Good morning, Whitewater.
Tuesday in the Whippet City will be sunny with a high of sixty-three. Sunrise is 5:52 and sunset 7:52, for 14h 00m 14s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 72.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Urban Forestry Commission meets this afternoon at 4:30 PM.
Kon-Tiki, 1947. Via Wikipedia.
The Kon-Tiki expedition was a 1947 journey by raft across the Pacific Ocean from South America to the Polynesian islands, led by Norwegian explorer and writer Thor Heyerdahl. The raft was named Kon-Tiki after the Inca sun god,Viracocha, for whom “Kon-Tiki” was said to be an old name. Kon-Tiki is also the name of Heyerdahl’s book; the Academy Award-winning documentary film chronicling his adventures; and the 2012 dramatised feature film nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
Heyerdahl believed that people from South America could have settled Polynesia in pre-Columbian times. Although most anthropologists as of 2010 had come to the conclusion they did not,[1][2][3] in 2011, new genetic evidence was uncovered by Erik Thorsby that Easter Island inhabitants do have some South American DNA,[4] lending credence to at least some of Heyerdahl’s theses. His aim in mounting the Kon-Tiki expedition was to show, by using only the materials and technologies available to those people at the time, that there were no technical reasons to prevent them from having done so. Although the expedition carried some modern equipment, such as a radio, watches, charts, sextant, and metal knives, Heyerdahl argued they were incidental to the purpose of proving that the raft itself could make the journey.
The Kon-Tiki expedition was funded by private loans, along with donations of equipment from the United States Army. Heyerdahl and a small team went to Peru, where, with the help of dockyard facilities provided by the Peruvian authorities, they constructed the raft out of balsa logs and other native materials in an indigenous style as recorded in illustrations by Spanish conquistadores. The trip began on April 28, 1947. Heyerdahl and five companions sailed the raft for 101 days over 6900 km (4,300 miles) across the Pacific Ocean before smashing into a reef at Raroia in the Tuamotu Islands on August 7, 1947. The crew made successful landfall and all returned safely.
Thor Heyerdahl’s book about his experience became a bestseller. It was published in Norwegian in 1948 as The Kon-Tiki Expedition: By Raft Across the South Seas, later reprinted as Kon-Tiki: Across the Pacific in a Raft. It appeared with great success in English in 1950, also in many other languages. A documentary motion picture about the expedition, also called Kon-Tiki was produced from a write-up and expansion of the crew’s filmstrip notes and won an Academy Award in 1951. It was directed by Thor Heyerdahl and edited by Olle Nordemar. The voyage was also chronicled in the documentary TV-series The Kon-Tiki Man: The Life and Adventures of Thor Heyerdahl, directed by Bengt Jonson.[5]
The original Kon-Tiki raft is now on display in the Kon-Tiki Museum in Bygdøy, near Oslo.
Here’s Puzzability‘s Tuesday game in this week’s Giving Away the Ending Series:
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This Week’s Game — April 27-May 1
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Giving Away the Ending
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You’ll need to do a little detective work this week. For each day, we started with the title of a well-known mystery book and replaced all the letters in each word—except the last letter—with asterisks.
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Example:
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A ****Y *N ******T
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Answer:
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A Study in Scarlet
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What to Submit:
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Submit the book title (as “A Study in Scarlet” in the example) for your answer.
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Tuesday, April 28
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