Rooftops on a Cloudy Day in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria
Aerial drone panorama of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria on a cloudy day.
Travel
My Travels
R.I.P., Matthew Buckland (1974-2019)
I’m shocked by news that Matthew Buckland, Africa’s leading expert about New Media, died today after a short battle with an apparently fast-acting cancer. Shocked because during May in Cape Town, when I last saw Matt, he apologized because his speech to a conference we were attending had been held later than scheduled and he couldn’t have lunch together because he was entered in a competitive bike race elsewhere in the Western Cape that afternoon. So, I walked him to his car, his off-road bicycle mounted atop its roof, and he went off, strong, determined, as he always was. That’s how I’ll ever remember him. As I recollect, I first met him during 2007 at the IFRA ‘Beyond the Printed Word’ newspaper New Media conference which was held in suburban Dublin that year. He was attending it with his fellow South African friends and competitors Elan Lohmann and Colin Daniels who (along with Vincent Maher and Lukanyo Mnyanda) I sometime light-heartedly refer to as the ‘Rhodes Mafia’. Each of them were journalism students at South Africa’s Rhodes University who were the first generation of their countrymen to be born ‘digital natives’; each becoming a leader with global renown for their continent’s unique forms of New Media. In Matt’s case, that involved a few years after graduation working as a web producer at the BBC in London, a job which soon led to seven years working as the general manager for online operations at the Mail & Guardian in Johannesburg, post-apartheid South Africa’s major weekly newspaper. After that, he headed the New Media lab for Naspers, South Africa’s major media company, for whom he became general manager of Publishing and Social Media at age 36. In 2010, he founded and became managing director of Creative Spark, a +70-person digital marketing agency that he last year sold to the London-based M&C Saatchi PLC global advertising & marketing agency for a reported 50 million rand (US$3.5 million). Since then, he’s been entrepreneur-in-residence for the global Media Development Investment Fund (disclosure: one of my former clients) where one of his roles has been to teach online publishing and online marketing to media in poor countries or those arising from repressive governments. Matthew Buckland had a rare combination of knowledge, drive, and integrity. My relationship with him during the past dozen years had gone from mentoring to instead referring my former graduate students to him […]
Overhead: the World’s Longest Airline Flight
[If the color photo that heads this post doesn’t appear on you smartphone, click here to view it.] Each morning at approximately 10:15 a.m. New York time (15:15 UTC), I can gaze upwards from my home a watch a jet airliner pass three miles over me and heading northeast. While that’s not unusual because I live 30 miles (48 kilometers), 40 miles (63 km), and 50 miles (96 km) respectively from the New York City area’s LaGuardia, John F. Kennedy (JFK), and Newark Liberty airports, this daily airliner is special. It’s approximately six minutes into the world’s longest non-stop airliner flight. Even without binoculars, I can see the stylized gold dragon against a blue background on the tail of this mostly otherwise white aircraft: a new, twin-engine Airbus a350-900 ULR (Ultra Long Range) model. It’s Singapore Airlines’ legendary Flight SQ21 and will be aloft some 18-hour before it completes its 9,534 mile non-stop flight from Newark Liberty International Airport (EWR). Singapore Airlines flew this route, setting the all-time record for a scheduled jet airline flight, from 2004 to 2013, then relaunched SQ21 this past October. (By the way, Cable News Network covered the relaunch of the route as if no airliner had ever flown that far before. Didn’t anybody at CNN know that Singapore Airlines had flown it from 2004 to 2013?) The earlier version of SQ21 used a long-range version of the four-engine Airbus a340 aircraft and carried a mix of coach and business class passengers. However, the route perennially lost money because these a350s had to be fitted with fewer than normal seats in coach due to the extra weight of the fuel needed to fly that long. By 2010, Singapore Airways had converted the a350s on this route to carry only 100 business class seats. Nonetheless, that wasn’t economical. The airline revived the route after Airbus Industries designed for it this special model of the new a350, which can carry both coach and business class while using less fuel than the a340s did. The a340 versions of SQ21 usually headed due north from New York City, flying over the North Pole, then south across Siberia, China, and Southeast Asia to Singapore. Depending upon the jet stream in the northern hemisphere, the a350 new versions of this flight will use that same route or follow a much more divergent route: using the jet stream to give the aircraft […]
The Best Brewery in America?
