If you could afford the best, which airline should you fly? First class is pretty spiffy on all of them, but some airlines take the concept of luxury to the upper limits. Take a look inside the top-tier accommodations of the seven most luxury-conscious  airlines.

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From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by psogle .

Image: Kalimedia

Cartography blog Strange Maps has a map of the British Isles showing current place names translated into modern English. It’s one from a collection known as The Atlas of True Names. You can view a larger image at the link.

Link | Other Maps of Translated Place Names | News Story

55-year-old Indian citizen Kashi Samaddar has completed an almost-seven year trip around the world. He has visited all 194 countries in the world, thereby setting a world record.

He spent £350,000 to visit every country on earth in the shortest time possible and thereby earnt himself a mention in the Guinness Book of Records – just don’t expect to be thrilled by his pictures.

Samaddar’s mission was inspired by trouble he had in South Africa in 2002 over his Indian passport. Samaddar then vowed to visit every country in the world to show it could be done.

The globe trotting adventurer was determined to complete the whole trip using his Indian passport – despite opportunities to adopt Australian and Canadian citizenship – as he wanted to prove an Indian could travel the world.

He also wanted to highlight the difficulties some nationalities encounter obtaining visas to enter countries – a problem he is very familiar with.

‘The most difficult visa to get was Moldova, which took me almost three years with many rejections,’ he said.

‘The problem isn’t with big countries like America, England or places in Europe, a lot of the time it’s smaller countries who don’t know what they should be doing.’

To abide by Guinness Book rules, he traveled using only public transportation. The rules state you only have to set foot in a country to count it, which may explain Samaddar less-than-impressive tourist photographs.

The photo above is of Kashi’s last place visited: Serbia Kosova on May 27 of 2008.

Links: Article at Daily Mail | More at World Records Academy.

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by digimouse.

Plates will be compared to databases of stolen or wanted cars, with matches triggering an immediate alert to local officers. If detectives are investigating a crime, they will be able to search the records to try to find possible suspects. [...]

"If it lowers the crime rate even a little bit, then it’s a great idea," said Yami Anolik, a 64-year-old real estate investor whose husband, Al Anolik, spoke in favor of the cameras at the meeting.

She said she did not share the privacy concerns of some of her neighbors, explaining, "If you’re driving on a public road, you gave up your privacy already. If you want to be private, stay at home."

Do you think this is a good idea? Link
(Photo: CJ Sorg [Flickr])

So, wearing a lifejacket, Miss Hughes jumped out of the boat, carrying the nine Rottweiler puppies ‘African-style’ by balancing the crate on her head and holding the side with one hand while swimming with the other.

Mr Cochrane and the two adult dogs also jumped off the boat and swam to the nearest beach at the Greek resort of Lalissos about 100 metres from their boat.When they got to the shore, exhausted, they were helped by German tourists from a beach hotel and members of the emergency services.

The British Embassy found Laura and John a hotel room for the night – and the puppies spent the night at a local Greek police station.

Link -via Arbroath

(image credit: KNSNEWS)

ABC News has the story:

The CIA constructed the prison over the next several months, apparently flying in prefabricated elements from outside Lithuania. The prison opened in Sept. 2004.

According to sources who saw the facility, the riding academy originally consisted of an indoor riding area with a red metallic roof, a stable and a cafe. The CIA built a thick concrete wall inside the riding area. Behind the wall, it built what one Lithuanian source called a "building within a building."

On a series of thick concrete pads, it installed what a source called "prefabricated pods" to house prisoners, each separated from the other by five or six feet. Each pod included a shower, a bed and a toilet. Separate cells were constructed for interrogations.

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Photo: Lucasfilm/Disney

There’s a bunch of new print ads out for Disney’s Star Wars Weekends, and they’re pretty funny.  See Darth Vader wait in line, Ewoks get denied, TIE fighters at airport gates and more at The Chive.

The unusual treasures have led Coburn and his team to suggest that the Mustang caves could be linked to “hidden valleys” thought to represent the Buddhist spiritual paradise known as Shambhala.

“Shambhala is also believed by many scholars to have a geographical parallel that may exist in several or many Himalayan valleys,” Coburn said.

