He Travels the World for Free
Michael Wigge Shares His Secrets
By Hannah Monahan
Traveling the world may seem like an exciting but expensive idea. But what if it could be done for free? Michael Wigge did just that. Casting away the norms of conventional travel, he set out on his trip from his native Germany without a cent to his name in hopes of reaching Antarctica.
Prompting strangers into a pillow fight in San Francisco, becoming the “human sofa”, and butler for a day, Wigge engaged in numerous alternative means of work. His two rules: 1. Avoid ordinary work and focus on uncommon services in exchange for trip essentials (a place to sleep, food, travel); and 2. Engage people. He found that if you let people in on your plans, they are more then willing to help make things happen.
Michael Wigge began his career as an anchor for the German VIVA program London Calling in 2002. Since then, the world has been his newsroom and playground, whether he is living with the native Yanomami Indian tribe in the Amazon rain forest, taking the longest recorded donkey ride in the history of music television, or fighting Sumo wrestlers in Japan.
Whether reporting from prison for MTV or entering Buckingham Palace solemnly attired as King Henry VIII, Wigge has always thrown himself into the most unusual of situations. . He has served as a reporter, producer, and journalist for public and network television.
He says about his travels, “Everything is possible without money. I made my dream come true.”
Read HERE.
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Wise Geek “Who is behind Wise Geek? It’s one of the most common questions we receive. We are a team of researchers, writers and editors dedicated to providing short, clear and concise answers to common questions. Currently, there are over 200 active contributors.”
Earth’s Amazon rainforest is home to one third of the planet’s land species, illustrating Earth’s ability to sustain itself within a concentrated area. – Provided by RandomHistory.com
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Greetings From the New Africa
For hundreds of years, outsiders have been divided sharply between Afro-pessimists who believe that Africa is permanently programmed to fail and Afro-optimists who see it as a cornucopia that could produce unimaginable wealth. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the slave trade made Europe rich, and Timbuktu was believed to be paved with gold. But then Africa became the “Dark Continent.” In the 1960s, it was the rising giant while Asia was seen as a basket case. By 2000, the Economist was calling Africa the “Hopeless Continent.”
Just now, most African countries have enjoyed more than a decade of economic growth at rates we in the West can only dream about. At the same time Congo, the massive heart of the continent, has suffered the most murderous conflict since World War II. Next door in Uganda, the capital Kampala has boomed while less than 200 miles to the north Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army has abducted children and committed appalling atrocities. Africa is so big and so diverse that it contains both horrendous disasters and extraordinary successes.
Stephen Ellis, a professor of social sciences in Amsterdam, and Jean-Michel Severino, a former vice president of the World Bank and for 10 years the head of France’s international aid agency, have been at the forefront of analysis and debate about Africa for almost three decades.
MORE.
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CLICK HERE.
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Top Lord’s Resistance Army Commander Captured
Just months after the controversial Kony 2012 campaign brought worldwide attention to accused Ugandan war criminal Joseph Kony and his Lord’s Resistance Army, Ugandan forces have captured one of his top generals. The arrest of Caesar Achellam in an ambush in Central African Republic is considered a significant blow to the rebel group and could prompt other members of the group to desert. The increased pressure on Kony is apparently taking a toll, forcing him to move almost daily in order to evade capture.
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An Ohio man has set the world record for fist-pumping.
Some parents are so excited to be grandparents, they’re freezing their daughters’ eggs.
How does an email get from sender to recipient? A new Google animated video has the answer.
A candidate for Dad of the Year has taught his 5-year-old daughter to pick a Master Lock in under a minute.
Is this the best worst ’90s-era tattoo ever?
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If you’ve been on the edge of your seat waiting to see how SyFy would follow up its camp-horror instant classic Sharktopus, it’s your lucky day. Here’s the first trailer forPiranhaconda.
Piranhaconda premieres June 16.
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Wedding season once again is upon us, and a June 1971 letter from future U.S. President Ronald Reagan to his soon-to-be-wed son, Michael, contains advice for the groom that stands the test of time.
An excerpt:
If you truly love a girl, you shouldn’t ever want her to feel, when she sees you greet a secretary or a girl you both know, that humiliation of wondering if she was someone who caused you to be late coming home, nor should you want any other woman to be able to meet your wife and know she was smiling behind her eyes as she looked at her, the woman you love, remembering this was the woman you rejected even momentarily for her favors.
Mike, you know better than many what an unhappy home is and what it can do to others. Now you have a chance to make it come out the way it should. There is no greater happiness for a man than approaching a door at the end of a day knowing someone on the other side of that door is waiting for the sound of his footsteps.
Read the letter in full here.
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Rolling with the lords of the craps table.
