GoNOMAD in the News

More and more coverage is coming up in newspapers about GoNOMAD.com

"Take offs and Landings" section of the Wall Street Journal. We passed along ideas for what's hot in travel lately.

Greenfield Recorder, local paper here about 14,000 circulation, did an interview and is doing a feature story soon. Coming in to shoot some pix soon, that will be good for local exposure.

Business West, a much bigger western Mass business mag, is doing a big story on travel and tourism and they are coming to interview me on Weds. this will be a nice big feature read all over the valley, plus they have a pretty good website.

NY times said they would include us in a story I need to call them back mid march. Guy said I was persistent, he appreciated it.

Doing Barney's and Arthur Around the World radio show on 3/1 about cooking in Italy.

Songs like Songs Should Be

Songs like this one by Frank Sinatra really move me. Read these lyrics and see if you too don't get weepy and appreciate the genteel charm of this song by The Chairman of the Board

Some day, when I'm awfully low,
When the world is cold,
I will feel a glow just thinking of you...
And the way you look tonight.

Yes you're lovely, with your smile so warm
And your cheeks so soft,
There is nothing for me but to love you,
And the way you look tonight.

With each word your tenderness grows,
Tearing my fear apart...
And that laugh that wrinkles your nose,
It touches my foolish heart.

Lovely ... Never, ever change.
Keep that breathless charm.
Won't you please arrange it ?
'Cause I love you ... Just the way you look tonight.

Mm, Mm, Mm, Mm,
Just the way you look to-night.

Verizon Versus Us

Lawrence Lessig presented an interesting argument in this month's Wired that Verizon is working against the public with a recent decision in Philadelphia. Governor Ed Rendell signed into law a bill prohibiting the government from offering free Wi-Fi in their municipalities. In Philly, more than half of neighborhoods have no broadband, so the city planned to set up a city-wide free Wi-Fi zone to fill in the breach. The gov's argument, bolstered by Verizon's voracious campaign donations and lobbying, is that businesses shouldn't have to compete with governments. Yet, as Lessing argues, we are happy with muncipal streetlights and water service, in spite of what may happen to private companies trying to offer the same thing.

The private market has failed the US so far in broadband, we are still ranked #13 in the world and many places in the US offer no high speed service at all. The solution he says is to encourage competition. Free wireless access doesn't kill demand for the same access in private.

The End of the USPS?

Andy Kessler wrote recently in Wired about whether we really need the US Postal service. What would happen, he asked, if this 180-year-old dinosaur disappeared tomorrow? Plenty of good things.

The mailing of bills is this giant's Achille's heel. Because paying bills on line makes so much more sense--it costs $2-10 per bill to send them, open them, deposit the checks and record the transaction. Noboby really needs to do it this way, it's just that we're creatures of habit. Kessler suggests that those who don't have computers could simply visit their local banks to pay the bills. Private carriers would love the chance to deliver first class mail....but are prohibited from doing so by the monopoly. If home delivery of packages, which UPS and Fedx hate (all of that ringing of doorbells and backing up the driveway), was combined with delivery of first class mail, costs for both would go down.

Kessler also points out that while the 550 million pieces of mail that the USPS delivers is impressive, each day 35 billion emails, one billion SMS messages and two billion instant messages are delivered by AOL alone. And none of these require the 707,000 workers, with benefits, that are employed by the Postal Monopoly.

Pablo's Surprise from the Grave

Just finished Mark Blowden's wonderful account of the manhunt for Pablo Escobar, "Killing Pablo." The ultimate end came after months and months of searching, and especially, of listening. There was a young commander in the Colombian Search Bloc who got very adept at using a device provided by the CIA, that allowed him to triangulate a signal from a cell phone or radiophone that "El Doctor" would use when he called his wife and kids who were holed up in a hotel suite. Each night, Juan Pablo, his sixteen year old son, would speak to Pa, and the CIA and Centra Spike would record them, and try to locate Pablo. The listeners heard that sonny wanted Pop's help answering a series of 40 questions posed by a journalist, and the two arranged a time to go over the answers. They even heard what time Pablo would call back.

