Serendipita

Hal writes that today would have been Edward Abbey‘s 80th birthday.

I discovered the author by accident when I found his book Desert Solitaire among a bunch of 75% off foreign language books at my favourite bookstore in Bonn. It must have been either shortly before or after André’s and my first trip to the USA because Arches National Park rang a bell, so I bought the book and instantly liked his writing style, as well as his descriptions of what Arches was like before it became a National Park.

I’ve since read The Fool’s Progress and The Monkey Wrench Gang, too. I enjoy his books partly because he describes landscapes and areas we visited during our trips to the US and instantly recreates the feeling of being there in my mind. I can almost smell the sagebrush…

Another book by him deserves being mentioned here: The Hidden Canyon with photos by John Blaustein. The text is Abbey’s journal of a boat tour through Grand Canyon.

In Desert Solitaire I first read about the controversy of building Glen Canyon Dam to create Lake Powell, which to me seemed strangely out of place in the middle of the desert when we visited it in 1999. If you want to see Glen Canyon the way it looked before the dam was built, I recommend the book Glen Canyon: Images of a Lost World by Tad Nichols, which is another favourite of mine I wrote about before (10 Jan 2001, 3 Nov 2004). You can see some of Blaustein’s photos here and here.

Markus und Arnim, zwei Flugbegeisterte, umrundeten die Welt – mit einem kleinen Flugzeug, einer zweisitzigen Cirrus SR22.

Das ganze fand in zwei Etappen statt. Am 27. Oktober 2005 starteten sie in Deutschland und erreichten am 19. November 2005 Melbourne. Den zweiten Teil der Weltumrundung (den ich noch nicht gelesen habe) starteten sie im Mai 2006. Man kann ihre Reise in ihrem Logbuch nachvollziehen.

Seven years and almost 3500 posts ago I signed up for a Manila weblog at www.editthispage.com. I honestly never thought that I would keep this up for such a long time, but even though my posting frequency has decreased quite a bit because I don’t have as much time as I used to have it is still a lot of fun.

There are two main reasons for me to keep this weblog: First of all, it is an excellent way for me to organize links to interesting websites in a way that I’m able to find them again, even years later (if the pages have not disappeared in the interim). And second of all, I’ve met and continue to meet interesting people from different countries, of different ages, with different jobs and backgrounds, most of which I would not have met otherwise.

I tend to think that I have few long-time readers, most of which I know (waving hello to the people who started out at ETP as well!), but sometimes I hear from people who have read my weblog for some time without me knowing them, like LuCaS, a fellow physics teacher from Belgium, who noted this weblog’s anniversary a day in advance. Hi Lucas!

Thank you all for reading!

P.S.: I know that National Delurking Week was the second week of January, but if you’ve been lurking here, why don’t you consider this the delurking posting for Serendipita and leave a comment? Thanks!