Do you ever get tired of real hard-hitting news, honest travel memoirs and deep think pieces on destinations? Yeah, us too. Which is why The Onion's new Atlas of the Planet Earth Google Map mashup is totally our new best friend.
The guide's hilarity is all sourced from satire publisher's newish book, Our Dumb World. This week's featured country is Egypt, which, according to The Onion anyway, is:
Located in the Smithsonian, the Louvre, the National Gallery in London and countless other museums throughout the Western world...behind thick glass displays in climate-controlled rooms.
Not from Egypt? With a new country each week, you'll be able to find a comically offensive description of your own nation soon. Here's hoping Turkey doesn't find out about this!
The Brits and the French, they're a comedy duo going back centuries. This week budget airline Jet2 got in on the act by posting the above cartoon on its website. Doesn't blocking a runway actually sound like a lot for a frog to do? Especially for a lazy frog, no less.
But we digress. The direct cause for the cartoon, of course, were travel-related delays caused by air-traffic controllers taking part in strikes throughout France. On one delayed plane in the Alps, the British passengers started a counter-protest by yelling "Rosbifs want to go home" for two hours. Poor flight attendants.
They like things a little rough in Budapest. The stylist Szabolcs Bodnar has taken to cutting his clients' hair with a chopping block and ax. To get stray hairs out of there, he uses a vacuum cleaner, and to straighten curly hair, he uses an iron. If you're up for it, you can instead hang upside down while he uses a samurai sword. Naturally, his salon has been a hit since he's included all this violence. Wasn't this a skit with John Belushi on Saturday Night Live?
Here's a scene from the old Japanese kid's show Kure Kure Takora (Gimme Gimme Octopus), videos of which that weirdo radio station WFMU is hosting on its blog. Your guess is as good as ours as to why the blue and green rubber blobs are so intent on attacking the nice red octopus mother's baby. See Boing-Boing for a little analysis; it doesn't sound as if knowing Japanese makes it any plainer. WFMU has a total of seven segments to watch and analyze -- there goes Friday morning.
The 2001 book An Ideal Boy is a glossy collection of educational charts and posters used in India up to the present. Cheaply and brightly printed, the posters appeared in post offices and on food stalls as well as in classrooms. The info given was usually a little . . . off. As the publisher says, "A chart of world religion for example features a map of India, a national symbol and Mahatma Gandhi; whilst one on Insect life has a surprising panel on frogs and chickens." We don't care overmuch about insects, frogs, or chickens, and we sometimes don't even brush up the teeth, but we do know these posters are awful pretty.
Bad News Hughes payeth a visit to the local Ren Faire, and it ain't all that pretty:
You know what else I noticed about the [goshdurn Ren] Faire? . . . . You think you're going to see a couple of knights have a good old-timey duel and the next thing you know two pirates, three clerics, a squire, a dungeon master and the queen disguised as a handmaiden have all run in to labor over some point of exposition and drastically reduce the amount of time the dudes in the armor spend whacking each other with fake swords. Hey, nerds -- I'm sorry your community theater production of Our Town isn't as fulfilling as you want it to be, but I'm totally calling bullshit.
So these two Brits take one of those "holidays" to Bangkok. But they thought the place sucked. So they went to a travel agent and got tickets to what they thought was Tenerife, in the Canary Islands. But what they got was a flight to Tel Aviv. Cor. As one of the couple explained, "it sounds daft but I'd never seen Tel Aviv spelt before. I thought it was what people in Thailand called Tenerife." Once they arrived, the unamused Israelis put them behind barbed wire for a time, and strip-searched them twice. And then the couple flew back to Bangkok, and we lost interest, but in the end their wanderings cost them about $8700, with $7300 of that for airfare.
It's been around a while, but Seth Stephenson's Slate series about Trying Really Hard to Like India still makes a great read. Dances by the "Lou Reed of monkeys," thwarted abductions by fake Bollywood directors, musings on the Indian head wobble, and easy access to both pharmaceuticals and oily, disturbing massages -- what more do you need? Thanks, Melissa!
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by pbb
They like things a little rough in Budapest. The stylist Szabolcs Bodnar has taken to cutting his clients' hair with a chopping block and ax. To get stray hairs out of there, he uses a vacuum cleaner, and to straighten curly hair, he uses an iron. If you're up for it, you can instead hang upside down while he uses a samurai sword. Naturally, his salon has been a hit since he's included all this violence. Wasn't this a skit with John Belushi on Saturday Night Live?
Here's a scene from the old Japanese kid's show Kure Kure Takora (Gimme Gimme Octopus), videos of which that weirdo radio station WFMU is hosting on its blog. Your guess is as good as ours as to why the blue and green rubber blobs are so intent on attacking the nice red octopus mother's baby. See Boing-Boing for a little analysis; it doesn't sound as if knowing Japanese makes it any plainer. WFMU has a total of seven segments to watch and analyze -- there goes Friday morning. 
So these two Brits take one of those "holidays" to Bangkok. But they thought the place sucked. So they went to a travel agent and got tickets to what they thought was Tenerife, in the Canary Islands. But what they got was a flight to Tel Aviv. Cor. As one of the couple explained, "it sounds daft but I'd never seen Tel Aviv spelt before. I thought it was what people in Thailand called Tenerife." Once they arrived, the unamused Israelis put them behind barbed wire for a time, and strip-searched them twice. And then the couple flew back to Bangkok, and we lost interest, but in the end their wanderings cost them about $8700, with $7300 of that for airfare.
It's been around a while, but Seth Stephenson's Slate series about 