“These hidden valleys were created at times of strife and when Buddhist practice and principals were threatened,” Coburn said. “The valleys contained so-called hidden treasure texts.”

Elaine Brook, author of Search for Shambhala, said the hidden valleys of Mustang indeed “have some of the characteristics of the mythical land of Shambhala.”

For his 1933 novel, Hilton used the concept of Shambhala as the basis for his “lost” valley of Shangri-La, an isolated mountain community that was a storehouse of cultural wisdom.

PBS will air two specials about the Mustang caves tonight. Link

(image credit: Kris Erickson)

“The hamster in the world of children is that little cuddly animal. Often, the adults who come here have wanted or did have hamsters when they were small,” said Mr Falquerho, who was dressed as a hamster.

The price for the room is currently 99 euros for a night, but the price will go up when Wifi and a TV screen are installed. Link -via Arbroath

This amateur video shows us how small everything is compared to the mighty Burj Dubai, the tallest building in the world.

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Christophe.

For some reason, the good people of Spain really like horned, charging mammals involved in their sports.  From the classic (yet controversial) bullfighting matches to the Running of the Bulls, and now an old tradition revived- Bull Leaping!  At Oddity Central, Spooky writes:

Teams of 5 to 7 bull leapers gather each year in cities like Valencia or Barcelona, to take part in a performance that many compare to the Russian roulette. Each team may face up to three bulls in the ring, at once, taunting and jumping over them just when the beasts prepare to impale them.

And, as he points out, no animals needlessly die during the events.

Video of the action.  Link to story/more pics.  | Photos by Ojodigital.

Often overlooked and certainly overshadowed by its more famous neighbor, the Manhattan Bridge will, this December, become a centenarian.  Quite a feat, all told, as the bridge’s history has been full of issues to say the least.

Gustov Lindenthal’s first design was thrown out purely for reasons of aesthetics. He came back with another idea – incorporating two thin-profile steel towers. This idea was retained but his main plan – four cables made of immense chains of eye bars (lengths of steel at least ten foot long joined at each end by steel pins) was again rejected. Perhaps the thought of what was essentially a gargantuan bicycle chain put the chills up the spine of the city fathers.

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From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by taliesyn30.

Benson weaves through skin-ripping pinnacles. In Malagasy, the formations are called tsingy, meaning "where one cannot walk barefoot." The terrain resists intrusions from hunters, hungry cattle, and wildfires.
Photo: Stephen Alvarez / National Geographic

A couple of weeks ago, we featured a story of how NatGeo photographer Stephen Alvarez’s went deep underground to explore the caves in the corner of Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia.

This time, Stephen, along with Neil Shea and biologist Hery Rakotondravony and colleagues went the opposite way – they climbed Madagascar’s astonishing Tsingy de Bemaraha stone forest:

One afternoon, returning from a hot, wet slog, vines along the trail tripped me up, and my right knee landed on a small rock. Back home in New England, where rocks come in rounder forms, I would have walked away with a bruise. But this was tsingy in miniature. A barb of limestone drove in nearly to the bone. It took two days to reach a hospital, where a nurse removed dirt from the wound. "Why were you doing this?" she asked, twisting a swab deep into the hole. She looked up. I was sweating. "I think you are a little dumb," she said. The tsingy is the perfect foil to human ambition.

Links: Article | Photo Gallery

Maggie the dog had a passport that would make most jet setters jealous, and over the course of her life she has crossed borders, braved wars, and experienced the world. Maggie managed to make friends on both sides of the conflict, with all walks of life, proving the old adage that dogs are  man’s best friend. Enjoy this tribute to a dog’s life well lived.

She was born on Cape Cod and came of age in Boston. But she lived in Jerusalem and walked the ancient, cobbled streets of the Old City where she begged on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She swam in the Sea of Galilee and climbed the Mount of Olives and crossed the Allenby Bridge at the Jordan River. She lived for a while on the rugged coast of Brittany in France and eventually crossed over by ferry, past the White Cliffs of Dover to arrive in London where she spent many long afternoons in a great, old pub.

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From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by CherryBomb.

