The use of the word “Sour” in the title is not a commentary on the taste of Tyre, but rather is an alternative name for Tyre…

Tyre’s origins are thought to date to around the 3rd millennium BC, when the original founders are believed to have arrived from Sidon to establish a new port city.

Alexander the Great arrived in 332 BC as he marched along the Phoenecian coast exacting tribute from all its city-states. Tyre, at that time still an island and in time-honored tradition, resisted and prepared for a long siege. The city was considered impregnable, but Alexander began building a sea bridge to reach the city. Meanwhile, on the mainland, Alexander’s engineers were constructing 20-story siege towers, the tallest ever used in the history of war. After several months these great war machines lumbered across the land bridge and the battle for Tyre began in earnest.

Running low on supplies and morale, Tyre finally fell after seven months and Alexander, annoyed by the stubborn resistance of the Tyrians, allowed his troops to sack the city. The city’s 30,000 residents were massacred or sold into slavery.

Alexander’s legacy lives on in Tyre, as the land bridge he created became the permanent link between the old city and the mainland, and Tyre became a peninsula.

In 64 BC, Tyre became a Roman province.

The Arabs took the city in AD 635 and the Umayyad caliph, Mu’awiyah, transformed the city into a naval base and it was from there that that the first Arab fleet set sail to conquer Cyprus.

In 1124, after a siege of five and a half months, Tyre’s defenses collapsed and the Christian armies occupied the city. Tyre remained in Christian hands for 167 years, until the Mamluks retook the city in 1291.

Once the State of Israel was established in 1948, Tyre’s position close to the sealed border further marginalized the city, which had already started to be sidelined by Beirut and Sidon.

And along with the rest of the South, Tyre suffered greatly during the drawn-out Lebanese civil war.

The battering the city took during the 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel didn’t help matters either. During the 2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict, several rocket-launching sites used by Hezbollah to attack Israel were located in rural areas around the city. At least one village near the city was bombed by Israel, as well as several sites within the city, causing civilian deaths. Israeli naval commandos also raided Hezbollah targets within the city.

And indeed, predominantly Shiite like much of the South, one will notice many many pro-Hezbollah posters on the drive into the city.

UNIFIL has about 12,000 troops and naval personnel in Lebanon after its expansion under UN Security Council resolution 1701 that halted the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war in southern Lebanon:

UN forces often find themselves the target of attacks around Tyre… Just last month, a roadside bomb struck a group of French troops. And in November two bombs ripped through downtown Tyre. The first bomb destroyed a pub at the Queen Elissa Hotel, popular with UN staffers, and the second went off five minutes later at a wholesale liquor store near Tyre’s port, also causing damage but no casualties.

The deadliest attack was in June 2007, when a bomb hit an armored personnel carrier near the Israeli border and killed six Spanish peacekeepers.

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The old part of Tyre lies on the peninsula jutting out into the sea, covering relatively small area. The modern town is on the left side as one arrives from Beirut. The coastal route goes all the way to Tyre’s picturesque old port, around which are a few cafes and restaurants. Behind the port is the Christian quarter, with its tiny alleys and old houses around shaded courtyards.

The port in Tyre:

A fisherman working on his nets:

One of the entrances to the Christian quarter:

The modern waterfront looks as if it could be in Beirut or Miami:

Once one starts walking away from the waterfront in Tyre, the modern city starts to look a little more interesting though:

And then one suddenly stumbles across the Roman ruins behind these high-rise apartments and they are extremely interesting:

Below is the Al-Bass Archaeological Site…

That’s the Al Bass Palestinian refugee camp on the far left. And just to the left of the Roman road is a vast funerary complex containing dozens of highly decorated marble and stone sarcophagi. To the right is a massive Roman hippodrome:

This huge, triple-bay monumental archway stands at the end of the Roman road. Originally the gateway to the Roman town, it dates to the 2nd century AD:

Next to the arch is the entrance to the largest and best-preserved Roman hippodrome in the world. Used for dangerous (and extremely popular) chariot races, the hippodrome is 480 meters long and once seated 20,000 people.

A view of the Roman hippodrome taken from the stands at one end:

The tight, high-speed turns at the end of the long, narrow course, were the most desirable spots to sit in as the sharp turns often produced dramatic collisions and falls:

A view of the seats:

A passageway running under the spectator seating – very much like modern stadiums… Very little remains now, but the spectator seating used to wrap all of the way around the hippodrome:

As an interesting “oh by the way” connected to the Romans, the most famous woman of ancient Tyrian legend was Princess Elissa, also known as Dido.  Embroiled in a plot to take power, when it became clear that she’d failed, Dido seized a fleet of ships and sailed for North Africa.  She founded a new port on the ruins of Kambeh, which became known in time as Carthage, near modern-day Tunis.  This became the seat of the Carthaginian empire. And we all know what headaches Carthage caused for the Romans…

Agrigento is located on the southern coast of Sicily and is renowned as the site of the ancient Greek city of Akragas. So, I’ll focus on that first…

In its day, Akragas was one of the richest and most famous of the Greek colonies.

