward disaster. “It started as a minor delay in Seattle and ended up a full-blown travelanche involving lost luggage, bad airport food, and dire intestinal consequences.”). Also: Read last year’s first batch of the Daily Candy travel lexicon.
From Our Own Correspondent: An Appreciation
by Frank Bures | 10.12.06 | 6:15 AM ET
Late last month, the BBC’s Andrew Harding ate at an unusual restaurant in Beijing. He reported back to the Beeb for the show that is one of my favorites anywhere, and a real gem for many of us who love good, vivid travel writing: From Our Own Correspondent. As Harding sat in the restaurant, he stared at the the grey and shiny food on his plate:
There is no Such Thing as a Boring Place. Only Boring Travelers.
by Michael Yessis | 10.11.06 | 9:24 AM ET
I love that sentiment, which comes from John Heaton, the subject of Tuesday’s “Frequent Flier” feature in the New York Times. “I find that some business travelers are numb to the portals through which they pass, focusing only on the destination,” he writes. “I think they’re missing a lot. Something as mundane as an airport stopover can be fascinating.”
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.
Which Country’s Tourists are the Worst in the World?
by Michael Yessis | 10.10.06 | 6:46 AM ET
Rolf Potts touches on the perennial hostel-lounge argument topic in his latest Traveling Light column on Yahoo! His opinion: The country a traveler hails from isn’t the problem. “The problem here is that assessing your travel companions by nationality is rarely an earnest inquiry so much as it is a dull parlor game—an empty exercise in rhetorical one-upmanship,” he writes. “The worst travelers in the world are, after all, the rude, small-minded ones—and rude, small-minded travelers can hail from any nation.”
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.
‘Will Disney Abandon Book-Lovers for Pirates 2.0?’
by Jim Benning | 10.04.06 | 4:14 PM ET
That’s the question Robert Niles poses at Theme Park Insider, reacting to word that Disneyland officials are apparently considering closing Tom Sawyer’s Island, a half-century-old fixture at the theme park, to build another Pirates of the Caribbean attraction. “[A]s much as I love Pirates, it is entertainment, not art,” Niles writes. “In Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain created the most compelling, debated and beloved characters in all of American culture. If today’s kids do not know of them, why, that’s a pretty damning indictment of the rest of us, as parents, educators and artists. That Disney’s failed these characters, and their story, by allowing Tom Sawyer’s Island to fall into decay does not speak to an inherent lack of appeal in the characters, but to a lack of foresight by Disney.”
Rolf Potts on “The Tourist Who Influenced the Terrorists”
by Michael Yessis | 10.04.06 | 7:12 AM ET
The new issue of The Believer features a story by World Hum contributor Rolf Potts about Sayyid Qutb, whose Islamist writings influenced Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden and their followers. Potts looks at Qutb, who spent part of the late 1940s studying in Colorado, through the lens of travel. “Considering that Qutb’s rejection of Western values was informed by such a willfully cartoonish misinterpretation of American culture,” Potts writes on his weblog, “it’s natural to wonder how his beliefs might have been tempered had he been a more engaged traveler.” Unfortunately, only a piece of the Believer story is available online.
How to Survive a Plane Crash
by Michael Yessis | 10.04.06 | 7:10 AM ET
From a BBC primer: “Most people believe that if they’re in a plane crash their time is up. In fact the truth is surprisingly different. In the US alone, between 1983 and 2000, there were 568 plane crashes. Out of the collective 53,487 people onboard, 51,207 survived.” And those figures don’t reflect this amazing story.
