Rogers Pass, British Columbia (Photo by Pat Mulrooney)
I just discovered that “Ski Bliss in Avalanche Country“, a blog posting from a few years ago, is one of the top three most popular items on e-Marginalia.com. Hmmm… Does this mean that backcountry skiing in Rogers Pass is a less-well-kept-secret now that the Olympics brought the world to British Columbia?
Photo via flickr.com
My wife stumbled upon this gem while shopping in Keene Valley the other day. I’m a Yellowstone fan too, but I’ve got to admit this is a pretty clever t-shirt!
Johnnie Mac (didgeridoo) busking in Prague. (Frugal Traveler)
When you travel, you see them everywhere: a guitarist strumming and crooning in the Paris Métro, a juggler in an Italian piazza, a human statue on a New York City corner. They are buskers, and these street performers are not necessarily locals; many are travelers looking to make a bit of extra money and prolong their journeys around the globe.
One of these is Johnnie Mac, a 40-year-old Australian singer-songwriter who, after some initial success playing with bands in Sydney in the late 1980s, decided to take his act to the streets of Europe. (“What are you doing that for?” he said his family asked him. “Are you mad?”) For years, he roamed the Continent, exploring the newly opening east and making it as far as Siberia and Mongolia.
Having settled down from his wandering ways, Johnnie Mac is married and fathering, but still finds time to assist fellow buskers. Visit his website BuskerWorld.com or read his eBook, “The Busker’s Bible”.
Read the full article at Frugal Traveler
Just smiled familiarly through Josh Marshal’s lighthearted reflection “Adventures in Obsolescence” on Talking Points Memo. He acknowledges his inability to dispose of dated gadgets event once he’s replaced them, and the condition (who’ll be the first to clinically diagnose it?) is all too familiar. He’s responding to a friend who’s in need of a second hand iPod since hers gave up the ghost and he decides to gift her his dinosaur, “one of those early all-white, physical scroll wheel, boxy archeo-Pods that probably many of you had at one point or another.”
Easy generosity, right? Give away something you no longer need or use, a gadget that’s already well into artifact-dom that nevertheless can help out a friend. True. And yet there is a funny compulsion which I admit to sharing that makes it difficult to part with these relics. Josh explains:
“So even after some gadget is well into its planned obsolescence and I’ve replaced it and it’s clear I’m never going to use it again, I just can’t manage to toss something I once found so cool and also dropped a decent amount of money on. And because of that, I have a small tribe of old i-Gadgets totally unused, sitting in boxes or drawers, living on borrowed time, or perhaps subsisting in suspended animation on borrowed time, because I can’t get myself to treat them as worthless and toss them in the trash.”
I periodically manage to pass these on, but generally they just collect and collect. I recently gave an older Sony Vaio laptop to a tech buddy who wiped all the memory and donated it to a charity that refurbishes computers for people who can’t afford to buy one. Cool idea. But all too often inertia prevails and the gadget graveyard fills up. So I’m making a resolution that when I return from Shanghai — and before I head off to San Franciso for DrupalCon — I’m going to eBay, fiverr, freecycle and craigslist my backlog of geriatric gadgets. If you’re in need, keep me honest!
Excited to accelerate my Drupal learning curve! I’ve just finished organizing my conference schedule at DrupalCon San Francisco next month. Flight? Check. Hotel? Check. Registered? Check. Sign-ups? Check. I’m good to go!
Photograph via twitpic.com
This arresting photograph of two bicyclists riding across the frozen surface of Lake Champlain captures the North Country spirit quite elegantly. And who says we put away our bikes when the snowflakes begin to fall. I have a friend who commutes an hour plus to work and then repeats the ride in the evening on a mountain bike with steel studded tires throughout the winter. In snowstorms. On icy roads. Up and down hills. Makes this photo seem like a leisurely meander…
When engineers determined the old Lake Champlain Bridge was unsafe and needed to be replaced, it seemed like the regrettable end of a historic landmark. The project, though, has led to a major archaeological discovery.
Scientists have found what appears to be a nearly 300-year-old French fort. The fort’s discovery would be significant in its own right, but it would also represent the first physical evidence of a substantial French settlement known to have existed on the Vermont shore of Lake Champlain starting in the 1730s.
“It’s a hugely exciting find — one of the great and exciting finds of a lifetime really,” said Elsa Gilbertson, administrator for the Chimney Point State Historic Site, where the apparent fort was discovered.
“You would be hard pressed to find a more significant archaeological site in Vermont,” said John Crock, director of the University of Vermont’s Consulting Archaeology Program, which conducted the dig in cooperating with the Vermont Agency of Transportation and Division for Historic Preservation.
Exciting discovery just down the lake from us. One more reason to visit the Champlain Valley! Hat tip to @SaundraMitchell for tweeting the post.
Malletts Bay ice skating from Mark Gould on Vimeo.
Video of skating on Mallets Bay via Reason #1972 why I love living on Lake Champlain: ice skating! This video wasa taken by @markgould while skating on skating on Malletts Bay.
Photograph of Utah’s Comb Ridge by Dawn Kish
(National Geographic Adventure)
The discovery of explorer Everett Ruess’s skeletal remains, as detailed in the April/May 2009 issue of Adventure (“Finding Everett Ruess“), appeared to be a slam dunk. A team of forensic scientists laid out an impressive case, backed by a DNA test that linked bones found in the Utah desert to the long-lost explorer, an icon of the American Southwest. Well, DNA results are only as good as the process that produces them, and in this case, a peculiar set of blunders managed to complicate, rather than solve, a 75-year-old mystery. (David Roberts National Geographic Adventure)
For the romantics out there who’ve been following this story through the years, it’s easy to agree with Everett’s nephew, Brian Ruess: “Everett,” Brian says, “just doesn’t want to be found.” Not when he was alive; not now.
“There’s no better way to experience a culture than to stand at the stove with a wonderful cook.” ~ Ruth Reichl
So long, Gourmet. We’re going to miss you.
That image above is one of the “picture poems” I included in 40×41: Midlife Crisis Postponed and it combines contour drawings that I made in 1994 during my final year in college with abstractions from photographs that I took in Peru in 2011. I’ve previously posted elements of “Contours & Artifacts” in Choice (June 4, 2012) and Wonder (December […]
