Tijuana is a city in Baja California, Mexico. It is part of the San Diego–Tijuana transborder urban agglomeration and the larger Southern California megalopolis. As the 2nd-largest city in Mexico and center of the 6th-largest metro area in Mexico, Tijuana exerts a strong influence in education and politics, in transportation, culture, art, and manufacturing, and as a migration hub. Currently, one of the fastest-growing metropolitan areas in Mexico, Tijuana is rated as a “High Sufficiency” global city by the Globalization and World Cities Research Network. As of September 2019, the city of Tijuana had a population of 1,810,645, with its metropolitan area containing a population of 2,157,853 as of 2020, an estimated 2,002,000 within the urban area.
Tijuana is located on the Pacific coast of Baja California and is the municipal seat and the cultural and commercial center of Tijuana Municipality (Mexican states are divided into municipalities, rather than counties as in the U.S.). Tijuana covers 70% of the territory of the municipality and contains 80% of its population. A dominant manufacturing center of the North American continent, the city maintains the facilities of many multinational conglomerate companies. In the early 21st century, Tijuana became the medical-device manufacturing capital of North America. Tijuana is also a growing cultural center and has been recognized as an important new cultural mecca. The city is the most visited border city in the world; sharing a border of about 24 km (15 mi) with its sister city San Diego. More than fifty million people cross the border between these two cities every year. Wikipedia
The ’60s might be American culture’s most relentlessly mythologized decade, and nowhere has that mythmaking industry been more successful than in our collective memory of its music festivals. Woodstock has become a shorthand for the counterculture’s zenith, Altamont for its nadir, while Monterey—which featured superstar-making turns by Otis Redding, Jimi Hendrix, and Janis Joplin—was arguably more important than either of the two. The lingering power of these events is inextricable from the films that were made of them: D.A. Pennebaker’s Monterey Pop (1968) produced some of the most indelible imagery in all of rock ’n’ roll, including Hendrix immolating his Stratocaster at the close of “Wild Thing.” Michael Wadleigh’s Woodstock (1970) won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and a Best Editing nomination for a young Thelma Schoonmaker (who worked on the film alongside her future collaborator, Martin Scorsese). Albert Maysles, David Maysles, and Charlotte Zwerin’s chronicle of the Rolling Stones’ free concert at Altamont Gimme Shelter (1970), is often cited as one of the greatest documentaries ever made of any kind. Between them, these movies largely invented the visual language of the rock ’n’ roll concert film, ensuring that the events they documented would become objects of fantasy for generations to come.
The 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, held on six consecutive Sundays throughout that summer, has not generally been spoken of in the same hushed tones as its more storied contemporary counterparts. Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s new film Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) goes a long way toward redressing that. The doc shines an overdue spotlight on an enormously successful festival, which provided a powerful musical gathering place for the city’s Black and brown populations and offered a showcase for luminaries like Sly and the Family Stone, Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone, B.B. King, the Staple Singers, and Mahalia Jackson.
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Gladys Knight (far right) performs with the Pips during the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival.Searchlight Pictures
“Today, we celebrate our Independence Day.” Twenty-five years ago, those words electrified audiences, who braved long lines and sold-out crowds to see the most anticipated movie of 1996.
Independence Day, which opened over the July Fourth weekend, turned Will Smith into a global star, birthed one of the most famous speeches in cinema history, and changed movie marketing with an explosive Super Bowl ad remembered decades later.
It also established filmmaker Roland Emmerich as a master of destruction who would go on to helm films such as The Day After Tomorrow,2012, and the upcoming Moonfall (the German filmmaker’s latest disaster pic, due out in February 2022.).
Before ID4, Emmerich and writer Dean Devlin were best known for Stargate (1994). In 1995, the duo emerged from a Mexican screenwriting binge with storyboards and an alien invasion script that sparked a bidding war among every studio in Hollywood.
That was only the beginning of their journey. The two went to battle with 20th Century Fox to cast Smith, whom the studio feared couldn’t sell the movie overseas. They had to reshoot the ending with just weeks to spare. And they fought to blow up the White House in a TV ad, something that was controversial, to say the least.
