The price of popularity

Posted on January 9, 2023 by Brian D. Butler

The Shore

by Rob A. Mackenzie

It’s why the tourists arrive and why
Time Out called Leith “one of the world’s
coolest neighbourhoods”; why
the sky is permanently blue and the sun
flaunts the burnished stonework; why
a red light area with two habitations in 1980
had three Michelin restaurants
less than twenty years later; why
the employment exchange where Spud interviews
in Trainspotting is now a renowned
purveyor of luxury cakes; why
gastropubs flood the port in summer
with seats by the waterfront; why
Festival time in August means any blow-up paddling pool
becomes an Air B&B; why
the old men who’d drink pints
from early morning in the Duke’s Head
now drink alone in single rooms; why
the only people buying houses are landlords
and young folk who wear suits in their sleep; why
every third person seems to be an artist
and the shops are full of craft ale; why
the world needs more takeaway coffee,
more chia seeds and acai berries,
more variations on the poshburger; why
the Volunteer Arms, rebranded as The Mousetrap
and tastefully lit, maintains an air of rarefied menace
with every cocktail lifted to lips; why
a night moth’s wing on the other
side of the planet ripples its waters; why
waxwork Queen Victorias float into the Firth of Forth
like upended canoes; why
nine out of ten avocado pizza lovers voted Leith a global
centre of culinary excellence; why
southern consumers demanded
obligatory subtitles for people with accents; why
the path of the destitute is cleared for the president
before they re-elect him; why the locals
are moving to affordable hinterlands halfway
up the Himalayas; why
they’ll never return until the mountains
are levelled as a plain, why
the plains sprout an overwhelming abundance
and those left behind
no longer need to ask why.

 

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To Airbnb or not Airbnb

Posted on January 8, 2023 by Brian D. Butler

Like millions of other travelers, I have used the accommodation service with mostly positive results. Lately though, it seems that most stories about Airbnb range from negative to nightmarish. Still, Airbnb remains the most popular rental service in most markets.

Since its launch in 2008, Airbnb has morphed into one of the most popular travel and short-term accommodation apps on the market. In 2021 alone, there were more than 300 million booking made through the app. To visualize just how massive the Airbnb landscape has become in major cities, the graphic above, which was created by Preyash Shah, shows every single listing in New York, London, and Paris.

To make this graphic, Shah used September 2022 data from insideairbnb.com, a website that pulls data directly from the Airbnb app. Once collected, the raw data was then cleaned to include active listings only fitting a few key parameters:

  • Any listing that did not have a review in 2022 was removed
  • The most expensive listings were individually checked to ensure the listing price matched the actual historical price and removed if there was a major discrepancy. This is due to inactive listings that are extremely marked up instead of de-listed

After scrubbing the data, each city’s immediate metro area was left with roughly 20,000 listings. As the data shows, a majority of these listings were for entire apartments. Paris had the biggest share, with about 85% of listings for entire apartments rather than private or shared rooms. This is especially interesting considering that Paris has extremely strict regulations around short-term rentals and Airbnb usage, one being that an Airbnb rental must be someone’s primary residence.

 

Posted in apps, Europe, Hotels, Maps, Tech, Tourism, USA | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

I am not a Bot (but this is)

Posted on January 7, 2023 by Brian D. Butler

The Latest Bot is an online magazine that is compiled fully automatically by a bot. From the choice of subjects to advertisements, to the texts and photos. No human work is involved. According to the creators, it is an experiment on the impact of artificial intelligence on journalism.

I am not a Luddite, but I am uncomfortable with the onslaught of AI bots unsurping the role of journalists, authors, and artists. Still, I am fascinated by the technology and its applications. What do you think?

How it works

“This is a digital publication that utilizes natural language processing technology (openai and chatGPT technologies) to generate written content.

To generate the actual content of the articles, we start with the titles that have been generated by the algorithm. These titles serve as the jumping-off point for the chatbot to create the texts and images that will be included in the articles. To do this, the chatbot will use its natural language processing capabilities to understand the meaning and context of the titles, and then generate written content and images that are relevant and informative for the reader. The result is a fully-formed article that is ready to be published and shared with the magazine’s audience.

Yes, this text is also autogenerated.”

Posted in apps, Tech, Travel Writing, Writing | Tagged , | 3 Comments

As the world turns

Posted on January 6, 2023 by Brian D. Butler

Frequent vistors to Travel Between The Pages are well aware of my life-long fascination with globes and maps. As a young child, I was gifted a small globe much like the one above, albeit much less expensive and detailed, which sat on my bedside table. It was the first thing that I saw each morning and the last that I saw each night. My little globe inspired years of daydreaming about distant lands and a longing for travel. I recently was reminded of my little globe when I ran across a short promotional video (see below) from Bellerby & Co Globemakers.

“…we have a small team of highly trained Globemakers, painters, woodworkers and cartographers, all leaders in their field. Together we create the hand made globes that Bellerby & Co. has come to be recognised for. It is born from a belief that we never compromise. From the wooden and metal bases, to the artwork, the painting and map-making, each piece is expertly crafted using traditional and modern globe-making techniques, and is lovingly produced in our North London studio; each piece is an individual model of style and grandeur and our globes are works of art in their own right.”

https://youtu.be/b17q-NgC7EA

The video is just a vignette.  Here’s the story of Bellerby & Co Globemakers.