Pablo was going through the answers with Sonny and he walked in front of a window in the fourth floor of a Medellin apartment. At that moment, a member of Centra Spike walked by and actually made eye contact with the Don as he was on the phone. Soon they called in artillery and began blasting....a few minutes later Pablo was sprawled out dead like a prize deer on the roof.

A few days later in a bag of items seized from the apartment was a gun. As the police chief's son took the gun out of the bag, it went off, the shot grazing the youngster's stomach.

Wife Swapping in Black and White

Last night's television viewing brought forth two pairs...a black man with a white wife and a black woman with a white husband. They were destined to meet on "Wife Swap," that terribly tacky yet totally fascinating improbable show where wives are traded and experience another's life. Black wife was lazy...and imperious. She came home from work every day and trooped upstairs to her bed, where her husband and sons waited on her, bringing her wine and food, and coming every time she shreiked their names. White wife was submissive....her beloved hubby worked all day and came home to plonk himself in front of the TV, never lifting a finger to help. White wife took care of their five daughters, homeschooled them, and liked being a stay at home dominated wife.

When the swap happened, black wife accused black husband of being a "typical black man" and explained that his lazy behavior was why she married a white dude. Black dude, stunned, said was generalizing and "she was the epitome of why race relations are so bad in this country." But white wife had equally angry feelings about white hubby--forcing them to take out the VCRs and TVs in the kids room and stop spending all of their time by themselves. At the show's end, both couples vowed to change their ways, and after some yelling at eachother's spouses, made up and hugged.

As big as BillyBob's Texas

I was invited to go to Dallas. I checked out the DFW tourism website and found out that one of the attractions in Fort Worth is Billy Bob's Texas...one of the largest nightclubs in the world. Here are some fun facts about this Texas-sized beer joint:

Our rated capacity is 6028 people at any one time.
The most bottled beer sold in one night was at a Hank Williams Jr. Concert. A total of 16,000 bottles were sold.The next highest bottled beer sales totaled 13,000 during a Clint Black Concert.
Merle Haggard once bought a round of Drinks for the whole Club & set a world record.
The Youngest singer ever to perform at Billy Bob's is LeAnn Rimes.
Garth Brooks last performed at Billy Bob's Texas in 1990.
More Than 15 Million Visitors have come through Billy Bob's Doors since 1981.

Budget Hotels in Texas

Brooklyn Wildlife

A Manhattan couple recently moved to DUMBO, one of Brooklyn's newest, hippest neighborhoods, reports today's Times. One night after a snowfall, they ventured out to Brooklyn Bridge Park, to watch the twinkling lights of the city across the East River. They spotted a small animal frolicking in and out of the snowdrifts.

A toy Chihuahua? A white squirrel? NO! Just a rat, playing in the snow.

In the same column a subway ride is recounted by a passenger who watched an artist sketching people sitting across from him. He tried to finish the sketches quickly, before his subjects could depart. He kept starting drawings and then, sigh, the stop would come up and the rider would leave.

Sideways in Trouble

One of my favorite movies of recent months, Sideways, was in today's New York Times with critics who loved the movie squaring off against those who are afraid of how it glamourizes boozing. How about the message of having a one-week affair just before you get married? Well I loved the movie and am not worried about these bad influences...

Here is what the Times said....

"Critics for the most part found the movie delightful and described Miles as an oenophile, adult viewers flocked to the clever comedy, and the positive buzz bolstered tourism in the Santa Ynez Valley, where the movie was filmed.

But a much more critical appraisal is coming from alcohol treatment professionals, recovering alcoholics and others who say that while Miles obviously suffers from alcohol addiction, his illness does not seem to register with audiences, just as it is overlooked in the movie. Polly McCall, an alcohol and drug therapist in New York City, said many of her patients are appalled that all they hear people talk about is how funny the characters are in "Sideways," which has been nominated for five Academy Awards, including best picture and best adapted screenplay. Ms. McCall argued that there is a connection between all of Miles's imbibing and his considerable troubles, from finding it hard to get up in the morning to his failed relationships and money problems.

Folksonomie's Progress

Met a guy on the phone the other day who runs hotelshark.com. he was wise in an internet way....explaining carefully the science of cost per click and how in a retail store, it is all about cost per foot. "You see on the web, if there are six choices of links to click on a page, adding more costs too much, by taking away clicks from the other 6.