Independence Day went on to earn a massive $817.4 million globally, making it the second-highest-grossing film ever at that time. Here, the key players — including Bill Pullman, Jeff Goldblum, Vivica A. Fox, Randy Quaid, and Margaret Colin recount how it all happened.
The Hooker Valley Track is the most popular short walking track within the Aoraki / Mount Cook National Park in New Zealand. At only 5 kilometers (3.1 mi) length and gaining only about 100 m (330 ft) in height, the well-formed track can be walked by tourists with a wide range of level of fitness.
The track is maintained by the Department of Conservation and has views of Aoraki / Mount Cook and access to the proglacial Hooker Lake, typically with icebergs floating in it. Hooker Valley Track has been named one of the ‘best day walks in New Zealand’.
The lookout point at the end of the Hooker Valley Track is the closest any walking track comes to Aoraki / Mount Cook, and reveals completely unobstructed views of the highest mountain in New Zealand, with Hooker Glacier in the valley below. There is also access to the shore of the glacial lake. The vegetation around the track is open alpine tussock, and as such the track offers clear views of the mountains surrounding the wide valley floor of the Hooker Valley. Wikipedia
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An image from Hooker Valley, South Island, New Zealand
May 2021. The 212-foot-tall rocket, the core stage and final major piece of NASA’s new Space Launch System (SLS), arrives at Kennedy Space Center. Assembly begins within the towering, iconic Vehicle Assembly Building, which hasn’t seen a human-rated deep-space rocket since the end of the Apollo program 50 years ago.
But the SLS isn’t an all-new ride; it’s got some familiar parts. Mounted at the bottom of the center stage are four RS-25 engines supplied by Aerojet Rocketdyne. Originally designed in the 1970s, the engines are seasoned, upgraded veterans, with 25 previous Space Shuttle flights among them. The most poignant of the four is engine number 2060, used on July 8, 2011, to launch the shuttle’s final mission, STS-135.
Doug Bradley was at Kennedy Space Center during that final launch, working as a chief engineer for Rocketdyne. “I’ve been to many flights, but it was different for 135,” Bradley tells Popular Mechanics. “It was electric. It was a very emotional flight.”
The grounding of the Space Shuttle left Rocketdyne with a backlog of 16 unused RS-25 engines, which the company mothballed. “For us, it was a bit sad to have engines in the stable that could fly dozens of times more,” says Bradley.
Now with the title of Chief Engineer of Advanced Space and Launch at Aerojet Rocketdyne, Bradley is overseeing the rebirth of the RS-25 engine. (A 2013 merger with Aerojet led to the company’s current two-word name.) And it’s quite a comeback: SLS is the custom-built, off-planet ride for NASA’s Artemis program, a multiyear campaign to return humans to the lunar surface and later to land people on Mars. That puts the RS-25, originally created with slide rules and graph paper, at the foundation of 21st-century human exploration of the solar system.
“It’s very gratifying to see those engines resurrected,” Bradley says. “And what’s better than going to the moon and Mars?”
Anyone who has ever tried to teach a child to tie their shoes knows how long it can take for them to get it right—and how frustrated they may feel in the meantime. But eventually, there comes that moment when it clicks. And it’s in that moment when their failures turn to successes and their perseverance pays off, that a little confidence in their own ability is built.
Some kids are born naturally confident in themselves, but for others, confidence is a muscle that needs to be strengthened over time. Here are some ways parents can help instill more confidence in their kids—and maybe even in themselves.
Be an example when you learn something new
The saying goes, “Fake it ‘till you make it.” And that expression can actually apply to setting an example for your kids when you are learning something new. Child Mind Institute suggests that it’s okay to acknowledge your own anxiety when mastering a new skill—but project enthusiasm as you grasp it. Similarly, Psychology Today adds that parents should keep any negative comments to yourself and treat yourself with grace and kindness. You wouldn’t say anything mean to your kids when they struggle or make a mistake, so don’t speak that way about yourself either.
