“Reader tips help us know Oregon's travel secrets better after summer's ... - Oregonian” plus 4 more |
- Reader tips help us know Oregon's travel secrets better after summer's ... - Oregonian
- Evoking the romance of space travel, 1940s style - CNET News
- Travel and Tourism - Philippine Star Online
- State patrol investigating fatal hit and run in Oconee County - Anderson Independent-Mail
- Tropical Storm Ana's winds reach 40 mph - Herald Tribune
| Reader tips help us know Oregon's travel secrets better after summer's ... - Oregonian Posted: 15 Aug 2009 10:15 AM PDT Too bad I was working when tips from readers sent me to all those wineries this summer. OK, so I made sure the 2006 pinot noir harvest was a good year, but I wasn't enjoying myself, mind you. Strictly business! From the sands of Cape Kiwanda to the rim of Hells Canyon, I chased down a big chunk of Oregon during this summer's Send Terry on the Road series. As part of Oregon's 150th celebration, I traveled the state by going where readers told me to go. Nearly 350 readers posted comments, many loaded with multiple travel tips, on my blog at oregonlive.com/travel. Thousands more read along and viewed photos and videos from the journey. Along the way, I blogged about frogs carved from logs in Milton-Freewater, the pie lady of Manzanita, the ravenous octopus in Newport and the melon sellers of Hermiston. Zephyr the cockatiel at Sutherlin was pretty cool, too. And the lion? I think he was inviting me to join him for dinner at Wildlife Safari in Winston.That was one dining experience I declined. After 10 trips and dozens of stops since mid-May, I put together some sample itineraries of the best travel experiences Oregon has to offer. Look for them -- as well as the winner of a Central Oregon getaway for sending us a tip -- on Page T4. With three weeks left before school begins in earnest, followed by Oregon's usually spectacular autumn, there's ample time left this year for a really good road trip. Or two or three. So look for my travel recommendations, research those reader tips online, then build your own travel scheme. There's pinot waiting to be tasted. (Look on this site through Monday, Aug. 17, for the full package.) This blog post is part of my "Send Terry on the road'' summer series, in conjunction with visitcentraloregon.com and www.traveloregon.com, which is also running a promotion called the Oregon 150 Challenge. -- Terry Richard; terryrichard@news.oregonian.com  This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Evoking the romance of space travel, 1940s style - CNET News Posted: 15 Aug 2009 09:54 AM PDT  The Raygun Gothic Rocketship is a 1940s-era rococo rocket that Burning Man attendees will have a chance to climb through. They may even get to see it launch. (Credit: Raygun Gothic Rocketship)OAKLAND, Calif.--Want a trip back to the romanticism and innocence with which space travel was associated in the 1940s? Then get yourself to Burning Man, starting August 31 in Nevada's Black Rock Desert. That's where the Raygun Gothic Rocketship, a retro rocket "made" in 1944, will be on display for the thousands of participants at the annual countercultural arts festival to play in and around. In reality, of course, the rocket wasn't made in the 1940s; It's being made as we speak in a warehouse in a run-down part of Oakland, just across the bay from San Francisco. But don't bother telling the more than 60 artists, scientists, engineers, and others who are putting countless hours of their time and energy into creating the rocket ship that their narrative is fiction: they're having too much fun crafting that narrative as they go to listen to any naysayers. The project, which is led by artists Sean Orlando, David Shulman, and Nathaniel Taylor, is one of 25 that received funding from the Burning Man organization. It is almost certainly the only one that will take visitors back in time to a place where space travel wasn't beset by some of the real-life failures and inefficiencies of NASA and other space agencies, and the disappointments that can come from mixing politics with science. Rather, the Raygun Gothic Rocketship is pure whimsy, mixed, of course, with some serious research into what a rocket of this era and style would be like. For the most part, the rocket and many of its components were designed using a CAD program called SolidWorks, Orlando explained when I visited the warehouse Friday. In the real world, though, it will be a 40-foot-tall retro masterpiece, complete with 17-foot-tall legs and three main compartments rising another 23 feet in the air. Once installed in the desert, it will be attached to an adjacent 25-foot-tall gantry by a 10-foot bridge. Visitors will be able to climb up through the three compartments and then go down via the gantry. The plan, Orlando said, is to have a launch event on the evening of Friday, September 4. Prior to the event, a very, very loud siren will be set off to announce to the thousands of Burning Man participants that fueling is about to start, and then those participants will begin to gather outside a 500-foot safety perimeter. Come launch time, be prepared for some special surprises, Orlando suggested. Making the rocket Featuring a solid steel frame, the rocket will be skinned entirely in brushed aluminum. And befitting a Burning Man ethos of "do-it-yourself," every bit of that aluminum is being made in the warehouse in Oakland on a set of what are known as English wheels, contraptions that can shape the metal into pieces with the rounded edges necessary for making a rocket. It will feature 42 aluminum panels, as well as the three legs, and it will all be held together by thousands of rivets. All in all, complete with its rococo shape, the rocket will very much like look like what it's supposed to be: a spacecraft built 55 years ago that has traveled through time and found its way to 2009. Asked where it was built, Orlando and Shulman laughed and admitted they needed a little more work on their back story. Just above the legs will be a main compartment serving as the engine room, armory, and life and biosciences lab. Participants will be able to look down through the floor at the rocket's engine (see video below), which will feature six power cells, each of which will display a high-voltage lighting effect. That effect, courtesy of 12,000 volts of electricity, was crafted in conjunction with a professor from the department of engineering at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand.
