Early on the morning of September 1, Roz Savage became the first woman to row, alone, from California to Hawaii. The voyage of 2,600 miles took her 99 days, 8 hours and 55 minutes. During the trip she was in surprisingly regular contact with the outside world, equipped with high-tech gear including a satellite phone, iPod loaded with audiobooks, water-proof speakers, video/still camera, and a solar panel rig to power everything (read more about the boat and the gear). In total, Savage packed a reported $80,000 of electronic equipment on the journey, which made it possible (at a cost of $1.50/min via the satellite phone) to update her blog, including photos and even videos, from the middle of the Pacific.

But the media coverage from her boat didn’t end with text, photos, or even video. Savage managed to record forty podcasts (iTunes link) from the water as well. They’re well worth a listen (despite the occasional satellite phone connection problems), and are sponsored by Audible (who also provided her with the audiobooks she listened to on the journey). It’s an amazing thing being able to keep in touch, at least via this technological remove, with a person who’s on a solo journey across the ocean.

Here are some highlights from Savage’s blog:

(more…)

Small town Americans love their harvest festivals. My town just finished one, so I’ve satisfied my jones for Polish sausage and funnel cake for another year. Here are eight more you may want to check out in the weeks ahead.

Great Outhouse Blowout

The Great Outhouse Blowout and Race 2008 at Penn’s Store in Gravel Switch, Kentucky will be September 6th. The event began as a dedication of the first outhouse at the store in 1992. The outhouse race draws entrants from all over the country. A racing outhouse must be a certain size and have a seat with a hole. Up to five people can push or pull the outhouse, but one person must be seated inside. The Outhouse Blowout also has musical performances and a car show.

International Goat Days Festival

International Goat Days in Millington, Tennessee runs September 12th through the 14th. Bring your goat for the chariot races, the goat milking competition, and the best-dressed goat contest!

(more…)

The American Museum of Natural History has posted an online exhibit called Picturing the Museum. Included are a series of archival photos showing old exhibits at their museum, the most interesting (to me, anyway) being a bunch of behind-the-scenes photos showing the staff putting together exhibits. The photos are all over the map, but in general are a fascinating look at the making of great exhibits. Some of the photos are picturesque, like this shot of “Sister and Sammy Keith collecting tadpoles for Trailside Museum” from 1931:

There are also old-timey pictures like this one, entitled “Museum staff assembling bones of dinosaur fore limb for exhibition,” and taken in 1916 (check out the mustaches on these dudes):

(more…)

How did Neal Stephenson do it? Way back in 1996, he managed to make what’s clearly the most boring subject on Earth — transcontinental data cable installation — into a clever, engaging 56-page article. Well, he probably did in the same way he made cryptography exciting in Cryptonomicon and a dystopian corporate future funny in Snow Crash: by being a super smart guy writing about stuff that’s actually interesting, beneath its veneer of super-dorkitude.

In Mother Earth Mother Board, Stephenson declares himself the “hacker tourist,” as he “ventures forth across the wide and wondrous meatspace of three continents, chronicling the laying of the longest wire on Earth.” Discussed: the insane past, present, and future of data cables; mastery of slack; Supreme Ninja Hacker Mage Lords; more. Here are some selected bits from the article:

[On the laying of redundant “FLAG” cables to connect the same points.] This raises questions. The questions turn out to have interesting answers. I’ll summarize them first and then go into detail.

Q: Why bother running two widely separated routes over the Malay Peninsula?

A: Because Thailand, like everywhere else in the world, is full of idiots with backhoes.

Q: Isn’t that a pain in the ass?

A: You have no idea.

Q: Why not just go south around Singapore and keep the cable in the water, then?

A: Because Singapore is controlled by the enemy.

Q: Who is the enemy?

