Yes, you should eat one. (Marco Secchi/Getty Images)

The delightful strips of deep-fried dough pictured at the right are called chiacchiere, and they’re served during Carnival in Venice (happening right now!).

In Italian, chiacchiere means “gossip,” which is, like, the perfect word for deep-fried dough — ’cause we all know how deep-fried dough goes down (deliciously), particularly when it’s dusted with powdered sugar (a sprinkle of guilt).

During Carnival, you’ll find various versions of deep-fried dough treats around, and you might as well eat ‘em while you can, particularly if it’s Fat Thursday, which the Florentines once called Berlingaccio — another Italian word that has to do with running your mouth. According to writer Elena Kostioukovitch et al, belingare meant “to chatter, prattle or jabber” on about something, particularly when your belly is all filled up with wine, deep-fried doughy goodness and other foods.

And that’s exactly what you’re supposed to do on Fat Thursday: run your mouth while you stuff your mouth. Sounds like a wonderful way to spend a day.

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A couple has their wedding photo taken in Brooklyn Bridge Park. (George Rose/Getty Images)

I was reading up on city parks yesterday and came across a BMW Guggenheim Lab Q&A with landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh, who designed Brooklyn Bridge Park in New York. Apparently, 13 years ago, when the park was just a proposal, it was fairly controversial, and not everyone was in support of the concept. But at the first meeting about the park, a woman about 80 years old got up, shuffled to the microphone and said something like this, Van Valkenburgh told the Lab:

“I’m an old retired lady and I don’t have money to go to the country anymore. And the one thing that I want you to let me do in Brooklyn Bridge Park is go down to the edge of the water at night and put my toes in the water and to see the reflection of the moon in the night sky.”

“It almost made you want to burst into tears,” Valkenburgh told the Lab, which is exactly what I almost did when I read that quote.

Ultimately, I guess all city parks probably attempt to have a heart just like this elderly woman’s. Since I was thinking about city parks, I came across a few lists of the best ones, which you might want to peruse, including this list put together by Project for Public Spaces, this one by Atlantic Cities and this one by Travel and Leisure.

Where’s your favorite park, and does it have a soul?

Go to the beach! (B2M Productions/Getty Images)

Well, you might say it’s the folks who live in these six countries: United States, Canada, Mexico, Singapore, Japan, South Korea, which are colored an alarming red on Expedia.com’s map of vacation deprivation.

According to Expedia’s study, in 2011, workplaces in the United States, South Korea and Japan gave out the fewest vacation days per year to employees. In Japan, workers only received about 11 days total per year, and then they only used about five of those days on average. Plus, out of everyone surveyed, the Japanese were the most likely to check their work e-mail and voicemail while on vacation. In the U.S., employees got a few more days on average per year than the Japanese — about 14 — but wound up taking just 12. In the U.S., not using vacation time was more about money than anything else. Thirty-four percent said they just couldn’t afford a vacation.

Meanwhile, folks in countries like France, Spain, Denmark and Brazil are living the life — soaking up a whole month of work-free days each year. And they’re not afraid to use every last drop of that time off. Literally, they use every last drop. Where are these lucky folks going on vacation? The stats show that a bulk of them head to the beach. Sounds like a plan.

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Pitch your tent here? (Ian Murray/Photographer's Choice/Getty Images)

Yes, you can do this! A newish Web site called Campinmygarden.com enables you to connect with folks who’ll let you pitch a tent in their yards for a small fee.

It’s the same online community concept established by sites like Airbnb.com and Couchsurfing.org — only you’ll sleep outside the house, rather than inside. Accommodations vary based on the property, of course; some members offer showers, running water, WiFi, secure gates, power sockets. As with most campsites, the prices are generally super cheap — like 5 to 20 pounds; they’re set by the member.

The Web site was started up in England in April 2011, so a bulk of the “gardens” are found in the UK — which is just fine, given that the countryside is so peaceful there it’ll likely lure you into a taking a nap in somebody else’s tall grass anyway. For example, consider this wide open field in South Downs.

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Gillette Castle (Barry Winiker/Getty Images)

Last week, while editing “10 Eccentric Homes with Hidden Passageways,” I became acquainted with Gillette Castle in East Haddam, Conn., a home constructed in 1919 by successful stage actor William Gillette, whose greatest role was that of Sherlock Holmes.

As you’ll learn from the article, Gillette set up his home to play tricks on people. He installed a mirror system, so he could spy on guests from his bedroom — that way he could burst onto his living room “stage” at the most magnificent moment. At dinner, he and his guests were seated on a cushioned bench along the wall; the dining table was on a track, and he pulled it toward the group and locked it into place. “HA HA HA” Gillette probably laughed inwardly. “I own the most clever table-on-a-track in the universe.” At his feet was a floorboard he pushed to send an electronic signal to the butler’s pantry for dinner service.

