Travel Archives – Page 10 of 28

April 1, 2023April 5, 2023

A is for Asia

There are few descriptive phrases that sum up a time and place as elegantly as “The Silk Road.” It is an idea specific to geography and historical era. Others terms–World War I, Manifest Destiny, the Roman Empire, or the Enlightenment–belong to a specific country or encompass a comparatively brief span of years. Even the Renaissance, as I found out in last year’s A to Z challenge, made a heavy impression mostly on a handful of places and was fairly localized to Italy and the coastal cities of Western Europe. Or take a place like the Fertile Crescent, which may have lasted centuries in the development of human processes, but it was really a spot, that convergence of the Tigris and the Euphrates.

In comparison, the Silk Road spread across a continent, and the biggest one at that. It began a few hundred years before the Common Era (BCE is the new way of saying minus zero year) and lasted into the era of colonization. To cover 26 posts on anything requires a vast stretch of subject.

September 25, 2022September 29, 2022

All the Unfit Kings and Riot Grrlz

It’s time to go back and see some live theater! Even if it’s on film.

We took a long weekend to trek up to Ashland for three plays, so if you’re thinking this is like free advertising for Oregon Shakespeare Festival, you’re probably right. But the performances were excellent, and all three have been filmed. If you can’t make the trek up to the rolling hills of the Rogue River Valley before the seasons ends, then you can watch the films live next weekend or on demand. Check out the options here.

My particular goal was to get my bingo card punched, which is to say that I had seen 36 of the 37 plays of Shakespeare and was only missing “King John.” (You’re going to point out that “The Two Noble Kinsmen” makes it 38 plays, and I’ll counter that it’s never staged and besides, John Fletcher co-wrote it. If you find a version of it somewhere, send me a link, and I’ll watch it. Meanwhile, I’m calling B-I-N-G-O.) And Shakespeare was his name-o!

Who Wants to Play a Weenie?

We were speculating as to why “King John” is almost never staged, when the history play that precedes it, “Richard III,” is done all the time It may be the nature of villainy in the central character. Even though Richard is one of the worst scoundrels that ever walked a stage, he controls his own destiny. He pillages, rapes, and murders with glee. A good actor will get the audience laughing at his roguish charm, while Richard woos his enemy’s widow or plans the assassination of the princes in the tower. Don’t believe me? Watch the Ian McKellen 1995 “Richard III.”

July 21, 2022July 25, 2022

Bones from Dinoland U.S.A.

Bones sinking like stones
All that we fought for
Homes, places we’ve grown
All of us are done for
And we live in a beautiful world
Yeah, we do, yeah, we do
“Don’t Panic” by Coldplay (1999)

King of the Terrible Lizards, New Mexico Museum of Natural History. Kajmeister photo.

Do we know everything about dinosaurs? What if they built cities out of rock that turned to the dust in which their bones lay? What if they wrote stories on parchment which disintegrated and scattered to the winds? We don’t know whether they spoke languages; their brains were too small–we assume–to do so. We know that some dinosaurs ate other dinosaurs based on the bones. That they walked upright, lived near rivers, protected their young, and covered all the continents, including Antarctica. Two hundred million years was a long time to flourish. Some of it is still a mystery.

Humans have only been discovering things about dinosaurs for about 200 hundred years (happy bicentennial Mary Ann Mantell!) There may be a lot more dino-history buried in those formations. We already know quite a lot from a relatively little, a lot to imagine from just a few bones. If a vertebrae is six feet tall, how big must the creature who carried it have been? (A: 75 ft long)