For the gambler, dice have long been the best machine with which to turn a small amount of energy into a large amount of uncertainty. For the philosopher, there is no handier piece of rhetoric with which to evoke the foggy relations between God and universe, universe and man, or man and his own affairs. And so as I watched two members of the Golden Touch Craps team construct a dice pit in a windowless conference room of the Hyatt Regency O’Hare, I could not help but feel as though I were witnessing the creation of a universe, a green, felt-covered, racetrack-shaped cosmos where the dice are subject to the will of man and the men, therefore, are gods.
The cosmos, in this case, was a bundle of hinges and planks that had emerged the same morning, ex ovo, from the back of Colonel Joe Fox’s Ford. The gods were milling around like Teamsters, lugging boxes and power tools and their own steak-fed bodies, gradually transforming the beige void of the Allegheny Room into a miniature casino, a school for the study of dice control. I myself felt moved to pitch in, holding one end of the scuffed rail as Colonel Fox unrolled the layout with its pass and come solicitations lettered in red and gold. He wore a gold crucifix and four gold rings and a gambling face like something out of the Old West, lines of stony indifference etched around his mouth and eyes. “I musta re-covered three hundred pool tables in my life,” he muttered as a GTC colleague plugged in a tiny vacuum cleaner and ran it over the felt.
The Golden Touch Craps team had scheduled one of their “Crap$ 101” courses to begin the following day. In Crap$ 101, novice players receive two days of hands-on instruction in Golden Touch betting systems, Golden Touch visualization techniques, and, most important, the Golden Touch “controlled throw,” a method of retaining influence over the dice after they leave the hand. Tuition is $1,495, which does not include room, board, or a ticket to Chicago O’Hare; but with eight coaches and sixteen students, the student-to- faculty ratio bests the Ivy League. For an additional $300, students can take home an instructional Golden Touch DVD and the Gripper, a block of green foam designed to enhance the muscle memory of the fingertips. As graduates, students are eligible to enroll in the $1,995 Advanced Course, though some of the school’s wealthier alumni opt for private instruction at up to $10,000 per day. Those who prove themselves capable dice controllers and clubbable personalities are sometimes invited to teach Crap$ 101 as assistants to the assistant instructors. The post includes a $400 honorarium, drawn from tuition receipts.
MORE.
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Junko Tabei Becomes First Woman to Summit Mount Everest (This day in 1975)
Tabei founded a climbing club for women in Japan in 1969 and, by 1972, was a recognized mountain climber. When Japanese newspaper and television companies sponsored an all-female expedition to climb Mount Everest, Tabei was one of the 15 women selected to go. In 1975, after months of training and preparation, the 35-year-old mother of two became the first woman to reach Everest’s 29,035-foot (8,850-m) summit. What disaster partway up the slope nearly ended the climb? More…
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The sheer cliffs at the mouth of Sydney Harbor have long been a popular Australian suicide spot. But they’re about to get a lot more deadly — the local man who is credited with talking at least 160 people out of killing themselves since 1964 died this week.
Window-watcher Don Ritchie, known as the Angel of the Gap, could spot the troubled ones from his home across the street; he’d wander down to the cliff-edge and calmly ask, “Can I help you in some way?” More often then not, he could. He’d chat with them a bit, then invite them back to his place for a cup of tea.
“My ambition has always been to just get them away from the edge, to buy them time, to give them the opportunity to reflect and give them the chance to realize that things might look better the next morning,” Ritchie once said. “You just can’t sit there and watch them. You’ve got to try and save them.”
From here : advocatingprogress
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Picts
The Picts were the ancient inhabitants of central and northern Scotland. Of uncertain origins, they were first mentioned in 297 CE by Roman writer Eumenius as northern invaders of Roman Britain. By the 7th century, they had a unified kingdom—Pictland—but later merged with the Scots. Their language is lost, and little is definitively known about their way of life, but their elaborately carved stelae depicting crosses and other symbols remain. What practice possibly resulted in the name “Pict”? More…
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A new campaign called “Freedom to Serve, Freedom to Marry” — whose debut video will give you chills — takes aim at the Defense of Marriage Act and its impact on gay and lesbian military families. The video follows the devastating trajectory of a lesbian relationship when one of the women serves in Afghanistan.
Evan Wolfson, the founder of Freedom to Marry, one of the organizations behind the campaign, spells it out for us:
Many people assume that, with the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” gay men and lesbians serving our country are now being treated fairly and equally, but that’s not the case. We ended the ban on open military service for gay and lesbian Americans, but there is still federal ban on treating married service members as what they are: married.
From : towleroad
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Originally posted 2012-05-16 12:14:09. Republished by Blog Post Promoter