Gillette’s castle has been called distasteful — it’s quirky, but not an adorable, conventional sort of quirky. It’s made of a rather bulky set of fieldstone blocks; on purpose (“or was it?” you think) it looks like ruins. Its features are strange: In his study, Gillette put his desk chair on a track, so he could glide toward his work, and behind that chair was a trick door through which he could disappear. The house has 47 custom doors with hand-carved puzzles that serve as locks, as well as feline-sized openings throughout for his cats. On the roof were water tanks full of gallons and gallons water; if the house had ever caught on fire, Gillette would’ve pulled a wooden lever shaped like a dragon’s tail, and all of that water would’ve come wooshing down, according to writer Henry Zecher. Outside, on the 125-acre grounds, Gillette built a 3-mile railroad track with a train that Albert Einstein and Charlie Chaplin eventually boarded, wrote Charles Monogan.

After Gillette died, the state of Connecticut purchased the property, and now it serves as a Connecticut state park, where you can have a picnic and take a tour of the home. Tell us what you think about it.

Lights are installed within the ice to illuminate the towers at night. (Ryan Davis)

Five years ago Brent Christensen thought it might be fun to build his kids an ice fort on his front lawn. Building such a fort wasn’t exactly a cinch, however, and he spent several winters perfecting the process for constructing what his kids came to call “the ice castle.”

Soon, Utah locals were cruising by his house to gawk at the icy mass, and in 2009 he was asked by the Zermatt Resort to build one on its property. This winter, he and his partner Ryan Davis have borrowed a park in Silverthorne, Colo., to build the lovely one-acre “Ice Castles” exhibit, which is open to the public with a $10 admission.

The question is: How in the world did they build it? Here’s the scoop from Ryan Davis:

The first thing the structure needs is a solid foundation, which is established simply by running water on the grass and waiting for it to freeze. After that, it’s just a matter of attaching icicles to that foundation and continuing to build upon that. The mortar for those icicles is, of course, more water, which freezes them to the existing ice structure.

Where do you come up with those icicles? You “grow” them, Davis told Coolest Stuff. Growing icicles is kind of like growing plants. They need lots and lots of water. The icicles are grown on custom-made racks behind a wall at the rear of the castle. By running water on these racks, Davis and his crew can grow 3,000 to 5,000 icicles in a day. When the racks are ripe with icicles, the crew plucks them and puts them in custom bags made out of carpet (which Davis says is the best material for this task). About 30 icicles will fit into each of the 50 bags. Every night, the 20-person crew makes several trips delivering new icicles to the structure.

An employee harvests icicles to be added to the castle. (Ryan Davis)

Of course, this structure IS supposed to be a castle — not just some boring mound of frozen water. And so, like any respectable castle, it has towers. These towers can grow to be up to 40 feet (12 meters) tall, Davis said. They’re so tall that steps must be built so that the crew can ascend and add more icicles to the tops of the towers. They even have to wear crampons on their shoes, as if they’re ice climbing — because, well, they are.

Although Davis and Christensen have a general design in mind for the ice castle, the look of the castle changes daily, depending on the temperature, the wind, the volume of water that’s run on the structure and whether it snowed that day. Sometimes the icicles will wind up looking like petals, or like leaves with veins in them, Davis told Coolest Stuff. Or they might be long and ribbony — only a half-inch thick and 6 inches across. “The weather customizes the look,” he said.

In all, the castle will require about 2 million gallons of water, according to the Web site, and if you’re wondering where all this water comes from, look no further than the City of Silverthorne. When Davis and Christensen asked to use the park for their attraction, they also asked if they could build a hookup to a nearby water main. In return for the water, they give the city a dollar from every ticket purchased, and that money funds a local scholarship.

Here are some more pictures of the gorgeous Silverthorne Ice Castles:

(Ryan Davis)

Davis says the night sky appears red when you're standing near the illuminated ice castle. (Ryan Davis)

(Ryan Davis)

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Le Mur des Je T'aime (Flickr/ConstantineD/Creative Commons License)

Here’s the story: In 1992, an artist named Frederic Baron decided to collect “I love yous” from non-French-speaking strangers on the streets of Paris.

The rules were this: The paper always measured 8.2 by 11.6 inches (21 by 29 centimeters). The strangers could write “I love you” in one of four colors: blue, green, red or black. After the strangers scribbled the magic words on the paper, Baron would note below them the language, the country the person was from, the pronunciation of “I love you” in their language, and the French translation.

