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| -Short Attention Span Theater- |
| Viking ship built of ice-cream sticks to set sail |
| 2005-08-16 |
| Obviously some people (such as myself) have too much free time on their hands. AMSTERDAM - A replica Viking ship made of 15 million ice-cream sticks is to be launched in Amsterdam on Tuesday by a former Hollywood stuntman who hopes eventually to sail it across the Atlantic. The Viking longship, which is 15 meters (about 49 feet) long and took Robert McDonald and two volunteers two years to build, is to be launched in Amsterdam harbor with a crew of around 25 for what is intended to be a 90-minute excursion in a bid to set a world record for the largest sailing ship made of ice-cream sticks. âItâs a dream come true. Itâs truly worth all the hard work,â McDonald said Monday of the painstaking two-year effort to assemble the birchwood sticks into a vessel. âI never want to look at glue again. I donât think I will be in a hurry to look at ice cream sticks again.â The ice cream sticks used to make the ship were provided by Unileverâs ice cream maker OLA and by children who collected discarded sticks around the world. McDonald is a 45-year-old from Jacksonville, Fla. whose Sea Heart Foundation helps provide leisure activities for children in hospitals, hopes to sail his Viking ship across the Atlantic next year. âThatâs still the ultimate goal, to sail across the Atlantic in the Viking-style,â McDonald said. Christopher Columbus was acclaimed for centuries as the man who discovered America in 1492. But in recent decades, more evidence has come to light showing that Icelander Leif Ericsson and the Vikings were the first Europeans to set foot on the American continent around the year 1,000. Viking longboats let Norse warriors land, pillage and plunder large parts of Europe and sail off knowing that no other vessels could catch up. |
| Posted by:anonymous5089 |
| #6 The significance of Columbus was that he was an official representative of a European government staking a claim to territory. Australia had a better documented history, and Europeans had been coming here for 200 years before the Brits officially staked a claim. |
| Posted by: phil_b 2005-08-16 18:15 |
| #5 No one claims 1493. Colombus claimed 1492. :-) |
| Posted by: JFM 2005-08-16 17:54 |
| #4 Lief Eric(glub)? |
| Posted by: mojo 2005-08-16 17:48 |
| #3 hope that glue's not water soluable :-) |
| Posted by: Frank G 2005-08-16 12:51 |
| #2 Columbus was the last to discover America. People all argue who was here in 1430 or 1180 or -8000. No one claims 1493. That's significant, in that the earlier landings, if they occurred, were not exploited and were forgotten. So they might as well not have happened. It's the same as all the claims that thus-and-such was really "invented" by someone hundreds of years earlier, when it was some crude drawings that no one ever saw, much less turned into a working model. I count many of Davinci's "inventions" in this category. |
| Posted by: Jackal 2005-08-16 12:46 |
| #1 At least he didn't have to eat that many ise cream bars to get the sticks. I have no doubt that Norse sailors and settlers reached the Maritime Provinces and possibly the New England area but I question if they they were the first Europeans to do so. They are only the first that can be proven to do so. And I personally think that a significant number of other mariners were crossing the Atlantic pre Columbus. Fishermen from Bristol may of been fishing in the Western Atlantic and going ashore as early as the the 1450s. In addition it looks as if the Portugese may of had settlements on Puerto Rico in the early 15th century. But Columbus gets the credit or blame simply because he was the one to make it stick |
| Posted by: Cheaderhead 2005-08-16 12:13 |