Lifelist Intro – New Feature

Are there things in life that you’ve always dreamed of doing, that you
told yourself with utter seriousness: I will do that someday? If so, then you have started your life list. It may be
just in your head for now, but the fact is, you’ve started a list of things that will make your life more fulfilling,
more adventuresome. That’s a good first step.

Now we want to help.

In the spirit of the grandfather of life-lists, John
Goddard
, we are beginning a feature called Lifelist. Every week or so we’ll choose one great adventure and do some
of the research for you. We’ll help you discover new ideas, find outfitters, stories and everything else we can, to
help you build your own life list. Ever said you were going to climb
Aconcagua, scuba dive the Great Barrier Reef, learn
Arabic, BASE jump some high rocky place? So have we.

We hope too that this will be a collaborative effort, so if you have items on YOUR lifelist that you’d like us to
include, send us tips or post comments. Also, if you’ve ever done any of the things on the lifelist items we feature,
tell us. We’d love to hear about it, and to get some dialogue going.  As we progress, we hope you add these babies
to YOUR lifelist and start knocking them off, one by one.

Fly Around the Moon with Space Adventures

Got an extra $100 million lying around? Check under your mattress,
break open the piggy bank, you’ll find it. Alas, I neglected yesterday to post about

this story
I read in the New York Times about a company that is offering space flights around the moon.

Remember Dennis Tito, the stocky, uber-tycoon that became the world’s
first space tourist? Well, Space Adventures, the same company that shot
him into the ether says they will be offering a trip that goes a bit further. Yesterday they unveiled an agreement with
Russian space officials to send two passengers on a voyage lasting 10 to 21 days that might take them around the moon.
Wha?! You mean we might be able to listen to Dark Side of the Moon as it passes below us? Holy Swiss cheese,
Gromit!

Check out the video on the company’s Web site (apparently they
should have a little chat with the boys at ILM). The company’s chief executive, Eric Anderson, said blast off might
happen as early as 2008. He also said that a few potential clients have already approached him about taking the trip
(yes, Mr. Gates, you can pay with Microsoft stock. No, Mr. Gates you can’t do
hand wings out the window, I’m
sorry
).

I’ve just written a note to my credit card company to see if they’ll up my maximum balance.

Edinburgh Festival

The world-famous Edinburgh Festival (a generic term for all the stuff that goes on in the Scottish city this month)
is in full swing right now. The Fringe
Festival
, called the “largest arts festival on the planet” (according to the Guinness Book of World Records),
started a few days ago and lasts until the 29th. And the
Film Festival takes place from the 17th to the
28th, and will show all manner of arthouse and world cinema films produced, well, pretty much anywhere.

But they also do mainstream films. You might remember (or phoned home about it) that ET actually premiered here in the
80s. This year’s mainstream fest will feature the films of George Romero, including his newest flesh eating flick
Land of the Dead. Fans of Romero will be happy to know that the
gore-master will actually be present at the festival for a program called An Audience With George A Romero. For more
info on the festival, check out the main site here, or
the Guardian’s Special report
Edinburgh 2005. There’s really so
much going on at the Festival this year, I can’t do it justice here. Check out the
site for yourself.

Cleaning Mt. Rushmore Gallery

For my first job out of school (not counting working as a ski photographer at Squaw Valley) I got to travel around
the country and see many of our National Parks. That’s one of the reasons that I rave so often about the
National Park Service and maintain a deep respect for the people who work for it…at
least the ones outside of Washington. And one of the coolest trips I ever got to take was to see
Mount Rushmore. The view from the bottom that most tourists get is cool. You see
the four heads up there carved into the mountain, and you think, hey, that’s pretty neat. I was lucky enough, however,
to get to climb up on top of the heads, to walk around on Lincoln’s prodigious brow, to hang a loogie off Washington’s
nose. Ah, those were the days.

Well, as I say, most people can’t get up to the heads anymore. But the next best thing for people sitting at the desks
right now is this gallery from MSNBC of the
recent effort to clean the heads of Rushmore. According
to this piece it was the
first time that the four Presidents have had their faces washed since the sculpture was completed. They probably washed
off my loogie, too. Damn.

Prague Getting Packed

It was just a few days ago that I was talking about
Prague and the Velvet Revolution and how I regret, just a wee bit, the fact that I didn’t make the move there in the
early 90s (it sounds like it was so much fun). I was thinking when I wrote that that the whole Prague as tourist
destination thing was more or less holding steady, that with other places in Slovenia and Bulgaria and Romania opening
up, that Prague was seeing a decline in its visitation. Wrong.

According to this piece in the International
Herald Tribune (IHT), the numbers for Prague
tourism are skyrocketing. Yup, the annual number of tourists in the Czech Republic (7.4 million last year) is expected
to almost double within the next five years, according to the business research organization Eurobarometer. If
that pace continues, tourists will soon outnumber the Czech population of 10 million. And if it continues (that is, if
it doubles) every five years for the next 100 years, then (let’s see…where’s my calculator) the number of tourists
visiting Prague in 2105 will be 242 billion! Holy Kafka, Batman. That is going to make for some very crowded
bars.