Cool story from Stellar Magazine. An Indian named Ajeet Bajaj is now the first Indian (from India, not Native American) to reach
the North Pole by using skis. Bajaj is well-known inside his own country and is a big time adventurer. He managed the
trip with three other Americans. When he reached the pole, he planted an Indian flag before turning around and coming
back on cross country skis.
Maproom Blog
And while I’m on the subject of maps, let me also send you over to a
wonderful new three years old blog I found on that very topic. The blog is called Maproom, and it is a wonderful read for the cartographically-inclined.
The site is a great resource for those who love maps (and what traveler doesn’t?) and who are interested in how
they are made, who makes them, and how maps are changing. Some of the stuff here can almost seem too techie, too inside
baseball, but most of the posts, while short and sweet, point you to fascinating resources. For example, this post looks at the current
hullabaloo over who actually discovered America. Was it the Chinese? And this one looks at the geology of the Bay
Area.
The New Yorker on Maps
Last night on the subway down to the
Lower East Side, where I went to a party in one of those apartments that make you feel like you yourself live in a
Third World hovel, I finished up an article from
last week’s New Yorker about maps. It is really good and I urge your to read it.
The piece was written
by Nick Paumgarten, one of my favorite writers at the magazine, and it examined the history and changing nature of maps
in the human experience. Paumgarten looked at some of the new extraordinary mapping services like Mapquest, that have changed our lives. He goes out on the road with a couple of guys who
actually do some of the human legwork that makes Mapquest accurate, guys who check on whether signs have changed or if a
one-way road is mislabeled. Fascinating stuff. Really.
But more specifically, the piece examined our
relationship to maps and how, with the advent of GPS and online services like Mapquest, our relationship with geography
is changing. How exactly? Well, that’s difficult to say. The old school cartographic folks would say that when we print
out a Mapquest map, we get only a small slice of the world presented to us, a swatch of specific geographic information
that has been separated from the larger picture, a larger picture that is provided when we look at maps the old
fashioned way, all spread out and inviting, revealing the broader world and your place in it. But the new tech folks,
the Mapquesters and the GPS nuts and the folks behind a company called Navteq
suggest that mapping and directions and finding out where you are and where you’re going, all these things are
undergoing a massive revolution that will make sure you never get lost again…and/or that you will never NOT know
where the closest Starbucks is.
Anyway, really good reading.
LA Times Book Fest This Weekend
If you’re as big a book fanatic as I am, then I’m sure
you have heard about or perhaps even attended The LA Times
Festival of Books. I confess I’ve only been once (and that was several years ago), but I saw some of my favorite
writers, including Tim Cahill and Pico Iyer. But it is a big event, a big LITERARY event in a city that is not known
for its high culture.
The Festival takes place this weekend, and travel book readers will be pleased to
know that they can listen to and possibly meet one of the luminaries of the travel guide world, Mr. Don George. Don is
the Global Travel Editor at Lonely Planet, a BIG, impressive title to be sure, but that said, George is also a swell
fellow, a really nice and down-to-earth dude, as you can hear if you listen to the podcast we did with George
a while back. Anyway, there are lots and lots of others who will be at the LA Times book event, so if
you’re in the area, drop on by. Here is a program to the event.
Oh, and maybe Neil will be
going…if so, let’s hope he’ll take some pics and post them. Neil?
Miffy Museum
Man, they’ll build a museum for just about anything
these days. To wit: The Dutch have actually built a museum for the author of
children’s picture books. That’s like creating a Shel Silverstein or Charles Schultz museum…wait, that’s not
such a bad idea. OK, for my skepticism. That’s kinda cool.
Well what it’s all about is a guy named
Dick Bruna, one of the world’s most popular creators of picture books, who will be joining the ranks of other Dutch
masters like Rembrandt and Van Gogh. To many, Bruna is best known for Miffy, the cutesy white bunny (of whom, I will
confess, I have never heard). But others certainly have. Bruna’s books have been translated into more than 40
languages, and 85 million copies have been sold worldwide. And so the museum will display many of these books as well
as 2,000 book covers, more than 100 posters, and dozens of postcards and pictures. The 4,000-square-foot facility is
part of the Central Museum in Utrecht.