A: FLAG’s enemies are legion. …

Dr. Wildman Whitehouse and his 5-foot-long induction coils were the first hazard to destroy a submarine cable but hardly the last. It sometimes seems as though every force of nature, every flaw in the human character, and every biological organism on the planet is engaged in a competition to see which can sever the most cables. The Museum of Submarine Telegraphy in Porthcurno, England, has a display of wrecked cables bracketed to a slab of wood. Each is labeled with its cause of failure, some of which sound dramatic, some cryptic, some both: trawler maul, spewed core, intermittent disconnection, strained core, teredo worms, crab’s nest, perished core, fish bite, even “spliced by Italians.” The teredo worm is like a science fiction creature, a bivalve with a rasp-edged shell that it uses like a buzz saw to cut through wood - or through submarine cables. Cable companies learned the hard way, early on, that it likes to eat gutta-percha, and subsequent cables received a helical wrapping of copper tape to stop it. …

In 1870, a new cable was laid between England and France, and Napoleon III used it to send a congratulatory message to Queen Victoria. Hours later, a French fisherman hauled the cable up into his boat, identified it as either the tail of a sea monster or a new species of gold-bearing seaweed, and cut off a chunk to take home. Thus was inaugurated an almost incredibly hostile relationship between the cable industry and fishermen. Almost anyone in the cable business will be glad, even eager, to tell you that since 1870 the intelligence and civic responsibility of fisherman have only degraded. Fishermen, for their part, tend to see everyone in the cable business as hard-hearted bluebloods out to screw the common man. …

I encourage you — no, I urge you — to go read Stephenson’s essay. Print it out, block out a few hours, and prepare for some wonderfully geeky edutainment. (Note: above I’ve linked to the printer-friendly version; there’s also a standard version, but it requires clicking “next” 56 times.)

The USA’s Uncle Sam is a big man. He’s almost always depicted as larger than life. And you’ll find him all over the country!

The Magic Forest amusement park in Lake George, New York displays what they call The World’s Largest Uncle Sam in the parking lot. He’s 38 feet tall, which is not the tallest, but he is pretty big.

There was once a chain of restaurants in Toledo, Ohio named Uncle Sam’s. The business died out, but not before three huge Uncle Sams were commissioned and built. Two of these have since left Ohio. A 42-feet-tall Uncle Sam stands in front of 23 Fuel Stop in Ottawa Lake, Michigan, where he beckons patrons to come inside and buy fireworks.

Another of the Toledo Sams was sold on eBay and went Hatch, New Mexico in 2006. The owner said he was going to place the statue in front of a business, but two years later, he’s still flat on his back.

(more…)

My adventures last weekend in Memphis started with a tour of the Peabody Hotel, chronicled here yesterday. After that tour, we, a group of twelve adults and fourteen children, walked a block or so over to historic Beale Street. By noon, there were already people partying in the street and live music coming from all directions. We enjoyed lunch at the Hard Rock Cafe and shopped for souvenirs at Schwab’s.

I asked the kids if they wanted to see the National Civil Rights Museum. Several said no, and one asked, “What’s that?” I said it was the hotel where Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. They changed their minds immediately! The word “museum” sounds like a real bummer when you’re eleven years old, but they all knew who Martin Luther King, Jr. was.

From this angle, you’d never know the hotel is now a museum. It looks pretty much the same as it did in the 60s. But step inside, and there’s so much much more.
(more…)

I went to a reunion last weekend of six families who met each other in China when we adopted daughters through the same agency. That was June of 1998. Those six babies are turning eleven now, and the families have grown to a total of 13 children from China, India, and Mongolia.

The girls were just happy to see each other, but there are a lot of fun things to do in Memphis, no matter what your age.

Saturday we visited the beautiful historic Peabody Hotel. We arrived in plenty of time to witness the arrival of the Peabody Ducks. Every day they are brought down from the penthouse at 11AM sharp. They swim in the lobby fountain until 5PM, when they retire to their suite.

John, the Duckmaster graciously welcomed our group of over two dozen, as well as the rest of the crowd.

