Think of all the liquid fresh water on the Earth’s surface – all the lakes, rivers, streams, ponds, etc. More than one-fifth of all that fresh water is in one lake: Lake Baikal in Siberia.

It’s only the seventh-largest lake in the world by surface area, smaller that three of North America’s Great Lakes – but it’s more than a mile deep. It was formed by water filling a deep rift valley where the Eurasian Plate is slowly splitting in two. If you’d like to visit, it’s not as remote as it looks. It’s only a one-hour drive from the city of Irkutsk, which can be reached from most of the world by air with a stop in Moscow. I found a round-trip flight from Dulles to Irkutsk for less than $1,500 on the Russian national airline Aeroflot (whose name sounds somewhat unfortunate in English). Happy virtual travels! http://bit.ly/2qk8F2B
Think of all the liquid fresh water on the Earth’s surface – all the lakes, rivers, streams, ponds, etc. More than one-fifth of all that fresh water is in one lake: Lake Baikal in Siberia.

It’s only the seventh-largest lake in the world by surface area, smaller that three of North America’s Great Lakes – but it’s more than a mile deep. It was formed by water filling a deep rift valley where the Eurasian Plate is slowly splitting in two.

If you’d like to visit, it’s not as remote as it looks. It’s only a one-hour drive from the city of Irkutsk, which can be reached from most of the world by air with a stop in Moscow. I found a round-trip flight from Dulles to Irkutsk for less than $1,200 on the Russian national airline Aeroflot.

Happy virtual travels!

It’s now been more than two weeks since Nike announced that the new face of their long-running “Just Do It” ad campaign would be former 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who became controversial for protesting police brutality and racism, and who is no longer in the league.

Images for the new ad campaign have already started to appear in print and online:

When I wrote about this last Monday, I was reacting to the initial announcement, which I saw in a tweet by ESPN reporter Darren Rovell. When I first saw the tweet, I wondered what exactly he meant by “Nike had been paying Colin Kaepernick all along.” The extremely cynical explanation – that the entire protest was just a Nike ad campaign – has fortunately turned out to be incorrect. “All along” simply means that they continued to honor their endorsement deal with Kaepernick after his playing career ended (and thanks to Mac for pointing this out to me).

And I’m sure you’ve seen some of the dank maymays that have flooded the Internet since the campaign’s announcement:

Yes, I’m sure you’ve seen these images. Which was Nike’s plan all along.

I’ve made a hobby of showing you some of the amazing places around our world, with a focus on the most obscure and unexpected, like the South Dakota – Montana border, and the Russian republic of Kalmykia. But of course all of the world’s most famous sights are there too, letting you play virtual tourist all over the world.

And here is one of the most famous of the famous: the Great Pyramid of Giza:

But even such a famous sight holds surprises. Zoom out a little to see the surprising amount of development around the Great Pyramid, including superhighways and golf courses:

Bullwinkle’s Corner:
An occasional series about poetry

Part 1: When Spring Comes

This is also part 3 of a series of posts about my terra ultima australis, the city of Puerto Montt, Chile

Part 1: A visit to the Deep South
Part 2: The other side of the South

Here’s another post from Bullwinkle’s Corner, an occasional series about poems that speak to me in some way. See the sidebar for the others.

Today’s entry is a song, which of course is a type of poem. And it’s a powerful one, about a real historical event: the Puerto Montt Massacre, in which police fired shots and tear gas into a crowd of protester/squatters, killing nine people. The singer-songwriter is Chilean folk singer Victor Jara (1932-1973), a Chilean folk singer, teacher, and political activist who was murdered in the early days of the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

Of course, music is meant to be listened to, so here is an audio recording of Jara performing the song live in Valparaiso, Chile. After an introduction and some silence, the song starts at 0:34. The song is in Spanish, but if you don’t speak Spanish, a translation is below.

Two things are helpful to know in interpreting the lyrics. First, Puerto Montt i is like Seattle in that it is a temperate city on the Pacific coast with a cold polar current offshore – so it rains a lot. The Chilean expression equivalent to “Is the Pope Catholic?” is “¿Lluvia en Puerto Montt?” (Is it raining in Puerto Montt?).

Second, who is the “port monkey” in the chorus? It’s Interior Secretary Edmundo Pérez Zujovic, who gave the order to evict the settlers. (He probably didn’t order the police to shoot, but you can imagine his attitude towards the settlers might have contributed to the violence.)

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqjfOxKFnB0&w=560&h=315]

Such a raw evocation of a tragedy – so angry yet so sensitive.

Last November, we found something so new that we had to invent a new way to describe it: presenting Asteroid 1I/`Oumuamua.

The letter I stands for Interstellar, and the number 1 means it’s the first of its kind ever seen. `Oumuamua (pronounced “oh-MOO-uh-moo-uh“) means “advance scout” in Hawaiian.

Here is the fascinating story of its discovery, told by some of the people who found it:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbL1ZoAQgUU&w=560&h=315]

And now it’s gone, headed back from whence it came after a quick half-spin around the Sun. 1I/`Oumuamua at a mind-blowing 26 kilometers per second (58,000 miles per hour). It has already gone so far that it is invisible to all but the largest telescopes.