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Groovy barf bags designed for Virgin Atlantic/Source: Design for Chunks
The fear that passengers might be breathing contaminated air and getting sick on flights is one that won’t go away any time soon. Thank US Vice President Joe Biden – and the spectre of swine flu – for bringing the issue back into focus (Biden said on The Today Show, back in April, “When one person sneezes, it goes all the way through the aircraft”).
Biden’s comments caused quite a bit of upset in the airline industry which is already on the ropes in these desperate economic times.
James May, president and CEO of an industry group called the Air Transport Association, said Biden’s comments that people should avoid air travel in response to the H1N1 flu outbreak were “extremely disappointing.”
“The fact”, May said, “is that the air onboard a commercial aircraft is cleaner than that in most public buildings.”
Enter Dr. Tony Overfelt of Auburn University, who was interviewed on the matter by PolitiFact.com.
Overfelt said aircraft ventilation systems may actually reduce the risk of exposure to disease compared with other crowded places because they get about half their air from outside the plane and use efficient HEPA filters.
So far, so good. But now we have a new scare about breathing bad air. A recent news story from The Telegraph has revisited the fear that we passengers are breathing contaminated air when we fly. This time it’s not flu germs but toxins entering the cabin via the “bleed air” system used on modern aircraft.
The newspaper pinned its story on a survey of high levels of illness found among pilots and crew, with around one in seven airline staff saying they had had to take more than a month’s sick leave in the previous year.
You can catch flu anywhere, and it doesn’t help if you don’t follow basic hygiene, like washing your hands. Toxins are another matter entirely. It sounds like another hyped scare – and we humans love scary fairytales – but it is one we will try and get to the bottom of.
[picture: Gallo]
German beach tourists who have long been whipping boys for such crass behaviour as placing their towels on sun loungers – sometimes before dawn – to reserve them, and sparking a long-running low-intensity European conflagration, have won.
Thomas Cook, the travel company, is now – at 3 euros a day – offering German tourists the option of paying ahead for their loungers when they book package holidays. A beach umbrella is included in the price, says The Telegraph.
Thomas Cook says the idea is to stop the “beach towel wars” that often spill over into name-calling and frequent bouts of xenophobia, and we all know how things turned out in Europe the last time that got out of hand.
Anyway, times are tough in the travel business, the Germans have more money than most Europeans these days, so why not go after your market with something they cherish. Clever.
Not one Royal Bengal tiger has been spotted in the Panna National Park since January.
Panna, one of India’s 27 tiger reserves, was home to an estimated 24 tigers.
A century ago, there were an estimated 40 000 tigers in India. By 1988, poaching and hunting had whittled that number down to about 4 500.
Now, says The Telegraph, that number is closer to 1000.
One thousand wild tigers.
Of course, those who use medicines made from tiger parts are getting the blame. It’s true that the demand for medicine made from tigers remains robust in China, South Korea and Taiwan, and poachers – especially in a poor country like India – respond to this demand.
But the real problem for the wild tiger is that it has nowhere left to go. India’s population is reaching 1.2 billion. Go for a walk in an apparently remote part of most rural India and you will see people toiling on every horizon.
Tigers and humans are competing for the one resource that gets scarcer by the day: space. It’s a contest that only the tiger will lose.
Twelve years ago, US journalist Cory Meacham warned us in his book How The Tiger Lost Its Stripes that while the tiger itself is not in danger of extinction, the wild tiger is. It’s all about habitat.
There are plenty of tigers in zoos and captive breeding programmes, and, yes, in circuses. Tigers breed happily in captivity as well.
Meacham is not a zoologist and he is not a sentimental animal rights activist. His question is: how do you like your tiger? If wild, then you have a problem that no amount of anti-poaching is going to resolve if you don’t first solve the problem of human encroachment on its habitat.
If you don’t mind your tigers out of the wild, well then the chances are you and your descendents will get to see a real live Royal Bengal tiger. Just not in the wild.
Ryanair is to move some of its operations from its base at Stansted Airport north of London to Spain because the Spanish have decided to drop landing fees in an effort to keep tourism in the air.
Greece has also eliminated landing fees and other airports are apparently giving discounts to airlines to keep routes open and traffic flowing.
The British, on the other hand, are going ahead with plans to INCREASE air taxes. Which is why O’Leary says he’ll take his “movable assets” – his aircraft – elsewhere.
Photo: Terry Shean
Table Mountain has made it into the final round of the New 7 Wonders of Nature contest, beating the Atacama Desert in Chile, the Azure Window in Malta and the Rock of Aphrodite in Cyprus for a hot place on the shortlist.
The list of the world’s top 28 natural wonders were announced this week by the New7Wonders Foundation in Zurich, Switzerland.
The short list includes such heavyweight spectacles as the Amazon, the Angel Falls in Venezuela, the Grand Canyon, the Cliffs of Moher in Ireland, the Great Barrier Reef, Vietnam’s Halong Bay and the smoking volcano of Vesuvius.
The New7Wonders of Nature bid began in 2007 following a successful campaign to elect the man-made Official New 7 Wonders of the World in which over 100 million votes were cast.
From an initial selection of 440 sites in 220 countries, the choice has been whittled down to a shortlist of 77 sites and then subsequently to an official finalist candidate list of 28 sites.
Now it’s down to the voters who will cast an estimated 1 billion votes to choose the official New7Wonders of Nature. The final votes will be counted in 2011.
Democracy rules! So, does Table Mountain deserve this honour? Comments, please …
You can find out more about the New 7 Wonders of the world – or vote – here.
Take a look at these two photos. The first shows the railway dining car “Protea” on a fast express back in the day when dining cars were the centrepiece of South Africa’s crack passenger trains.
The second shows her as she is today, lying stripped, vandalised and dumped on a siding in Cape Town where Transnet’s “heritage” operation keeps its historic – and previously valuable – coaches. Read More…
A Saturn V blasts off. SOURCE: NASA
Lock up your daughters! Hide the animals! Get the shotguns – here comes a rocket!
The launch of the Saturn V that took the Apollo 11 astronauts to the moon must have been a spectacular sight.
The astronauts rode into space in a tiny capsule atop a 110m-high three-stage rocket packed with explosive fuel, the first stage punching them into space at an initial velocity of 9 920 km/h and burning 2 000 000 kilograms of propellant in the first 68km of flight.
Too bad we’ll never see that again, although a multiple rocket launch at the start of a world-changing ballistic missile attack would be pretty gripping to watch, if only for a short time.
However, I am told that the Space Shuttle launches are pretty damn fiery and earth-shaking and you CAN go and see them down at the Kennedy Space Center in balmy, happy Florida, USA.
Since the Space Shuttle is also an endangered animal – there are to be another seven Space Shuttle launches before the vehicles are retired – if you want to see one, go now.
There are a couple ways to see a launch. You can head off on your own to one of the recommended off-site viewing spots, or you can watch it on site at the Kennedy Space Center. A good option is to sign-up for a tour with an operator.
For a calendar of scheduled Space Shuttle and other rocket launches, click here.
Then go and chase some rockets.
In a moment of pure Orwellian drama, Britain’s Home Secretary, Alan Johnson, says the swine flu pandemic is a bigger threat to the United Kingdom than terrorism, even as British Airways, Virgin Atlantic and a number of UK cruise ship companies begin stopping people from travelling if they arrive at the boarding gate with flu-like symptoms.
Johnson told The Telegraph newspaper “we have been preparing for this for a long time. It came actually above terrorism as a threat to this country…”
The airlines are now demanding a fit-to-fly certificate from passengers if they have been turned away at the gate for health reasons.
The insurance companies have also indicated that they will not pay out to anyone who travels against official advice and falls ill while abroad.
Nice slideshow here on the world’s most expensive cities – and a couple of money-saving tips should you find yourself visiting any of them.
Of course, just about anywhere you travel on the Rand ranks as expensive these days. Except Thailand which is always pretty good value. Pity it’s so far away …
Jamie Neale is going to earn an estimated R1.3 million for wandering off into the Australian wilderness, without his cellphone, and getting lost.
Twelve days later and after A$100 000 had been expended on a massive search, he was found by two bushwalkers, dehydrated and half-dead.
This is a good time to remember the gory story about Aron Ralston, the hiker who went off alone down a remote canyon in Utah and then spent more than a week contemplating his imminent, slow and miserable death when he got an arm trapped under a 360 kilogram boulder.
Now, it’s a good thing that there are still people trying to disconnect from the grid and go off and have real life adventures – the cellphone generation really is missing out on life.
What’s not so good is that Neale has now signed a deal to sell his story to the media companies.
More worrying is the prospect of this prodigal son becoming a motivational speaker. We have already learned all we need to from Jamie Neale: don’t go off walking without your phone, and even better – if you’re not the outdoor type – stay home and drool in front of the TV.
What happened to Aron Ralston, you may wonder? Well, he paid for his mistake. After days of chipping away at the boulder with a knife and supplementing his rapidly decreasing water supply with his own urine, he eventually freed himself. First, though, he had to snap the bones in his trapped hand. Then, with his now blunt knife, he cut off his arm.