Common Sense and Whiskey

Funny Place Names

These two maps are really entertaining. Just click through and go see:

Map of Orkney, Map of Shetland

Chernobyl, Istanbul, Kyiv, London

London, Istanbul, Kyiv and Chernobyl. 25 pictures so far. Click here. Then under 'styles,' click 'slideshow.' Make 'em as big as you can.

One or two more most days, right through April.

Wednesday HDRs - London, Istanbul & Kyiv

The three cities (besides Chernobyl) that we visited earlier this month. Everybody takes this tourist picture of London, so I decided to do something else with it - first tonemap it and then make it up to look like an oil painting. Man, it was cold that day.

Sometimes I think there is no city greater than Istanbul. Here's the Haggia Sophia at twilight.

And this is St. Sophia's Cathedral in Kyiv. (Kyiv is the Ukrainian language spelling. Kiev is Russian.) Kyiv is full of cathedrals. There are several more waiting on my hard drive.

Click 'em to make them bigger. There's a new photo or two a day from this most recent trip showing up here at EarthPhotos.com and here, more slowly, on Flickr.

Just Passing Through

12 March 2013, London Heathrow to Istanbul Ataturk: Looks like we’ll run due southeast this morning, generally above Luxembourg, Stuttgart and Munich. Then we’ll cross the Alps between Innsbruck and Salzburg - the Tyrol - approaching the Balkans over Zagreb, then Belgrade, then just north of Sofia (“Bulgaristan” where we’re headed) and into Istanbul.

Before Europe was “united,” as recently as the early 90’s, only half of this route would have been over friendly territory. The line came down between Vienna and the omnious land of Marshall Tito and the Yugo (we snickered at the Yugo), beginning on 2013’s map with lovely little Slovenia. It would have become only more ominous as we’d pass over Bulgaria, known only back then for it’s relentless tractor production and it’s shot-putting female Olympians.

•••••

We’ve just left a country in the doldrums, and freezing. The state of British politics is irritable and downcast, among both rulers and ruled.

And last night perhaps hundreds of people spent the night on motorways, trapped in their cars in part of a winter-long progression of snowstorms. Cold, as low as minus eight across the south, at a point on the calendar when daffodils are expected, or at least hoped for.

You can walk around London anytime but it’s not often you can walk around London in a miserable and furious snow flurry, and so yesterday I layered up and walked along the south bank of the river, tourist traffic (like me) down but still present, even the barge traffic muted by the snow. The world closed in.

•••••

The British economy is stagnant and the same debate that wearies you here, wearies you there. Living standards are not expected to exceed pre-crash levels for ten years. Banks are themselves on the dole and still lend less than before, for lack of business demand. The number of small businesses borrowing this year is forecast to be down from 23 to 20 per cent.

And the queen is sick. At 86, a stomach bug keeps even a monarch down longer than one would like. After a week’s hiatus, her Majesty demurred on returning to the public eye yesterday, apparently judging that a church service in drafty old Westminster Abbey wasn’t in one’s best interest.

Still, get any ten million people in one place at one time and a fine time may be had, and  we had one. I have a new favorite British bookstore, besides the Waterstone’s in Oxford, home to all the world’s textbooks. This one is called Daunt Books, in the Marylebone High Street. At Daunt, books are arranged by the countries of the world.

I'm Just Saying

BA’s 777 business class configuration is a scream in both the comedic and Edvard Munch senses. Jamming eight across in business means an outlandish scheme that somebody may have sold as brilliant, but that is not. It yielded a sort of cattle pen inside which we rode over from ATL to London.

Rainy Day Reading

We've been a little scarce here at CS&W as we try to finish up some longer-form writing and get set for a trip to Rapa Nui that's about a month away. More on that as we get closer.

For now, here are ideas of interest from all over, if you're so inclined:

- Not long ago, my pal Rick Lewis moved to Cotacachi, Ecuador. He blogs about it at brokedownpalette.
- Alfred Molon, a Dane, has some 23,000 photos here, from much of the world.
- Albanian Tourism Project Puts Beds in Bunkers, from Der Spiegel.
- Kebabistan, a Eurasianet food blog, is worth a look.
- Update on the state of things in Ukraine, from Salon.
- The Enclaves and Counter-enclaves of Baarle, on the Dutch/Belgian border, from Big Think's Strange Maps.
- And you might have seen that the British have invaded nine out of ten countries, from an upcoming book.

Luxury without the Hotel

The London company OneFineStay looks to have a portfolio of several outstanding, higher-end vacation rentals that look like the kind of thing that would appeal to CS&W readers. They've been good enough to describe a few of their properties here. This photo is from the Violin Factory, described below, and there are several more photos below the fold. Contact OneFineStay.com.

