National Park Service Adds Fish Tacos, Lentil Soup And More To Menus This Summer

by Libby Zay on

Starting this summer, the National Park Service (NPS) won’t just serve up greasy cheeseburgers with a side of fries. A new initiative is bringing healthy, sustainable options to snack bars and restaurants inside parks across the country.

Camp staples like hot dogs and summer favorites like ice cream will remain on many menus, but additions like fish tacos, lentil soup, black bean sliders, yogurt parfaits and organic bakery items will give visitors healthier choices. In addition to offering a wider range of options, the NPS is also encouraging concessioners to work with local farms whenever possible.

“There is no reason that you should have to take a vacation from eating well when you visit a national park,” said National Park Service Director Jonathan B. Jarvis, who spearheaded the move to raise the bar on food standards and sustainable food guidelines, in a press release.

It makes sense that the NPS is responding to growing consumer demand for healthy food, especially in parks where people are hiking, biking and otherwise being active. Kids might not be happy about substituting their french fries for vegetables and fruit (which according to USA Today they can do at the Grand Canyon South Rim), but the new menus will make trips to parks a healthier, happier experience for everyone.

[via USA Today]

Four Down Two Across: Arrival In Alaska

by Will Shortz on

A wonderful, if long, start to Robert’s and my trip to Alaska – up at 5:30 a.m. in New York City, to bed at midnight in Juneau, which is itself four hours behind New York. A busy day, too.

Tim and Phil of the Juneau Table Tennis Club met us at the airport. The drive to our hotel downtown was spectacular, even with overcast skies. Snowcapped mountains rise straight up from the edge of town. Streams cascade down the sides almost vertically. I’ve never seen anything like it.

The Juneau Empire, the local paper, had a front-page article (with photos) about our trip. And KTOO, Juneau’s public radio station, has been promoting our visit for two weeks.

This evening Robert and I put on a table tennis exhibition at a local middle school, which more than 100 people attended. Then we played with as many others as we could, separately and together, both singles and doubles.

In the car earlier tonight I thought of a puzzle: name a U.S. state capital whose last two letters are the same as the first two letters of a second state capital – whose last two letters themselves are the same as the first two letters of a third state capital. What capitals are these?

I’ve thought of two answers, which I’ll reveal tomorrow.

Follow Will and Robert’s Trip across Alaska through next week at “Four Down Two Across.”

The Drive-In Movie Theater Photography Project

by Sean McLachlan on

Today we have an interview with a very interesting travel photographer. Craig Deman has done a number of photography projects, including The Drive-In Project, a look at abandoned drive-in movie theaters across America. Since today is the 80th anniversary of the drive-in theater, we decided to have him as a guest.

Welcome to Gadling, Craig! Tell us a little about the project and what attracts you to abandoned drive-ins.

You know how some people can remember many details about their childhood and teenage years and some people can only remember a few? I fall into the latter category. Even though I might not remember a great amount of the details of my childhood, I do have vivid memories of my earliest experiences at drive-in movie theaters. I remember the first movie my mom took my sister and me to at a drive-in. Can you say … “Supercalifragilisticexxpialidocious”? I remember the names of the guys I was with in my friend Mike’s trunk when we snuck into our local drive-in. Without question, I remember the details of the first girl I was “with” at a drive-in movie theater!

Today, approximately 90 percent of drive-ins are closed from their peak in the late 1950s. As a lover of architectural and landscape photography, drive-in movie theaters represent defining moments and passion for me. The distressed and decaying wood of a ticket booth, overgrown and unwieldy shrubs/trees where cars once parked, matched by the enormous scale of a screen tower all together scream as loudly to me today as if I was back in the day we laughed with joy upon successfully gaining entrance to the drive-in while sequestered in my buddy’s trunk.

Putting it simply – it’s the raw emotion, still present, from almost 50 years ago, that attracts me to abandoned drive-ins. A lot of people respond to the imagery of my Drive-in Project by referring to it as “haunting.” I’m good with that, as long as those same people’s definition of the word haunting includes “Mary Poppins” and getting busy.

