Cool island breezes would be nothing without the soft melodic clanging of the steelpan. And even
though Carnival has passed and the streets of Trinidad & Tobago have simmered down a bit,
the steelpan can always be heard drifting out from a nearby pan yard. The article found
here introduces us to a brief history of the only
acoustical instrument developed in the 20th century and the man who introduced it to America. Catch a piece of
Trini history and read more about Mr. Rudy King now that all the Carnival craziness is over.
Hemingway’s Haunts
Hemingway was one of those guys who went eveywhere. But one of the places with which is he closely associated is
certainly Cuba. Old Man and the Sea, good ol Santiago, the fish and the sahrk, the whiff of the sea. Ah,
yes. Papa.
And so. Literary Traveler brings you to Hemingway’s Cuba in
this piece. The author
meets the “Old Man”, who is now dead, so the article is obviously a bit dated, but that doesn’t detract (too much
anyway) from the appeal of the article, which almost makes you want to pick up TOMATS and give it another read.
A New London Museum
Museums are some of the most fascinating places to visit in any city and if you think you’ve covered every
museum London has to offer, think again. A new museum is in town and is quite thorough on its subject. The LA Times has
a small piece on the
opening of the
Churchill Museum in London. And they make it sound so touching too.
“His baby rattle, the red velvet suit he wore during bombing raids, his Nobel Prize.”
The museum is divided into five sections, each focusing on a different time in his life. Churchill lived from
1874 and died in 1965. A very interactive way of learning about the events in his life was put in
place and will operate by way of a computerized filing cabinet. Overall they just want a museum with
personality. If you ask me the baby rattle did just that, but I’d give it a gander to see all the other pieces
collected from around the world.
Savage Summit
Books about women adventurers probably fill about half the shelves of those about men. Maybe
less. Yeah, probably less. But it’s great when a good book comes along about women adventurers, for women adventurers.
Or for whoever. Jennifer Jordan’s account of
the first five women to climb to the top of K2 is called
Savage
Summit, and it appears to be a hit.
The Times
reviews the book today and gives it a half-hearted thumbs up, saying the book is compelling but that some of the
biographical sketches are “thin”.
K2 is called the “Savage Mountain” because it kills without mercy. Lower than Everest, it none the less is
far more dangerous. The fact is, K2 has some of the harshest climbing conditions and weather of any place in the world
and at the beginning of the 2004 climbing season, ninety women had successfully summited Everest, but only five female
climbers had reached the peak of K2. Today, all of them are dead.
You can read the first chapter
here.
Bones, Bones, Bones!
Remember when Jurassic Park lit up movie houses and cinemas
across the world? It made great conversation for weeks and could be considered one of the top ten films featuring a T-Rex
ever! (Just how many films feature dinosaurs though?) Taking into account how HOT the subject matter of
recreating, excavating, or anything to do with dinosaurs typically is, one might think about
A&E Travel’s seven day dinosaur dig in
Montana taking place this May through August.
Based on the news at Travel Video you can be
apart of an authentic scientific dig as you work alongside researchers in Montana’s Hell Creek. The experience is
far from being on a tour. And after you are done learning about the evolutionary processes between Late
Cretaceous dinosaurs of the LuFeng Province of China and dinosaurs of Montana’s Hell Creek Formation you can have a
soda at the old-fashioned drug store and soda fountain. Now ain’t that something? All that digging for
fossils and some soda pop. This one is seriously worth looking into adventure goers. Tell me what you
think.