The London ‘unhotel’

Traveling is all about immersing yourself in the culture and lifestyle of your destination, and what better way to do that than bypassing a hotel and living like a local instead. London based company onefinestay allows you to do exactly this, as they have over 500 upscale homes which they rent out to travellers while the owners are out of town. When you arrive at your new home you are handed an iPhone for your stay, loaded with local information and recommendations collected from the home owner. The collection of onefinestay homes includes some pretty unique vacation rentals in London and New York, so if you are looking for accommodation with a difference you will certainly find it. For those with a taste for the unusual, here is a little London preview:

The Violin Factory

Behind an unassuming set of old wooden doors lies this breath-taking home right in the heart of London. Once a violin factory, it has now been transformed into a modern architectural masterpiece where sunlight from the ceiling windows floods into illuminate the triple height main room. The home is no stranger to the limelight as its journey to completion in the loving hands of its architect owner was featured on UK TV show Grand Designs, and sci-fi fans may recognise it from Dr Who.

St Pancras Clock Tower

If you’re looking for unusual then look no further than the Clock Tower at London St Pancras station.

Dear London,

Good luck.

From a friend in London:

"The latest is that the security firm is not secure, the food and drinks companies will not be supplying food or drink and the British archery Paralympic champion got that way in a road-rage attack. On the rare occasions that I go into London, I hear messages from Boris Johnson, London’s blond explosion of a mayor, telling me that transport will be disrupted so I’m not learning anything to my advantage so far.

I would use the comedy channel to wake up to but they don’t do time-checks.

My favourite local cafe was visited by the police ... the POLICE! ... because she had a poster on the wall publicising her Olympic Onion Rings! It wasn’t the name that was the problem, it was use of the logo of the Olympic rings  – those symbols of unity and cooperation in sport – depicted in rings of onion. The POLICE are now defending the commercial interests of international organisations that CLAIM to be non-profit! (don’t start me on MacDonald’s and Coke!).

Frankly, I want to hide under the bed but there isn’t room what with all the monitoring devices and special agents under there already."

It's Not Easy Being Royal

Rainy conditions prevail over southern England, and, reports the Telegraph:

"The Duchess of Cornwall, fresh from her Jubilee duties, braved the poor conditions as she toured the annual Royal Cornwall agricultural show in Wadebridge.

The sheep section had to be closed and some judging moved inside."

The horror.

Masters of the Universe: Wednesday HDR

Currently the second-highest ranked HDR as voted by viewers of EarthPhotos.com, and my personal favorite:

Click the photo to make it much, much bigger.

Walking along Oxford Street in London about dusk in January 2010, we came upon this office building, and it looked promising enough that I ran to get my tripod from our hotel room and came back in time to catch these guys about to leave for the day. Several exposures from a single RAW, tonemapped in Photomatix & finished in Photoshop.

See over 800 photos from cities all over the world in the Cities Gallery and (at the moment) 220 HDRs in the HDR Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

Captain Beany Paints Himself Orange: Silly Museums #7

Meet Captain Beany, Curator, the Baked Bean Museum of Excellence, in Port Talbot, Wales (Which looks like it just may be in Captain Beany's back room).

Or, maybe, don't.

Books: The Atlantic

The book to buy this week is Simon Winchester's Atlantic. It's another in a string of books by Winchester about One Big Thing. This review puts it like this:

"Veteran journalist Simon Winchester has, in recent years, taken to writing what might be called geological blockbusters. His method is to focus on a relatively contained event — the eruption of Krakatoa, say, or the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 — and envelop it in several layers of context, social, scientific, historical, political."

Winchester has done the Atlantic before. In the fun little book, The Sun Never Sets (reissued in 2004 as Outposts), he visited the odd remnants of the British Empire, including, in the Atlantic, islands like Tristan de Cuhna and St. Helena, the Falklands and Ascension and Bermuda. The new Atlantic is the story of the entire ocean writ large.

(Photo of a sunset somewhere south of the equator in the Atlantic Ocean, en route between St. Helena and Ascension islands. Photos from these two islands in the St. Helena and Ascension galleries at EarthPhotos.com.)

The World's Shortest Commercial Flight

According to Seth at The Wandering Aramean, "The trip, between Westray and Papa Westray, takes anywhere from 75 to 180 seconds, depending on the winds."

Wednesday HDR: Masters of the Universe

We posted this photo and a few similar ones here back when we took them, but I've reworked this one as this week's Wednesday HDR. It's one of my favorites - kind of, I don't know, whimsical. Click the photo for a much larger version.

Walking along Oxford Street in London about dusk last January, we came upon this office building, and it looked promising enough that I got my tripod from our hotel room and came back in time to catch these guys about to leave for the day. Several exposures from a single RAW, tonemapped in Photomatix & finished in Photoshop.

See over 800 photos from cities all over the world in the Cities Gallery and (at the moment) 220 HDRs in the HDR Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

The Airbridge Airline of the Month

Other than your own private transportation (specifically an ocean going yacht), there are only two ways onto and off of Ascension Island, which is about a thousand miles west of Africa in the South Atlantic Ocean: The Royal Mail Ship St. Helena, which shuttles between Ascension and St. Helena Island (which is also in the middle of the ocean - see previous post), and the twice weekly "Airbridge" run by the British Ministry of Defense.

