photo from Ken Rotberg, Delray Beach, Florida
I am always intrigued by the urban art “interventions” of the Spanish art performance collective Luzinterruptus. Their latest piece titled “Plastic Garbage Guarding the Museum” is a large scale installation consisting of thousands of multicolored plastic shopping bags inflated with air, internally lit and piled in dumpsters.
The work was commissioned by Winterthur, Switzerland‘s Gewerbemuseum to underscore the environmental impact of Europe’s conspicuous consumption as part of a series called “Oh, Plastiksack!”.
The inauguration of the piece last month included a street party where bag “balloons’ were distributed to be paraded through town.
If you’re a travel geek, or just a glutton for punishment, you don’t want to miss out on the always entertaining website Airline Meals. Curated for over a decade by an anonymous website designer from Rotterdam, this curiously engaging website offers more than 25,000 photographs of airline meals from more than 600 different air carriers around the world. Along with the intriguing photos, the site also provides information on food in airport lounges, airport restaurant availability, a menu card archive and even behind the scenes reports on international airline catering companies.
Beyond the peculiar food offerings, my favorite aspects of Airline Meals are actually nonfood related. The site also has marvelous archives of historic airline advertisements and aviation related photographs from the 20th century.
The brand new free London Official City Guide app for iPhone and Android keeps you up to date with the hottest events, outstanding attractions and the must see recommendations for things to do across London. You can also quickly find free events and places to go, and be the first to know about secret events and London offers with the special alerts. The app also features all of the Mayor of London’s free events throughout this summer like no other, from London’s largest ever free outdoor arts festival to contemporary dance and opera performed in unusual locations across London. You can even follow the free Discovery Trails while strolling along some of London’s most scenic streets
Download the London Official City Guide App now from Google Play or the Apple app store. The London Official City Guide App is brought to you by the Mayor of London.
Now that we are immersed in the quadrennial celebration of all things sport, it may be an appropriate moment to stop and examine the true costs of all this hoopla. After seeing exactly what the 2012 Olympic Games is costing London and the British taxpayers, other cities may have second thoughts about bidding on future Olympics. You can certainly build a lot of schools, hospitals, parks, community centers and bridges for $14.6 billion. What would you prefer your tax payments funded ?
“Cities at night may be one of the most beautiful consequences of humanity”
Between 2002 and 2008, astronaut Don Pettit and his colleagues on the International Space Station took more than 4,000 extraordinary photographic images of the world’s great cities at night. Pettit narrates this amazing video orbital tour of the world starting with the city of Zurich, Switzerland. Who knew that Japanese cities have a signature blue glow when viewed from space, or that Hong Kong looks like a dragon from above.
London has many unique features, but few are aware that it’s the only city in Europe that can boast a railway line for the dead. The little-known London Necropolis Railway was constructed in the mid-19th century by the London Necropolis and National Mausoleum Company to serve their own Brookwood Cemetery, which is located twenty-five miles from the city in Surrey.
The London Necropolis Railway Station opened in 1854 near London’s famed Waterloo Station. Trains carried both caskets and mourners directly to the cemetery grounds. In the always class-conscious 19th century England, even the cemetery train had First, Second and Third Class carriages for the living and the dead passengers. At Brokwood Cemetery there were even separate stations for Anglicans and non-believers.
In 1900, a new London station was built for the railway of the dead on Westminster Bridge Road. Sadly, the station sustained serious damage during an April 1941 German bombing raid. The historic station was closed and never repaired. Today, the station entrance still stands, but few passersby recognize its significance.
The A47 Mobile Library is a book mobile that travels around Mexico City. Funded by the nonprofit alumnos47 foundation, the A47 carries 1500 books and is large enough to accommodate small groups for workshops, lectures, book groups or just to browse the mobile library shelves. The cleverly designed bookmobile is built on a Mercedes Benz freightliner frame.
It may come as a surprise that purchasers of travel guidebooks in both the U.S. and the U.K. still prefer traditional print books to digital editions. That is according to the Bowker organization, which provides publishing and information management services to libraries, retailers and publishers. The goal of Bowker’s research study was to help publishers of travel guidebooks better understand consumer buying habits and trends.
The study also found that travelers are using social media networks mainly for travel experience and photo sharing, but not so much for trip planning. Another unexpected result of the research showed that U.K. travelers tend to use travel apps more than U.S. travelers, and that those apps tend to come from non-travel guidebook publishers.
So don’t ditch those Lonely Planets or Let’s Go Europe guidebooks just yet. You can see the entire study on the Bowker U.S. website.
The nonprofit publishing house The Library of America was created in 1979 with seed 
money from the National Endowment for the Humani1ties and the Ford Foundation. Their ongoing mission is to preserve the cultural heritage of American writing and publishing. The LOA reissues American literary classics and overlooked treasures in authoritative editions based on scholarly research.
The LOA recently launched a neat online companion to their 1950s Science Fiction Golden Era Collection, with cover art, author interviews and terrific articles on classic books by the likes of Neil Gaiman, William Gibson and Connie Willis
.
