Odyssey Marine: pirates, or worse?

The folks at Odyssey Marine can't be too happy about the writeup they received in the April 7th New Yorker. We've been reporting sporadically on their recent discoveries and their ongoing conflict with Spain. The New Yorker report digs much more deeply into Odyssey and its principals, however, and it doesn't paint a pretty picture. Not only is Odyssey made out to be a bunch of brazen treasure-hunting ocean-floor plunderers -- there is also the possibility that more money is being made out of manipulating the price of the company's own stock than from actual recovery of specie and artifacts.

The Olympic flame: the Nazis' torch burns on

A timely reminder that the Olympic torch was invented for the 1936 Berlin Olympics -- and that the controversy it is currently attracting as it makes its way to Beijing derives directly from its origins as a talisman of nationalistic supercessionism.

Now, despite China's attempt to put a smiley face on the torch relay -- "Light the Passion, Share the Dream" says the Chinese Web site (see torchrelay.beijing2008.cn/en) -- the Tibetan protests have laid bare its nationalist essence. There are reasons why the Chinese wanted a route that invoked glory (by touching Everest's peak) and power (by passing through Taiwan).

Of course in 1936 the relay reflected a more ominous threat. The torch was carried through Salonika, Greece; Sofia, Bulgaria; Belgrade, Yugoslavia; Budapest; and Vienna, and was welcomed along the way not by extensive protests but with pro-Nazi demonstrations. A prescient editorial in The New York Times, sensing the drumbeats of war, called the torch's route a "strategic highway" that traced the line of the German "Drang Nach Osten" -- the drive to the East that the Kaiser sought in the First World War, and which Hitler was soon to put into practice.

The article notes and links to the upcoming exhibition at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, The Nazi Olympics: Berlin 1936, which opens on the 25th.

Let's Not Go

It's been some time since I relied on guides such as Let's Go and Guide du Routard; the Lonely Planet volumes held up better as one outgrew the backpacker/student mindset, but it's been a while since I've bought any of them, either.

And probably will be quite a while longer, too, after this story:

A Lonely Planet author says he plagiarized or made up portions of the popular travel guidebooks and dealt drugs to supplement poor pay, an Australian newspaper reported Sunday.

Thomas Kohnstamm, who has written a book on his misadventures, also said he didn't travel to Colombia to write the guidebook on the country because "they didn't pay me enough," The Daily Telegraph reported.

"I wrote the book in San Francisco [California]," he is quoted as saying in the Telegraph. "I got the information from a chick I was dating -- an intern in the Colombian Consulate."

Via Roger Simon, who comments in passing:

. . . funny thing, there was this supposedly great Pho joint in Phuket I traveled fifty miles for... and it turned out be a laundromat

In my experience, beyond the issue of out of date, garbled, or possibly badly plagiarized information, the youth-oriented budget guides' notions of what constituted good food often drastically differed from my own.

UPDATE: A must-read followup on the issues raised by this flap. Excerpt:

I spent a very pleasurable evening over beers in China with a fellow guidebook writer perhaps a year ago. We swapped amusing guidebook disaster stories for hours to the horror of a group of backpackers who shared the bar with us. Finally, he confided in me how, on one particular rush job for a guidebook publisher I won't name, he briefly visited a large lake in the far north of China. "I wrote in the book, 'Nice lake, take a walk around it,' " he told me. "Problem was, half of it turned out to be in North Korea, and the first person who did, ended up in prison."

Tax time madness

The light is finally glimmering at the end of the tunnel.
The comments feature has been re-enabled (no, I didn't disable it -- but I couldn't manage to get the time to fix it until now, either), and maybe I'll be able to post some of the links I've accumulated over the past couple of weeks.