%Slideshow-577%When you were doing this project, did you get to meet any folks who used to go to these drive-ins?

The people I met from Alabama to Arizona or from Nevada to New York were universally eager and open to sharing their personal experiences at drive-in movie theaters. People expressed a breadth of emotions when describing individual feelings they held in their memories about drive-ins they had visited.

Let me tell you about a couple of folks I met. I was shooting the Lake Estes Drive-in (Colorado), when I met the owners John and Sharon, in order to gain access to the projection booth. When we entered the projection booth, my eyes opened as wide as a kid being offered candy, as this was the first and only abandoned projector booth that I came across that still had a projector in it. It was dusty and needed a tune up to be sure, but it was a beautiful hunk of metal. All I could think about was what an organically perfect interior setting this was for my series. The rawness of the setting evoked such visceral emotions.

John and Sharon are planning to redevelop the land where the drive-in was located over 20 years earlier. They want a “good home” for the beautiful hunk of metal and offered me the projector. As of this interview, I haven’t figured out where I could house it. I’m still thinking about it, to the dismay of some in my family.

I came across something unique when I was researching drive-ins to shoot in Tennessee. Brothers Ed and John grew up going to the Moonglo Drive-in located in Pulaski. They own a dealership and loved going to the Moonglo when they were growing up. They loved it so much that as adults they bought the property and built their car dealership around the Moonglo’s projection booth and screen.

It was too good pass up for this project, no matter how far I had to drive to get there. Ed and John are great guys and thanks to them, I captured some wonderful images. While they’re concentrating on growing their dealership, I don’t believe it would take too much to get them to consider firing up the Moonglo as an operating drive-in movie theater.

Do you have any tips for budding photographers who want to take their own images of abandoned Americana?

Yes, I call it the three Ps – plan well, be patient as well as persistent. The Drive-in Project was shot over a four-year period in ten different states. Living in California, I traveled thousands of miles to shoot 80 percent of the drive-ins within the series. Each and every location deserved to have painstaking thought put into each image and that’s what they each received. If the lighting wasn’t right at the time I was there, I slept in the rental car, hoping the next morning would bring better light.

The three Ps came into play often during those four years, but nowhere more so than the drive-in located in Commerce, Georgia. Initially, I couldn’t even find it. So many years have passed that the drive-in is now engulfed by a full-blown forest that has hidden the remnants of the screen and ticket booth from the main road.

After finally locating the screen through the forest, I loaded up my equipment and began to hike out to setup my camera, a Mamiya RZ67. Suddenly, I felt this incredibly sharp pain in my right foot. I had stepped on a 4-inch nail that pierced my shoe and was now embedded in the ball of my foot. I said to myself, “I have come this far, I have to keep going and get the shot.”

I loosened my shoe and pulled the nail out, hiking further into the forest to a clearing where the small remaining piece of the screen was visible. As I’m setting my tripod up, I heard this rustling and am joined by two Georgia State Troopers. The troopers informed me that I was trespassing on private property, but I’d done my research and I knew the name and contact info of the property owner who had given me permission to shoot there. The troopers ended up being nice guys and were quite interested in my project. They left me to do my work and just as I was feeling good about covering the three Ps until one of the troopers, as they were walking away, said, “Watch out for snakes around here!”

What’s next for you?

I’ve started a project that involves a 1950s “Normandie Starline Mod 1” beauty parlor chair, which I have named Marilyn. Marilyn has a beautiful chrome dryer top with a pink chair with an ashtray in the left arm and a swing handle that lifts the leg rest. Marilyn will be photographed in various environments juxtaposed against outdoor landscapes, models inside my studio and street scenes.

The name of my new project is: “Road Trip With Marilyn (RTWM).” Although I am only about 20 percent into my RTWM project, I have found that Marilyn helps me in a couple of ways as a photographer. Marilyn is a great icebreaker; her physical appearance attracts and pulls people into the space she is placed in. People are anxious to play with her and pose with her chrome dryer top. I’m excited about hitting the road with Marilyn and capturing an eclectic series of photographs. Maybe we can hook up with you, Sean, while you’re on one of your upcoming adventures?