Below is a snippet from Trekshare, a travel site using "reader produced copy"


Mr. X and the Muse
NYC - 30-Jan-05
As you might have read in my peru travelogue, things have been rough for me the past couple of years. Things have changed dramatically since I was hiding out in Macchu Picchu. Mr X, as I will call him, took care of the drug charges and got be back into the US. Turns out that he was so facinated with my good looks and charm at Macchu Picchu that he had to take me back to NYC. Mr. X hooked me up with the people at J Crew and I am now their top model. Mr. X calls me his Muse. I feel like I am on top of the world.

Ancient Village...since 1993

Found this snippet today on the web

Ever since the small Peruvian village of Chucuito discovered ancient Inca ruins nearby, said to be a site where Inca women would go to cure infertility, the village has become a mecca for millions of tourists each year.

People from all over the planet trek to this little village to see the ancient ruins and, perhaps, through that nearness feel an almost mystic kinship with the ancient Incas themselves - a people of which so little is known they seem almost to be beings of the realms of dream or myth.

Which is a good thing because, while the Incas and their culture were very real, the ancient Incan ritual infertility site at Chucuito only dates back to ... 1993 ... that would be A.D. (or C.E. if you're an Oxfordian). That's right, the relic of the ancient past is all of 12 years old.

How do we know this? Because that's when the villagers of Chucuito built the "ruins" to attract tourists, reports Las Ultimas Noticias.

It's not that the villagers talked, mind you, but experts brought in to study the "ruins" discovered they were built by the villagers to convince authorities to invest money to attract tourists to the region. Now that's archaeology!

GoNOMAD: Dining with Nomads in Iran

GoNOMAD: Dining with Nomads in Iran

This is the kind of story you'll find on our website. I love publishing stories like this!

Let's let in the Good Guys and Kick out the Bad

This just in from the people who are cracking down on illegal immigrants, from AOL news:
"We're busy all the time," says Jonathan Rust, chief of the Air Transportation Unit for ICE, which is a division of the Department of Homeland Security. "We have two (Boeing) 737s and two MD-83s, and I could probably use two more."

ICE expects the number of deportations to increase again this year. In his 2006 budget, President Bush has requested an additional $170 million above the $1.4 billion that ICE's Detention and Removal program will get in 2005.

This is progress.

Killing Pablo

Picked up a fast-paced read the other day, my Valentine's day present from Barnes and Noble. It is a book called Killing Pablo, about how the US government helped track down and kill Pablo Escobar, the most notorius Colombian drug cartel leader of all time. The story provides a glimpse into the wild lifestyle of the Medellin Cartel, with giant fincas (farms) condos, and fleets of vintage cars that these richer than life men acquired and then lost when they finally went down. The story of Colombia in the early '90s is horrifying--a complete lawlessness, that went as far as assassinating dozens of judges, bombing an airliner with 100 people on board, and killing five or six presidential candidates.

Pablo comes across as a soft spoken stoner who is elegantly polite, and dreadfully ruthless. He personally did the honor of kicking a hog-tied informant into his pool and watching him drown. He was so feared that the policians changed the constitution so that he could not be extradited to the US. Then they made a deal to put him in a luxury prison that he had built, and where he could run the cartel. He broke out and I'll let you know how they finally caught and killed him when I read more.

GM's Two Billion Dollar Bargain

The Detroit News had a feature story about GM that illustrates part of why this behemoth company lost more than 2.6 billion since 2000. It has to do with not noticing that in Europe, diesel engines are the way of the future, even though back in 1999, they were just beginning to come into their own. It is clear when you travel in Europe and go to a gas station, the diesel is always cheaper than the regular gas. So more and more people drive diesels, now 46% of all cars have these engines. But Bob Eaton, the head of GM in 1999, thought people didn't like diesels, so he rejected putting any big GM funds into developing it. Instead they bought a 20% chunk of Fiat for a couple of billion.

Fast forward to 2005: The only growth in the European car market IS DIESELS! The author compares this to what would have happened if Toyota and Nissan had not developed light trucks, since these too are the biggest growth area in the US market.
Last week GM paid out two billion to buy their way out of the Fiat deal, effectively giving up on the area where the growth is.

GM Europe is still losing money. Without Fiat's help, though, Opel would be as good as out of business.