At 3:59 p.m. on a former farm 20 miles (32 km) into the woods of rural Massachusetts, 150 people, most between the ages of 21 and 40, and from at least a half dozen U.S. states, queue in the dirt swept by winter winds behind a large, green aluminium shed no more than a decade old. Its door opens for the day at 4 p.m., but only for four hours. By 5 p.m., the queue outside the opened door will be 350-people long. This is the Tree House Brewing Company of Monson, Massachusetts. Hundreds have traveled to this unlikely location because Tree House is arguably the best artisinal brewer in the United States. In BeerAdvocatecom‘s ranking by thousands of people of the top 250 beers brewed in the U.S., three of the top five ( indeed, seven of the top U.S. 20) are from this shed, including the top beer. Tree House doesn’t distribute its products to pubs, restaurants, or stores. Its beer can only be gotten here. Yet none of its beer can be drunk here because the brewery doesn’t have a pub license. The first few hundred people waiting in queue will be allowed to buy a limited number of cans of beers (I bought two six-packs for $43), although those towards the back of the queue might be too late. An hour after the door opens, one of three of that day’s fresh-brewed varieties has sold out. By 6 p.m., a second is out. And by 8 p.m., no matter what, the door closes for another day.
In the Mood Today for East Asia
I’m in an eastern Asian mood today. Many things have reminded me of it. For instance, Thailand is renown for its Public Services advertisements on television. Here is a recent example, a full movie told in only three minutes: Click here to read Adweek’s story about why and how it was produced. The same producers two years earlier created a possibly even better Public Services short, about compassion: The story behind that one is here. ∅ Kudos to Chinese pharmaceuticals billionaire Li Jinyuan who took 6,400 of his employees on a nine-day vacation in France. They arrived aboard 84 commercial flights and occupied 140 hotels. the cost was €15 million ($18 million). ∅ Who exactly won? Forty years after Communist North Vietnam took over capitalist South Vietnam, an international poll reports that Vietnam is now the world’s most capitalist country. China was ranked fourth. ∅ When traveling to such places, or anywhere in the world, I’d always thought that the best passport to have was Swiss, because nobody blocks the politically neutral Swiss. However, CNN reports that the best passport to have is actually U.S. or U.K., followed by France, South Korea, or Germany, or Sweden, or Italy, or Denmark, Singapore, Finland, Japan, Luxembourg, or Netherlands, and only then Swiss. Those groupings are based upon how many countries the passport holder is allowed to enter either without a visa or by relatively easily obtaining a visa upon arrival at the border. One hundred forty-seven countries permit that for U.S. or U.K. passport holders. ∅ Speaking of travel, it was interesting to see the the CEO of the Starwood Hotel Group concede that his company’s Sheraton brand has become tired and in need of change. ∅ You might say that I’m sensitive to submarines. Although my naval officer father served aboard surface ships during World War II and the Korean Conflict, I grew up around New London, Connecticut, headquarters of the U.S. Navy’s submarine fleet. Seeing nuclear submarines silently leave that port (which was actually across the river in the town of Groton) was a routine sight. By far the most advanced submarines in the world are the Seawolf-class submarines constructed just after the end of the Cold War. These ships indeed are parts of a trio of U.S. ‘superweapons’ that no other nation possess. The other two in the trio are the super-accurate LGM-30G Minuteman III missiles (each capable of delivering within 30-minutes a thermonuclear warhead, […]
Meet Ahmet Merabet, The Muslim French Policeman Who Gave His Life Defending Freedom of Speech
Meet 49-year old Ahmet Merabet, a Muslim policeman from the 11th Arrondissement of Paris, who on Wednesday (7 January 2015) gave his life defending the right of free speech. He and 49-year-old policemen Franck Brinsolaro, a French Christian, where guarding the offices of the satirical weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo when three Islamicist terrorists attacked with assault weapons, killing Merabet and Brinsolaro then 12 members of the newspaper’s editorial staff. It was Merabet’s death that was pictured in a spectator’s mobile phone video.
Roque de la Bonanza in Late Springtime
When photographing a black volcanic rock in bright sunlight, it extremely difficult to get details in the shadowy areas. It’s when a state-of-the-art, handheld light meter is worth its weight in digital cameras. Good postcard shot.
The Power and Pleasure of Color
Spring here in the Northern Hemisphere brings more color to the world, reminding me me of the power of color. Although the flowers and leaves have not yet blossomed where I am in Connecticut, this photo I took at a temple in Bali shows the power and pleasure of color.