Tennessee Body Farm

by Neil Woodburn on

The Body Farm isn’t a tourist attraction, but it should be.

Imagine a plot of land over which forensic scientists have scattered some 150 dead bodies so that they can measure their rate of decomposition. According to a fascinating article in Wired Magazine, the scientists have carefully placed the bodies in cars, houses, fields, and anywhere else where police might find skeletal remains. The aim is to gather enough information so that when a body is found in the real world, forensic scientists are better able to estimate its date of death.

So, while all this research is going on, how about opening up the gates for guided tours? I’m sure there are enough morbidly interested people to make this a real tourist draw and in the process, generate a good deal of cash to help the research facility.

And let’s face it, the Body Farm is located in Tennessee–which needs all the help it can get attracting tourists (just kidding folks!).

Spencer Tunick: Nudes, landscapes and global warming

by Jamie Rhein on

At a recent trip to my son’s dentist, I was flipping through the latest issue of Time Magazine and came across a photo of hundreds of nude people standing on Aletsch Glacier in Switzerland. The photo was taken by Spencer Tunick on August 18 as Tunick’s effort to show the vulnerability of people and the planet due to global warming–an interesting, and certainly eye catching approach.

(The photo here is of participants walking up the glacier before their clothes came off. It’s on the Aletsch Glacier page of the Spencer Tunick Experience Web site. Yes, there’s a nude photo there as well.)

I find Tunick’s work tasteful and compelling, perhaps because I grew up in a house filled with art and surrounded by artists. Perhaps, I find Tunick’s work intriguing because there are so many people of all shapes, sizes and skin tones represented that the individual becomes part of the whole. As a person with a sociology background, people in groups draw me into the idea of the bigger picture of life and relationships. This is perhaps part of Tunick’s point. Seeing the photo in Time Magazine reminded me of my own missed Tunick opportunity.

A few years ago, a friend emailed me about participating in a Spencer Tunick photo shoot outside the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. Sure, I’m game, I thought, and registered. The photo shoot date was switched, however, and I had a conflict, so I was unable to participate after all. I wasn’t sure that I would have anyway, but it was a gleeful thought. My friend did show up along with hundreds of other people, for the event and thought the experience was wonderful and liberating. She ended up with a limited edition of the official photograph for her efforts and an interesting story to tell. She did mention how cold the ground was at that time in the morning.

Tunick’s most recent shoot was in Miami, Florida this past October. The photographs are on exhibit through the end of this month at the Sagmore Art Hotel in Miami. The one here is from the exhibit. If you can’t tell, it’s of men on rafts.

If you have a hankering to have a travel experience you won’t likely repeat elsewhere, register to participate in a future Spencer Tunick photography event. I’m sure he’s not done yet, so who knows where such an endeavor might take you.

Rick Steves on being a guidebook writer

by Aaron Hotfelder on

After 30 years producing guidebooks, Rick Steves could easily throw his suitcase into a closet and spend all his time swimming through his piles of money a la Scrooge McDuck. But the man continues to plug away, meticulously researching various European locales for his eponymous guidebooks. And more power to him.

To many of us, Rick Steves has the dream job– earning money to travel around the world, to think, write, and talk about travel. But in a recent article, he explained the process of researching a guidebook, and how it differs from what most people might imagine (as some Gadling contributors already know).

Rick says that while on location, guidebook writers’ entire days are spent conducting research, and he offers his secrets for how to get the best information about restaurants, hotels, activities, and more. For example, “Checking hotels before 10 a.m. is bad news — — people haven’t checked out yet — and the staff is still busy with breakfast. It’s hard to see a room. Checking late in the afternoon is also bad — everyone’s checked in for the day and places are reluctant to show rooms. Prime hotel-checking time is 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.”

Rick also answers a question I’ve always had about guidebook writers– how do they eat at all those places? Turns out, sometimes they don’t. “Restaurants are a big priority for any guidebook researcher…. I can’t eat everywhere, but I can talk to customers in each place. My reward — just before the kitchens close — is to eat at my favorite place.”

Personally, Rick’s guidebooks have never really fit my travel needs, but I’ll give the guy points for appearing to be one hell of a nice guy. And if you’re so inclined, you can give him points for this as well.

Last year, Neil Woodburn “hated” on Rick Steves here.

Rediscovering the long walk with Will Self

by Aaron Hotfelder on

Over at World Hum, Frank Bures has an interesting interview with Will Self, a British novelist, journalist, and ardent defender of the long, meandering walk. Last year, on a journey from London to New York, Self walked the 26 miles from his home in south London to Heathrow Airport, then walked 20 miles from JFK in New York to his hotel in Manhattan.

For this peripatetic author, the urban hikes are about more than fitness; indeed, Self is often seeking puffing on a cigarette during his walks. Self is a student of psychogeography, a very smart-sounding term that is actually relatively simple– it’s about removing city dwellers from their hermetically-sealed modes of transportation– cars, subways, buses– and finding a way for them to really experience the urban landscape.

“People don’t know where they are anymore, ” he said last year in a story about his lengthy airport walks. “In the post-industrial age, this is the only form of real exploration left. Anyone can go and see the Ituri pygmy, but how many people have walked all the way from the airport to the city?”

In the World Hum interview, Self compares his practice of psychogeography to another of his passions, writing. “Like writing-which is low start-up, all you need is a pen and a piece of paper-psychogeography is bare-bones. You just get out there and experience. It doesn’t require the hypermediated world, it is more akin to a meditational practice.”

Check out Self’s new book Psychogeography right here.

Visiting the past: Tracing your ancestry through DNA testing

by Neil Woodburn on

If your family is anything like mine, you’re not quite sure what part of the world your ancestors herald from. Sure, we have an idea stretching back to the late 1800’s but have never known beyond that – something fairly typical for many Americans whose ancestors came over on the boat sometime in the last 400 years.

And so, I remain jealous of those who journey across the world to their ancestral home to visit the village where long-dead relatives lived for generations before uprooting everything and moving to the New World. It must be a very wonderful feeling to stand in such a place and completely submerge oneself in family history and reconnect with the past.

I’ve thought often of hiring a genealogy specialist to help track down my family’s history so that one day I could knock on a door in Scotland, Ireland, Wales, or God knows where and introduce myself to some distant relative whose ancestors never caught the boat. How cool would that be?

There is another option, however, to researching my family history–one, that explores the family tree all the way to the roots.

DNA testing is something that was prohibitively expense even just a few years ago. Today, however, one can pay just $1000 for a partial genetic decoding that will not only reveal all sorts of things about inherited traits and predisposition towards certain diseases, but it will also trace back your ancestry.

Although a wonderful article in Wired Magazine focuses mostly on the “dozen or so diseases and conditions, from type 2 diabetes to Crohn’s disease” that can be identified through genomics, journalist Thomas Goetz does briefly discuss the ancestry angle thanks Jimmy Buffett. One day when Goetz was doing researching for the article, the singer stopped by a genomics lab to figure out if he was related to investor Warren Buffett (he wasn’t). In the process, however, he peeked into his ancestral genome to learn that his “maternal lineage showed a strong connection to the British Isles.” He also discovered “a strong link to the Basque region of Spain.” Very cool!

Sure, there are no addresses or even cities provided with such research, but at least it will point wanderlust travels such as myself in the right direction home.

And it’s simple. Just fill up a 2.5-milliliter vial with spit and mail it off to 23andMe, a genomics company run by the wife of one of the Google billionaires. The information will be securely posted online 4-6 weeks later, at which point you will know more about yourself than perhaps you’d ever like to know.