Here’s one you don’t see everyday. It is a heart-warming story for both the conservation minded and the ectomorphic (you know who you are!). This BBC piece has it that the world-s tallest man saved the lives of several dolphins by putting his looooong arms way up inside of them and removing several dangerous plastic pieces of, um, plastic. The man’s name is Bao Xishun and his occupation was listed on his MySpace site as a Mongolian herdsman. The dolphins had swallowed said shards in their aquarium in Fushun, north-east China. And as soon as the news was heard the they were injured someone said, Hey, you now that Mongolian herdsman? That reaaaly tall guy? He’ll be he can help. The rest, as they say, is history. Always nice to have the tallest man alive around when you need him.
States with the Most Expensive Speeding Tickets
Over the river and through the woods to grandma’s house we go. Just make sure you don’t go too fast this upcoming holiday season.
A recent article in Forbes Magazine cites information from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that the national median fine for a speeding ticket is $200 in the States. Each state, however, can fine whatever they feel like when they catch you barreling down their highway system a little too fast.
So which states are the most expensive to be nabbed in? Which ones should you bypass entirely on your way to grandma’s house this Christmas?
Forbes thoughtfully ranked the ten most expensive states when it comes to speeding tickets. The top five all have maximum fines of a whopping $1000–Georgia, Illinois, Nevada, New Hampshire and North Carolina.
Thankfully Forbes also offers suggestions on how to beat the system if, or when, you get pulled over. My favorite: pour some water on your lap and tell the cop you are rushing home due to a bladder problem. Classic.
Planeta’s Interview with Tim Leffel
On a few occasions in the past, we’ve mentioned the work of travel writer Tim Leffel. Leffel’s Web site Perceptive Travel is a must-read for us here at gadling and, come to think of it, I realize we ought to link there more often. But anyway, he is also well known for his budget-minded books like The World’s Cheapest Destinations and, more recently, Make Your Travel Dollars Worth a Fortune. In this interview over at travel-activist site Planeta, Leffel holds forth on the travel writing thing, traveling on a budget in general, and on “contrarian travel” a nice term that means travel outside of the mainstream. That is certainly an appealing topic, anyway, to a majority of gadling readers.
It’s an informative look at the world of budget travel and offers some insight into how one can best use the Web to come up with creative and cheap trip ideas.
Worldhum on Endless Summer
Even though I’ve never met him face to face (we did do a podcast a ways back, however) Worldhum‘s Jim Benning and I share a few things in common. First, we both write travel blogs. Worldhum, which Jim writes with Mike Yessis and a host of other top travel scribes, is IMHO, one of the best travel sites out there. Another thing we share is a Southern California upbringing. And more than that, it seems, a very beach-oriented Southern California upbringing.
Now, it’s hard to describe exactly what that means. To me, being a wee lad in So Cal in the late 70s and early 80s didn’t seem very special. But now that I look back on it, I know that it was. I lived in a sleepy, sandy beach town near Newport Beach, a middle class place where surfing and being on the water was a way of life. So was skateboarding. I spent a gazillion hours perfecting my kick turns on So Cal sidewalks, and another gazillion learning how to carve sweet turns on the face of a wave on my Boogie Board. Those times are now almost mythical to me, brimming with innocence, glimmering with fresh sunshine, a time of absolute childish joy. It is often difficult to describe to people in New York City what it was like growing up in Southern, California.
But sometimes when I try ,I tell them to take a look at a movie that was made back in the 60s called Endless Summer. The film celebrates its 40th anniversary this year, and according to Worldhum’s Benning, it’s popularity lives on, Benning calls it one of the greatest wanderlust-inducing documentaries ever made. And he’s right. And while the movie chronicled a small group of surfer’s quest to find the best waves on the globe, I still think of it as a California film, because the surfer’s sensibilities are all So Cal.
In this nicely done piece from Worldhum, Benning talks at some length about the impact of the best surf film ever made, and why it remains both an excellent bit of filmmaking and a relevant cultural artifact for our fast-paced times.
Cruise Ship Dumping
Our good friend Josh Berman, who hauled himself with his wife out to glorious Boulder, Colorado, is still keeping busy traveling and writing his blog, Stonegrooves. It’s been a while since we checked in with the prolific travel book writer, so I figured we’d do so and post about this video of a cruise ship dumping it’s trash onto a Belizean barge.
I’m not sure what the legality is of this act, but Josh suggests it’s illegal. Whatever the case, it does point out one of the big issues facing the rise in tourism around the globe: solid waste disposal.
This is actually an issue just about ever where, but for cruise ships and such it is an even bigger problem. There are actually entire organizations whose stated purpose is to control this issue. I remember taking a boat up the Amazon years ago, and I watched in horror as one of the boat’s workers literally swept a week’s worth of trash into the Amazon River. Everything went: bottles, condoms, batteries, food trash. It was disgusting.
So that might not be the most lovely note upon which to pay a visit to Josh’s blog, but what can you do.