The original $2.4-billion investment in Fiat, the $2-billion getaway payment GM will make and GM Europe's losses add up to $7 billion.

Prepping for the Wall St. Journal

What's hot in learning travel? The Wall Street Journal wanted to know. We got a call in our South Deerfield offices from Lara Naaman, who writes the Take offs and Landings column for the weekend Journal. We answered her after doing some research. Countries we think are the hottest destinations are Croatia, Antarctica, Italy, Thailand, Bostwana, and Egypt.

"People are looking for something new, different," Gerel Dashdoorov, of Nomadic Expeditions told us. "That's why Mongolia is a popular destination for us...people can stay in an ecolodge in the Gobi desert, and in Yurts with the horseback riding nomads. Until 1990, you couldn't even go to Mongolia, and now you can and about 5-10,000 Americans go each year. We also heard about cooking classes in Croatia, where not using the euro makes everything cheaper, and that Costa Rica and Mexico lead the way for Spanish Abroad's language courses overseas.

Go On Make My Day--Comment!

Just read you don't have to register for anything or sign up or give any email address to make a comment.

So come on, if you read my blog and like it, hate it or have any feelings whatsoever GO AHEAD AND COMMENT, will ya?!

How he Paid for his Gates

Christo is in the news big time right now, after the newly opened installation of his 23-miles of orange gates with flowing orange curtains on top. The thousands of upside down 'U's circle New York's Central Park, and have been on the drawing board since 1979. This new installation cost $21 million. So how did he raise the money?

Christo doesn't take foundation grants or government money. Like his exhibit in Marin County CA where he strung up gauzy curtains over 24 miles from the hills down to the sea, he earns the money and spends it on the exhibitions. He sells drawings, and photographs of the work in such huge numbers that he can pay that huge bill all by himself. Gotta admire this, in an age of ridiculous arts grants such as the guy who got the money to put a crucifix in a jar of urine and call it art. Hey, call Christo's flowing Gates what you will, but it has brought the city out to view it and nobody but the artist footed the bill.

Clean well done travel website

Pauline from Slowtrav.com chatted with me recently from Hawaii. We shared ideas about how to increase profits in the web business. I gave her a good idea...one that has generated a lot of money for other sites. airport parking. She said that her model was a subscription to membership in their travel community. People can leave all sorts of ideas and advice about travel, mostly to Italy and Britain.

Pauline used to program back in the early '80s, working with punch cards. A certified web head, she loves her life and the freedom that it allows. She takes trips to England and Italy and has many meetings all over the globe with members of the Slow Trav Community. The site is very easy to navigate, has clean narrow pages and she does it all herself with MS Front page, unlike most of us who use Dreamweaver.

How Badly They Wanna Get to Ikea

COPS battled to stop a RIOT last night at the opening of an IKEA furniture store.

Dozens of officers were backed up by fire engines and ambulances as tempers raged in Edmonton, North London. One woman lost consciousness and many more were injured.

Thousands turned up to grab special offers, like a sofa for £45.

As the Swedish-owned store flung open its doors at midnight the crowd surged in. Terrified staff had to bolt the doors again after just half an hour.

Customers, many who had queued for 13 hours, were furious at missing the giveaway. Some tried to smash doors open.

Others tried in vain to escape the crush. Those inside battled over furniture.

Kirk Rutter, 33, from Dagenham, Essex, said: "It was a stampede. They were like animals. I saw women punching women and men threatening children."

In the panic many abandoned their cars on the A406 to get to the store. A police spokesman said: "The numbers who turned up far exceeded expectations."

A man in his early 20s was stabbed in a car park close to the store, in
an apparently unrelated incident. It is not thought he had been attending the opening.

Last September three men were trampled to death in a stampede when IKEA opened in Saudi Arabia.

Channel 40 News in the Office

A guy from Connecticut wanted to buy tickets to see the Pats in the superbowl. He goes to eBay for the first time in his life. What luck! Some guy from Georgia was gonna go to the game, but he got transferred to Italy. He has the tickets up on ebay for $2500. "If you want them, pay my reserve price," said the man, in email from Italy. The buyer, named Mark, bit, but when he tried to pay by paypal, he found out that it doesn't work in Italy. He had to pay by Western Union, and well, he watched the game, like you did, on TV.

