UC Irvine history professor and World Hum contributor Jeffrey Wasserstrom is determined to pump you up—intellectually speaking—for the Olympic Games. Last November, we noted his suggested reading list, which included no fewer than 12 books.
It’s all in Names on the Land, George Rippey Stewart’s soon-to-be-reissued 1945 book about how America’s “creeks and valleys, rivers and mountains, streets and schools, towns and cities, counties and states, the country and continent itself” were named. In Slate, Matt Weiland calls the tome “a masterpiece of American writing and American history.” Among the tidbits he highlights: “The original name proposed for the state that became New Jersey was Albania.”
Related on World Hum:
* What’s in a Place Name?
* Esquire Complains About Hotel Bar Names
Consider the numbers: By 2020, it’s estimated that 2 billion people worldwide will be learning or using English, yet only 15 percent of them will be native speakers. Thus, according to an intriguing story by Michael Erard in Wired, English will evolve, with pieces of Chinglish, Singlish and other mash-ups native speakers often poke fun at comprising large chunks of the world’s most dominant language. The fracturing isn’t unique. For instance, see: Latin.
In Chicago. In 1930. Gene Weingarten’s story, which chronicled what happened when “internationally acclaimed virtuoso” Joshua Bell busked for 43 minutes at the L’Enfant Plaza metro station in Washington D.C., unknowingly covered ground already trod in the Windy City.
Got pre-flight jitters? Just light up a joint in the airport and you’ll be ready to go. That’s what a Colorado-based group called SAFER (Safer Alternative For Enjoyable Recreation) is proposing, according to The Economist’s Gulliver blog. The folks at SAFER are advocating the creation of a toking lounge at Denver International Airport, pointing to recent cases of alleged alcohol-induced passenger belligerence as part of their argument. In the unlikely event that SAFER gets its way, there will be a lot more people misplacing their boarding passes during layovers in Denver.
Related on World Hum:
* Nine Great Ways to Get Thrown Off an Airplane
Seriously. Archaeologists and others are worried that surging tourism on Easter Island is bad news for the island’s iconic Moais. We noted that, in March, a Finnish tourist cut an earlobe off one head. It turns out that’s but one of many threats to the big stone heads. “More tourism, more deterioration. More visitors, more loss,” an archaeologist tells the AP.
Related on World Hum:
* Easter Island: Where the Roads Diverged
Photo by individuo via Flickr, (Creative Commons).
Historical sites from the temples of Angkor Wat in Cambodia to the Parthenon in Athens are under siege from bacteria, which are blackening, cracking and defacing monuments, The New York Times reports. Can scientists stop them? Many are optimistic, others not so much. “We have to accept that at some moment [the monuments] will disappear,” said Thomas Warscheid, a geomicrobiologist based in Germany. “But we know a lot about how to conserve them for the next 20, 30 years.”
Photo by gbaku via Flickr (Creative Commons).
What does it mean when a world-class city like Rome looks to a big budget movie with a big American star to boost tourism? And what if that movie, “Angels and Demons,” the prequel to “The Da Vinci Code,” allegedly undermines the Roman Catholic Church? As Tom Hanks and company finish filming the movie based on Dan Brown’s book, those questions are being debated in Rome—and in the pages of the New York Times.
Related on World Hum:
* Travel Writers and the ‘City Movies’ They Love
* Move Over, Frodo: ‘Sex and the City’ Tourism Takes Off
* Did ‘Easy Rider’ Get the South All Wrong?
Forgoing a car or taxi (and its fumes) in favor of public transportation, walking or biking is one way you can green your vacation, says Grist magazine. Other tips include going on service-oriented vacations to work on an environmental project, buying locally-made goods (do those Greek warrior booties say “Made in China”?) and exploring an area near your hometown rather than on the other side of the world.
Emily Bazelon admits that she’s not one for exposing her kids to heavy cultural programming on vacation—most of the time. But, she writes in Slate’s summer vacation special issue, “on this particular Sunday, I was also feeling the prick of inadvertent peer pressure: a friend’s offhand comment that her kids had been to the FDR Memorial more times than she could count. Whereas mine had been there never.” The resulting field trip has mixed results—and Bazelon shares some lessons learned in her essay.
Photo by jimbowen0306 via Flickr (Creative Commons)