Ancient Akragas covered a huge area — much of which is still unexcavated today — but it is probably best represented by the Valley of the Temples, which comprised an area on the southern edge of the city where seven massive Greek temples were constructed during the 6th and 5th centuries BC. Now excavated and partially restored, they constitute some of the largest and best-preserved ancient Greek ruins in the world.

It’s been said that if you wish to see Greek ruins, go to Sicily rather than Greece. And it’s true. These are just one example of the many ancient Greek ruins that can be found in Sicily.

The ruins of Akragas are listed as a World Heritage Site:

The Temple of Juno:

The Temple of Juno from a distance:

It was not until after I took this picture of the Temple of Concordia, that I noticed the girl in the yellow dress putting her charms fully on display (click on her if you are unsure what I mean). I assume she must be a big fan of The Velvet Rocket:

This was my intended picture of the Temple of Concordia:

The area around the Temple of Concordia was later re-used by early Christians as a catacomb, with tombs hewn out of the rocky cliffs and outcrops. That is what you are seeing here:

The other temples are much more fragmentary, having been toppled by earthquakes long ago and quarried for their stones:

As I mentioned above, Agrigento is on the southern coast of Sicily, making it the closest part of Italy to Africa. And in fact, the city was invaded on multiple occasions by the Carthaginians (now Tunisia).

But, about that being closest to Africa bit… My time in Agrigento was the hottest I have ever been. And I’ve gone hiking in Death Valley in August. The blast furnace heat of Agrigento certainly makes you realize how close you are to Africa.

In Italy, it is common for married couples to visit ancient ruins on the day of their wedding to be photographed with the attractive setting in the background. Given the heat I described above, I don’t know how these guys didn’t have sweat pouring off of them. Either way, they were being photographed as we were leaving, so I decided to take a picture as well. That’s why the guy is looking at me like, “Who the hell are you? And why are you taking my picture?”

To my surprise, Agrigento is officially one of the poorest towns in Italy on a per capita income basis. I use the word “surprise” because this was probably the most modest home we saw in Agrigento and it was right next to the ruins. So, in other words, it was in a prime spot:

However, Agrigento also has a long-standing history of organized crime, particularly involving the smuggling of narcotics. I believe that may be the explanation for homes such as the one pictured below and why, as is true for most of Italy, people seem to have more money than official statistics would suggest:

The Actors:

Somali pirates:

Ethiopia’s Ogaden rebels:

Fighters working for various Somali warlords:

The African Union:

The Kenyan military:

TFG Militia:

The Ethiopian military:

Al Shabab Islamic militants:

Deus Ex Machina:

One Of The Theaters:

Mogadishu, Somalia:

It’s an interesting part of the world… And a dangerous part of the world no matter who you are, as the late terrorist leader Fazul Abdullah Mohammed demonstrated:

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As I’ve said before, we keep a huge file of photographs related to various research projects. The origins of many of the photos we know well. But many sources provided others over a period of years, and many of the sources did not know exactly who made which frame. Some were made by the government, others by families, others by journalists — foreign and domestic. If the photographers’ names are made known to us, we will update and credit them in this post.

I can’t recall if this is Rome or Catania. Either way, it is Italy and a scene one will see recreated every night in thousands of locations across Italy. I liked all of the motorcycles parked out front, suggestive of later excitement to come…

To get here (on the road leading to Howland Flat which one picks up a little outside of La Porte) travel for about a mile past the St. Louis Bridge up to the top of the ridge. Along the way, you will see the road to Port Wine, Scales, etc. leading off to the right. Keep to the left.

When you have gotten to the top of the ridge (where the road levels out), keep an eye out for evidence of mining activity on the right:

Park here, as far off of the road as possible, and then head into the woods on the left for perhaps one or two hundred meters…

The town of St. Louis is believed to be the earliest mining town in northern Sierra County. St. Louis was founded by a party of Missourians who were working the rich placer claims on a tributary of Slate Creek nearby. At its peak in the 1850s, the town contained over a hundred miner’s cabins and other dwellings, several fine hotels, three saloons, several stores (including a jewelry store), a barber shop, a Wells Fargo branch, a sawmill, a boarding house, a schoolhouse and even a farm.

At that time the town had a population of approximately 900 residents.

