Woah! Check this bastard out! A flying car! Can you imagine how different history would have been if I’d had been racing through the streets of Paris in one of these on that fateful night in 1997? It would have been all, “Henri Paul! Unfurl the wings at once!” and me and Dodi could have been in St. Tropez within the hour instead of all that unsavoury death stuff that actually went on. I’ve got no regrets though. Up here, the taps are all full of nectar and because I’m in the VIP section, I don’t have to rub shoulders with the normal folk and all their moaning. The blog that features the flying car says that, “you will see them in the skies of the United States or England during the next 12 months”. Fuck’s sake – you’ve got more chance of seeing me coming back and banging out Sexual Healing on The X Factor.

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Up here, The Big Man likes to see his army of soldiers down on Earth fighting for what they believe in. Between me and you though, he also thinks strippers are pretty cool too. That’s why he recently sneakily set up a running battle between members of a church and workers from a lap dancing bar that exist across the road from each other in Ohio. The God-botherers have repeatedly urged the fallen women to come to the church and the dancers finally gave in – having parties on the grass outside with not many clothes on instead of going inside and singing boring hymns. Not that The Big Man’s all that bothered about the outcome – he’s too busy pumping iron ahead of a cage-fighting showdown with The Bloke From Downstairs next month.

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The office is empty, it’s rainy across Britain, and everyone in the rest Europe is taking their summer break. Yep, it’s got to be time for The Summer Holiday Issue, this week brought to you by Katie.

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A recent ILM report has revealed that over two-thirds of UK workers can’t help but check their emails while they’re on holiday. Sound familiar? Well, it might be about time to make a little more positive use of that Smartphone addiction. Remember sitting through your Uncle’s tiresome post-holiday slideshow and marvelling at all the little boxes of slides? There’s now a Web 2.0 way to deliver a much richer version of that very experience – while you’re on holiday. Tripline, launched in beta this week, gives you the tools to create an interactive story of your holiday; a way to plan and share your trip while you’re there, and a much more exciting way to tell everyone about it when you get home. Beyond sharing, Tripline obviously also makes bragging rights far easier to come by, combining your Foursquare check-ins, Facebook status updates, tweets, and Flickr uploads onto your geographical journey. It’s more than just a map mash-up; it’s a story of your holiday in real-time. As Techcrunch point out, Tripline isn’t in of itself unique, but what’s caught our eye is the fact that (unlike Where I’ve Been) when the user base reaches critical mass, it could offer real-time stay/eat/drink/do recommendations. A future for the suffering travel guide publishers perhaps?

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Flight booking has historically been the least enjoyable part of going on holiday, but a beta site from British Airways aims to change all that. Rather than starting with a destination in mind and working back, you start with where you currently are and work forward to see all the travel possibilities. Once you’ve typed in the city you’re travelling from, how many hours you want to fly, number of stops, and the type of holiday you want (cultural, family etc), a world map then throws up a host of possible journeys that match your criteria. We like it because it shows how airlines could be used as inspiration tools, as opposed to just getting from A to B. And it makes the journey part of the adventure. Perhaps it’s due to the slump in business class bookings, or simply a dedication to the pleasure of flying, but it seems that BA have rediscovered their love of travel.

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Welcome to “travelling like a human”. Sounds appealing doesn’t it? Ten seconds on Airbnb and we were already hooked. Airbnb is like a slicker version of Craigslist with places to stay everywhere we’d like to go. It allows anyone from average joes to stately homes to rent out their extra space to visitors. Listings include crashing on someone’s sofa to renting a castle or treehouse for your trip. Sites like Airbnb (and similar smaller services like istopover.com and crashpadder.com) are turning the travel industry on its head. Sadly, rather than up their game in the face of competition, legislative action and the health & safety police has begun to protect the established travel industry. We love the idea of sites like Airbnb, which bring value, inspiration, and homeliness to the business of tourist accommodation, so we’ll be behind the NY sub-letters movement to call Gov. Paterson for support. This is yet another example of the growing trend for going-it-alone, successful young entrepreneurs creating services that we really wish we’d thought of.

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The comic book adventures of Tintin are coming alive thanks to a new series of tours by travel company On The Go and Moulinsart (the ‘Tintin Foundation’). The Destination Tintin tours will take you from India, to Jordan and then to Egypt – countries in which the intrepid adventurer, his little dog Snowy and friend Captain Haddock chased all manner of adversaries. As well as epic adventures, they’re also running Tintin-lite escapades, offering weekend trips to Brussels, where Tintin author Hergé lived and worked. For the lucky, geek-fan, some trips will also be accompanied by well-known ‘Tintinoligists’ to share expert views of Hergé’s much-loved adventures. Seeing destinations through the eyes of an iconic traveller or resident gives holidaymakers a richer, guided experience and offers a new way of packaging up well-trodden terrain.

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18 months after the city’s historic Templehof airport closed, Berlin’s mother of all airports has been saved from the threat of demolition, transformation into a cosmetic surgery centre or conversion into a giant mall, and instead been reimagined as a public park, Berlin’s biggest. It is now home to its own music festival, food market, sports events, and epic cycle tracks (formerly runways). What’s nice is how thousands of Berliners are making it their own. We’re seeing a parallel trend in India where real estate projects are popping up to exploit unused greenfields, changing the way we think about the business and social potential of aiports. In the UK, recent government promises to relax legislation around disused buildings mean that we could be looking at a similar scenario.

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Much has been claimed of Twitter – from the most “popular” word in the world to the scourge of society. Scientifically, Twitter must also take at least 12.47% of the blame for Justin Bieber and over 9000 really bad jokes about people tweeting what they ate for lunch. But the one thing that’s definitely true is that microblogging is “social” media and is about connecting to other people, right? Possibly not. In a throwback to Stanley Milgram’s gloriously misanthropic experiments of the 1960s, a bunch of sadists at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore deliberately caused a group of subjects to become “socially anxious” by getting them to play an online game where players pass the ball to each other, but deliberately never passing the ball to the subject. This had no effect on the subjects’ tweeting. However, when they instead made the subjects “existentially nervous” by getting them to think about death that led to a marked increase in tweets. So social media might be better named “narcissistic media”? The 40% drop in US college students’ empathy scores over the last 30 years would certainly bear this out.

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Great news for Europe’s fashion powerhouses and bad news for China’s enterprising counterfeiters this week as new research shows that wearing fake designer goods actually makes you into a worse person. In a study by the University of North Carolina, volunteers were told they were either going to wear a pair of real designer sunglasses or fakes while doing certain tasks, and given the opportunity to cheat. 30% of people who thought they were wearing genuine shades cheated, but a dramatic 74% of those who thought they were wearing fakes cheated (despite the actual shades being the same in both cases). And not only that, the “fake” group were more likely to feel that people in general were dishonest tax evaders and Post-it thieves. It seems that people feel subconsciously “inauthentic” when they know they’re sending out false signals and this inauthenticity infects their behaviour. Other studies show that this attachment to the genuine article may be a core human trait even in babies.

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