No tickets, big eBay scam. Now he's got the FBI, local detectives and western union looking into it, more than 14 others also lost their money. CUT TO CLOSE UP OF MAX IN HIS OFFICE. GoNOMAD is gonna be on TV again tonight, this time we're commenting on Internet fraud on Channel 40 ABC news. Thanks to Joe and a friend's research, I found out some good info on how to prevent it and tips like "get more contact info than just an email if you buy something on eBay." Jim, a big friendly TV guy, came to the office here and we chatted. I gave them GN tee shirts and the camera included a shot of the site logo on the wall behind me.

Super Bowl bling: Companies line up to tackle ring job

This article shows a fascinating close up photo of the 2003 ring worn by the Patriots after they won their last superbowl....the one before this sunday!

Getting prepped to have TV cameras come to our GoNOMAD offices...going to be on TV on Friday, Channel 40 ABC news wants to discuss internet fraud...speaking of the Pats, a local sports fan lost thousands when his bid to buy tickets on ebay went bad. Now we're finding out what he should have done differently, sort of Monday Morning quarterbacking.

Sounds like Some Party

Love it when the newspapers get fooled, probably by a blogger yet. From today's Washington Post Styles section, courtesy of poynter.org, which is a great media insider site, if you like news about media...

Correction

A Feb. 5 Names & Faces item on an Evite to Michael Saylor's birthday party was based on a copy of the invitation that had been partially forged before it was sent to The Post. The original Evite from MicroStrategy's CEO said the party will be "exotic, mysterious and ebullient," but it did not say "erotic." It said "Think 'Alias' (the TV show), but sexier," but did not include "much sexier," as was reported. The original also specified "cocktail dresses," but did not say "the shorter the better." And, the original did not end with -- or even contain -- the words "no one leaves alone." Nor was there anything in the original invitation unfit for a family newspaper. The birthday celebration involved dinner and dancing at the Ortanique restaurant for about 200 guests.

Scene that I was photographing at the Fort Lauderdale airport when a police officer came up and told me I might be in trouble...so he ran a check and found I wasn't on the terrorist watch list. 

A Better Way to Spend the Money

Thomas Friedman is back with his regular column in the NY Times and puts forth this smart idea about the huge rewards being now DOUBLED for the capture of Bin Laden and al Zarqawi. He thinks there are much better ways to spend the money:

What I would do with the $75 million we have budgeted as rewards for bin Laden and Zarqawi is use it instead to sponsor an essay contest for high school students in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Syria and Egypt. The contest entry form would say the following: "In 2,000 words, write an essay on one of these two topics: 1. Why do you believe the Arab-Muslim world is fully capable of achieving democratic, representative government and how do you envisage it coming about through peaceful changes inside your country, without any American or other outside help. 2. Write an essay about the lives of any of the great medieval Arab or Muslim mathematicians, scientists or philosophers and how their innovations helped to shape our world today."

The winners would be awarded visas and four-year scholarships to any accredited university in America to which they could gain acceptance. The winning essays would be posted on the Web in English, Arabic, Urdu, Farsi and French. What do you think would make America more secure? Rewarding one person for turning in bin Laden or putting thousands of young Arabs and Muslims through American schools?

Wedding Ring on the Sailfish

Today's Miami Herald served up this gem. A Fort Lauderdale fisherman put his wedding ring around the bill of a sailfish that he caught off the Florida coast in 2002. And now he said he caught that same fish, complete with the ring around the bill!

But everyone doesn't believe him...so a local radio show has arranged for him to take a polygraph to prove his fisherman's tale is true, despite the digital photos the fisherman's pals said they took of the fish.

Now you know why I love having a blog, I just gotta tell people about these amazing things I read.

Dubya's Numbers in Doubt

Visiting my daughter in Miami this weekend brought an opportunity to read the wonderful Miami Herald. This Knight Ridder stalwart is always full of interesting and well thoughtout reads. One front page story detailed how Social Security might not be in as bad shape as the Prez thinks. GWB's figures, which he said meant near bankrupcy in 18 years or so, are based on a very low growth rate for the economy, of around 1.8%. The actual growth rate for the US economy since 1950 has been 3.5%, so the fact is that there will be more and more money coming in than GW is predicting, if these trends hold.

