My father was a do-it-yourselfer, a master carpenter
probably better than Jesus as the Son-of-God's carpentry skills were
never well documented (but I'm sure the SOG had more important things
to do than building bird houses). I didn't take after either one. My
woodworking was plagued by bent over nails and my middle school shop
teacher, a large ruddy man bursting with blood pressure, said I did
rivits like “a girl.”
But the Maker Faire , sort of a Burning Man meets Martha Stewart
affair, grabbed what was left of the little boy in my soul, the urge to
build a Go Cart or blow up the neighbor's garbage can. This was not a
hangout for the tough-as-nails guys who hang out in the tool department
of Home Depot. Here the muse was as important as the monkey wrench.
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I am headed to Sri Lanka next week and
asked a mutual friend of mine and the late Arthur C. Clarke if it
would be possible pay Clarke a visit. "I'll try, but he is very weak", was the
reply. Clarke, of course, passed away yesterday. I spent a day in
1994 exploring the sandbox that is his mind while working on a
documentary on the future of travel.
Oh, we Americans
are a wild and crazy bunch: toiling hard and productively, spreading
democracy by day...partying hard by night. Or is it partying day and
night? According to a new report on travel trends, we Yanks are
binge drinking, G-string snapping "debaucherists," longing for
the eternal spring break.
This report, put out by the UK research
firm Euromonitor International, says the hot trend among the British
is traveling with pets. Western Europe likes Slow Travel (an analogy
to Slow Food) and South America "End of the World Tourism"
inspired by "March of the Penguins." For the Middle East it is
Halal or Islam-safe travel. But we North Americans are cut from a different
cloth. We pine for the lifestyles of the rich and vacuous, of Britney
and Kevin and the rest for whom life is one endless DUI. I'll admit
that I share the helpless anguish of millions of Americans about the
state of our Union and have entertained the notion that finding a pal
in Yukon Jack until Bush lets go of the football might be less toxic
than watching cable news, but is this a for-real trend or a
fashionable whack at US culture drawn from the backside of The Queen?
Talk about a holiday escape. A few years ago I flew from the real Bethlehem, in the Middle East, to Brazil's Bethlehem, a town called Belem at the mouth of the Amazon where after some Christmas shopping at a rather funky, politically-incorrect market, I began a jungly yuletide cruise. Have a look at a Flash video and some pictures.
I’m sure,
if you are over 18 you have spent some holiday season away from home. A
few years ago I flew to Frankfurt, Germany the day before US
Thanksgiving for a 1/2 hour business meeting. The meeting was a bust
and alone, in a terrible mood, on a bone-chilling afternoon I boarded a
train for Heidelberg, where the Student Prince was alive and quite
drunk.
