Thought I’d share this shot, taken a couple of days ago, looking out of a window at the ancient and famous Chateau de Chillon (Montreux, Switzerland). Lake Geneva spreads out beneath the Alps, looking exactly as it did when Lord Byron wrote The Prisoner of Chillon.
As Switzerland suffers through its warmest winter since they’ve been keeping records (140 years), the beauty is undiminished, while snow is scarce.
One of the more interesting history books I’ve read in the last few years is A Path Between The Seas : The Creation of the Panama Canal by David McCullough. The book, while at times a rather dense historical document, reveals the incredible hardships endured by workers (made many times more difficult by diseases like malaria) and the immense engineering challenge it took to build the canal. It was also one of the great events of the turn o the century that signaled the emergence of the United States as a global power. I got a chance to see the canal years ago when I was traveling through Latin America, and thought it was amazing. But I never actually got to ride through the canal.
Well, in a way, I can now say I did. This video over at YouTube is a very well done time lapse of a trip through the entire canal. You get to see not just how the locks work, but how the canal looks through some of its broader stretches. The video itself is kind of a historical document, especially since the Panamanians are making big changes to the canal. It’s a neat — and quick — little ride that you too can take right here.
In 1966, New York City established the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcasting. This not only gave filmmakers unprecedented access to the world’s most exciting and vibrant city, it ensured gossip writers in the Big Apple would be forever employed.
To celebrate the anniversary of the MOFTB, the City launched a snazzy interactive map pinpointing locations that have served as backdrops over the years. Allowing users to filter by film, television, filmmaker, scene type, time period, and neighborhood, the map is a nifty way of planning a day in NYC. Want to hit all the locations around the City that Woody Allen has featured? Plan on making 11 stops. Interested in visiting all the locations used for movies set pre-1966? That’ll be 23 stops.
The only problem with the map is that, while it tells you where to go, it doesn’t give you the back story for the destinations. Does that make it useless? Fuhgeddaboutit. Pick up a copy of the photo-filled coffee table book that inspired the map and use the map as the basis for a totally kick-ass scavenger hunt.
One of the latest UNESCO World Heritage sites is in Malawi. Chongoni Rock Art, found clustered in 127 different locations in the granite hills of Malawi’s central plateau, are images painted onto rock. They’ve been here for a long time-a very long time. The folks who painted them may date back to the late Stone Age when folks were hunter-gatherers. The Chewa ethnic group in Malawi whose ancestry goes back to the Iron Age is also responsible for some of the art. The Chewa, an agriculturally-based ethnic group that lives in Malawi today, were still painting on the rocks until the early 20th century. They continue to tie their ceremonies and rituals to the paintings. Because the practice of creating rock art is not common among agriculturally-based people, the existence of this work is interesting in itself. As another interesting note, most of the art is connected to symbolism that depicts women. Yeah! I like that.
One of the reasons Chongoni Rock Art is deemed a World Heritage site is that this is the largest concentration of rock art in Central Africa.
Thanks to the Mapologists at Strange Maps, you can see a map of the world created in 1072. The map, made by Mahmud Kashgari bin Husayn bin Muhammad, was included in the Divanu Lügat-it-Türk, his treatment of Turkish culture. It is the first world map of Turkish origin known in history, and today is preserved at Istanbul’s General National Library.
The map indicates the location of places like Rus, Alexandria, Tashkent, Balasagun, Gog and Magog (a Biblical land walled off from the world by a mountain range), The World-Encircling Sea, and Kashgar (the map-maker’s birthplace). Surprisingly, there’s nary a Wal-Mart to be seen.