Toulouse is the capital of the French department of Haute-Garonne and of the region of Occitanie. The city is on the banks of the River Garonne, 150 kilometers (93 miles) from the Mediterranean Sea, 230 km (143 mi) from the Atlantic Ocean, and 680 km (420 mi) from Paris. It is the fourth-largest city in France, with 479,553 inhabitants within its municipal boundaries (as of January 2017), and 1,360,829 inhabitants within its wider metropolitan area (also as of January 2017), after Paris, Lyon, and Marseille, and ahead of Lille and Bordeaux.
Toulouse is the center of the European aerospace industry, with the headquarters of Airbus (formerly EADS), the SPOT satellite system, ATR, and the Aerospace Valley. It also hosts the European headquarters of Intel and CNES’s Toulouse Space Centre (CST), the largest space center in Europe. Thales Alenia Space, ATR, SAFRAN, Liebherr-Aerospace, and Airbus Defence and Space also have a significant presence in Toulouse. Wikipedia
I know I’m not the only one feeling this right now. It’s a sentiment I’ve been hearing a lot from friends and on social media, and it’s no surprise given the strange and stressful circumstances we find ourselves in. The unpredictability of the pandemic and the global economy, coupled with the strain of adjusting to new realities of work, childcare, and school, have almost everyone I know craving an escape.
Yet with travel restricted in many places, a carefree getaway isn’t in the cards for most people.
Still, vacations are an important part of well-being. One study, for example, showed that when men at risk for heart disease didn’t take annual vacations, they had a 32 percent higher risk of having a fatal heart attack than those who did. Likewise, a study of women showed that those who took vacation rarely — i.e., once every six years or less often — were eight times more likely to develop heart disease. Other studies have shown an increase in sleep quality and an improvement in reaction times of up to 80 percent after taking a vacation.
Still other research has shown that regular vacations are more important than money to overall well-being, so much that a regular vacationer making less than $24,000 a year might even be happier than a non-vacationer making more than $120,000 a year.
Many parents of young children struggle to introduce new foods into their kids’ diets. About half of American children are picky eaters by the age of two; they are, in the vernacular of nutritionists, “food neophobic.” Our pediatrician once told me that one of our sons, who was a fussy eater, would need to try new food at least six times before the taste would no longer fill him with fear and loathing. My wife and I wanted to fight our son’s food neophobia for some practical, nutritional reasons, but more fundamentally, we wanted him to eat adventurously so he could enjoy this part of life. Openness to a wide variety of tastes and smells enhances the pleasure of eating.
This is an instance of a larger truth: Openness to a wide variety of life experiences, from visiting interesting places to considering unusual political views, brings happiness. “Only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn’t exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible,” Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in his Letters to a Young Poet, “will himself sound the depths of his own being.”
Tortuguero is a village on the Northern Caribbean coast of Costa Rica in the Limón Province. The small village, which can be reached only by boat or airplane, is sustained almost entirely by eco-tourism. The population is estimated at around 1200-1500. Tortuguero can be translated as Land of Turtles and gave its name to the neighboring Tortuguero National Park. The village is situated on a sand bar island, separated from the mainland by Tortuguero River and bordering the Caribbean Sea. Tortuguero is renowned for its navigable canals that run through the rainforest in the national park, and has earned the nickname of ‘Central America’s Amazon’.
The beaches around Tortuguero are key nesting sites for four species of sea turtle, including two critically endangered species. The National Park is also host to an incredible biodiversity of insects, resident and migratory birds, and mammals, including jaguars and four species of monkey. Accordingly, there are four biological stations — the John H. Phipps Biological Field Station, the Caño Palma Biological Research Station, the ASVO station (Asociación de Voluntarios para Servicio en Areas Protegidas), and the GVI Jalova Biological Station — which operate from the area immediately around the village and concentrate on research and conservation of the local ecology, particularly the turtles. The ocean here can be dangerous to swim in due to rough surf and strong currents. Wikipedia
An image from Tortuguero Conservation Area Costa Rica
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
An image from Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico
Photo: Rawpixel.com (Shutterstock)
Avalon Nuovo
JAN BUCHCZIK
James' World 2 