If you long for the glory days of festivals like Woodstock, where the mud seeps into your Converse sneakers and there are no VIP accommodations, Bonnaroo '08 is your bag: The tent-camping-centric, off-the-beaten-path concert weekend draws ever increasing star wattage this weekend in Manchester, Tennessee while still being its sweet hippie self.

We're definitely catching MGMT and Lez Zeppelin tonight, Chris Rock and The Swell Season (the musicians from "Once") tomorrow, Kanye "Almost Mr. M.I.A." West on Saturday and, if we haven't died from heat stroke by then, Aimee Mann on Sunday. Drink your water and wear sunscreen, people.

And remember, if you absolutely must live-blog your concert experience, check out the Fuse TV barn. They'll have cell phone charging stations and computers with web access so you can make your friends jealous without even leaving the fest!

Related Links
· Bonnaroo [Official Site]
· Summer Music Festivals: We Heart Bonnaroo [Jaunted]
· Bonnaroo coverage [Jaunted]
· A Travelpod for Bonnaroo? [HC]

[Photo from Bonnaroo '07: batesvillebreeze]

Bromley Mountain is having quite the political summer. Vermont's senior senator, Democrat Patrick Leahy, snuck a provision into a recent farm bill that would have had the federal government sell some national forest land to the ski resort in his state. But President Bush--or more likely one of his aides--caught the earmark; Bush specifically cited the proposed sale as one reason he vetoed the farm bill.

Congress didn't care for that, and they overrode the veto--only to find out that a paperwork mistake will force a re-vote on the entire thing. So Bush may have yet another chance to stick it to Leahy and Bromley Mountain.

In the meantime, the resort has plenty of summer activities on its current property. A three-track alpine slide is the main draw, but the zip line, "space bikes" and water slide also look pretty decent. If they ever get that extra land from the national forest, who knows what might be added... Maybe a statue of a senator?

Related Stories:
· Bromley Mountain [Official Site]
· Farm Bill Background [NC Mountain Times]
· President Bush's Message on Farm Bill Veto [Official Site]
· Ski Resorts in Summer coverage [Jaunted]

The fact that this made-from-surveillance-camera-footage music video came out of England shouldn't surprise us in the least. After all, the UK is where you'll find airports planning to implement facial-recognition technology.

But however creepy all these cameras are, it's still pretty cool. Maybe making videos with closed circuit cameras is the 21st century equivalent of waving to your friends back home via webcam?

Related Stories:
· The Most Clever Music Video of the Year (So Far) [WorldHum]
· Band Record CCTV Video [BBC]
· Dystopia Travel: British Airports Getting Face Scanners [Jaunted]
· Videos coverage [Jaunted]

Richard Branson pokes his nose into everything and has sticky fingers in every business pie. Now we hear he's got his beady eyes on a skyscraper hotel in Manchester.

If the deal comes off, there'll be a shiny Virgin City Hotel sign on a 44-storey skyscraper on Aytoun Street, Piccadilly. The four-star hotel would only take over 23 floors of the building, and the rest would be taken up by whatever brings most profit to the Albany Crown developers - offices and shops mostly.

Virgin City Hotel is a baby brand and has not actually yet signed any deals with any hotels anywhere. But if it follows the Virgin style, we can imagine the hotel -

A Jaunted reader points out that Skybus isn't the only airline with Boston lust. Turns out Manchester New Hampshire airport, MHT, which is a good 54 miles from Boston, now calls itself "Manchester Boston Regional Airport." Please.

We know with the Red Sox winning the World Series, the Patriots working on an undefeated season and the Celtics ready to return to glory, everybody wants to claim they live in Boston these days, but New Hampshire is not Boston. MHT might as well call itself "Manchester, NH--Manchester England Regional Airport".

That said, Manchester does offer a new high frequency bus service operates every two hours, 24-hours a day, seven days a week between MHT, the Anderson Regional Transportation Center in Woburn, MA and the Sullivan Square MBTA Subway Station. This service is free to all passengers. Very cool. So tell us this MHT: Why not just call yourself what you are, a small airport about an hour from Boston with excellent transportation options to and from the city, instead of going all Skybus on us and trying to convince noobs that Manchester is a suburb of Boston?

Related Stories:
· Skybus So Wants Portsmouth to be Boston [Jaunted]
· Skybus coverage [Jaunted]

This past weekend brought Bonnaroo to a 700-acre farm in Manchester, Tennessee, and along with it sold-out shows (to the tune of about 80,000 tickets at $200 each) by The Flaming Lips, The Police, Damien Rice, Tool and tons of other music masters.

We hear the heat was blistering (95+ on Saturday), but the sets were awesome and after listening to tipsters (those helpful hippies!) and surfing the message boards here are our quick and dirty post-Bonnaroo tips so you'll be in top shape for next year:

If you're looking for a jazz break, head to the only tent with waitress service, Somethin' Else, full of tables and cool drinks. Although don't expect to hear the actual music - apparently the ventilation fans overpower the tunes.

