The Getty Center

I found the gardens more exciting than the museum.

David Hockney turned hundreds of 4″x6″ into a single 4′x6′

Amsterdam in December

Click each photo for more images… 

[ Architecture ]

[ Bikes ]

[ Grafitti/street art ]

[ Canals ]

[ Local art ]

[ Stores/local businesses ]

View the entire set on Flickr

Leave, and wait for me. I will arrive.

Sinterklaas

Now this David Sedaris story makes more sense…

In the years before central heating, Dutch children would leave their shoes by the fireplace, the promise being that unless they planned to beat you, kick you, or stuff you into a sack, Saint Nicholas and the six to eight black men would fill your clogs with presents. Aside from the threats of violence and kidnapping, it’s not much different from hanging your stockings from the mantel. Now that so few people have a working fireplace, Dutch children are instructed to leave their shoes beside the radiator, furnace, or space heater. Saint Nicholas and the six to eight black men arrive on horses, which jump from the yard onto the roof. At this point, I guess, they either jump back down and use the door, or they stay put and vaporize through the pipes and electrical wires.

Read the entire story

Can’t forget Zwarte Piet…

Paris—Je t’aime

I took these photos in 2001. I fell in love with Paris immediately. (Paris, France. Not Paris Hilton.) Seeing the film Paris, Je t’aime quickly brought back memories.

Space tourism made possible by Virgin Galactic

Notes borrowed from Yahoo! News

Virgin Galactic, part of British billionaire Richard Branson’s Virgin Group, has sold some 200 tickets to passengers for suborbital flights, starting in 2008.

It has collected $15.6 million in deposits for the flights, a ticket for which costs $200,000. Virgin Group is building five spaceships and two airplanes by 2010 for the venture.

Travelers will take seats in a spaceship that will be attached to a separate airplane. Following takeoff, the spaceship detaches itself from the plane at an altitude of about 49,000 feet. It then enters suborbital space for about 15 minutes — including five minutes of weightlessness. After its journey into space — at 87 miles above Earth, it returns to the ground. The total flight-time is about 2 hours and 15 minutes, and the voyages will initially launch from the Mojave Desert in Southern California before relocating to a permanent base in New Mexico in 2010.

London anti-war rally

 

Notes to come…