Bill Murray's Blog, page 88
April 26, 2017
Stranded
[image error]
The Royal Mail Ship St. Helena is under repairs in Capetown, South Africa. For a normal ship that wouldn’t generate any headlines. But the RMS St. Helena serves as a literal lifeline and the only means of transportation for the inhabitants of St. Helena Island, a speck of land way out in the South Atlantic ocean. This document, attempting to address questions from stranded and potential passengers and businesses, shows the RMS St. Helena’s importance to St. Helena Island and also to Ascension Island, where the RMS usually calls on it’s regular itinerary. It’s interesting to follow this link and read about the trouble caused by the possible dry-docking of the Royal Mail Ship.
[image error]
You can feel the remoteness of these places when you take the three day journey out from the African mainland to St. Helena and the overnight journey onward to Ascension. But that just became way more immediate for the unfortunate subject of an article headlined British woman mauled by shark near Ascension Island saved after husband punched it. The only way off Ascension Island is the RMS St. Helena or via the British Ministry of Defense’s “airbridge,” used to shuttle troops between the Falkland Islands, the military base at Ascension and the Brize Norton base near Oxford, England. The airbridge, it turns out to the ill fortune of our shark attack victim, is temporarily not calling at Ascension either, as you can see from the question and answer sheet.
As a result,
the family found themselves “pretty stuck” by travel chaos across the South Atlantic.
St Helena’s airport, built with the help of £285 million from the Department of International Development, was due to open last May but flights have been postponed indefinitely as it is too windy for commercial aircraft to land safely.
As a result, people normally get the island’s ageing supply ship, the RMS St Helena, to Ascension Island, but it broke down near South Africa in late March and it remains there having repairs to its propellor.
Furthermore, flights have stopped touching down on the military runway on Ascension for safety reasons, reportedly because of cracks in the runway.
Here is an idea of a bit of the other-worldliness of Ascension Island:
See more photos of both islands in the Ascension Island and Saint Helena Island galleries at EarthPhotos.com. More of my stories about St. Helena and Ascension here.
April 25, 2017
You Go, Girl
Theresa May: "We want to lead the world in preventing tourism". pic.twitter.com/OcrLkWso5W
— Adam Bienkov (@AdamBienkov) April 25, 2017
Manifesto for Travel
This morning I sat down to begin the long process of narrating the audio version of my new travel adventure book Out in the Cold. As I reread the preface (it has been a little while since I wrote it), I thought it stands alone as a pretty good manifesto for travel. So I thought I’d share:
OUT IN THE COLD
PREFACE
I’m pretty sure the discovery of America started with a bar fight and I believe I can persuade you that it is so. The chain of events that brought Norse ships to Newfoundland began when a court in Norway found Thorvald Erickson guilty of murder and tossed him out of the country.
The Saga of Eirik the Red, Thorvald’s son, doesn’t say exactly what his old man got up to that night, just that he was exiled “because of some killings,” so Thorvald and the clan loaded up the truck and they moved to northwest Iceland.
Eirik grew up and married a local girl. When Thorvald died they moved south where before long the local sheriff found Eirik guilty of murder just like his old man, and Eirik was banished from Iceland. Thorvald’s bar fight led to Iceland, Greenland and the New World. We will visit the settlement his grandson built in Newfoundland.
But this is not about the Vikings, although they are here. This is a collection of northern tales from the frozen-tight Svalbard archipelago, 800 miles from the North Pole, the Faroe Islands, Iceland, Greenland and Atlantic-facing Canada.
•••••
A daiquiri on your cruise ship balcony may imply that you are on vacation, but it does not mean that you are traveling. Crowding people together on “fun ships” to share viruses for several days holds up as well as socks from Wal-Mart.
Once, in the Himalayas, in a place called Sikkim, whose very geography required vocational derringdo, a mad driver told me “Man didn’t evolve from apes to act like sheep.” He meant that you must engage.
Your free time is as surely an asset as your home or your car. I say, get out there and put some of it to good use. If the unexamined life isn’t worth living (Socrates), get to examining. Compare and contrast your experiences to those of others.
In these pages we will meet an artisan carver of narwhal bones in Greenland. We’ll cruise the streets of Reykjavik with an ebullient Icelandic author, hike with a part-time tour guide in Labrador who cannot imagine why you’d want to be anywhere other than on the tundra, and spend time with others whose lives, objectively, are nothing like your own.