(more…)

Wow. So I visited the House on the Rock in Spring Green, Wis., this weekend and it was easily the most frightening place I’ve ever been. And I only saw part of it. I guess I don’t know what I was expecting… Spring Green is the home of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin, so I suppose I was thinking of something more along those lines – a really architecturally interesting house. And I guess it was. But the architecture is overpowered by the enormous, bizarre collection of crap within its walls. My friend Mikaela described it as “a garage sale held by mental patients.” It’s a pretty fair assessment, except the stuff isn’t for sale.

This is a hard article to write because it’s difficult to describe exactly how horrifying, creepy and bizarre this place is. I can tell you all I want and be as descriptive as humanly possible and show you any number of pictures, and still it’s not going to adequately portray the Creepy. But I will try.
(more…)

“Lizzie Borden took an axe and gave her mother forty whacks. When she saw what she had done, she gave her father forty-one.”

With a great little ditty like that, how could I not stop by the Lizzie Borden house when I visited Boston/Providence last weekend? Thanks to your fabulous suggestions, it made the list of things to do on our little extended weekend vacation.

I felt kind of bad about dragging my friends to a maybe-haunted house where a possible psychopath might have killed her parents, especially since we only had a couple of days in the area (and the Boston-Providence area is obviously not lacking in things to do). But it turns out that I wasn’t the only one itching to see it – our lovely hosts Sam and Kylie had been meaning to get there ever since they moved to the area. By the way, if I mentioned her in the story, Kylie wanted to me to note that she is a great dancer. Just so you know.

Anyway, now I had justification, so we took off on Sunday morning (is that sacrilegious?) and made it to Fall River around noon. For those of you unfamiliar with the infamy of Fall River and Lizzie Borden, here’s the abbreviated story:
(more…)

Dreaming of a remote island where you can really get away from it all? So far away that you may never (be able to) come back? This week, we’ll take you on brief tours of five prime vacation non-destinations. Before starting, you might want to fire up Google Earth, just so you’ll know to get back home.

The Commander Islands

If you center your Google Earth screen at 54 degrees, 59 minutes north and 166 degrees, 17 minutes east, you’ll look down on Bering Island in the Commander archipelago off Kamchatka Peninsula. Although part of Russia, the Commander Islands are geologically an extension of Alaska’s Aleutian Islands. The gap between the Commanders and the rest of the Aleutians is such, however, that the Aleuts, the indigenous marine hunters of the north Pacific, never made it the islands – nor did anyone else until the 1700s. As a result, this little archipelago formed the last redoubt of Steller’s Sea Cow, a three ton, 25-foot long, kelp-grazing relative of the manatee. By 1768, 27 years after the islands’ discovery by Vitus Bering, these floating blubber balls had been driven into extinctions by rapacious sailors, fur traders and seal hunters.
Times have changed, and now most of the region lies within the Komandorsky Nature Reserve, noted for its vast populations of sea birds and marine mammals (several of Steller’s other creatures – such as his sea lion, sea eagle, and eider – are still there in numbers). The 750 residents of the islands are concentrated in the single settlement of Nikolskoye, which looks none too inviting. Zoom in, setting your pointer at 55 11’42 N and 156 59’38 east, and take at look at this “village’s” forlorn setting and industrial-style buildings.

Not a single tree grows in Nikolskoye, or the rest of the archipelago, for that matter. “Bleak” is an apt descriptor. But then so too is “interesting.” Check out, for example, the odd, linear feature on Bering Island’s northern tip (55 21’47 N; 156 58’02 east). Know what it is? If so, please enlighten the rest of us!

UP NEXT: The Commander Islands (and why you don’t want to go there) And if you missed yesterday’s post on the Andaman Islands, click here.

Guest Blogstar Martin W. Lewis is lecturer in international history and director of the program in International Relations at Stanford University. He’s also one of Mangesh’s favorite professors!