For all Bonnaroo tries to do for the environment (a solar-powered stage, copious recycling bins, biodiesel generators for power), the crowds work directly against it. Don't sit in your SUV running the air conditioner rampant all day and expect the hippies to love you.

Buy tickets to The Police and go to the show in your hometown next time they're on tour. Apparently they played the same set at Bonnaroo as they've been playing on tour, 50 mins shorter than what was promised to fans!

Sign up for the Bonnaroo mailing list - you can get tickets to the festival for $150 before Christmas (offered to list members) and save yourself $50.

If you're camping in the car lot for the show, remember that if you bring a tent next year, you might just be 30 minutes closer to "Centeroo". Tents get priority distance-wise.

All in all, we hear the festival was fun, less muddy than recent years, and the music excellent.

Related Stories:
· Bonnaroo Travel Coverage [Jaunted]
· A Travelpod for Bonnaroo [HotelChatter]
· The Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival [Official Site]

[Photo: CoreyPud]

Friends? Lovers? Co-conspirators hungry for publicity but not actually attracted to each other? There's no telling what the exact nature of Jessica Biel and Justin Timberlake's relationship is. Whatever the case may be, we do know that they recently spent time together at The Lowry Hotel in Manchester, England. The two were spotted at the hotel's bar, and later on their way up to Justin's presidential suite. The Lowry's Charles Forte suites start at about $3158 a night, including unlimited wired broadband. So were Jess and JT actually getting it on, or was she simply taking advantage of the hotel's ample tech offerings and updating her MySpace page all night? We might never know. Sigh.

[Photo: pit-yacker/US]

Related Stories:
· Justin Timberlake & Jessica Biel Reunite in England [US]
· Hotel WiFi Lures Jessica Biel to Justin Timberlake's Love Shack [Jaunted]

I may be a vegetarian, but I would eat a peacock in a second. I’m not even picky: peacock brownies, peacock pizza, I’d even eat peacock ice cream with a little feather sticking out of the cup for garnish. And then I’d eat the feather. Maybe you’re wondering: why all this spite? Don’t worry, there’s a story to back it up.

I was about 3 years old and I was at the London Zoo with my parents for a day out, as we lived there at the time (in England, not in the zoo). The London Zoo just happens to be the oldest zoo in the world, and opened in 1828. I was in my stroller, buckled in tight. It was then that my parents handed me one of my favorite things: a chocolate chip cookie.

I took a bite and began to smile from the top of my ears to the tips of my toes. And I think it was at this point that my parents turned away, because soon after a peacock waddled over to me, plumage all aflutter. (This frankly was weird, because the male peacocks are only supposed to shake their tailfeathers when they’re trying to find a lady peacock to mate with, and I know I’m not their type.)

Apparently English zookeepers think hungry, horny, 3-foot-tall birds should just be able to mingle amongst the common folk. The peacock stared at me with his beady little eyes, lowering his head so he was almost at my eye level. And then he grabbed the cookie right out of my hand and stood there, just past my reach, chowing down on it. As I was fastened in to my stroller, there was not a damn thing I could do. Like some kind of school bully, he just stood there until he finished the whole cookie before running away. And I wish I had yelled out, “What? Don’t you want to insult my mama while you’re at it!?” as I shook my little fist.

My parents never saw this peacock, or so they say. They just thought I had a very vivid imagination. I know this, because they asked if the peacock could talk and whether he asked for something to drink after he finished the cookie. The valuable lesson I got from this excursion? Never trust a dude who’s into tail.

- by Emily Epstein of b’scuse me? fame.

Based on the top searches on Travelistic this week, I’d say that European-summer-trip planning is kicking into gear:


– Switzerland
– Italy
– Jamaica
– London
– Paris

Your top tags reveal an addiction to our tag cloud; you guys just can’t help clicking on those boldfaced words, can you?


– Architecture
– Beaches
– Drinking
– Scuba
– Snowboarding

The slide in this picture isn’t in a theme park (unless your idea of a thrill ride is watching Un Chien Andalou), it’s in the massive entry hall of the Tate Modern in London. The Tate Modern was once Bankside Power Station, and after removing the turbines, curators were left with a five-story gallery capable of dwarfing even the most grandiose installations. Carsten Höller’s twisting steel-and-plastic slides are the seventh installation underwritten by the Unilever Corp. to utilize all that space. The tallest of several slides drops 182 feet to the gallery floor, reducing cool and collected museum-goers to giggling idiots in the space of a few seconds. Höller, of course, dresses this up for the art world with statements like: “The funfair experience is completely underrated, I don’t know why we don’t take it more seriously philosophically and artistically.” I’m sure the 600,000 people who’ve queued up for the slides since they debuted were considering the philosophical implications as they plummeted towards the gallery floor. A piece from this weekend’s Washington Post travel section has all the details on how you can visit before the exhibit ends on April 15.

– “Doing the Electric Slide in London” (Washington Post)
– “Catch the tube at the Tate – it’s worth the ride” (Guardian)
– Tate Modern (official site)
– Tagged: Art

(Image via austinraustin’s photostream)