Photo: flickr user Prince Roy

Deck Chair has compiled pictures and videos of seven unique golf courses, including one that floats, one that sits astride a motor speedway, and another that is 1,365 km long. Pictured above is a scene from the golf course at Coober Pedy, a small mining town in Australia. The land is so desolate that golfers must carry around a piece of turf from which to tee off.

Link via The Presurfer | More about the Coober Pedy golf course

Photo: Icebridge (NASA)

Antarctica is roughly 5.4 million square miles (14 million square kilometers) in size, and that’s with all of its ice.  There is a land mass beneath, which looks like this.  Twitter user Icebridge made this image to illustrate just how large our most unvisited continent actually is.

Conversely, “it is estimated that at any given time there are (only) 1,000 people ‘living’ in Antarctica, but this varies depending on the season.” (from Answerbag.)

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The Outback town of Kulin, Australia, welcomes many tourists for the annual Kulin Bush Races in October. In the days leading up to the races, locals construct fanciful horses out of all kinds of materials to entertain those who travel the highway leading to the Jilakin Racetrack. This has become known as the Tin Horse Highway. See more tin horses placed in funny situations at Holtie’s House. Link

Astronomical clocks – amazing works of engineering that are sometimes six hundred years old – can be found throughout the world.  Europe, however, has the lion’s share.  Here are some of the more remarkable examples of the form.

To say that this clock is astronomical is, perhaps, stating the obvious. Another word that might describe the Prague Orloj is exquisite. The first and perhaps most astonishing fact about this astronomical clock is that it was finished and in place in 1410, over eighty years before Columbus made his voyage of discovery to the Americas. The first thing that draws the eye is the dial at the center of the clock which shows the positions of the moon and the sun. What makes the Orloj a magnet for visitors to the Czech city is the clockwork show of the figures of the apostles, which on the hour parade themselves. There are other moving sculptures too – plus a dial which pitted with medallions which represent the months of the years.

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From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by taliesyn30.

Gus Garcia-Roberts from the Miami New Times explains:

In 2004, Kendall native Xavier Cortes was a 37-year-old out-of-work actor in desperate need of a gig. Opportunity came in the classified pages of this newspaper, where an advertisement sought "an extroverted, fun individual, male or female, who knows how to ride rollerblades and isn’t afraid to wear a tutu."

Cortes immediately answered the ad. He was hired by the Coconut Grove Chamber of Commerce. He donned a hot-pink wig and matching tutu, carried a wand, and began each shift with $40 in dimes. For his wage of ten dollars an hour, paid each day by a different Grove business, Cortes skated through the neighborhood putting coins in meters that were about to expire. He left a calling card tucked under windshield wipers. "You’ve just been saved by the Coconut Grove parking-meter fairy," it read, and included a coupon to the business that had donated the dimes.

Cortes’s new occupation was the counterattack strategy employed by Grove business owners who felt under siege by MPA enforcement officers scaring away customers. [...]

Cortes was catcalled by construction workers and berated by teenagers, but to the Grovites who understood his purpose, he was a hero worthy of tips, cigarettes, and free meals. Soon though, he says, a cold war developed between him and MPA officers. "They would try to intimidate me, telling me it was illegal to feed another person’s meter," he recalls. "They’d try to figure out my routes and shifts. I’d see them hiding behind walls spying on me. It got ugly, and it went all the way to the top of the MPA."

Link (Photo: C. Stiles)

Hey, it’s hard to keep a tower on the straight and narrow! The Leaning Tower of Pisa may be the most famous, but there are towers that lean all over the world. Web Urbanist looks at thirteen of them, including the Round Tower of the Kilmacduagh Monastery in Ireland pictured. It leans 1.5 feet, but is in no danger of falling over. And its door is 26 feet off the ground! Link -via Unique Daily

The creator put a ton of effort into filming as much of his trip as possible, and included some highlights like the automatic beer machine at the Tokyo lounge (at 3 minutes 50 seconds).

