Valencia, Spain
La Despertà the beginning of Fallas 2009 -The last Sunday in February boasts one amazingly loud display making this one of the most dramatic festivals in the world. Firecrackers in the hands of thousands of people 7:30 am on a Sunday morning. The aftermath is a cloud of smoke and ringing ears.

“The last Sunday in February is a huge, busy day in the city. Not all Sundays are like this. And in Valencia, the last Sunday in February manages to achieve the polar opposite. It’s 7:30 in the morning, and you’re on the streets, in the middle of World War III.

The Despertà is Valencia’s annual wake-up call for Fallas — the region’s most important festival and one of the biggest in the world. At 7am, thousands of people belonging to organized groups (Fallas Commissions) gather at Parterre Park (location) to collect their ammunition bags for an assault on the city’s sleeping populace. And at 7:30am sharp, all hell breaks loose.”

“These freaks just start throwing firecrackers everywhere.
And I’m not talking cute
cherry bombs. This is the real shit. 15 seconds into the “parade”, a piece of shrapnel caught me just under the eye. An ugly, fat kid laughed at me before throwing a mini-grenade under my feet. A zombie-eyed homeless guy snuck up behind me, then offered me a firecracker. I think I screamed, I’m not sure, my ears were reverberating, reality seemed skewed.”source link

Ivrea Carnival

The Battle of the Oranges, Ivrea, Italy
Italy stages its biggest food fight each  February in the Piedmont town of Ivrea, where thousands gather each year before Lent to re-enact a medieval battle by hurling oranges at each other. By the end of it the entire town is awash with Vitamin C.

Orange fetishists are well advised to visit the northern Italian town of Ivrea, 35 kilometers from Turin, on the Sunday before Lent when the townsfolk stage their annual Battle of the Oranges, the country’s largest fruit fight.

It involves around 3,000 revellers on foot and in carts drawn by decorated horses and lasts for three days, after which everyone is covered in pulp and orange juice, and the streets are slippery with squashed orange peel.
The ceremony, part of the town’s historic carnival, marks the rebellion of the people against tyrannical lords who ruled the town in the Middle Ages. Each year a carnival mascot is chosen from the town’s school children to play “Violetta”, a beautiful girl who in medieval times refused the advances of a lord and came to represent the victory of freedom over tyranny.

More at Spiegel-source.



Ivrea Carnival

Image Source

Located in Brussels, Belgium, NEMO33 is officially the Deepest Pool in the World with a depth of 108 feet. The complex was designed by Belgian diving expert John Beernaerts as a multi-purpose diving instruction, recreational, and film production facility, and opened in 2004. 

The pool is filled with 660,430 gallons of non-chlorinated, highly filtered spring water.

 “The water that fills the pool comes from a spa and it’s heated by solar panels to keep it nice and warm.”

 Imagine jumping in to a pool minus the chlorine smell. The temperature is  maintained at 86°F and contains several simulated underwater caves at the 32 foot depth level. At this level there underwater windows that allow outside visitors to peer into the pools at various depths. The pool is a big hit with recreational scuba divers who are able to enjoy the constant controlled atmosphere and water temperature for varying levels of instruction. The pool has two large basin areas at depth levels of 16 ft and 32 ft, and a large circular shaft descending to a depth of 33m (108 ft). There are three permanent bells of air under pressure where air is renewed constantly, this aids instructors to spend more time with students at depth.

A view through one of the pools windows at 30 feet

Find Nemo33 on Wiki maps

The sport of shin kicking has been around since the 17th Century. First established by Robert Dover in 1612. Shin kicking unfortunately died out in the early 1900’s, although I can’t imagine why? It was reborn in 1951 at Chipping Camden, England. Although the games are not quite as brutal as the earlier versions, I’m sure players are secretly rejoicing that they now prohibit iron capped boots. Players use to prepare for the games by smashing hammers into their shins.

“According to the rule book, only in mid-kick can a player attempt to bring his opposition to the ground, with a ‘stickler’ on hand to make sure a shin is hit before a fall can be scored. Each round features a best of three battle before winners go on to fight other winners – until only two remain.”

The games are held every year on May 31st in Chipping Camden.

 Even though the games have safer guidelines, the video outlines a barbaric ritual that appears to have many spectators. Congratulations to this years Barbarian, Steve ‘The Bull Dog’ Williams the British Shin Kicking Champion of 2008.

source via Sogloss

Rolling Bridge at Paddington Basin

“Rather than a conventional opening bridge mechanism, consisting of a single rigid element that lifts to let boats pass, the Rolling Bridge gets out of the way by curling up until its two ends touch. While in its horizontal position, the bridge is a normal, inconspicuous steel and timber footbridge; fully open, it forms a circle on one bank of the water that bears little resemblance to its former self.

Twelve metres long, the bridge is made in eight steel and timber sections, and is made to curl by hydraulic rams set into the handrail between each section.

The Rolling Bridge opens every Friday at noon and won the 2005 British Structural Steel Award.

Please note that on the rare occasion that wind speeds reach 30mph in the basin, the bridge will not open.”

Geneva, 10 September 2008. “The first beam in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN¹ was successfully steered around the full 27 kilometres of the world’s most powerful particle accelerator at 10h28 this morning.”

Two magnets of the Large Hadron Collider are seen before they are connected together in an undated photo.

 The world’s largest atom smasher’s first experiment will pave the way toward the recreation of post-big bang conditions. By creating hundreds of thousands of head-on collisions each second, physicists hope to understand the fiery conditions of the universe a trillionth of a second after the big bang.

The beam of protons was fired inside a circular, 17-mile long tunnel underneath villages and cow pastures at the French-Swiss border.

“The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was cooled to a chilly ?271°C, just a couple of degrees above the lowest temperature possible, absolute zero, and colder than outer space! Sector 7-8 (an eighth of the accelerator) thus becomes the world’s largest superconducting installation cooled by superfluid helium.