“Great poets feel into the future with most sensitive antennas, and live out ahead of us, a piece of future development, and yet unrealized potential. Poets and philosophers, if they do not sell out to please, but have the courage to be themselves, represent the most precious and dangerous models a culture can have. They don’t supply a ready-made set of duties and doctrines to be followed, but they show and teach the opposite: the path to individuality and personal conscience.” Hermann Hesse
I never had the opportunity to fly on the supersonic Concorde airliner, but I’m hoping to get a chance to travel on Boom Supersonic’s new Overture jet when the plane begins carrying passengers in a few years. While it’s not the “90 minutes from New York to Paris” that the band Steely Dan envisioned in the 70s, the supersonic airliner promises to cut transatlantic travel time by half. The airplane is able to travel at Mach 1.7, which is two times the speed of today’s fastest aircraft. It also has a nonstop range of 4,250 nautical miles and a cruising altitude of 60,000 feet.
This will make it possible to jet between New York City and London in 3.5 hours, in comparison to its current 5.5-hour flight. Alternatively, it could get between Seattle and Tokyo in 4.5 hours instead of eight-and-a-half hours.
Boom Supersonic’s Overture will use 100% sustainable aviation fuel (SAF). Its aerodynamic design of a tapered front that spans out towards its rear allows it to reduce drag and fuel consumption. It will also incorporate four wing-mounted engines that will essentially drastically reduce noise for passengers onboard flights.
A number of airlines, including United, have already placed orders for the supersonic jets which will hopefully be in service within six years.
I recently had the opportunity to road trip along the Mid-Atlantic coast of the U.S. in the states of Delaware, Maryland and Virginia. The highlight was a visit to Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge, on Assateague Island, which has stunning beaches, wildlife trails, and the famouswild Chincoteague ponies. These ponies and the annual Pony Penning Day are the subject of Marguerite Henry’s 1947 children’s book Misty of Chincoteague, which was made into the 1961 family film Misty, filmed on location. Legend has it that the feral ponies on Assateague are descendants of survivors of a Spanish galleon that sank on its way to Spain during a storm in 1750 off the east coast, but the likelihood is that they are actually descended from domesticated stock, brought to the island by Eastern Shore farmers in the 17th century to avoid fencing requirements and taxation.[
The area is stunningly beautiful, but the threats from the climate crisis and sea level rise are always present. I recently stumbled upon the haunting video below titled The Ballad of Holland Island House. The captivating animation chronicles the tragedy tell the true story of the last house standing on a sinking island in the Chesapeake Bay, the northern part of which is within Maryland, the southern portion within Virginia. Animator Lynn Tomlinson uses an intriguing animation technique using just a thin layer of oil-based clay.
The music is by Anna Roberts-Gevalt and Elizabeth LaPrelle – a perfect companion to the animation which produces a soulful and haunting view of the impact of sea-level rise. The words are told from the perspective of the house.
The Library of Short Stories is a website which compiles and share sout-of-copyright fiction for anyone to peruse. The site collects all types of short stories across various genres – you have your classic Conan Doyle, Dickens, Chekov, Hemingway and Poe. You can read stories on the website or download for free in various formats to save for later. It’s well worth a look.
For the most wild, yet most homely narrative which I am about to pen, I neither expect nor solicit belief. Mad indeed would I be to expect it, in a case where my very senses reject their own evidence. Yet, mad am I not – and very surely do I not dream. But to-morrow I die, and to-day I would unburthen my soul. My immediate purpose is to place before the world, plainly, succinctly, and without comment, a series of mere household events. In their consequences, these events have terrified – have tortured – have destroyed me. Yet I will not attempt to expound them. To me, they have presented little but Horror – to many they will seem less terrible than barroques. Hereafter, perhaps, some intellect may be found which will reduce my phantasm to the common-place – some intellect more calm, more logical, and far less excitable than my own, which will perceive, in the circumstances I detail with awe, nothing more than an ordinary succession of very natural causes and effects.
River Roads by Carl Sandburg
Let the crows go by hawking their caw and caw.
They have been swimming in midnights of coal mines somewhere.
Let ’em hawk their caw and caw.
Let the woodpecker drum and drum on a hickory stump.
He has been swimming in red and blue pools somewhere hundreds of years
And the blue has gone to his wings and the red has gone to his head.
Let his red head drum and drum.
Let the dark pools hold the birds in a looking-glass.
And if the pool wishes, let it shiver to the blur of many wings, old swimmers from old places.
Let the redwing streak a line of vermillion on the green wood lines.
And the mist along the river fix its purple in lines of a woman’s shawl on lazy shoulders.
It has been my good fortune to have traveled extensively throughout Switzerland by train. IMHO the Swiss railway network is unparalleled for its engineering and for the beauty of the geography that it covers. So, I was happy to learn that this month Switzerland is celebrating 175 years since the country’s railway linked two Swiss cities. In August 1847 a railway line was opened connecting the Swiss cities of Baden and Zurich. Since then the rail network has added more than 5,000 kilometers of track. Now, the Swiss broadcaster SRF is celebrating 175 years of the country’s railway network by taking you on a Journey Through the History of Swiss Railways.
SRF’s history of the Swiss railway includes a map (above) which shows the opening of new railway lines by year of construction. This map is accompanied by a graph which shows the length (in km) of railway lines opened in each year. From the animation of this map you can see that the golden era of the Swiss railway was in its first one hundred years. Since the 1920s further extensions to the railway in Switzerland have been fairly sporadic.
Claude Monet first discovered Venice in 1908 when he was 68 years old. The two months Monet spent there are documented in letters he and his wife Alice sent to friends and family in France. They tell of the highs and lows he experienced during his short visit and how he ultimately wished he’d travelled there as a much younger man.
Ann Agee, Sheboygan Men’s Room (detail, east wing men’s washroom), 1999; vitreous china and glaze. John Michael Kohler Arts Center Collection.
Over the years I’ve visited hundreds of museums in dozens of countries and I’ve seen my share of museum bathrooms. Many are unmemorable institutional facilities, but many are worthy design destinations. The American Alliance of Museums polled their members on their favorite museum bathrooms. Here are some of the highlights.
The winner of the unofficial poll was the Biophilic toilets at Longwood Gardens in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania. I’ve been there and they are spectacular.
My favorite museum facility has to be at the Hundertwasserhaus art museum in Vienna.
You can check out more of the entries by clicking here.
Even if you do not live in North America you are probably aware that the United States has been experiencing a wave of book bannings and attempts by a vocal neo-Fascist Christian Nationalist minority to censor both library books and school books. But this story out of Texas is particularly outrageous.
The book Life is So Good, co-written by George Dawson, is banned at George Dawson Middle School in Southlake, Texas. The same George Dawson who wrote this book is the George Dawson the school is named after.
The short video below underscores the irony of the ban on this particular book in this Texas community. NB: If the video fails to play in your email version of TBTP, please click here.
Travel Between The Pages 