Other factors in the Social Security picture are even more important....such as life expectancy. People who retire today are less likely to smoke..."and lord knows what happens if they find a cure for cancer in the next 70 years." But immigration, long a thorn in the GOP side, will also play a part. Some economists base the high growth rate to rising immigration, bring more workers who pay taxes to our shores.

Shrapnel Wounds

The Army is experimenting with a new form of anethesiology, using nerve blocks to keep pain signals from traveling to the brain, thus eliminating the need to provide mind numbing morphine in the operating room. Procedures can take place with the patients fully awake. This from the latest issue of Wired Magazine.

Col. Chester Buckenmaier, who projects "a gruff, old fashioned avuncularity, with a bushy mustache and a cleft chin" talked about other unforeseen complications that have come up during the war. Soldier's injuries, 90 percent of the time to the legs and arms because of body armor, are aggravated by strange infections. When a bomb detonates under a Humvee, septic muck from the chassis and road surface--carrying native strains of bacteria for which US troops have no resistance--is blown deep into the ravaged tissue. This complicates things for the doctors and adds to the misery of the more than 9000 injured so far from the war.

Outsourcing Europeans

There is a new way to outsource, use young rich Europeans who are on vacation, to fill the ranks of headset wearing telemarketers.

With hundreds of employees yakking into headsets, Tecnovate's New Delhi office looks like a typical Indian call center, except for one thing: Nearly 100 of these workers aren't Indian. Call it "multilingual outsourcing" or "Eurosourcing" -- Tecnovate is leading a new trend in call-center hiring. Taking advantage of the 20-somethings who flock to India for postcollege sojourns, the firm is hiring workers from Germany, Norway, Sweden, and the like.

The Europeans get an exotic year on the subcontinent, while Tecnovate gets a polyglot staff to serve its 15 travel, financial, and telecommunications clients. The imports work for Indian wages -- $5,000 to $8,000 a year, about 25 percent of what they'd earn at home -- but live like royalty. With an employment package that includes housing, a housekeeper, and time off to travel, Tecnovate has attracted more than 200 European workers since testing the program in 2002.

20-Foot tall Babies

A man in Salinas, California named John Cerney creates his own genre of billboard-sized art in fields throughout the Imperial Valley. He doesn't like to display his creations, gigantic realistic photographs mounted on plywood, indoors. He would say no to even the inside of cavernous MassMOCA, in North Adams. No, Cerney prefers to see them as giant roadside canvases. One of these installations was a 20-foot high baby playing with a equally huge tractor and a horrified farmer fleeing the scene.

Cerney has big plans, after he visited Mount Rushmore, for another installation. He wants to construct the Rushmore-sized image of "Mother Earth, peering down at all the little people passing by."

Don't you hate these? This just about sums it all up, doesn't it? 

My house in the snow in January, 2005, in South Deerfield, MA.  

Cuba 1972

Last night on PBS Fidel Castro was in the spotlight. Footage included Castro's embracing of the Soviet Union, the bearded one leaning over a conference table to light Breznev's cigarette. In 1972, Castro set one of his many impossible goals for the young communist nation. First he wanted to have "more cows than Holland," to be the world's biggest milk and cheese producer. That didn't work. Then he set his sites on sugar...and vowed during one of his famous 3 hour speeches that the nation must produce 10 million tons that year. This was far away from the normal output, but the nation rallied, and from overseas, came teachers, farmers, students, all trying to help the young nation meet this daunting goal. Many acres were destroyed in this mad scramble to make the bearded one proud, and they toiled day and night. At the end, the harvest was only 8.5 tons, and another long handwringing speech ensued. The bearded one, (referred to by Cubans simply by a touch of the chin) was again disappointed.

Then the protests began....and thousands said they wanted to leave Cuba. Furious, TBO said, fine, go, in fact, in answer to the flotilla of US yachts, speedboats and fishing vessels that came by the hundreds to pick up Cubans, he emptied the jails and sent as many as 150,000 across the strait to Florida. Finally Carter put a stop to it, since there were so many floaters it was impossible to manage on our side.

Many of them returned to Cuba after a few years...and others are still fighting TBO.