Ascension is the refueling stop between the Airbridge's real destinations - The U.K. in the north and the Falkland Islands in the south. Twice a week a flight leaves the Brize-Norton RAF base near Oxford, England, stops to refuel at Ascension, and continues to the RAF's Mount Pleasant airport on the Falklands. And twice a week it returns.

A Day in the Scottish Sun for American Haggis Lovers

There's a dusting of snow on the mountains around the farm. Feeling like a pioneer woodsman (I must buy some big flannel work shirts) this morning, I fed a fire until it crackled furiously in the wood stove, situated a mug of coffee so that little rings of steam rose between me and the window, and settled in to take in all the world's overnight developments via our so-called DSL, way up here at the far end of the last twisted pair on this entire gravel lane.

While reading "6 Reasons Bacon is Better Than True Love," I remembered that sometimes the internet can be just a wee bit of a time waster. But, if you knew where to find it, there was real news; It seems the U.S. is lifting it's 21 year ban on sheep offal!

And this is news because?

Because of haggis.

"... butchers in the US have tried, and failed, to make their own versions of the pudding without using the vital ingredient: sheep. "It was a silly ban which meant a lot of people have never tasted the real thing," said Margaret Frost, of the Scottish American Society in Ohio. "We have had to put up with the US version, which is made from beef and is bloody awful," reports the Guardian.

No need for bloody awful haggis anymore. And to top it off, the news comes in the same week as the observance of Robert Burns night.

*****

A week and a half ago Mirja and I took a London Cab over to the Royal Academy of Arts for the new exhibit, The Real Van Gogh: The Artist and His Letters. The only trouble: that exhibit started the following Saturday. So we walked back out across the street and into Fortnum & Mason (Piccadilly since 1707) and there, in cans just as readily available as Campbell's Chicken Noodle Soup, were rows and rows of haggis.

Not knowing they were contraband, it was good that we didn't buy any. The next day was our flight home and big metal cans were going to have a hard time finding their way into our laden bags. Instead, our shopping cart was filled with smaller, handy travel-sized extra strong English mustards, special flavored Welsh sea salts - and, of course, crunchy Cambodian crickets (baked, not fried) and Scorpion vodka.

Although funny, if you search the Fortnum & Mason site this morning, you don't return any results for crickets or scorpions - or those chocolate covered tarantulas that shared the same display case. All of which looked more appetizing than these chickens from Nepal or these dogs in Hanoi.

Browse through nearly 300 more photos in the Food and Drink Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

The Perils of Working with Models

The Brits do museums great. Last week we spent an afternoon at London's British Museum which, thanks in part to a legacy of colonial occupation, contains some seven million artifacts. You could devote an entire week's vacation to that museum alone.

Unfortunately, the British Natural History Museum has found itself in the midst of a bit of controversy. Its 2009 Veolia Environment Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition attracted some 43,000 entries and the winning photo, above, has been disqualified.

Officials said the judging panel "concluded that it was likely that the wolf featured in the image was an animal model that could be "hired for photographic purposes." There will be no winner for 2009.

According to the BBC, the photographer, Jose Luis Rodruiguez "had, throughout the investigation, denied "hiring" (the wolf) for the photograph. The disqualified photographer maintains that his subject was a wild wolf." There's more in the Guardian.

The 2010 competition is now open. 

More Titans of Industry, Photographed in their Lair

These photos were so much fun to produce I thought I'd post another. A few days ago I posted one of these in a separate post, and here's a second, similar one.

We were walking down Oxford Street near Hyde Park in London last Thursday just around 4:30 in the afternoon, dark coming on. We looked up and saw these titans of industry a few floors above us. They spend all day looking down on the street, so we thought it would be fun to return the favor.

I ran back to the hotel, grabbed the tripod and returned to a parallel street where the building could be seen from a little more of a distance and put the D700 through its paces, shooting various exposures in RAW. I've been post-processing off and on since, and I hope to have a few more variations over time. These two are tone-mapped HDRs with the strength set really low.

See them larger and in higher-res here and here at EarthPhotos.com.

Back on the Farm

A couple of travel days (Oxford to London to Atlanta back to the farm) and a couple of days of rest, and we're back. Housekeeping notes: We'll keep the South Atlantic Gallery (which contains about 120 photos) where it is on EarthPhotos.com, and we'll add new St. Helena and Ascension Island galleries to the EarthPhotos Countries page over the next couple of weeks. That will bring the total number of countries and territories represented to 97.

Rich, Important People on Vital Missions

A fun photo, I thought, of busy, busy men in an office building on Oxford Street near Hyde Park, London, today. We'll have all these up in higher-res in a few days on EarthPhotos.com.