Participants will be invited to climb through each of the three compartments and to explore the many displays they'll come across. The idea is to give visitors a sense of what such a rocket would be like inside. The second compartment will feature crew quarters, navigational and observational tools, and audio and video communications and scientific instruments. All of these things will be available for participants to play with. There will also be a telescope that participants will be able to look through for "deep scanning" of space. The idea there, said Shulman, is that crew members would need to look out into space to determine approach trajectories for when the rocket docks when it lands. Similarly, there will also be a probe launcher, which will fire off small rockets. Sticking with the narrative, the rockets are intended to travel one-to-two parsecs. Practically, they may fly three or four hundred feet, where they can be picked up by passersby, who, hopefully, will return them to the main rocket ship in exchange for small gifts.  The rocket features a telescope that crew members used to peer into space for docking. (Credit: Raygun Gothic Rocketship)At the top of the rocket is the cockpit, where a lovely pilot's chair will be installed. The chair will be made to rotate around, and allow the pilot to engage with the ship's flight controls. The pilot will have access to communications so that he (or she) can talk to those in the compartments below. For that, the team is utilizing 1930s and 1940s-era hand-cranked telephones. How the idea began I asked Orlando and Shulman how the idea for the Raygun Gothic Rocket ship began, and Orlando said that, from the beginning, they wanted to work on a retro rocket based on a romantic 1940s aesthetic. A big part of that, said Orlando, whose father was a NASA contractor, was building up a sense of the excitement and innocence around space travel that still existed in the 1930s and 1940s, when science fiction was "still very positive and wide-eyed" and people saw nearly unlimited potential for space. Added Shulman, the idea was to bring out that sense of wonder that perhaps went away a bit when the Cold War kicked in and politicians took the space program into another direction. And for participants who visit the rocket, Shulman said, the hope is that they will walk away with the feeling that they got to take part in a "real rocket from the 1940s." "We want it to be disorienting," Shulman said, "and create doubt: is it real, or is it not."  This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Travel and Tourism - Philippine Star Online Posted: 15 Aug 2009 09:03 AM PDT MANILA, Philippines - He was naked. Unmistakably, unabashedly, shockingly, completely naked. As I gaped at his nudity, he showed no sign of timidity or shame. He simply stood there, with his (to be completely fair to him) taut muscles and proud stature, oblivious to the fully-clothed world around him. I could see my own father and brother tinkering with their SLRs to get the perfect shot of him in all his naked glory. My mother and sister-in-law were posing in front of him with big smiles on their face. While everyone in the Italian piazza was excitedly clamoring around him with cameras to capture his nakedness, he remained totally unmoved. Shell-shocked as I was, I had to admit — he was gorgeous. A gorgeous piece of art, even if he wasn't the real thing. I was, of course, looking at Michaelangelo's famous sculpture "David" — or at least a copy of the sculpture on the steps of the Palazzo della Signoria in Florence. David is inescapable in this city — in the Gallery of the Academy (where the original David sculpture is), the Piazzale Michaelangelo (where another bronze David stands), little marble imitations being sold in the flea markets, even souvenir postcards bear David's manhood! Art is indeed everywhere in Italy, and its rich history remains preserved in its paintings, sculptures, cobblestone paths, buildings, and bridges. When you see all of these, your mind wanders back to the time when artists used canvases and marble blocks to capture landscapes, moments and emotions, and when families left their indelible mark using crests and coats-of-arms. In Palazzo della Signora in Florence for example, there was a beautiful collection of sculptures of mythological characters. Some of them were from popular Greek tales, like Perseus, proudly holding Medusa's severed head up for everyone to behold, and "Menelaus Supporting the Body of Patroclus," a sad and touching image from The Iliad. Even Poseidon, king of the ocean, had his marbled image in a fountain not far from them. The detail and workmanship of these pieces is wonderful. Their frozen states remain expressive and pregnant with meaning, and they leave a lasting impression on you. Aside from the works of art, the buildings and structures of decades and centuries ago are still around to reveal stories and histories. It's wonderful that they were able to maintain these edifices even as the modern world descended upon them. Milan's Galleria Vittorio Emmanuelle, whose construction began in 1865, houses several shops, cafés, even a McDonald's. The glass and iron ceilings