TheAirGorillaBlog

Cool travel site in Germany...

The Gorilla is impressed... by the Magdeburg water bridge, which is located at the Elbe River in Germany.

You have one canal going through the air over another canal. Check out the picture below. Wild! And every gorilla likes "the wild," so that's why he's having us post the comment here. It is notable for being the longest "navigable aqueduct" in the world, with a length of 918 metres. The reunification of Germany and establishment of major water transport routes made the Water Bridge a priority. The bridge site is open to visitors and includes a parking lot, bicycle and pedestrian paths and informational signs detailing the history and construction of the bridge.

More information:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magdeburg_Water_Bridge

Cell phone use while traveling: Some legends are false...

The gorilla received an email about "5 Things You Never Knew Your Cell Phone Could Do" which provided a whole list of interesting-sounding tricks to use your cell phone to unlock your car door, rally emergency services overseas, etc., so the gorilla decided to do a little research. Theclaims have been circulating for at least five years via people forwarding chain emails to one another. The gorilla found out that most of these tricks are in some cases urban legends and in other cases "partial truths" you cannot depend on universally. Here's a guide to the claims posted by about.com...

CLAIM: The worldwide emergency number for cell phones is 112.
Not quite. Throughout most of Europe and a few countries outside of the EU, dialing 112 will connect users to local emergency services. However, the number won't work in North America, nor most of Asia and Africa. Many, but not all, cell phone models will allow special emergency numbers to be dialed even if the phone lacks a SIM card or the keypad is locked.

CLAIM: Unlock a car door with your cell phone and a spare remote key.
False. As discussed previously in these pages, cell phones and remote keyless entry systems work on entirely different radio frequencies. Therefore, cell phones are incapable of re-transmitting the signal from a remote key to unlock a car door.

CLAIM: Press *3370# to access 'reserve battery power.'
False. On some Nokia phones, users can punch in special codes and toggle between speech codec modes to 1) enhance voice transmission quality at the cost of diminished battery performance, or 2) enhance battery performance by decreasing voice quality. Apparently, some users have misconstrued the latter as "tapping into reserve battery power." On that score the email is doubly erroneous because *3370# is the code for enhancing voice quality, so using it actually decreases battery life!

For the rest of the article see...

http://urbanlegends.about.com/od/business/a/cellphone_tips.htm

 

The gorilla is confused by this video...

The gorilla is more strong in brawn than strong on an IQ test, but his human brothers at AirGorilla find this video equally perplexing as he...

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18985-impossible-figures-brought-to-life-in-virtual-worlds.html

"Ever found a computer game truly impossible? If not, you soon might, thanks to Chinese computer scientists who have found a way to depict physically impossible figures in 3D virtual environments."

"The endless staircases of the Dutch artist M. C. Escher appear impossible and possible at the same time, and able to go in all directions. Such visual trickery depends heavily on the observer's viewpoint – and that makes it difficult to animate Escher-type figures in games. If the viewpoint pans around a 3D computer depiction of such a staircase, "the impossibility is lost", says Tai-Pang Wu at the Chinese University of Hong Kong."

"Now his team has found a way to make these images viewable from a useful array of angles. The trick is to take advantage of the image's strangeness; viewers scarcely notice if an Escher staircase becomes slightly distorted."

[For rest of article see link above...]

The Gorilla's favorite dinosaur

The Gorilla has a concern for all animals of the jungles, the fields, and the mountains. Thus he has partnered with a "save the gorillas" campaign of Virunga National Park in the Congo. But the Gorilla is particularly impressed with beasts who have a healthy self-esteem and strength his fellow gorillas. Today, he's become impressed with a newly discovered species dinosaur and disappointed he'll never get to meet one! It is the "Mojo-ceratops." Yes, definitely a proud dinosaur. Per Science Daily,

"(July 8, 2010) — When Nicholas Longrich discovered a new dinosaur species with a heart-shaped frill on its head, he wanted to come up with a name just as flamboyant as the dinosaur's appearance. Over a few beers with fellow paleontologists one night, he blurted out the first thing that came to mind: Mojoceratops."

"It was just a joke, but then everyone stopped and looked at each other and said, 'Wait -- that actually sounds cool,' " said Longrich, a postdoctoral associate at Yale University. "I tried to come up with serious names after that, but Mojoceratops just sort of stuck." [...]

"The dinosaur is one of more than a dozen species belonging to the chasmosaurine ceratopsid family, which are defined by elaborate frills on their skulls."

