Category Archives: Travel

“Here I am, brain the size of a planet and they ask me to take you down to the bridge.”

The Guardian: Don’t panic! The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is back. “It’s the biggest thing to happen to the universe since the Vogons blew up Earth. Our writer grabs a babelfish and goes behind the scenes as the space satire returns.”

“The original cast has been reunited to record a new radio series of the intergalactic comedy that, from small beginnings in 1978 on Radio 4, grew into a juggernaut that spawned a TV series, a Disney film, a much-loved series of books, several stage shows and even a video game.
[…]
The new series combines unpublished material, dug out of Adams’ notebooks by archivist and superfan Kevin Jon Davies, and newer plotlines drawn from And Another Thing, Eoin Colfer’s book continuing the saga, which was commissioned by the Adams estate after the author’s sudden death at the age of just 49 in 2001.”

I’ve read the four-part trilogy and enjoyed the original radio play. Looking very forward to this!

Link via MetaFilter.

“So Bears Ears isn’t really about oil and gas.“

The New York Times: Oil Was Central in Decision to Shrink Bears Ears Monument, Emails Show.

“Even before President Trump officially opened his high-profile review last spring of federal lands protected as national monuments, the Department of Interior was focused on the potential for oil and gas exploration at a protected Utah site, internal agency documents show.”

Link via MetaFilter.

“While the U.S. government has been the source of a lot negative media attention this year, the travel industry must continue to stand for open borders, inclusivity and the celebration of diversity”

NBC News: Tourism to U.S. under Trump is down, costing $4.6B and 40,000 jobs.

“International tourism to the U.S. began to wane after Trump took office, leading to a so-called Trump slump. Experts say that Trump’s proposed travel bans and anti-immigration language have had a negative impact on the U.S.’s attraction for foreign visitors, in addition to a weaker dollar and heightened security measures.

“It’s not a reach to say the rhetoric and policies of this administration are affecting sentiment around the world, creating antipathy toward the U.S. and affecting travel behavior,“ Adam Sacks, the president of Tourism Economics, told The New York Times.”

Link via MetaFilter.

“We were frozen out,” said Knowles.

The Washington Post: Nearly all members of National Park Service advisory panel resign in frustration.

“More than three-quarters of the members of a federally chartered board advising the National Park Service have quit out of frustration that Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke had refused to meet with them or convene a single meeting last year.

The resignation of 10 out of 12 National Park System Advisory Board members leaves the federal government without a functioning body to designate national historic or natural landmarks. It also underscores the extent to which federal advisory bodies have become marginalized under the Trump administration.”

Update:
NPR: Majority Of National Park Service Board Resigns, Citing Administration Indifference.

“”The President still hasn’t nominated a director for the National Park Service and Secretary Zinke has proposed tripling entrance fees at our most popular national parks,” [Washington Sen. Maria Cantwell] said. “His disregard of the advisory board is just another example of why he has earned an ‘F’ in stewardship.”

“To not have any meetings, to not have their phone calls returned, to not have any opportunity to have an audience with the officials at the interior department is really a slap in the face and I think sometimes you have to make a statement,” Sally Jewell, the secretary of the interior during President Obama’s second term, told NPR’s Here and Now on Wednesday.

“They were being ignored, and I have to believe that’s consistent with what this administration has done with other advisory boards and councils in other agencies, as well,” she said.

Since taking office, President Trump has sought to roll back protections of national parks and public lands under the auspices of the Department of the Interior. The administration has ordered a dramatic downsizing of two massive national monuments in Utah and has announced plans to open up oil drilling in protected areas of the Arctic and the Atlantic.

“If we lose the people with the knowledge and the ability to educate the next generation of young people, to appreciate our history, our culture, our natural world,” Jewell said, “then we lose the value of the national parks.””

“An old tongue’s new tricks”

The Economist: The strange reinvention of Icelandic. “A language both ancient and modern.”

“In perhaps their most famous example of purist creativity, when a word for computer was needed in the 1960s, the planners coined tölva, combining tala (“number“ ) and völva, an old word for prophetess. When doctors started talking about AIDS using the English acronym rather than its long, literal Icelandic translation, heilkenni áunnins ónæmisbrests [spoken], the committee coined two shorter alternatives: alnæmi [spoken], something like “all-susceptibility“ , and eyðni, which sounds like the English term, but comes from the Icelandic eyða, meaning “to destroy“ . When Icelanders started saying “podcast“ , the council quickly responded with hlaðvarp [spoken], from roots meaning “charge“ (squint and you can see hlaða as a distant cousin to “load“ ) and “throw“ .”