Friday, December 20, 2013

Nutmeg Poisoning

Cleaning out my mom's house and going through old caches of foreign or otherwise un-Coinstar-able money, I found a Zambian ngwee. (The ngwee is worth one hundredth of a kwacha, in case you were wondering.) I've never been to Zambia or anywhere near it. But finding this tiny coin with an aardvark on one side, which had somehow made its way into my childhood home, made me instantly crave a trip to Zambia. (I get like that when I don't travel regularly; it's like a chronic condition that I can't afford to manage properly.) Unsurprisingly, the Connecticut-related material I've been drawn to recently has all had a travel angle to it.

-Richard Conniff writes about the elephant-hunting history of Deep River in TakePart. There's more on the Africa-Connecticut River Valley link on ConnecticutHistory.org. (And if you've never seen the adorable and extremely wrinkly-looking elephant statue in Deep River, it looks like this.)

-GhostTowns.com is exactly what it sounds like, and it includes ten Connecticut locations. Cuties Island off Stamford sounds intriguing...if I had a boat...

-If you know anything about Connecticut, it shouldn't surprise you to learn that the Polaroid was invented in Lebanon by a man who was born in Bridgeport and later lived in Norwich.

-I found a copy of Serendipity in my dentist's office. If you, like me, had never seen this magazine before, it covers Fairfield and Westchester Counties and it is both highly entertaining and everything Connecticut's worst enemies would imagine. Serendipity's vacation suggestion? Charter a train!

-I'm generally a couple years late to everything entertainment, and the travel series Stephen Fry in America is no exception. In it, Fry zig-zags around America being witty in a personalized London cab. In Episode 1, New World, he stops briefly in Groton, where he seems genuinely intrigued by a nuclear submarine. (This is thankfully far less random than some of the things he gets up to in other states, like visiting the Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles.) I do love how Britons say the word "Connecticut." It just sounds so hard for them, and makes it even more improbable that the early settlers stuck with that name in the first place.

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