and beautifully classic facades of this long arcade are just gorgeous, and their symmetry might make you miss the coats-of-arms of four major cities in Italy found on the floor: a red cross on the white ground for Milan, a wolf for Rome, a lily for Florence, and a bull for Turin. They surround the heraldic symbol for the Savoy family. Venice still has its canals and beautiful bridges as well, where we were able to hop on boats to get around. They weren't as fast as today's subways or buses, but we had more time to appreciate the beautiful old buildings we were passing, all of which seemed to float on water. We spotted "parking slots" for boats, singing boatmen entertaining paying guests on their gondolas, and bridges stretching over the canals. When we weren't on the water, we loved the little surprises that we found as we weaved through their maze of streets. We fell upon Murano shops, hole-in-the-wall restaurants, little plazas, gelato shops, and even fellow Filipinos who were up for a midnight chat. Yes, Italy's streets are lined with beauty and history waiting to be discovered. It's as unavoidable as David's nakedness in Florence — from the paintings of the great masters to the painstaking copies drawn on pavement with colored chalk, from the famous sculptures to the street performers dressed as sculptures. My family and I found ourselves scrambling for guidebooks from street corners and audio guides in the popular spots just to give us a better perspective on all the beauty standing before us. It's easy just to take pictures and let your eyes settle on all the art and architecture, but it becomes so much more meaningful if you find out the history behind it all. View previous articles from this author.  This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| State patrol investigating fatal hit and run in Oconee County - Anderson Independent-Mail Posted: 15 Aug 2009 09:46 AM PDT OCONEE COUNTY — A pedestrian is dead after being struck by a vehicle outside Westminster Friday night. The pedestrian was traveling west on U.S. 76/Long Creek Highway and was struck by a vehicle near Coffee Road around 10:40 p.m. Friday, according to Lance Cpl. Kathy Hiles of the South Carolina Highway Patrol. The vehicle then continued traveling west on U.S. 76 toward Westminster, Hiles said. Authorities did not have any information Saturday afternoon about the vehicle and as of that time had not released the name of the pedestrian. The vehicle likely received significant front-end damage in the collision, Hiles said. Anyone with information about the collision is asked to call the state patrol at (864) 260-2200. Check back with this Web site later for more information as it becomes available. There are no comments yet. Comments are meant to offer our readers a forum for thoughtful, robust debate about local issues. Comments are moderated, but you may find the content of the conversations offensive, objectionable or factually disputable.  This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Tropical Storm Ana's winds reach 40 mph - Herald Tribune Posted: 15 Aug 2009 08:56 AM PDT After weakening for about a day, the second tropical depression of the year finally turned into Tropical Storm Ana overnight. The National Hurricane Center predicts that Ana will remain a tropical storm as it reaches the upper Bahamas by Thursday morning. Beyond Thursday morning, most of the Florida Peninsula lies within the cone of uncertainty, a broad area where the storm has good chances of traveling. Ana has gained both strength and momentum and is expected to near the Leeward Islands later today, possibly prompting the National Hurricane Center to issue a tropical storm watch there. It is producing 40 mile-per-hour winds and traveling at a speed of about 16 miles per hour. According to the NHC's forecast discussion, Ana's future track and intensity are both uncertain. Conditions are good for the storm to grow stronger than forecast, as upper atmosphere winds from the west are expected to weaken. Official forecasters are predicting that it will remain a tropical storm, but some computer models turn it into a hurricane and others shrink it back to tropical depression status. The track of the storm depends a lot on its strength. If it weakens it will stay further west. If it strengthens more than forecast within the next few days, it likely will take a more northeastward turn, according to the forecast discussion. Right behind Ana is another large tropical wave that forecasters expect will turn into a tropical depression today, a system just shy of a tropical storm. Conditions are also good for that wave to eventually become Tropical Storm Bill, but it is still very far out to sea. Most forecasters on Friday expected that tropical wave to be the first named storm of the year. A large cluster of thunderstorms within a weak tropical wave is expected to move over the state today, bringing heavy rain this afternoon. That tropical wave has very slim chances of becoming an organized, circulating storm. All rights reserved. This copyrighted material may not be re-published without permission. Links are encouraged.
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