places i want to know more about

1: the kuril islands in the sea of okhotsk -- who lives there and what do they do? do any of you post to ilx?

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/50/Demis-kurils-russian_names.png

kinda looks like my spinal cord

they have a quite interesting topography iirc, the vulcanicity of the pacific rim creating the sort of exagerrated, rotund contours beloved of meretricious landscape gardeners and seaside mini-golf courses

http://www.topfoto.co.uk/gallery/rian1991_2006/images/prevs/1044306.jpg

^^^so meretricous!

the cloud is just overkill

Looks like a hidden Mario level

brat chirpoyev means "chirpoy's brother" :)

http://chuiko.com/uploads/posts/2010-12/129146317569264.jpeg

a place i recently wanted to know more about was changthang, the least populated non-polar region

awesome factoid: kuril islands claimed by england and france in a "forgotten episode" of the crimean war

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_siLWsCodXxM/TFpgc-r7ShI/AAAAAAAASB8/Jd8NSnsRZSI/s1600/untitled.jpg

i read a novel based in the aleutians once (mainly about seal hunting and adultery iirc): i guess life here is not entirely dissimilar (pacific ring of fire etc) but i would like to read kuril-inflected fiction i think

ps haha at the aleutians being the "easternmost point of the US by one definition"

OP is location of where Russian navy has a tendency of sinking Japanese fishing boats.

oddly enough only two weeks ago i met someone who'd been to ladakh in changthang -- the meeting was about something else entirely, so i didn't find out much about it

...but yet a pretty critical position in Risk (game).

these are the photos of the kurils i had in mind, away from the eroded coastline it resembles a sort of extremist verion of scotland

http://englishrussia.com/2009/01/19/the-kuril-islands/

some of the rest of it looks like farcry/crysis

http://englishrussia.com/2011/10/29/beautiful-iturup-island/

what put it in my mind was watching repeats of "the world at war", and an ep abt the pacific war -- obv lots of maps of the entire pacific, and the american plan of attack, but i was struck by the long chain of islands very obviously joining japan to kamchatka and wondered why no one ever talked about them

they were mostly japanese at one time, then russian since 1952 i think

Calais/St Stephen on the Maine-New Brunswick border. I imagine this as a watery idyll. Do people live in one and work in the other? Do they get scanned and fingerprinted everyday?

natives of the Kurils: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ainu_people

a place i recently wanted to know more about was changthang, the least populated non-polar region

― Nigel Farage is a fucking hero (nakhchivan), Wednesday, November 2, 2011 1:36 PM (22 minutes ago) Bookmark

"plain of chang" is impt in lovecraft mythos, no?

Risk (game)

lol

Calais/St Stephen on the Maine-New Brunswick border. I imagine this as a watery idyll. Do people live in one and work in the other? Do they get scanned and fingerprinted everyday?

― Ismael Klata, Wednesday, November 2, 2011 2:54 PM (17 minutes ago) Bookmark

I do not know for certain but I'd imagine that some do and that there is some kind of card you can get if you do need to cross often in order to work. I actually didn't know that was possible until I visited a border town in CA and learned that the US has this sort of thing with Mexico or at least did at the time I was there.

haha ismael's q made me think of life in enclaves and exclaves generally, and i went to the lovely wikipedia list of same, and there in relation to azerbaijan is nakhchivan...

spitzbergen and nova zembla

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c2/Barentsz_arctic_map.jpg

Everything I know about Novaya Zemlaya(*) comes from here

http://www.arrakis.co.uk/jpg/dragon1.jpg

(*) basically, nothing

Morning ablutions always a traumatic time for me due to scary devil face in Kamchatka peninsula on my map of the world shower curtain

http://www.koryaks.net/images/Kamchatka-Map.gif

(Karaga Island is the eye)

nice cover for the herbert! mine's got some shitty NEL painting (haha of an actual dragon)

Heartily recommend this book, by the by
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41iOj3CBVHL._SL500_AA300_.jpg

Yep, Atlas Of Remote Islands is excellent.

that strap is "50 islands I have never set foot on and never will" -- filed under "travel literature" lol

http://images.nationalgeographic.com/wpf/media-live/photos/000/099/cache/largest-vietnam-cave_9969_600x450.jpg: son doong cave in vietnam, the largest

fuck, i just missed an entire documentary about antarctica

Could be wrong about this, but the Okhotsk were some of the most well-travelled (by sea, land, and ice) people in the ancient world (most probably the Bering Strait crossers). The Ainu are believed to be the ancestors of the the polynesians, the Easter Island native peoples*, and there were remains of a 10,000 year old human discovered in the Pacific Northwest (USA) who was tested and found to be more closely related to the Okhotsks than any other civilization,

*IIRC the theory is that one of Captain Cook's crewmates from West Pacific Polynesia was able to communicate with tribes off the coast of Peru (Easter Island/Galapagos) despite thousands of miles of distance.

I could be making all this up, but I read a lot of Natl Geographic as a child and read a lot of wikipedia in my middle age.[citation needed]

also: lip tattoos!

http://d21c.com/zenegata/SAT/AINUGIRL.jpg

The Ainu are believed to be the ancestors of the the polynesians

I've never heard this one. Who says that? I doubt the genetic evidence indicates anything like it.

If you really want to penetrate to the interior of the aggressively weird, chase up the (supposed) similarities between the Ainu language and Basque. (I once read a book which used this as a keystone in its determination of the year, date and time of day of the foundering of Atlantis.)

did it have a good cover?

cover = year, date and time of day of the foundering of Atlantis, in very big letters (i've probably told this story before on ilx, is that what you mean?)

(but this is the first time i realised that anyone except the writers of that book claimed there were similarities between ainu and basque: i'd always remembered it as japanese and basque, and merely found it funny that no one else had ever noticed...)

There is a bit of Ainu in Japanese. Sapporo comes from "dry, great river" in Ainu.

(i've probably told this story before on ilx, is that what you mean?)

no! it just sounds like the sort of book that would have a good cover

Hainault in Essex is a Frenchified corruption of Ainu, it's where they began their transglobal migration

I have read somewhere that the Ainu are the world's hairiest people.

if it was somewhere on the internet it seems to be packed with made-up nonsense about the ainu

https://i.redd.it/bscwo0sasx741.png