27. Astrophysicist, writer, artist. Michigan. Business inquiries: kaijunobiz@gmail.com
Alien-like chatter of the world’s deepest lake as photographer shares eerie sounds of newly-formed ice. Alexey Kolganov films himself skating on transparent ice of lake Baikal, as new cracks form under his skates
Bro that is literally nature telling you to stop
Lake Baikal is just like that
always something new with this fucking lake
My favorite thing is that Europe is spooky because it’s old and America is spooky because it’s big
“The difference between America and England is that Americans think 100 years is a long time, while the English think 100 miles is a long way.” –Earle Hitchner
A fave of mine was always the american tales where people freaked out because ‘someone died in this house’ and all the europeans would go ‘…Yes? That would be pretty much every house over 40 years old.’
‘…My school is older than your entire town.’
‘Sorry, you think *how far* is okay to travel for a shopping trip?’
*American looks up at the beams in a country pub* ‘Uh, this place has woodworm, isn’t that a bit unsafe?’ ‘Eh, the woodworm’s 400 years old, it’s holding those beams together.’
A few years ago when I was in college I did a summer program at Cambridge aimed specifically at Americans and Canadians, and my year it was all Americans and one Australian. We ended the program with a week in Wessex, and on the last day as we all piled onto the bus in Salisbury (or Bath? I can’t remember), the professors went to the front to warn us that we wouldn’t be making any stops unless absolutely necessary. We’re headed to Heathrow to drop off anyone flying off the same day, then back to Cambridge.
“All right, it’s going to be a long bus ride, so make sure you’re prepared for that.”
We all brace ourselves. A long bus ride? How long? We’re Americans; a long bus ride for us is a minimum of six hours with the double digits perfectly plausible. We can handle a twelve hour bus ride as long as we get a bathroom break.
The answer. “Two hours.”
Oh.
English people trying to travel around Australia and wildly underestimating distance are my favourite thing
a tour guide in France told my school group that a particular cathedral wouldn’t interest us much because “it’s not very old; only from the early 1600s”
to which we had to respond that it was still older than the oldest surviving European-style buildings in our country
China is both old and big. I had some Chinese colleagues over; we were discussing whether they wanted to see the Vasa ship (hugely expensive war ship which sank on it’s maiden voyage after 12 min). They asked if it was old, I said “not THAT old” (bearing in mind they were Chinese) “it’s from the 1500s.” To my surprise they still looked impressed, nodding enthusiatically. Then I realised I’d forgotten something: “…I mean it’s from the 1500s AFTER the birth of Christ” and they went “oh, AFTER…”.
My dad’s favorite quote from various tours in Italy was “Pay no attention to the tower – it was a [scornful tone] tenth century addition.”
My last boss was Chinese, and she said when her parents came to visit her from Beijing they pronounced Chicago “A very nice village.”
This post keeps getting better
When I was researching my family tree, I found reputable records all the way back to about 900AD (Scotland - I’m American) and even now I can hardly wrap my head around how long ago that was. Like anything older than 300 years to the Americans is ANCIENT and here I am sorting through church records almost 1100 years old like its nbd
Anonymous asked:
Tell us about the Edmund Fitzgerald?
Yee Haw lets go
The Edmund Fitzgerald was a gigantic freighter ship launched in 1958. At the time it was the largest ship on the Great Lakes and continues to be the largest ever ship sunk on them.
In 1975, she was carrying a load of ore to an island off the coast of Detroit from Wisconsin. She had to travel Lake Superior to get there.
The thing about the Great Lakes is that they’re lakes only by name. In every other aspect, they’re seas. They’re gigantic and angry and if I were to plop you down on the beach in front of one you would think you were facing an ocean.
Superior is the ‘angriest’. It’s the largest and deepest of the lakes. There’s legends about this lake that go back to the Chippewa and Ojibwe tribes about just how ruthless it is. “It never gives up her dead” is a common quote, made even more famous by the Gordon Lightfoot song “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”.
Anyway. November 10th, 1975. The Edmund Fitzgerald was trying to make Whitefish Bay when a storm struck the area. The winter months are especially cruel on the Great Lakes, considering they’re often subjected to the polar vortex.
Early November is a little early in the season for such a harsh storm to occur so it sort of took the ship by surprise. This particular storm had hurricane force winds and 35ft waves.
The thing was, the ship wasn’t alone, it was briefly in contact with the SS Arthur M. Anderson, another ship setting for Gary, Indiana. Throughout the afternoon the storm pummeled the Fitzgerald, while the Anderson couldn’t do much more but listen to their calls over the radio before, at around 7pm, they went completely dark.
The Fitzgerald never sent any maydays, technically, but the captain did report over the radio that “I have a bad list, lost both radars. And am taking heavy seas over the deck. One of the worst seas I’ve ever been in”. Note, this was a gigantic ship, the crew were very experienced, and hearing that from Cpt. Ernest M. McSorley, a man with over 40 years experience, is troubling. His last message to the Anderson was “We’re holding our own”.
Her entire crew of 29 perished, and no bodies were recovered. The exact cause of the sinking remains unknown, though many books, studies, and expeditions have examined it. They may have been swamped, suffered structural failure or topside damage, experienced wave shoaling, or a combo. The disaster is one of the best-known in the history of the Great Lakes. The ship currently rests in two pieces at the bottom of Lake Superior, 530ft deep.
The thing is, if it had just gone 15 more miles, something that would have taken less than an hour at the ship’s speed, it would have made Whitefish Bay. It wouldn’t have sunk.
It’s a story I grew up hearing every year as a Michigander. Our school played documentaries every year. In the vast world history of shipwrecks, it’s not much. It wasn’t a Titanic level sinking by any means, but every kid knows the story. Every year, the Mariners’ Church in Detroit rings its bell 29 times.
"lake michigan is a vibe right now" (@swoodlife ig)
List that under both “nature is powerfully beautiful” and “horrifying new ways to die.”
Totally Lost is a is an open and evolving project: a photographic and video research throughout Europe to discover, survey and map the abandoned architectural heritage of the Totalitarian Regimes of the 20th century in Europe.
There are many buildings of great historical value which lie neglected all over Europe: institutional buildings, dwellings, monuments, bunkers, schools, etc. These places, once the ideologies that produced them disappeared, become the starting point of a visual research between architecture and memory, that investigates their relationship with the contemporary world.
Through the lenses of photographers, video makers and urban explorers Totally Lost aims at showing how these places represent fragments to be reconnected in a network of new meanings to give, new contents to generate and new potential to value. The path and the participation become very sense of the project and forces us not to close definitively with the past, but to understand how bring these places into the future.
Photographs and videos are like a filter, that lets us question ourselves about things still burdened by memory.
Images and text via
How quickly do you think a war would start if England started referring to Wales as “England to the left”, Scotland as “England to the north” and Ireland as “More left England”
I think a lot of people assume in their heads that Europe is further south than it is because it’s so warm there in comparison to say, Siberia or northern Canada.
Well why is Europe so warm then? I’m glad you asked. They get all the hot wind.
And you may reasonably ask, is this hot air coming from the central Atlantic or from the mouths of European politicians? Like most things it’s a combination of different… but no yeah it’s just warm air currents from down south in the tropics
This also shows why a relatively mild heat in California or Texas might cause drought and heat-stroke in places like England or Denmark, because those areas are used to Northern-Canada levels of heat
I think the thing that affected me most when moving across the ocean is the strange high light in Northern Europe. The sky is a different color, and the winters are just slightly darker and drawn-in.
