Bill Murray's Blog, page 138
October 22, 2013
Reading Around the Web
Looks like my second book, Visiting Chernobyl, is on track for publication by the end of next week. The day it’s up on Amazon I’ll excerpt it here and send the first chapter to everybody who signs up over on the right (Go ahead, sign up now). While I’m tending to that, here are a few entertaining, well done or arcane things to spend some time with:
- A Night under Concrete: Albanian Tourism Project Puts Beds in Bunkers
- Tom Christian, Descendant of Bounty Mutineer, Dies at 77
- How a high school-educated drug smuggler built a fleet of submarines—in the middle of the jungle
- The Enclaves and Counter-enclaves of Baarle
- I Went on the World’s Deadliest Road Trip
- Bad Blood: The Life and Death of Alexander Litvinenko
October 13, 2013
Sit Down, Be Quiet. Turn Everything Off. Welcome Aboard.
Ever feel like your airline is quick to scold you about all the things you must not do? Here, Air New Zealand shows it’s the non-dour airline. Gentle, pretty funny.
October 8, 2013
Sochi Olympics Watch #17
We all know about all that nasty corruption (2, 3) surrounding the most expensive ever $50 billion Sochi Olympics, now just four months away. We’ve heard how Sochi is only 300 miles from Grozny, about that £5 billion thirty mile road, about the whole Russian gay paranoia thing and how 2014 is turning into a Gulag Olympics, and darn it, now the Olympic flame keeps going out. The photo is a screen grab from Novosti, in which former Soviet world swimming champion Shavarsh Karapetyan gets a hand from an unidentified man with a cigarette lighter as he runs around the Kremlin in a nationally televised ceremony.
Here’s a look inside the factory that built the torches.
Meanwhile, writes The Guardian, “an IOC delegation praised the ‘magnificent’ venues and promised a ‘fabulous experience’.”
October 6, 2013
Vienna Antipodes
There’s not a hell of a lot to say about Phnom Penh, really. You’ve seen one hardscrabble, impoverished, backward, big, poor, provincial city in Southeast Asia, you’ve seen Phnom Penh — except this one is a national capital.
Phnom Penh is the place on the globe most exactly opposite in every way to Vienna. It’s haphazard as Vientiane, the capital of Laos, but it’s ten times the size. It has a sort of genial, low-rise sprawl that wanders on into the outskirts until you find yourself in uninterested rabble and uninspired local markets with livestock in between.
We hired a Corolla and pointed our way down Preah Monivong onto Mao Tse Tung Street. The official street signs look official, but behind them on the sides of buildings you get an occasional peek at the French colonial “Rue Mao Tse Tung” versions, in peeling paint.
Mao Street itself, as we swung right onto it, greeted us as a warehouse district stocking steel bars, tubes, channels and shapes, and then PVC pipe and tubing. It stretched several kilometers this way, away from the river, and while most businesses were open air, there were occasional enclosed A/C restaurants, the odd “hand phone” shop, and a bright new sleek Intercontinental Hotel.
We pondered the Suki Soup Wedding Hall.
The drive required more of an amble, even when the road was flat, maybe thirty-five kilometers an hour, because of the crush of scooters and the vague driving rules. The Cambodian left turn across traffic is really a gentle, gradual veer that can take up hundreds of feet and introduces oncoming traffic directly into your lane at any given moment.
The third road off Mao Street wasn’t really tarmac, and with rainwater filling the pot holes, it’s a marvel how the scooter riders’ clothes stayed spotless.
I’m a little disturbed how under-disturbed I was by the Cheong Ek Genocidal Center. It’s a simple place with a glass stupa filled with skulls, and clothing in the bottom, and sections like “elderly woman” and “young man.”
We took pictures of monks taking pictures of themselves. There was a souvenir shop. How garish. It just had all the usual stuff, and “Beware Land Mines” t-shirts and “Pol Pot Money.”
It took almost an hour to get out the fifteen kilometers to Cheong Ek, and the same to get back.
•••••
This post is also found on Medium. More photos from Cambodia on EarthPhotos.com.
September 29, 2013
New Books
This is a classroom (more on EarthPhotos.com) in the Kopachi kindergarten, just inside the ten kilometer exclusion zone around the Chernobyl reactor number 4 in March 2013, 27 years since the famous accident. Based on that visit, next month I’ll publish Chernobyl, A Considered Guide for Travelers on Amazon.com. If you sign up on the sidebar on the right I’ll send you the first chapter for free when the book is published.
Rapa Nui, A Considered Guide for Travelers comes right behind it in early 2014, then that summer 2014 we’ll do Sikkim, between Nepal and Bhutan in India. Please sign up for excerpts from all these books over on the right. It don’t cost nothin’ and we’ll send you free content from all of them.
September 25, 2013
People – Wednesday HDRs
Here are a lucky thirteen shots of people from around the world. All the photos link to larger versions at EarthPhotos.com. As usual, all of these were tonemapped in Photomatix for the HDR look and then fiddled with in various versions of Photoshop with various iterations of Nik software. There are more HDRs in the HDR Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.
This lady sells and repairs utensils at a market south of Quito, Ecuador.
The Mercado open air market, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
Shoe shine man at the office, Antigua, Guatemala.
Woman from hill tribe near Sa Pa, Vietnam.
The boys, in a Havana, Cuba neighborhood.
Hoi An, Vietnam vegetable market.
Friendly kids, Likoma Island, Malawi.
Cold winter night’s card game, Verenna, Italy.
Deck hand on the RMS St. Helena as it heads to sea from the port of Walvis Bay, Namibia.
Worshippers at St. Mary’s Church, Mt. Entoto, Ethiopia.
Day labor. Istanbul, Turkey.
Phuntso Meat Shop, Thimpu, Bhutan.
Local bar, Havana, Cuba.
September 23, 2013
One ‘Za’ Short of a Reset
That big symbolic ‘reset’ button Hillary Clinton presented to Sergei Lavrov? It was printed with the word ‘peregruzka,’ a good faith stab at ‘reset’ by the Americans.
Almost.
Peregruzka translates as ‘overload.’ The correct word, they say, would be ‘perezagruzka.’
September 20, 2013
New Post on Medium Today, “Havana Right Now”
Pleased to have my first offering up today on Medium. It’s a very short story about a weekend trip down to Havana. The longer version will be a chapter in my next collection of travel stories. For now, let’s kick the tires a little bit and see how this Medium thing works.
September 13, 2013
Friday Photo Quiz #185
Four clues here. The last one is the big giveaway, a building built for a one-time ruler but now used as the national parliament. It has 3,700,000 square feet of floor space.
Can you guess the country? Click through for the answer. And a good weekend to all from CS&W and EarthPhotos.com.
And the answer is …………………………………….. it’s Romania.
The top photo is the medieval Transylvanian town of Sighisoara, birthplace of Vlad the Impaler, prince of Wallachia and inspiration for the fictional Count Dracula. Second and third are both from Brasov, another medieval Transylvanian town, and that’s Nicolae Ceausescu’s palace, now the national parliament in Bucharest, the world’s largest civilian building.
There are much larger versions of these and 72 more photos in the Romania Gallery at Earthphotos.com.
And take all the CS&W photo quizzes.
September 10, 2013
Serbia: Good New Stuff
Congratulations and best of luck to my friend Laurence Mitchell on the publication of his latest edition of Bradt’s Serbia Guide, just out in the U.K. Laurence is a member of the British Guild of Travel Writers and the Outdoor Writers and Photographers Guild, and a fine photographer who blogs at East of Elveden.