We will shake hands with the President of Iceland and stand naked and alone on the side of the glacier Vatnajokull (separately from the president). We will drop in on the last French outpost in North America, talk shop with a diplomat and eat wind dried sheep in the Faroe Islands, dine with strangers alongside icebergs at a lighthouse north of Newfoundland, and find Greenland so beguiling, we will visit twice.
•••••
[image error]Who ever thinks they are finally and fully grown up? Not me, not in my 20s, or 30s or even 40s. I still think people who wear adult clothes and enjoy it, skirt and blazer, suit and tie, selling investments or copiers or conjuring income from intangibles like air time or web space – those people are grown up, or at least grown up in a way I’m not, in the western businessy way.
I will never be a winning jockey in the Great American Corporate Advancement Derby. I don’t enjoy yard work or the NBA and I don’t know anything about grown-up stuff like the American Automobile Association or why you should be a member. Or what those ads for active traders are talking about, when you be honest.
I don’t buy clothing with the logo of its manufacturer or shop on Black Friday. That others do, that’s real nice. I just don’t have their motivation. But I think I’ve got one thing on them: I’m pretty sure the flame burns brighter in my magic adventure lamp.
Let us all think of a place that sounds exciting, take ourselves there and see what happens, minding Nelson Mandela’s words: May our choices reflect our hopes and not our fears.
•••••
Imagine a range of actions: At one extreme, you never leave your house, and at the other you drive into Somalia honking your horn and waving an American flag. I like it just inside the go-too-far side of that tent, poking on the fabric with a dull knife, trying not quite hard enough to cut through.
Within reason, mind you. Cut through the fabric and you end up kidnapped in Niamey, blasted in two in Helmand or beheaded in the new Caliphate. So let us stick with adventure reasonably achievable. In this case, starting 800 miles shy of the North Pole, chasing a total eclipse.
•••••
Preface from the book Out in the Cold, Travels North: Adventures in Svalbard, the Faroe Islands, Iceland, Greenland and Canada. Buy it in paperback here. Read other excerpts here. Kindle version soon. The audiobook version, begun today, should hit in the fall.
Also published on Medium.
April 24, 2017
The Runoff
[image error]On yesterday’s elections: 1. the French have rejected both traditional parties in an election for the first time in the history of the Fifth Republic. And 2. the pollsters largely got it right, which is more than can be said for their British and American counterparts these last couple years.
While the next two weeks are potentially fraught, for the moment the idea of a functioning European project survives. But headlines like
“Macron to ‘blow Le Pen out of the water’ in final round of French election – Not even a terrorist attack could increase Front National’s chances, experts believe”
in this morning’s Independent are exactly what forces of moderation don’t want to see over the next two weeks. Because, as Der Spiegel explains,
“if only a fraction of those who believe that Macron’s victory is a given end up staying home on May 7, then Le Pen has a shot at becoming France’s next president. Because there is one certainty that has survived: Front National supporters will turn out in force.”
While the periphery frays (Brexit, the Turkish referendum), you can at least make an argument this morning that the core still believes in the European idea. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves with this ‘blow her out of the water’ kind of loose talk. Two delicate weeks lie ahead for an entirely untested would-be leader in a world full of surprises.
April 23, 2017
Quotes:
“Nasty people are incredibly persistent while nice people go off having lives of their own.”
You’re Welcome
Whatever I can do, happy to help.
[image error]
April 21, 2017
Weekend Reading
Load these on your device of choice and enjoy them down by the creek this weekend:
The Geographical Pivot of History by H.J. Mackinder (free download), seminal, much quoted work of geopolitical analysis.
Crimetown USA, the city that fell in love with the mob by David Grann in the New Republic.
The Most Expensive Weapon Ever Built by Daniel Soar in the London Review of Books
The Sense of an Ending by Michelle Legro at Longreads.com
A Wounded Metropolis: London in the Age of Terror and Brexit by Christoph Scheuermann at Spiegel Online
Friday Photo Quiz 2
Win free stuff, once a week this summer. Every Friday I’ll put up a random photo from one of the 120 countries on EarthPhotos.com, and you play sleuth. Where on earth can it be?
Leave your best guess as a comment. I won’t publish the comments so no one can give away the answer.
I’ll put all the correct answers into a hat, draw one, and the winner of the drawing will win a copy of the audiobook version of my book Common Sense and Whiskey.
New photo every Friday, drawing the next Thursday, winners notified by email Friday.
Good luck. Have fun.
So, take a look at this week’s photo. What country is this?
