The Amazing Race is an American adventure reality game show in which 11 or 12 teams of two race around the world. The race is split into legs, with each leg requiring teams to deduce clues, navigate themselves in foreign areas, interact with locals, perform physical and mental challenges, and travel by airplane, boat, taxi, and other public transportation options on a limited budget provided by the show.

When Kaikee Kharas, Rustam Ghandhi and Rutton Shroff were lost in the snow-clad mountains of Afghanistan in the mid 1930s on a nine-year cycling expedition around the world, they knocked on the door of a shepherd asking for food and shelter. The herdsman shared his humble meal with them and provided them place to sleep in, but was nowhere to be seen next morning. When the trio went looking for him in the snowy wastes, they found him deep in slumber and nearly dead. They had to rub his limbs and revive him.

For most of my life I owned very little. I dropped out of college and for almost a decade wandered remote parts of Asia in cheap sneakers and worn jeans, with lots of time and no money. The cities I knew best were steeped in medieval richness; the lands I passed through were governed by ancient agricultural traditions. When I reached for a physical object, it was almost surely made of wood, fiber, or stone. I ate with my hands, trekked on foot through mountain valleys, and slept wherever. I carried very little stuff. My personal possessions totaled a sleeping bag, a change of clothes, a penknife, and some cameras. Living close to the land, I experienced the immediacy that opens up when the buffer of technology is removed. I got colder often, hotter more frequently, soaking wet a lot, bitten by insects faster, and synchronized quicker to the rhythm of the day and seasons. Time seemed abundant. After eight years in Asia, I returned to the United States. I sold what little I had and bought an inexpensive bicycle, which I rode on a 5,000-mile meander across the American continent, west to east.

Kelly, K. (2010) What technology wants. New York, New York: Penguin Books.

The two main characters of the book are the narrator, Sal Paradise, and his friend Dean Moriarty, much admired for his carefree attitude and sense of adventure, a free-spirited maverick eager to explore all kicks and an inspiration and catalyst for Sal's travels. The novel contains five parts, three of them describing road trips with Dean. The narrative takes place in the years 1947 to 1950, is full of Americana, and marks a specific era in jazz history, "somewhere between its Charlie Parker Ornithology period and another period that began with Miles Davis" (Pt. 1, Ch. 3). The novel is largely autobiographical, Sal being the alter ego of the author and Dean standing for Neal Cassady. Like Kerouac, Sal Paradise is a writer who published two books over the course of the plot, even though the names are not known.

The funeral cortege of Mary Kingsley at the pier in Simonstown (Wikipedia)

Nella primavera del 1994, Luther Blissett, attraverso una campagna mediatica fatta di azioni, proclami, rivendicazioni e smentite, sconvolge la vita quotidiana, gli ambienti artistici, la lotta studentesca, i quotidiani e le radio bolognesi tastando la vulnerabilità dei media ufficiali.