The mining operations at St. Louis were:

Brundage & Conlan
Brundage & Weimer
Cleveland Company
Clifford & Company (Wallace & Company and Conlan & Jacobson)
Conlan & Fraler
Elephant Flume
Fraler & Rowe
Hawkins & Company
Hendel & Berg Flume and Mine
Independent Flume and St. Louis Water Company
Kavanaugh Flume
Little Table Rock
Loftus (William) Blue Lead
Morgan & Donahue (Sierra Union Water and Mining Company)
Morgan & Tullock
North Ravine Flume Company
Pittsburg Flume
Purrington & Company
Quartz Company
Sierra Nevada
Smith & Brundage (Conlan)
Sutton & Company

However, by 1915 St. Louis was mostly deserted. And a year later, hydraulic mining washed most of the town away.

Nevertheless, St. Louis was still occupied until the 1950s by Claire Baker who lived in the old schoolhouse (She was not the first as at least one old miner had lived in the schoolhouse over the preceding years). Despite being constructed in 1855, the chalkboards, maps, desks and even part of the school’s library were said to still be in fairly good condition until the town was abandoned for good.

When the population of St. Louis went to zero in the 1950s, there were also apparently several houses still standing along with the schoolhouse.

Now, nothing remains of these structures.

The only evidence one will find of the town when wandering through the woods are some odd depressions in the ground:

Or some bits and pieces of the structures that used to be here poking out of the ground:

Or some piles of rocks that are not natural:

If you start seeing signs like those pictured below, you are on the right track to find the cemetery at St. Louis of which there is still something to see:

The cemetery:

It has certainly seen better days, but there are still some standing headstones in the cemetery:

Unfortunately, I don’t know how long this will remain the case as the cemetery at St. Louis is rapidly succumbing to the elements:

A marker being slowly covered by pine needles, leaves and brush:

My cousin uncovering another marker:

Something or someone had recently knocked this headstone over:

And some of the markers have been lost completely and just a circle of stones remain to indicate that someone is buried there:

The picture below was taken in the 1980s and if you compare it to the pictures above, it provides a sense of the amount of deterioration the cemetery has undergone in the subsequent two decades.

The town is long gone, but I’m not sure there will even be much of the cemetery at St. Louis left after another two decades.

India (probably Madhya Pradesh)

Feasting on human body parts, these cadaverous rakshasas (malicious spirits) are also attendants of terrifying yet protective deities such as the goddess Kali (and her variant Chamunda). In fact, this sculpture is a fragment from a large image depicting such a deity who once wore a garland of skulls and stood on a corpse (only parts of the garland and the corpses’ head remain).

Occurred: Summer 2001, London

Over the summer of 2001 I worked as an intern at an American investment bank in London.

After work, I would frequently join my co-workers in a pub down the street that we had locked down.

One evening while hanging out with my usual group, a guy I recognized from Lazard walked in by himself.  This guy was quite handsome, always dressed impeccably and had the assured self-confidence of a natural alpha.

He ordered a drink and then turned his back to the bar and surveyed the room.

A noisy gaggle of English girls next to us almost immediately caught his attention.

He sized them up, retrieved a napkin from the counter of the bar, wrote a number on the napkin and casually slid it over to the most attractive girl of the bunch.

It got her attention.

“What’s this? Your phone number? You really expect this to work? You haven’t even…”

“It’s my bank balance.”

They left together ten minutes later.

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Now, lest readers draw the wrong conclusions from the above story, be aware that the above technique is almost certainly appropriate solely for dedicated golddiggers.  And my Lazard acquaintance had plenty of tight game to work with already.  In the above case, he correctly took the measure of the English girl he was interested in and simply applied the best method to achieve his objective.

On balance, men almost universally overestimate the importance of money in attracting women. This is probably so because the relatively chaotic, amorphous nature of psychological game is harder for men to comprehend than is a hard objective metric like money. It’s much simpler to say to a man: “First you make the money, then you get the power. Then when you get the power, you get the women.”

The problem with this plan of action is that, one, it’s highly inefficient, and, two, most women — and this includes hot women — aren’t aroused by a man with money nearly as much as men think they are. Women are attracted to an alpha attitude which can be correlated with money. But money is not a necessary condition for embodying the alpha attitude. There are easier ways to attract women for sexual congress and loving long term relationships than slaving for years in a corporate gig saving every penny to afford a monster mortgage or risking prison in the drug trade.

Furthermore, there is this misperception out there that money automatically equates to power, which is something that girls do indeed find very attractive in a man. But we all know souped-up IT and finance nerds making well into the six figures who struggle with their dating lives. Power is more a state of mind, or a will to attitude, than a blessing that flows from big bucks. The shiftless badboy with the motorcycle and smirk has more power over women’s hearts than the well-paid CFO who sucks up to women by throwing free meals and unearned gifts at them.