[image error]
April 20, 2017
French Election Watch
A good “if you only read one article about the French elections” article: Extremists on Left and Right Push France to the Brink in Spiegel Online.
Excerpt:
(Marine) Le Pen was asked in a recent TV campaign special what she would do if the French voted to remain in the EU in a referendum she has said she would hold. She normally has an answer ready for whatever question might be asked, but this time she said nothing for a long moment, before responding: “I would resign.” When the moderators then asked what the point of a referendum is if she wanted to determine the outcome beforehand, she became angry and quickly switched to her favorite topic: the media’s vicious attacks on Le Pen and her party.
The Turks, the French, the Ballot Box Gloom
[image error]
As the sun swept the Anatolian plain last Sunday the margin of support for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s power grab slipped. For a moment I thought the responsibility for the future of the Republic could rest with urban, cosmopolitan, relatively liberal Istanbul.
Silly me. Before dark the futility of hoping good sense could prevail over the combined forces of rural conservatives and elite-controlled media became clear. The electoral commission’s decision, taken during voting, to allow unvalidated ballots to be counted meant the fix was in; the Erdogan forces deployed whatever votes they needed to assure the President’s continued power, likely until 2029.
You may be in your fourth decade of life in Harare and Robert Mugabe has always been your leader. It’s getting to be like that in our Turkish NATO ally. And for his trouble manipulating the referendum, Turkey’s leader has been rewarded with congratulations from the American president and a long-sought visit to Washington.
This kind of thing is going around. So far it’s mostly tinkering around the edges, tentative constricting of liberty, freedom, thought, in our country and abroad. No would-be despot is yet prepared to go full throat but in all countries everywhere, “line up behind me” is gaining cachet.
The West’s reigning pundits are sure of the cause: Our worldwide distemper reflects the various electorates’ rejection of globalization. More narrowly, I think, it seeks to demonstrate rejection of the decisions taken by leaders since the 2008 global financial crisis.
In our part of the world we talk a good game on the importance of freedom and individual rights, peace and harmony and opportunity and justice and sweetness and light. But what recent plebiscite shows reason for optimism for any of that? The Turkish referendum? Brexit? Trump? France?
Well now. France.
Should French political dissatisfaction send their country spinning into the arms of either extreme candidate (who in late polling cluster with the other, more conventional leaders, all within a few percent of one another), the Fifth Republic’s future heir to Charles de Gaulle may either:
– lead France out of the EU and into the Kremlin’s orbit under Marine Le Pen’s assiduously sanitized, formerly Jew-baiting, still alarmed-by-immigrants right, or
– lead France into the uncharted, hologramatic realm of La France Insoumise, equally out of the EU from the left via the man the horrified French right calls the French Chavez.
Far more so than in the U.S. and even in increasingly Little England (where the reliably Tory-horrified Guardian’s opinion page this week called the Prime Minister’s call for a general election a coup), in France the entire system-as-we’ve-known-it is up for grabs. The center right and center left, which have alternated power throughout the Fifth Republic, both smolder in shambles.
The candidate on the conventional right, battling grimly back here at the end, is mired in scandal, and the conventional left has come apart at the seams. The candidate put up by the incumbent Socialist Prime Minister’s party has spun his wheels, unable to get traction, while farther to the left the anti-capitalist Jean-Luc Mélanchon has come on strong, out of nowhere since my first handicapping three weeks ago.
Meanwhile the candidate desperately designated as the Gallant White Knight is an unproven 39 year old would-be maverick who has spent his entire life preparing inside the establishment. As a skeptical Dissent magazine summarizes, Emmanuel “Macron attended the prestigious Henri IV prep school in Paris. From there, he moved on to Sciences Po, a highly selective university that specializes in politics and international relations, before graduating from the ultra-elite École Nationale d’Administration, an institution that literally produces France’s ruling class.”
So what have we got? Who knows. French election watchers have begun to caution that ballots uncast in the first round may be more portentous than those cast, and that “polls showing Ms. Le Pen losing badly in a May 7 runoff election against either Emmanuel Macron or Francois Fillon (the two more conventional candidates) could be misleading.
There is some doubt whether supporters of Mélanchon on the far left could gin up enthusiasm to vote for establishment-bred Macron just to block the xenophobic Le Pen. At mid-week before Sunday’s first round, the Globe and Mail and Politico EU echoed this idea.
It all adds up, as the France 24 chyron has it three days before election day, to “total uncertainty.”
[image error]
Also published here on Medium.com.
