What We Loved This Week: The Barringer Meteorite Crater, RCL Enterprises and Book Marginalia

Travel Blog  •  World Hum  •  06.25.10 | 5:22 PM ET

Jim Benning
This view out the airplane window of a giant hole in the Earth. I was flying over Arizona earlier this week when the pilot pointed out the nearly mile-wide Barringer Meteorite Crater. Scientists believe it was created 50,000 years ago by a meteorite traveling at about 26,000 m.p.h.

Barringer CraterPhoto by Jim Benning

Eva Holland
My leg in last weekend’s Kluane Chilkat International Bike Relay included a stop at U.S. Customs—which meant I crossed the border in costume, on a bicycle, with my passport jammed into my sock. It was a novel spin on a familiar ritual. Here’s a shot of me getting going at the start of my leg:

Photo by Nathan Millar

Layne Mosler
Thanks to a recommendation from Troy Johnson, a native New Yorker, former disco owner and fellow taxi driver, I tasted what might be the finest sweet potato pie in the Big Apple at RCL Enterprises in Queens last Sunday. This soul food take-out spot, which also specializes in oxtails and turkey wings, has been around since 1972, and they cater for many of the churches around the city.

Pam Mandel
My husband bought me a beautiful 1939 Royal typewriter. He got it off Craigslist from a Sudanese hipster who was liquidating his belongings prior to return to Sudan where his fiancée and new life await him. I loved discovering the cult of the typewriter, reading typewriter blogs, and learning that Royal used to demonstrate the durability of their typewriters, by dropping them from airplanes. Try that with your iPad!

Michael Yessis
This chills-inspiring bit from Ian Frazier’s Talk of the Town piece about marginalia in books at the New York Public Library:

A few of the marginalia in the books were wordless—for example, in Jack Kerouac’s copy of “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,” by Henry David Thoreau. Kerouac possessed this book but did not own it, having borrowed it from a local library in 1949 and never brought it back. On page 227, this sentence—“The traveller must be born again on the road”—was underlined in pencil, with a small, neat check mark beside it.

Tags: Shameless Self-Promotion, What We Loved This Week, News and Briefs


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