Naturally, all else equal, having money will help your pickup more than not having money. But the “all else equal” is the key qualifier. If you are looking to get more bangs for your buck, so to speak, working longer harder hours to amass bank is not the way to do it. When you realize that most women worth fucking don’t care all that much about how much money you make, you understand that the road to gratification leads away from the path laid down by conventional wisdom.

As long as you make a decent living (i.e. don’t live in a cardboard box), have a car (unless you reside in the heart of a major urban center or lead a traveling lifestyle), have some stylish threads, and keep a clean, cared-for home, the money factor evaporates for all but the most die-hard golddiggers. Remember, a man’s ambition is one of the traits women love. Whatever financial reward he has earned from his ambitious undertakings is almost irrelevant, like icing on the cake.

Perhaps it is a guy thing, but I have always been fascinated by volcanoes. I remember seeing video footage when I was a child of Etna spraying lava hundreds of meters into the night sky and wanted to visit ever since then. Nice to cross something else off of the list…

Mount Etna is actually one of the most active volcanoes in the world and so there is almost always something going on at the summit.

Currently standing at an elevation of 10,922 feet high, this height varies with summit eruptions (the mountain is 69 feet higher than it was in 1981).

Down at the base of Mount Etna, one can see where the lava has flowed down the mountain for millenia. Over time, countless villages and towns below Etna have been destroyed. Of course, those lava flows have also produced incredibly fertile agricultural land, which is why people keep coming back:

To get to the top of Etna, one follows the twisty, windy road up as far as possible. Then, one must park and take a chairlift up to the next level:

Your editor taking the easy way up:

The landscape becomes increasingly barren as one gains altitude:

The lift ends at this building… We were up here in the summer, but I think it would be pretty cool to be up on Etna in the winter and go skiing on an active volcano:

The wheel that keeps the cable and the chairlift moving:

Once you’ve made it this far on your journey to the top, you are not done though.

You’ve got to hire one of these guys…

…To haul you up to the next level in one of these:

The end of the road near the summit of Etna…

I know it may look like it, but I have not altered the colors in these pictures in any way. Such an extreme environment produces extreme color ranges:

Volcanic activity first started at Etna about half a million years ago, with eruptions occurring beneath the sea off the ancient coastline of Sicily.

As an interesting “oh by the way”, Etna erupted smoke rings in the 1970s, one of the first times this extremely rare event was captured on film:

The summit of Mount Etna is still actively erupting and so this is as close as we could hike:

This former observatory demonstrates the dangers of getting too close to Etna:

We were able to make our way around to one of the recently active craters near the summit that is still venting steam and occasionally ash, but is not particularly dangerous at this time:

It was interesting to touch the ground with my bare hand as it was hot. Digging down a little, the earth became increasingly hot and I am confident one could easily cook a meal up here by simply digging down a little.

Frequently, steam would erupt with a roar from one of the surrounding vents, ranging in size from small holes in the ground to large craters, and then subside again as quickly as it started.

In Greek Mythology, the monster Typhon was supposedly trapped under Mount Etna by Zeus and the forges of the unfortunate Hephaestus were said to be located underneath the mountain.

Given the environment on the ground, it is easy to see how such myths developed:

The view down the mountain toward the Sicilian city of Catania displays the stark landscape:

I love these extreme environments – same with alpine areas and deserts…

I can’t wait until we bring you a Velvet Rocket exclusive from the surface of Mars or Europa or an even more distant destination on The Velvet Rocket travel wish list.

Taken in 2010…

I know. Believe me, I know. Taking a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge is as about as touristy and cliche as it gets. And I really don’t care for touristy and cliche. But, when I saw the way the light was streaming through the bridge, I thought it was pretty cool. Forgive my occasional lapses into the territory of the cliche.

The Velvet Rocket staff are quite familiar with Italy and have seen most of it. And we (including our Italian correspondent) remain unanimous on one point: Sicily is our favorite part of Italy.

These scenes from the small Sicilian town of Cefalù, which can be found in the province of Palermo along the northern coast, should hopefully begin to demonstrate why:

Given its name, Cefalù obviously has a Greek connection in its origins, but the town has been occupied by countless other civilizations over the centuries ranging from the Romans to the Arabs (who made it part of the Emirate of Sicily) to the Normans among many others… Cefalù finally joined the Kingdom of Italy in 1861.

On the summit of the promontory overlooking Cefalù are the remains of several fortresses. With Sicily’s history of invasions, these were undoubtedly put to good use:

It’s hard not to like Sicily: