Don’t be a Tourist Mini Guide to Belgium

Belgium gave us Audrey Hepburn, great comic books and the Communist Manifesto. It’s barely the size of New Jersey but it produces more than 220,000 tons of chocolate per annum and it’s home to about 125 breweries. And those are just the fun facts. Cooler than you think, stranger than you think and more impressive…

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Where they make the Machines from Jules Verne’s Dreams

Behind the walls of an old shipyard’s warehouse in Nantes, a French troupe of artisans has been welding and hammering and carving away at something unprecedented for twenty years, building a strange mechanical universe you thought only existed in the pages of a Jules Verne novel, or in the sketchbooks of Leonard Da Vinci. Celebrating…

13 Things I Found on the Internet Today (Vol. CCCLXII)

1. A rain forest. Inside a volcano. With a lake at the very bottom. Location: Terceira Island, Azores Archipelago, Portugal. Found on the instagram account of Nate Dodge. 2. The Sweet Nostalgia of Opening Day at Disneyland, 1955 Full photostory on The Atlantic. 3. Acceptable and unacceptable hair styles for men from The Disney Look (1977) Found on…

The Tour de France is a Beautiful Mess and Maybe that’s How it Should Be

For a long time, I didn’t really “get” the appeal of the Tour de France. A bunch of men in spandex torturing themselves on two wheels, each producing enough sweat to flush a toilet 39 times? (That was one of the more unusual statistics I found floating around out there). And how does anyone take…

Drink and Dive into Europe’s Underwater Wine cellars

Nearly a decade ago, south of the Aland archipelago, between Sweden and Finland, a 200 year-old shipwreck was discovered to be holding 168 sealed bottles of Veuve Cliquot produced between 1839 and 1841 at the bottom of the sea. Divers had the first taste, and found that the wine was not only drinkable, but good; dare…

If He likes the Way You Think, You Can Borrow his Private Island for Free

This time next summer, how would you feel about escaping to your own private island? Having the space to think, work on a few ideas … ya know, generally soak up all the inspiration that can be soaked from living on your own goddamn island for an entire week. Such an opportunity exists, friend, and…

13 Things I Found on the Internet Today (Vol. CCCLXI)

1. A vintage trailer, complete with a 1955 BMW Isetta micro-car The BMW Isetta became the world’s first mass-production car to achieve a fuel consumption of 3 L/100 km. It was the top-selling single-cylinder car in the world, with 161,728 units sold. Found on Vintage Camping. 2. The Man with the Golden Airline Ticket You might…

Celebrate 50 Years Since the Moon Landing with a Cheat Sheet of Mind-Blowing Moon Trivia

There’s a lot of interest in the Moon again lately and not just because this weekend marks the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing in 1969. Only 12 people have walked on the moon, and no one has been back since 1972, over four decades ago. If all goes well, Nasa has plans to return to…

Volunteering for Life on Mars, or Something Like it

Somewhere out in the Utah desert right now, there are a bunch of folks pretending to live on Mars. The simulated Martian habitat, known as the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS), is the closest you can get to the red planet here on earth, where science projects are created for space, and tasks that astronauts…

Don’t Be a Tourist in New York: The Soundtrack

Of course Don’t be a Tourist in New York comes with its own soundtrack! It’s less about the Franck Sinatra clichés, and more about the sounds of gritty New York in seventies and the folk singers that flocked to the East Village in the 1960s. You’ll also find plenty of talent born and bred in…