DeputyDog has a great post about huge and amazing gatherings of people. The picture above is from the Maha Kumbh Mela Hindu pilgrimage. An event that happens only once every twelve years. Millions of people congregate on the ganges river for the religious festival.
There is a belief that bathing in the river during the festival will wash away past sins and promote healing. Pilgrims travel from all over the world to attend the festival. The last festival, held in 2001 had over 70 million attendees.
Ok, this is just bizarre. An Indian businessman, Bahadur Chand Gupta, is selling tickets on his Airbus 300 to fellow Indian countrymen for $4 a ticket. Wow, $4! Thats an amazing price. So what is the catch? Just this, the plane doesn’t go anywhere. It is even missing some engines!
What you are buying with your ticket, is the ability to experience a virtual flight. You get all the joys of modern air travel without having to actually leave the ground. And of course you don’t go anywhere. You get a safety demonstration, airline food, and even captain’s announcements. Oh, and you also get the joy of sitting in cramped seats for a while.
The most amazing thing, is that people are paying Gupta for this dubious privilege. fewer than 1% of Indian’s have ever experienced plane travel. So the entire “trip” is an exciting thing for the passengers. I guess this just goes to show that anything can be sold if you can find the right buyers.
The very name, lost city, conjures up thoughts of adventure and treasure. Pictures of ancient cities and ruins always fascinate me. Looking at the pictures, I can almost imagine myself exploring ancient temples and palaces.
So I was pretty excited when I found an entire site devoted to images and photos of lost cities and monuments from ancient civilizations. The site has tons of pictures organized into location. Clicking on a location gives you a brief description of the city and it’s history.
The picture above, is of the cave temple complex of Badami. Badami was the capital of the Early Chalukyas, who ruled over Karnataka India in the 6th to 8th centuries. The cave temples date back to 600 and 700 AD.
Check out the site for more pictures and info on ancient lost cities. Shunya: Lost Cities
This amazing little girl roller skates under 40 parked cars. The girl is from India, and I don’t know any of the details beyond what the video shows, but it looks like a competition of some kind. Pretty amazing.
The amazing video above shows a tiger leaping 12 feet into the air to attack a forest ranger who was sitting on top of an elephant. It seems that a rogue tiger had been reported in the area, and a team was sent out to deal with it. Tigers being a protected species, they were not planning to kill it.
The tiger was tracked to the field in the video, where an attempt to take it down with a tranquilizer dart was made. The ranger who fired the dart, missed. This so enraged the tiger, that it attacked.
After the attack, the video cuts off, but the rest of the story has the park ranger who was attacked and another park ranger falling off the elephant they were riding. At which point the elephant attacked the tiger in defense of the rangers on the ground. Eventually the tiger was driven off. The ranger who was attacked lost three fingers and had bad lacerations on his arm and side.
A company in India is starting to mass produce the first air powered car. Rather than run on electricity, gasoline, or hydrogen, this car runs on compressed air. It will go up to 68 miles per hour, and has a range or about 125 miles on a single tank. You can refuel it anywhere you can get access to compressed air. It also has a built in air compressor that can be run by simply plugging it in. The built in air compressor takes about 4 hours to “refuel” the car. So it’s something you would want to do overnight. The cool thing about this car, is that it is completely emissions free. Whether you believe strongly in the dangers of global warming, or not, you have to agree that anything that cuts down on pollution is a good thing. Of course, the electricity that is used to produce the compressed air has to come from somewhere. So if it comes from a dirty coal burning plant, then all you have done is shift the pollution away from you.