Gadling has the video clip: Link [embedded Vimeo clip]

French photographer Fred Lebain took a trip to New York City and took a series of photos around town.  He then revisited those sites after printing out huge poster versions of his shots.  Then he carefully re-aligned the shots to incorporate his previous image into a new, dynamically interesting one.

these postcard images show lebain’s preference for particular areas of the city,
telescoping his views – a time parallax representing the days which separate the two shots -
and superimposing his vision of new york. hands, feet or a pair of jeans can be seen…
like surrealistic winks, indicating that the photographer is not alone in his mission.

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Chinese meteorologists say they brought about Beijing’s earliest snowfall in a decade, after seeding rain clouds with silver iodide to ease a drought.

The Weather Modification Office sprayed clouds with 186 doses of the chemical to bring rain for the wheat crop, the Beijing Evening News said.

But the arrival of a cold front caused heavy snow to fall, disrupting road, rail and air travel.

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A 35-mile rift in the desert of Ethiopia will likely become a new ocean eventually, researchers now confirm.

The crack, 20 feet wide in spots, opened in 2005 and some geologists believed then that it would spawn a new ocean. But that view was controversial, and the rift had not been well studied.

A new study involving an international team of scientists and reported in the journal Geophysical Research Letters finds the processes creating the rift are nearly identical to what goes on at the bottom of oceans, further indication a sea is in the region’s future.

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Seven rock formations called Man-Pupu-Nyor (little mountain of the gods) stand in the Komi Republic, a part of the Ural Mountain area of Russia. They range from 30 to 42 meters tall! The pillars formed when erosion washed away the mountain that once surrounded them over a period of 200 million years. Legend says they are evil giants who had a spell cast upon them. Link -via the Presurfer

NatGeo photographer Stephen Alvarez took this amazing shot of the Stephens Gap Cave in Alabama. As you can see, you’d need to rapel down the sunlit entrance to the left, or simply walk down the dark entrace to the right.

Mark Jenkins of National Geographic went spelunking for this fascinating article:

I’m about to back out when my shovel breaks through. I feverishly round out the hole and cram my head through. There is a low, triangle-shaped crawlway ahead of me. Surging with adrenaline, I try dragging myself into this new passage, but my chest gets stuck.

From the beginning I have been hyperfocused on digging in order to stave off dark, horrifying feelings of claustrophobia. But now, stuck like a rat in the throat of a snake, a sickly anxiousness sweeps over me. I violently kick my legs, but to no avail: I’m swimming in dirt. I realize that by not using the drag tray to remove the dirt, I’ve buried myself.

I try to calm my racing thoughts, but my mind is preoccupied with the millions of tons of rock above me. I’ve been told that caves seldom collapse, and yet here I am, trapped at the bottom of a breakdown, in a cave that obviously did collapse. I try to slow my frantic breathing because I’ve also been told that hyperventilating expands one’s lungs and only tightens the squeeze, which is exactly what’s happening. Suddenly I’m thrashing shamelessly, kicking and clawing and writhing. I manage to knock off my headlamp, and everything goes black.

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The Chiang Mai Yi Peng Festival is an Buddhist holy day in Thailand. That evening, celebrants send send burning lanterns aloft, floating on hot air. According to YouTube user bugzila:

[...]it is the great festival of Lanna duly succeeded from ancient age. “Yi Peng” or full-moon day of second lunar month of Lanna villagers is corresponding to the full-moon day of 12th month of central region during the end of raining season and beginning of cold season when the climate is very nice and fair. One tradition of Lanna other than Loi Kra Thong on the river is to light up the lantern and float up in the sky based on their belief that to pay worship to Phra Ket Kaew Julamanee in the heaven or to relief one’ bad luck for more auspicious life.

Via Urlesque

The Haunted Mansion attraction at Walt Disney World features tombstones inscribed with the names of real people. This series of posts called 13 Tombstones tracks down who those people are -mostly Disney employees whose names are now enshrined in the parks for posterity. Link -via Boing Boing

Those who live in The Hague never stopped using an old-fashioned name that described the place according to its medieval use. We get the official name Den Haag from Des Graven Hage, which means “the counts’ hedge” and refers to the fact that Dutch noblemen once used the land for hunting.

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A reader sent this picture to Curious Expeditions, asking if they knew where it was taken. The biggest clue is the building in the background with its distinctive architecture. Can you identify the building or the setting? Link