Ben Groundwater kicks it off nicely with some jungle action. The comment thread in the story below is a little thin… so far.

“Those guns,” I said to nearest guide, pointing at the AK-47 slung across his chest, “they’re not for the gorillas are they?”

The guide laughed. “For the gorillas? No. These are for the guerrillas.”

Among my craziest:

• Hectic and terrifying bar brawl on Santorini… apparently it was not tourist season yet.
• Jumped onto a moving train in northern Germany
• Taught myself to ride a moto in Thailand… on dirt roads, in flip-flops (never, never, never try this- now that I have learned to ride properly, I look back on this one and shudder)
• Amsterdam, New Year’s 1999-2000. Do the math.
• Some others that I don’t discuss in public.

via The Sydney Morning Herald, and sent to me by Squigsy, a card-carrying IJT member who has enough crazy travel stories to cover you if you come up short.

Yin Xiuzhen has created miniature cities in open suitcases, using discarded clothing and other found materials. These textile sculptures are called, fittingly enough, Portable Cities.

Her current exhibition (at the Anna Schwartz Gallery in Sydney) features Melbourne, Shenzhen and Jia Yu Guan.

Looking at Mini-Melbourne, we can see that Yin cleverly rendered Flinders Street Station, the MCG and other notable landmarks. (Having never been to Shenzhen or Jia Yu Guan, I can’t comment on their veracity, but they sure look cool).

Yin spends time in each place and the buildings chosen for re-creation are ones that she finds memorable. It provides an interesting view of the locations and enforces her key message; you cannot truly understand, and therefore learn from an environment, unless you spend a good amount of time there.

(MrXStitch)

Via designboom.

None of the top 10 US carriers encourage customer complaints on their Facebook pages, with most guiding their users to a 1-800 number (?!) instead. Hint: your customer is online. Throw ‘em a link.

JetBlue, the #7 airline, has far and away the most fans (over 316,000; 3x as many as United Airlines, who comes in second with nearly 150,000).

The European list was interesting, if predictable in places. Obviously Ryanair isn’t too active on Facebook, since Michael O’Leary’s antics are pure, unadulterated flamebait.

Ryanair could use social media to its advantage, if only it could muzzle its CEO in order to stay out of damage control mode. Alternatively, Ryanair could shoot the moon and have a Facebook group dedicated to coming up with the most heinous airline surcharges and changes that anybody could invent.

Then again, Ryanair has cultivated a corporate culture of just not caring what its customers think; at least, the past several years’ worth of bizarre moves has made the rest of the world believe that that’s the case.

In the US, Delta is alone in integrating ticket purchasing into its Facebook page. Hard to tell how effective this is (do you buy a plane ticket because you saw your friend do it?), but it makes all the right noises in terms of “that social media thing that all the kids’re doing”.

KLM lets its fans make their own luggage tags, which can include a picture. The potential for having a laugh with this feature is limitless.

Cathay Pacific uses its Facebook page as a recruiting tool; it’s the only airline on the list that does so.

Swedish photographer Chris Maluszynski spent a few years (off and on, one presumes/desperately hopes) taking snaps of the carpets found in Las Vegas casinos.

Nothing in a casino is there by chance: everything is geared toward making you stay and play. Cheap or free drinks and food, no clocks… and hideous carpets. Turns out that the loud carpet patterns are meant to help fuel your urge to gamble, as opposed to just looking ugly enough for you to prefer looking at the gaming machines and tables.

David Schwartz also takes casino capets pretty seriously, and writes about them on The Die is Cast.

Check out more of Chris Maluszynski’s casino-carpet photography on Wired.

The Oatmeal rules.

The crap we put up with getting on and off an airplane – The Oatmeal

The chimps have figured out how the snares work, and are triggering them without getting caught or hurt. When the chimps pwn the traps, those traps are then prevented from catching anything at all: monkey or non-monkey.

I wonder how long it will be before these chimps find a way to redeploy the snares. Chimps are smart, and they just don’t give a fuck, sometimes even eating each other. They are not to be messed with.

Sometimes a chimp lightly knocked the sapling that holds the snare, before grasping it to break the trap.But in all cases, they avoided touching the dangerous part, the wire loop.In the video above, chimp can be seen seeking out and inspecting snares, without breaking them.

via BBC – Earth News.

The header says it all, no? Monkey Business is a series of short documentaries about people from around the globe who work with monkeys.

So far, there are four. I hope that more are on the way. According to the monkey wrangler in Delhi, “the public is really fed up with monkeys. They come into people’s homes and steal their mobile phones.”

Join him in a tense monkey stakeout via the video below. (Bear in mind, though, that monkeys aren’t actually poisonous, thought a monkey bite is a vector for infection)

These mini-docos aren’t LOL-funny, but are really interesting glimpses into the lives of people for whom interaction with monkeys is a daily event.

Monkey Business: India from Manjaro on Vimeo.

(found via boingboing)

Check out more of BLU’s wall work.

Image via BLU II.

Graboids are the monsters in Tremors, which you already knew… unless you’ve been living under a rock, in which case Graboids would be able to get you.

Also, hit the comment thread in this BoingBoing post to see just how many Tremors quotes you all actually know.

“What the hell is goin’ on? I mean, what the hell is goin’ on?!” – Val

Monstrous Wildlife from Frank Robnik on Vimeo.

1. Brackendale, British Columbia is the eagle capital of the world. Usually, when heading to Whistler, I’m either on a motorcycle (during the spring and summer) or in a car (winter), and have never noticed the sign that Brackendale is famous for its eagle population. How could I have missed this?!

I was on a training ride for the Whistler GranFondo, and noticed all sorts of landmarks that escaped my attention before, either because they’re covered with snow or because I can’t take my eyes off the road. Cycling, though, lets you pay attention to the scenery, and the Sea to Sky has that in spades.

Do the Brackendale eagles have their own website? Yup. The Brackendale eagles have their own website. Brackendale Eagles Provincial Park is just north of Squamish. I’m sorry to report that I did not see any eagles. I’ll definitely be keeping an eye out next time I cycle through… which will be all too soon.

2. A Colt Is My Passport, directed by Takashi Nomura, is a very stylish noir flick. Joe Shishido plays the least paranoid hitman of all time. The Nikkatsu Action films are a scream: the stylish recreations of Western noir and crime flicks, as well as Seijun Suzuki’s bizarre experiments in celluloid.

If you’re into gangster flicks that are heavy on style and light on traditional plot structure, try Branded to Kill.

I was introduced to the work of Seijun Suzuki, and this whole genre of Japanese cinema, by Dr. Leigh Smith.