Oh, the hyperbole! I’ll bet the first minute and a half of this clip offers more entertainment than the 400-foot-tall Great Orlando Wheel ever will when it opens in central Florida in 2010. See for yourself. 

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With that over-the-top headline, Time magazine begins addressing the safety of adventure tourism in the wake of the death of 49-year-old Austrian Markus Groh. He died last month during a shark-diving excursion off Great Issac Cay in the Bahamas. A shark bit his left leg, and he bled to death. Scuba Adventures, the Florida company that ran the trip Groh took, chummed the waters to draw sharks and eschewed cages for its clients. 

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Tom Swick recently asked beach-goers in Fort Lauderdale if they were familiar with his “favorite Fort Lauderdale novel,” Glendon Swarthout’s spring break-themed “Where the Boys Are,” published in 1960—or the film or song of the same name. It’s not hard to imagine the response. The South Florida Sun-Sentinel has video. 

The South Florida Sun-Sentinel recently named its readers’ picks for the seven wonders of the region. They included, predictably, the Florida Everglades, Walt Disney World and the Florida Keys. On Sunday, travel editor Thomas Swick named seven other wonders, and his was just the kind of quirky list we like. 

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In a World Hum story about visiting Ernest Hemingway’s old Key West house, Doug Mack noted that each one of the dozens of cats residing there has “a calm but vaguely sinister look on its face, creating a mildly Hitchcockian scene.” That scene—made all the more Hitchcockian because some of the cats famously have six toes—has been at the center of a controversy ever since the USDA claimed the historic site is an “exhibitor” of cats and requires a special license. But now, the house has won some support from the Key West City Commission. 

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No way, I say. The fate of “Vamos a Cuba,” however, rests in the hands of a three-judge panel at the Federal Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Miami, which yesterday heard arguments regarding a Miami-Dade Country school board decision to remove the book from school libraries. According to the Miami Herald’s Tania deLuzuriaga, the controversy started when Juan Amador Rodriguez, a parent and former political prisoner in Cuba, complained that the travel book failed to accurately depict life on the island. The school board removed “Vamos a Cuba” in June 2006. A federal judge soon ordered the book back into the library, setting the stage for the current appeal process. 

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Every day brings news of more amusement parks in the works, on themes ranging from the sacred to the profane. In Charlotte, North Carolina today, 88-year-old evangelist Billy Graham celebrates the dedication of the Billy Graham Library, which, according to some observers and Graham fans, is more like a corny theme park than a dignified museum. “Their concerns start just inside the enormous glass cross that forms the door to the 40,000-square-foot museum,” according to the Los Angeles Times, which headlined its story, Billy Graham, tourist attraction. “The lobby is set up like a barn to evoke Graham’s boyhood on a North Carolina dairy farm. Hens cluck on a soundtrack. A stuffed cat heaves a battery-powered sigh. And amid bales of hay, a cow that looks uncannily lifelike begins to sing.”

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Out: Tom Sawyer and books. In: Jack Sparrow, movies, video games and, yes, vertical integration. Last October, Disneyland fans were wondering whether park officials would ditch Tom Sawyer for Jack Sparrow, turning Tom Sawyer Island, which was designed by Walt himself and opened in 1956, into a “Pirates of the Caribbean"-themed attraction. Or, as one observer put it, “Will Disney abandon book-lovers for Pirates 2.0?” Absolutely, Disney officials announced today, though they’ve slyly kept the island’s original name. On Friday, Pirate’s Lair on Tom Sawyer Island will debut, timed, not coincidentally, with the opening of the latest “Pirates” film, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End.

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Sin City spent $52,158,800 in advertising in 2006 to lure travelers to the desert, almost tripling the outlay for the runner-up on the list, Puerto Rico. Texas, Florida and Arkansas round out the top five. Brandweek has a list of the top 25. (Via Jaunted)

Related on World Hum:
* Who’s ‘the Official Corporate Sponsor of Airport Paranoia’?
* Selling Israel: A Land Rich in Holy Sites or Hot Babes in Tel Aviv?
* Australia’s ‘Bloody’ Success

Super-hyped Super Bowl XLI takes place this Sunday in Miami, as you probably know. Pulizer Prize-winner and sometime travel writer Dave Barry lives in the city, and this week he’s written a guide for all those traveling to South Florida. “Welcome to Miami, Super Bowl visitors!” Barry writes in the Miami Herald. “You are going to have a wonderful time, from the moment you arrive in our magical city, until the moment you discover that your wallet is missing.” Barry’s advice ranges from learning some phrases to communicate with the Spanish-speaking locals to navigating South Beach. 

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Yahoo! Current Traveler, one of four channels launched this week by the partnership between the Internet giant and the Al Gore-backed upstart cable network, features amateur and professional travel videos—and, perhaps in a category all by himself, videos by U2’s Bono. 

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Say it ain’t so, Mickey Mouse! Orlando, Florida, home of Disney World, ranked at the top of Men’s Health’s list of angriest cities in the U.S. How can one of the self-proclaimed happiest places on earth be located in the angriest city in the U.S.? The story on the magazine’s Web site gives no explanation of how it arrived at its list of the 100 angriest cities, so if you live in one of them, don’t get too angry about your arbitrary designation. Use it as an excuse to get yourself to Vanuatu fast. The country was recently selected as the happiest country on the planet. Or, perhaps even better, head to the Florida Keys to that other happiest place in the world: Margaritaville. Thanks for the tip, Eli.