Traveling through the South last month, I seemed to come across Martin Luther King Jr.’s name almost everywhere I went—from the display at the old Stax Records site explaining the impact of his assassination on the collaboration between white and black soul artists, to the homeless man in Atlanta who advised me that an unspecified “they” would surely kill Barack Obama “just like Dr. King.” The King assassination cast a long shadow, and not just because the 40th anniversary of his death was looming. (It was Friday.)

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We’ve apparently been loving our favorite Egyptian boy-king to disintegration. Archaeologists in Luxor’s Valley of the Kings removed King Tutankhamun from his stone sarcophagus in his underground tomb last weekend and placed a climate-controlled glass box in his underground tomb, according to the AP. “The humidity and heat caused by...people entering the tomb and their breathing will change the mummy to a powder,” said Egypt’s antiquities chief, Zahi Hawass. “The only good thing (remaining) in this mummy is the face. We need to preserve the face.”

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A Halloween question: What are America’s ghost towns really like? Not exactly a trick-or-treater’s technicolor spookfest, writes Hugo Martin of the Los Angeles Times. Martin explored some abandoned towns in the West, offering a not-so-marketable tableau of death, decay, doom and depression. The creepiness includes: 

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The people backing the $7 billion project certainly hope so. And so do a number of observers from low-lying port cities around the world, where flood concerns are on the increase as the polar ice caps melt. As Doug Saunders writes in an interesting essay in The Globe and Mail, “when we visit Venice today, we are visiting our homes tomorrow.”

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Antiquity trumps Art Deco, at least in Athens, where ancient glory is both identity and economy. Two buildings—a 1930s landmark and a house owned by “Chariots of Fire” theme composer Vangelis Papathanassiou—are scheduled to be razed in order to clear the view of the Parthenon for visitors at the New Acropolis Museum, says the AP. The plan has enraged Athenians who believe Greece spends too much time lingering over its antiquities instead of appreciating (and preserving) its modern treasures. Neighborhood residents and architects have begun a feverish Internet campaign to save both buildings. So far they’ve gotten a lot of attention and e-mail support from all over the world.

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Paul MacCready, the engineer who designed the first plane to fly under only human power, has died at the age of 81. Reports the AP: “On Aug. 23, 1977, the MacCready-designed, lightweight Gossamer Condor made the first sustained, controlled flight powered solely by a human. The flight, pedal-powered by pilot Bryan Allen, lasted just 7 1/2 minutes but covered a figure-eight course with pylons a half-mile apart at the airport in Shafter, Calif.”

An international team of scientists using NASA satellite images, among other tools, has determined that the medieval city of Angkor was at least three times larger than previously thought—about the size of present-day Los Angeles. 

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We noted a story in the Los Angeles Times news section last year examining the Myanmar government’s ill-conceived, theme park-like development among the historic temples in the ancient city of Bagan. On Sunday, the Times covered the story from a traveler’s standpoint. Joe Robinson visited Bagan, exploring the temples on a rented girl’s bicycle with a leopard-print seat. 

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The Washington D.C.-based nonprofit group the National Trust for Historic Preservation recently released its 20th annual list of the 11 Most Endangered Historic Places in the U.S. They are: 

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This afternoon, a restored P-38 airplane that made an emergency landing in Greenland in 1942, and became buried under ice for 50 years, will take off from New Jersey’s Teterboro Airport in an attempt to complete its mission—to fly to England. “Glacier Girl” was part of an eight-plane team flying from the U.S. to England to help with allied defenses during World War II when rough weather over Greenland forced all the planes onto the ice. In the early ‘90s, The Lost Squadron was located and “Glacier Girl” was excavated from under more than 200 feet of ice. 

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When I walked up a stairway into Tiananmen Square during a trip to China several years ago, the first thing to pop into my mind was the massacre. Tiananmen, of course, is synonymous with the government crackdown that left hundreds of demonstrators—or possibly more; facts are in dispute—dead 18 years ago today. But visiting Tiananmen is different from visiting other sites known for atrocities. Unlike Dachau or the Killing Fields, which have memorials marking the events, there’s no monument or public acknowledgment in Tiananmen that the massacre even happened. 

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Yes, you in the fabulous oxygen mask. And your colleagues. On this day back in 1930, long before they became flight attendants, stewardesses had their big debut. The Today in History column notes that registered nurse Ellen Church started work as a stewardess for Boeing Air Transport on a flight from Oakland to Chicago. Slate, which suggests it was actualy a flight from San Francisco to Cheyenne, has a slide show to mark the occasion.

Related on World Hum:
* The New Hot Job in India: Flight Attendant
* ’Has the Romance Gone Out of Travel?’
* Who Wears the Pants on Alitalia Flights?
* Singapore Girl: Icon, Anachronism, Winged Geisha and Pretty Young Thing
* Flight Attendants After 9/11

Photo by Mandroid via Flickr (Creative Commons).