landspeednyc

Why don't Arpey and Kellner just have a cage match? (AA vs. CO to China)

Not content to fly ORD-PVG (AA) or EWR-PEK (CO), AA and CO are enlisting the support of the
flying public to support new routes to China.

AA wants to fly DFW-PEK

CO wants to fly EWR to PVG

The next candidate for "Euroflation"? Slovenia

I think that' I've seen that economists deny the concept of Euroflation, but consumers don't always buy that. I'm sure it will still be a topic of conversation in Slovenia soon enough:

Slovenia begins euro entry countdown

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - Slovenian euro coin production has begun as the EU finance ministers on Tuesday (11 July) gave a final formal go-ahead for the country's entry to the 12-member eurozone as of January 2007. 

The Slovenian central bank must distribute 155 million euro coins and 42 million bank notes by the beginning of the next year.

Cartoon from Metropole Paris

What's next for Time Out? Manchester, Liverpool, LA, Kiev, Delhi and Barcelona

The Independent has a feature on "Time Lord" Tony Elliott and the history and future of his Time Out empire. Some excerpts:

More than 38 years after he used a £75 21st birthday gift from an aunt to found a magazine named after a Dave Brubeck record, Tony Elliott, the founder of Time Out, has made a discovery that he is especially excited about.

...The discovery is this: that there are other cities here in the United Kingdom with the vibrancy and culture to justify a weekly Time Out magazine of their own. Next February, Elliott plans to launch simultaneously in Manchester and Liverpool.

...his next target is the West Coast. "I believe we can establish a business in Los Angeles and will do it in about 18 months, two years' time. The big question in LA is the relation between online and print. It's very spread out and is maybe a good place for us to explore a slightly different model, with online leading and print being a supplement to online." ...The most recent addition to the portfolio was Time Out Almaty (which, in case you didn't know, is the cultural capital of Kazakhstan). Launches will take place next year in Kiev, Delhi and Barcelona as well as Liverpool and Manchester.

Super size me, Prague style: follow-up

Not only were the folks at Jaunted nice enough to pick up my link in the first place, but they're nice enough to do what I'm too busy/lazy to do- actually follow-up  on things!

Slav Sheds Spare Tire Super Sizing

I see beer cheese in my future...

 

Newcomers to Japan appear on TV to say what they find 'cool'

From Japan Today:

What's cool about Japan? The premise of the new NHK-BS program called “Cool Japan” is that first impressions offer the best clues. It’s a reasonable assumption. The Japanese themselves, like natives anywhere, take their environment too much for granted to know. Long-term foreigners — like long-term foreigners everywhere — are probably too jaded to think anything’s cool.

Enter the wide-eyed newcomer. His or hers are the eyes that see what others miss. The program format confronts moderator Shoji Kokami with 10 greenhorn gaijin — anyone in the country longer than six months need not apply. Naturally, there’s a language barrier, and so Kokami is assisted by simultaneous interpreters. Budgetary constraints making it impossible for NHK to hire qualified interpreters versed in all the native languages of all the short-term foreigners in Japan, the choice of guests is restricted to those speaking English.

The program debuts in April. Writing in Spa! (April 4), Kokami tells us how things are going so far. The first program will deal with the Japanese home. What is cool about the Japanese home? Four things above all: tatami, sliding fusuma doors, high-tech toilets, and — slippers.

It's not just americans getting fatter: "Heftier Australia may give boost to toilets"

From the AP/Houston Chronicle: 

Heftier Australia may give boost to toilets

SYDNEY, Australia  — Toilets may need to get sturdier as a result of the country's increasingly obese population.

Standards Australia, a nongovernment group that establishes safety and design standards, is considering recommending stronger loos for larger users, a spokeswoman said Tuesday

The current industry standard for toilet seats is 100 pounds, and Standards Australia is looking to increase it to 330 pounds, spokeswoman Kate Evans said.

           

Super size me, Prague style: Volunteer to spend entire month eating typical Czech food

From PragueMonitor:

Volunteer to spend entire month eating typical Czech food

PRAGUE, Feb 6 (CTK) - The Aerofilms company has hired a volunteer to spend an entire month eating nothing but typically unhealthy Czech cuisine as part of an experiment accompanying the local distribution of the feature documentary Super Size Me, Ivo Andrle from Aerofilms told CTK today.

Cantonese is losing its voice

From the LAT:

Speakers of the spicy tongue that can make words of love 
sound like a fight are having to learn its linguistic kin, 
the mellower Mandarin.
...
Cantonese, a sharp, cackling dialect full of slang and 
exaggerated expressions, was never the dominant language of
China. But it came to dominate the Chinatowns of North America
because the first immigrants came from the Cantonese-speaking 
southern province of Guangdong, where China first opened its 
ports to foreigners centuries ago.

It is also the chief language of Hong Kong, the vital trading 
and financial center that became China's link to the West.

But over the last three decades, waves of Mandarin-speaking
mainland Chinese and Taiwanese immigrants have diluted the 
influence of both the Cantonese language and the pioneering 
Cantonese families who ran Chinatowns for years....

2006 World Cup Germany- the Guardian's guide to the host cities

Remember that you have until 1/15 for this round of ticket requests at FIFA World Cup.

The Guardian's guide to the host cities is here.

Edit- the Sydney Morning Herald has their entry ("Achtung! Herr we come"), as well

Amoeba records keeps Amoebeing- record chain bets on the past, future

A lot of East coasters (and others around the world) are really F'in jealous of Californians in one major way; they have Amoeba records and we don't. The LA Times' Michael Hiltzik reports here:

...Through all this upheaval, Amoeba Music survives. The independent record chain was founded in 1990 in a Berkeley storefront and subsequently expanded to three stores — one on San Francisco's Haight Street and another, launched in November 2001 near Sunset and Vine, that instantly became a Hollywood landmark.

Up to now Amoeba's success has been based on looking backward. It relies for as much as half its unit volume on used, vintage, and collectible LPs ("vinyl" in used-record parlance), CDs, and DVDs on which high profit margins make up for the razor-thin margins on new CDs. Amoeba's used-record buyers are masters at assessing with a glance material that comes across its trade-in counters by the thousands per day — more than 200,000 items a month at the Hollywood location alone, not including items acquired from established collections or at estate sales.

But Amoeba is about to take a couple of big leaps into the future, with plans to start its own record label and to create an online site for downloadable music.

"We're starting the 21st century now," Dave Prinz, 52, one of the company's co-founders, told me last week in Berkeley. "The Internet is changing everything. We were ignoring it."