Want to outsource your work? Consider out-horsing your work instead!
Some clever folks in Iceland created a giant keyboard and let a few of their Icelandic horses play on it.
You can even get them to write your out-of-office email response as well.
Hekla frá Þorkellshóli generated my most recent out of office email for me. High quality!
Major multi-day hikes:
More information and some of them taken from here.
It’s springtime, and that means wildflowers are blooming in the gorge! Knowing when to go and what trails you want to take can be overwhelming. Here’s two good resources.
With the increased popularity of the gorge, you now need permits more than ever before to hike trails and see the flowers. Here’s some links for that:
Enjoy an armchair visits to some of the more beautiful train stations in Europe
Take the train From Pancras up to Canterbury.
From the Antwerp station, take a ride up to Ghent.
BricksBoy Studio does a complete walkthrough of the San Francisco ‘Art of the Brick‘ installation. Currently only in San Francisco and Chicago, this video is perfect for Covid time adventuring without leaving your couch.
At Japan’s anti-procrastination “Manuscript Writing Cafe”, there is no leaving until your work is done.
The cafe is for writers of all kinds who are facing imminent deadlines. Customers first write down their work goals and an expected length of time it will take to achieve them. Next, they choose between three levels of intensity of progress checks from ‘mild’ to ‘difficult.’ Only after achieving said goals can writers check out. According to the cafe’s owner, Takuya Kawai, every customer has achieved their goals, even if they’ve had to stay past closing time. The cafe also offers unlimited coffee, tea bags, high-speed Wi-Fi and charging ports to maximize work efficiency.
Here’s the address if you want to go. It turns out that I walked a block away from here a few years back, but it didn’t exist as this kind of cafe yet.
原稿執筆カフェ 3 Chome-34-1 Koenjikita, Suginami City, Tokyo 166-0002, Japan
I was lucky enough to stay at this really amazing Hobbit home AirBnB by Kristie Wolfe. I recently read an interesting article on the properties she has created.
Chicago is a city full of amazing architecture – something you don’t see as much on the west coast with it’s more modern buildings. There are some really great Chicago architecture tours by the Chicago Architecture Center if you visit the city.
One such architectural marvel was the Pullman Mansion. The Pullman Mansion was built for George M. Pullman on Prairie Avenue and was known as the social center in Chicago for over 50 years. When the area surrounding the mansion became blighted in the 1920s, the Pullman family auctioned all the contents in 1921 and demolish the home.
At the sale, everything was sold – not just furnishings and art, but also the wall panels and decorative interiors. Everything that could be pried loose was sold.
In 1984, architect Michael Shymanski made a discovery in the basement of the old Chicago Historical Society Building that shed light on the Pullman mansion. He found a whole pile of pieces from the old Pullman home – along with the original construction plans. It turns out that the craftsman who built the home had numbered and labeled each of the pieces during fabrication (something very common for the time). It was possible to know exactly where each piece came from.
This video is one of the best put together documentaries about how the house was put together and what it looked like. Definitely worth a look if you like Chicago architecture.
For Christians, we are about to enter the mysteries of Holy Week. Christ enters Jerusalem, is crucified by the temple leaders, and then rises from the dead – an act which opens the gates of eternal life for humanity. There is so much going on in such a few short days, one can barely keep up with it all. It’s no wonder the different events of Holy Week have been the subject of countless masterpieces over time.
On my first trip to Paris, I did the tourist things like visiting the Louvre and saw the Mona Lisa. But what’s much more interesting is that when I left the hall, I saw a painting that captivated me far more than fair Lisa. A painting by Antonio Campi called The Mystery of the Passion, Resurrection, and Ascension of Christ (1569).
Click the image below to see a full-sized scan (4018×3212 px (4,9 Mb))
What is fascinating about it is that the more you look at it, you see all the events of Holy Week until the Ascension of Christ in one picture. I spent a lot of time looking at it and finding all the different parts. There is so much detail in this one giant painting! Just some of the events are:
Give this little video clip a watch to see what events you can see.
Links:
The history of the Oberammergau Passion play begins in 1633. In the midst of the Thirty Years’ War, after months of suffering and dying from the plague, the people of Oberammergau – a small town south of Munich, Germany – pledged to act out the passion: the suffering, death and resurrection of our Lord, Jesus Christ once every 10 years.
Normally it should have happened in 2020, but was delayed due to Covid. Instead, it was moved to this year: 2022. The 5 hour play will now have performances from May 14, 2022 until October 2, 2022. If you are in the area, you should catch it since it won’t return until 2030.