Over time, Baron collected an amazing 1,000 pages of “I love yous” in 300 languages. He published them in a book and then decided to make them into a mural. He enlisted the help of Claire Kito, a calligraphist, to learn the handwriting of the strangers and paint their “I love yous” on the wall. The wall includes 612 tiles, each 8.2 by 11.6 inches (21 by 29 centimeters) — the same size as the pieces of paper. The splashes of red on the tiles represent the broken heart, “which the wall attempts to reunite.”

"I Love You: The Wall" is found in Paris at Buttes Montmartre, Place des Abbesses, in the Square Jehan Rictus. (Flickr/vfowler/Creative Commons License)

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If this thing becomes a tree, it's going to be a very big one. (David Sutherland/Getty Images)

OK — so, right now this is just a big idea, not an approved plan. But a French consulting company released an infographic detailing its hopes to cloak the Eiffel Tower in plant life, enabling it to serve as the ultimate symbol of France’s dedication to sustainability.

Turning the tower into a tree would mean planting it with 600,000 plants, attaching 12 tons of rubber tubing to the structure as well as hemp bags full of soil, plus installing an irrigation system to keep the plants hydrated, according to Inhabitat. In becoming treelike, the tower would pack on 378 tons of weight. It also would grab 87.8 tons of carbon dioxide out of the city’s air.

Can the tower handle the extra tons? Will birds build nests in its plant life? Might it turn golden in the autumn and then shed its leaves in the winter like a real tree?

Good questions, good questions. But right now, who knows? And the City of the Paris and SETE, which runs the tower, released a statement indicating they’re not associated with the plan proposed in the infographic, according to Reuters.

This whole thing made me think of a post I wrote awhile back about the scathing criticism the Eiffel Tower received during its construction. People just plain didn’t like the tower; they called it a “hateful column of bolted iron,” which of course seems so silly today, given how not-hateful it is. Anyways, this tree plan is interesting because it would turn the tower into a much fuzzier, furrier sort of creature. Kind of like if the tower grew a beard.

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The castle's waterfront lawn (Anke L/Flickr/Creative Commons License)

Sometimes you watch a movie and you think: This place is pretty. I would like to go there.

In this case I’m speaking of “Melancholia,” a not-at-all hilarious movie made by controversial director Lars von Trier, which was filmed at a gorgeous waterfront property in Sweden called Tjoloholm Castle, according to media reports.

As castles go, this one isn’t that old: It was built between 1894 and 1904 in the province of Halland in Sweden and was designed in the Arts and Crafts style by architect Lars Israel Wahlmann. Even though it looks like a castle you might find in 16th-century England (not Sweden), it was actually quite modern for its time. It had electricity and central heating, and it had a vacuum cleaner. By vacuum cleaner, I mean a machine that weighed 1 ton and was pulled by horses, according to writer Henrik Berezin.

The property was owned by a man named James Dickson, who unfortunately died of blood poisoning after he cut his finger and never got to see his castle as a finished product. But his widow Blanche lived in the castle with the vacuum cleaner, and built an adorable little village, complete with a church, school, village hall and library, nearby, for the benefit of all those who worked on the sprawling estate. According to one Web site, some of the houses in the village have been restored and today are available for rent. So, if you can’t afford castle living, maybe you could afford village living.

The castle (Anke L/Flickr/Creative Commons License)

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This is what a portaledge looks like. They can be hung from cliff faces, like this one in Yosemite, or from trees. (Greg Epperson/Getty Images)

Do you wish to dangle from great heights while you snooze?

Yes, you do. And you might as well do it in Bavaria, Germany, at an adventure resort called Waldseilgarten. Here at the mountain retreat, you will have three sleep-up-high options. They are as follows:

• Sleep on a platform in the trees, about 22 feet (7 meters) above the ground. The platform is just like you would imagine a platform to be — it’s made of wood and looks like the floor of a tree house. You’ll need a sleeping pad and sleeping bag, and you’ll eat dinner and breakfast on the platform, among the boughs and leaves and whatnot. ($166 per person, per night)
• Sleep in a portaledge (tent) dangling from a tree. You’ll need rope assistance and tree climbing skills/training to ascend and descend from your hanging tent. (Plan your bathroom breaks wisely.) The tents sway from large branches of large trees. Meanwhile you’ll have a gorgeous view of the mountains. ($333 per person, per night)
• Sleep in a portaledge (tent) attached to a cliff face — just like the rock climbers do it. You can sleep as high up as 3,280 to 6,561 feet (1,000 to 2,000 meters) or as low as 328 to 984 feet (100 to 300 meters). Either way, if you fall out of bed, it’s going to hurt. Given the risk, this type of sleeping arrangement is set up by appointment only, and it’s not cheap. ($1,186 per person, per night)

[via Treehugger and Gizmag]

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