Posted in Art, Film, Maps, Tech, Tourism | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

Enough with the GOATs

Posted on January 5, 2023 by Brian D. Butler

It’s that time of the year when the faculty of Lake Superior State University releases an annual list of words that they say deserve to be “banished” from our vocabularies over “misuse, overuse and uselessness.”

“Our nominators insisted, and our Arts and Letters faculty judges concurred, that to decree the Banished Words List 2023 as the GOAT is tantamount to gaslighting. Does that make sense?” said Rodney S. Hanley, the university’s president, in a very serious statement announcing the new list.

“Irregardless, moving forward, it is what it is: an absolutely amazing inflection point of purposeless and ineptitude that overtakes so many mouths and fingers,” Hanley added.

Here’s the full list of the school’s banished words for this year:

  1. GOAT
  2. Inflection point
  3. Quiet quitting
  4. Gaslighting
  5. Moving forward
  6. Amazing
  7. Does that make sense?
  8. Irregardless
  9. Absolutely
  10. It is what it is
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In the midst of hate, I found there was, within me, an invincible love.

Posted on January 4, 2023 by Brian D. Butler

On this day in 1960, Albert Camus, French author, philospopher and journalist, died in an automobile accident at age 46. In his coat pocket lay an unused train ticket. Camus had intense Motorphobia (fear of automobiles), and thus avoided riding in cars as much as possible. Instead, he took trains everywhere, as much as he could. He had planned to travel by train with his wife and children, but at the last minute accepted his publisher’s request to travel with him by car. And so it goes.

“In the midst of hate, I found there was, within me, an invincible love.

In the midst of tears, I found there was, within me, an invincible smile.

In the midst of chaos, I found there was, within me, an invincible calm.

I realized, through it all, that…

In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.

And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back.”

Albert Camus, The Stranger

 

Posted in Books, Europe, Public Transport, Writing | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

A Library Is A Spaceship

Posted on January 3, 2023 by Brian D. Butler

I have been a fan of the wildly imaginative writing of Isaac Asimov since I was a child. Recently I ran across a charming story about the iconic sci-fi author and a letter that he wrote in 1971. He sent the message below to celebrate the opening of a new library in Troy, Michigan. His letter addressed the children of the Troy, Michigan as follows: “Congratulations on the new library, because it isn’t just a library. It is a space ship that will take you to the farthest reaches of the Universe, a time machine that will take you to the far past and the far future, a teacher that knows more than any human being, a friend that will amuse you and console you—and most of all, a gateway, to a better and happier and more useful life.”

 

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Running Into A New Year

Posted on January 2, 2023 by Brian D. Butler

Running Into A New Year

I am running into a new year
and the old years blow back
like a wind
that I catch in my hair
like strong fingers like
all my old promises and
it will be hard to let go
of what I said to myself
about myself
when I was sixteen and
twentysix and thirtysix
even thirtysix but
I am running into a new year
and i beg what I love and
I leave to forgive me

— Lucille Clifton (1936-2010)

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“The Best Things In Life Are Free”

Posted on January 1, 2023 by Brian D. Butler

Today copyrighted works from 1927 will enter the US public domain. They will be free for all to copy, share, and build upon. These include Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse and the final Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, the German science-fiction film Metropolis and Alfred Hitchcock’s first thriller, compositions by Louis Armstrong and Fats Waller, and a novelty song about ice cream.

Jennifer Jenkins of Duke University’s Center for the Public Domain has painstaking researched highlights from the coming year’s entrants, including many works of literature that Travel Between The Pages followers may be interested in reading.

  • Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
  • Arthur Conan Doyle, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes
  • Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop
  • Countee Cullen, Copper Sun
  • A. A. Milne, Now We Are Six, illustrations by E. H. Shepard
  • Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey
  • Ernest Hemingway, Men Without Women (collection of short stories)
  • William Faulkner, Mosquitoes
  • Agatha Christie, The Big Four
  • Edith Wharton, Twilight Sleep
  • Herbert Asbury, The Gangs of New York (the original 1927 publication)
  • Franklin W. Dixon (pseudonym), The Tower Treasure (the first Hardy Boys book)
  • Hermann Hesse, Der Steppenwolf (in the original German)
  • Franz Kafka, Amerika (in the original German)
  • Marcel Proust, Le Temps retrouvé (the final installment of In Search of Lost Time, in the original French)

These are just a handful of the thousands of books entering the public domain in 2023. There is a lot to celebrate: a modernist masterpiece, poetry from the Harlem Renaissance, children’s verses featuring Winnie-the-Pooh and other characters, and early works from Hemingway and Faulkner. Copyright will also expire over Arthur Conan Doyle’s final Sherlock Holmes stories.

You can check out the entire list at the Duke website.

 

Posted in Art, Books, Film, History, Music, Photography, Theater, USA, Writing | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Hymn to Time

Posted on December 31, 2022 by Brian D. Butler

HYMN TO TIME
by Ursula K. Le Guin

Time says “Let there be”
every moment and instantly
there is space and the radiance
of each bright galaxy.

And eyes beholding radiance.
And the gnats’ flickering dance.
And the seas’ expanse.
And death, and chance.

Time makes room
for going and coming home
and in time’s womb
begins all ending.

Time is being and being
time, it is all one thing,
the shining, the seeing,
the dark abounding.

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