Today is Groundhog Day, a North American festival which reckons that “if a groundhog emerges from its burrow on this day and fails to see its shadow because the weather is cloudy, winter will soon end. If the groundhog sees…

In the early days of mass automotive travel, fuel stations often resorted to some wacky gimmicks to differentiate themselves from the pack and lure in customers, such as novelty architecture that made the station building even more of a roadside attraction than the fuel they were selling. Today, many of these wacky 1930s-era stations are icons to thousands of visitors every year.

While most visual artwork is intended to please the eye, some artists strive to reach the other senses as well.  Some of them create large-scale sculptures which create sounds from natural sources – generally wind or water. Our first example…

One of the world’s largest UNESCO World Heritage Sites encompasses dozens of locations in and around the Russian city of St Petersburg. In later posts we’ll visit the outlying forts and country palaces, but first we’ll explore some of the…

To celebrate the holiday season this year we’ll take a look at Christmas Trees, whose “leaves are so unchanging. Not only green when summer’s here, but also when ’tis cold and drear”1. In the United States, an estimated 31 million…

There are around 6.98 billion people in the world, and at least a few million of them have been photographed by Google’s Street View cameras as they captured 48 different countries and regions. But today I’d like to draw your…