You, me, and Marilyn in the Sudan! That would make for some interesting photos. Thanks for joining us today!

Artist Crams Entire Amusement Park Into Cube

by Libby Zay on
The Glue Society, Facebook
Amusement parks are typically sprawling, open-air places filled with the adrenaline rush of rides, the smell of fair food and the promise of laughter. But what happens when you take out all the fun and games and reduce a park down to just its physical elements? That’s what artist James Dive from the Glue Society did when he compressed an entire amusement park into a 13-by-13-foot cube full of dodgems, prizes, tents, tickets and more.

“The project is about the finality of a missed moment,” Dive told Creative Review, also mentioning that getting all the pieces to fit into one giant box “was undoubtedly one of the most violent process [sic] I’ve ever embarked upon.”

The sculpture, titled “Once,” is currently on display in Aarhus, Denmark, at Sculpture by the Sea, an annual outdoor sculpture exhibition along the city’s coastline that is free and open to the public. If you happen to be passing through, the show (and this piece of amusing art) will be up through the end of the month.

Check out some more pictures of the piece after the jump.

[via Gizmodo]

The Best Cup Of Coffee In Uganda

by David Farley on

Knowledge, as they saying goes, is power. True. It also leads people to become annoying know-it-alls, Nobel Prize winners, dictators and/or plumbers. For me, though, it just made me a coffee snob.

Let me explain. I’ve always appreciated good coffee but I didn’t really know what made coffee good and not good. But in December 2011, a magazine sent me to Ethiopia to discover why the coffee of this East African nation was so great. I traveled there with Intelligentsia Coffee’s Geoff Watts. Mr. Watts, introduced to me by the owner of a coffee house in my neighborhood, is possibly the most important coffee buyer on the planet. Geoff was on a mission too: to buy superlative coffee for the hip coffee roasting company (which just opened its first outlet in New York City, by the way).

A while later, I was in Uganda, an East African country not particularly known for its java. I was staying at Kyambura Lodge near Queen Elizabeth National Park. When I commented on the coffee, one of the employees said they grow and roast the coffee themselves. A few hours later, I was standing in front of Nicole Simmons, the director of the program. Simmons originally came to Uganda to study the troop of 20 chimps that live down in the gorge near the resort. She liked it here and when the opportunity came to run the program, she jumped at it.The rub, though, was that she didn’t know much about making coffee. So she went to work, reading as much as she could about it. She recruited 11 women and one man, all residents of nearby villages, to bring in their plucked coffee cherry (which is always written about in the singular), where they would de-pulp it, shade dry it and then roast it.

“The problem with Uganda,” Simmons said, “is that there’s no quality control here. Even when a coffee maker or roaster stays there, you taste the coffee and it’s not good.” Simmons shrugs, adding. “This is Uganda.”

Another thing about Uganda, or at least this part, is that it’s below 1,300 meters sea level. That means it’s technically not highlands and it means quality Arabica beans can’t grow. It also means she’s stuck with robusta beans, which are far inferior. “It’s perfectly okay,” says Simmons. “Robusta is indigenous to this area. We do a lot of quality control and so this means we can either do a very good robusta or a mediocre Arabica.”

She walked me over to a bucket of water and a bag of cherry. “The kind of quality control we practice is this: we only put cherry in a bucket of water. Whatever floats, is probably a bad one. And then we only put fully ripe cherry through the machine – if it’s too green it makes the coffee taste bitter.” It’s a temptation among coffee farmers to turn in all the cherry they’ve plucked, even the green ones, since they’ll get paid based on the amount they turn in. The rub, though, as Simmons pointed out, it leads to poor quality coffee.

The only way to get Omwani Coffee (as they’ve named it) has been through Tank Coffee in the UK – though it doesn’t seem to be available on their site at the moment.

About a third of the women in the collective are HIV positive, and earning the extra money from this side business means they can now afford medicine when they couldn’t previously.

So, it turns out, a little knowledge of coffee saves lives too – and that’s a good thing.