For the rest of the article visit
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/07/100708160935.htm

Funny Named Places to Travel to

If you search an atlas in detail or you travel all over, you will surely come across some unpronouncible place names, some funny, place names, and some that roll off the tongue with pleasure. The gorilla has been amusing himself with some of these names and has decided to share a batch:

Funny names:

Toad Suck (Arkansas)
Buttzville (Pennsylvania)
Huehuetenango (Guatemala)
Nosy Be (Madagascar)
Keetmanshoop (Namibia)
Warrumbungles Mtn. (Australia)
Buckingbong State Forest (Australia)
Wagga Wagga (Australia)
Whapmagoostui (Quebec)
Bangkok (Thailand)
Kamloops, BC
Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg (New EnglanD)
Nk'mip Winery (BC)
Skookumchuck (BC)

Mellifluous names, a pleasure:

Alta Floresta (Brazil)
Paramaribo (Suriname)
Comodoro Rivadavia (Argentina)
Montevideo (Uruguay)
Katatota Island (Canada)
Zanzibar !!
Vladikavkaz (Russia)
Appalachicola, FL
Chattanooga TN
Penetanguishene, ON

Unpronouncible (without a determined tongue):

Jijoca de Jericoacoara (Brazil)
Thiruvananthapuram (India)
Coatzacoalcos (Mexico)
Amarosseldabay (Mali)
Kaadedhdhoo (Maldives)
Makhachkala (Dagestan/Russia)
The Kwakwaka'wakw (Native Canadian tribe)

Hope that was fun!

- Gorilla

Gulf Travel Update...

As reported by Travelmole, "There’s a bright spot amid the darkening, spreading muck in the Gulf of Mexico. Despite the oil slick’s negative impact on tourism, passengers, lots of them, are flying into Florida’s newest airport," Florida Beaches Airport (ECP), an international airport north of Panama City Beach, Florida, near West Bay. It opened May 23.

"Southwest offers eight daily flights from Houston, Orlando, Baltimore and Nashville. Delta offers eight flights from Atlanta and three from Memphis on Delta Connection."

"The airport waived landing fees for both carriers for the first 12 months, 'but they have to maintain service for that time period,' Curtis said." However, there are multiple other airports in the FL, MS, AB beach region, and overall holte and package bookings have been down in the region. "The president touted the region’s beaches and crab cakes, even while citing a Mississippi hotel owner’s lament of a 40% falloff in bookings." The problem is not so much cancelations as it is the downbeat rate of new bookings. The oil ddisaster has covered a portion of the year, so far, in which there would normally more bookings being made than stays being completed.

"Numerous hotels, travel sites and destinations now offer 'clean-beach guarantee' programs that include refunds or credits for future vacations. ... Weeks ago, Key West, miles from the nearest tar ball, was the first destination in the state to launch a clean-beach guarantee. That was followed by a feature added to www.fla-keys.com on June 14 designed to correct Gulf spill misconceptions."

For the rest of the article, see http://www.travelweekly.com/article3_ektid216374.aspx

Left-Over Soap Saves Lives, Cool

As unlikely as it may seem, the Florida-based Clean The World is showing how barely-uses but recycled bars of soap and bottles of shampoo left behind in hotel rooms is helping prevent diseases that kill 1.8 million children a year.

About 177 hotels and B&B’s collect soap for Clean The World, which was started by Shawn Seipler and Paul Till, two hotel guests who wondered what happened to thrown-out soap.

For the rest of the story, see this article.

In Kamchatka, a gorilla needs more fur...

Our destination of the week is the volcanic and very wild Kamchatka Peninsula East of Siberia and West of Alaska. Kamchatka is extremely geologically active and has numerous volcanoes, geysers, hot springs, and even a lake of acid! It contains the southernmost expanse of arctic tundra in the world and is notable for its wealth of arctic wildlife, fish, game, and marine life. Furthermore, nineteen of Kamchatka's volcanoes constitute the "Volcanoes of Kamchatka" UNESCO World Heritage Site (source: Wikitravel). There are more then 160 active and extinct volcanoes on the peninsula which are of great interest from both a scientific and purely touristic point of view. There are 5 species of Pacific salmon, and many different species of trout come to spawn in the rivers of Kamchatka. There are plenty of water-fowl on the lakes; an abundance of brown bears and other fur-bearing animals in the forests, and reindeer on the tundra. You would fly in to Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, the largest city (pop. 250,000) from Anchorage (Alaska) using Vladivostok Air. From Europe, you fly on Aeroflot (good luck) through Moscow or on either Vladivostok Air or Rossiya Airlines through St. Petersburg, Russia.

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ODD TOURIST SIGHT -- PINK DOLPHIN. The world's only pink Bottlenose dolphin which was discovered in an inland lake in Louisiana, USA, has become such an attraction that conservationists have warned tourists to leave it alone. Although there are also other albino dolphins around the world, they are not pink -- they are white.

Charter boat captain Erik Rue, 42, photographed the animal, which is actually an albino, when he began studying it after the mammal first surfaced in Lake Calcasieu, an inland saltwater estuary, north of the Gulf of Mexico in southern USA. When he first noticed it, he says, "It was absolutely stunningly pink."

A close relation of dolphins, the Amazon River Botos, called pink dolphins, live in South America in the Amazon.

For the full article, see http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/4927224/Pink-dolphin-appears-in-US-lake.html

IN A GALAXY VERY VERY NEARBY, when you travel, you never know WHAT you'll find... Or perhaps, if you start seeing things like this while you travel, its time to pull over at the nearest hotel and call it a day.