Month: April 2020

1. Orta San Giulio is in northern Italy and is on Lake d’Orta and it’s pretty amazing. It is surrounded by large foothills and there is a small island, Isola San Giulio (pictured), that has a restaurant, a basilica, and a there’s probably a hotel there as well. I hope to go there when this is all done.

2. If you’d like to see what picture the Hubble Space Telescope took a picture of on your birthday, then click away.

3. Writer Bill Donahue goes to visit his uncle who lives in Montastruc and spends his days translating the History of the Peloponnesian War from Greek into Latin:

Ultimately, most of us will shake off the fantasy. But it really is possible to vanish into the French countryside. I know this because in 1980, my uncle bought a crumbling, centuries-old house at the northern edge of the Pyrenees, an hour from the Spanish border, and never returned to American life. William Joseph Donahue was a Catholic cleric—both a monk and a priest—as well as a sensitive poet who in middle age came to regard his Benedictine order in Washington, D.C., as hidebound and archaic. After writing a pained 28-page letter to the pope, beseeching His Holiness for “release from my religious vows,” and following a brief stint as a newspaperman in Canada, my uncle moved to Montastruc-de-Salies, a small village where the church bells toll hourly and sleekly clad cycling squads spin through in springtime, mixing with tractors and stray dogs wandering the road. The Tour passed through Montastruc in 2008, and this year, on July 24, Stage 16 will wend 1,300 feet up and down the Col de Portet-d’Aspet, about 15 miles from the village.

4. I had no idea that the Patagonman was a thing, but the video is stunning and Patagonia looks like another place I’d love to visit when it is all said and done. For refernece purposes, the Patagonman is a triathlon in well, Patagonia.

5. Kendrick Lamar talks about sampling and it is genius.

1. Lake Lugano is right on the border between Switzerland and Italy, just north of Milan. This part is in Switzerland, but you could rent a boat, go from Switzerland to Italy and back again, all the while drinking win and eating good food. I hope to go there when it is all over.

2. Via Futurism, a very intriguing Earth-like planet:

The exoplanet, called Kepler -1649c, orbits its small red dwarf star within the system’s habitable zone, a distance at which rocky planets receive enough star radiation to allow for liquid water to exist. It’s almost precisely the same size as large as Earth and receives 75 percent of the amount of light Earth receives from the Sun.

In other words, it’s a distant world that’s likelier than many others to support life. At 300 light-years from Earth, it’s the most similar to Earth in size and estimated temperature out of the thousands of exoplanets discovered by the Kepler space telescope, according to the researchers.

3. Do you know what the Wainwrights are? I didn’t know about them either, but they are set of fells (a fell is in-between a mountain and a hill, but probably more of a hill) that are in the Lake District, which is in Cumbria in northwest England. Alfred Wainwright wrote the book on the fells (literally), which is why they are called the “Wainwrights” and there are 214 of them and the highest one is 3,209 feet and the smallest is 951 feet. In England it is a thing to go run up the fells and it’s called fell running. This guy, Paul Tierney set the record for running up all 214 Wainwrights and you can watch him do it here.

4. DJ Jazzy Jeff and Will Smith did a Zoom concert.

5. GQ talked with famed travel TV-guy Rick Steves and he talks about quarantining as well as now having to buy his own weed now:

You’re also a weed enthusiast. Has that been part of your quarantine lifestyle?

Not yet, but it’s going to be. For the first time in my life, I actually bought marijuana. Because of my notoriety in helping legalize marijuana, I’ve never had to buy marijuana in my life. People just give me marijuana. Perfect strangers come up to me and they put a joint in my shirt pocket and they say, “Thank you.”

1. Three Peaks Nature Park is in Northern Italy in the Dolomites almost in Austria and it looks amazing. I’d like to visit there when all of this is over.

2. I have a sister that lives near San Diego and these two wall murals are in a town called Encinitas. One of these is outside a liquor store and I can’t remember where the other one is.

3. My family and I were supposed to go see the redwoods this summer. For whatever reason, I feel that it is incredibly important to go see these massive trees and show them to my boys. I found this virtual hike of Redwood National Park and found it really nice.

4. I can’t say that I know very much about Beau Miles, but he’s an Aussie and he does interesting things and he ran the entire length of the Australian Alps, 650 kilometers.

5. Podium Runner with what happens to your brain when you run (it’s like using CBD!):

One reason for running’s therapeutic effect is the cocktail of zenning neurochemicals it releases. This includes those sensationalized mild opiates, endorphins, which result in that runner’s high phenomenon. (Evidence for which was officially demonstrated in 2008.)

“It’s a pain killer, so that alone is going to give you a little bit of feel-good,” says Aimee Daramus, Psy.D., a Chicago-based psychotherapist, referring to endorphins. She also points out that the adrenaline released by a run gives a runner an enhanced sensation of strength and speed, which can be calming. Additionally, by raising your heart rate, running changes brain chemistry by increasing the availability of other anti-anxiety neurotransmitters like serotonin, gamma aminobutyric acid (GABA), brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), and endocannabinoid levels—substances that latch onto the same neurological receptors as THC, producing the calming high one gets from consuming cannabis.

1. The Parco Nazionale Gran Paradiso, Italy, probably translates (I don’t know Italian) to the National Park of Grand Paradise and what a name for a park. It looks amazing and I can’t wait to go there when all this is over.

Image via Wikimedia Commons.

2. I’ve never heard of this and thanks to Open Culter, it is a choir singing your favorite songs. Kind of loved all of them and the group that does this on YouTube is Choir! Choir! Choir!

3. Sidetracked is one of those sites that I’ve added to my RSS feed reader and am always glad that I did because there are always some terrific photographs and in this post, it’s about the postman who walked to and from Rhenigidale to deliver the mail for 20 years. It’s beautiful and yeah, click on over.

4. Pretty good use of Zoom.

5. The backstory of Toy Story, the movie that the animators were told to make and then they made the movie they wanted.

It is not always bad, in this process, to have things not work, to have crashing things that happen, the re-building allows them to be so much better.”