Recently launched: MAPMagazine, an online publication that devotes itself to Madrid’s Anglophone expats and visitors. The magazine, which feels to us like a cross between the NYT and Facebook, is a useful compendium of news and calendar items. There are lists of free (and cheap) things to do, restaurant reviews, and coverage of the capital’s nightlife scene.

We’re impressed by the breadth of material covered and by the absence of snarky expat snivel. You know what we’re talking about. So if you’re hankering for it, go elsewhere.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Photo by David Dee

If they can be pressed into diamonds, ashes are a girl’s best friend.

A 19-year old German woman wanted to have her father’s ashes pressed into a synthetic diamond, but Wiesbaden district courts ruled against her Tuesday in favor of her grandmother. (She hates me. She’s always hated me.)

The court heard the daughter of the deceased express a wish to send the ashes to Switzerland to be turned into a “memorial” diamond. “However, she could not provide sufficient evidence to prove her father wanted to be pressed into a diamond,” the court in western Germany said, according to Reuters. (He totally did so tell me that he wanted to be turned into a diamond!)

The diamond making process subjects ashes to intense heat to produce graphite which is then pressed to produce a raw crystal that is then polished and cut into a synthetic diamond. Check it out.

(It’s, like, so unfair. Those ashes are mine, I tell you. MINE!)

Popularity: 4% [?]

Lonely Planet today announced the launch of their new travel video community site, lonelyplanet.tv. The site features a combination of user-generated travel videos and original programming from Lonely Planet TV.

We’re into the site’s clean interface and interested (if unsurprised) by the YouTube-inspired functionality that allows travelers to view, share, and rate posted videos. We like the way the site integrates Google Maps to identify where the video was shot. We found a few gorgeous clips, including this one taken from the summit of Mera Peak in Nepal.

With this new site launch, Lonely Planet does a cannonball into the pool of video social networking sites occupied by Travelistic and a handful of others. Welcome to the party, LP!

Popularity: 2% [?]

Photograph by jj_mac

When it comes to strange European news, Berlin is hot this week. The latest episode? Berliners looked on as a 91-year-old man got stuck to his roof while recoating it with bitumen.

After the nonagenarian slipped, neighbors called the fire department. At first, observing youngsters assumed that, due to the man’s age, he was trying to commit suicide. One witness said he looked “like a beetle on its back.”

As a matter of fact, kiddo, the man in question was simply trying to spruce up his surroundings.

C’mon, peeps, can’t an on old timer put a roof over his head without the attention of local authorities and the international press? Back in the old days, a man could slip and fall in peace. Put that verdammt camera away before I box your ears with it!

Unfortunately, it appears ageism is an epidemic that knows no boundaries.

Popularity: 3% [?]

We’ve been enjoying the Guardian Unlimited’s Been There site-within-a-site. Been There is a series of reader-generated tips, suggestions, and travel guides.

The site’s “tips we like” section is particularly interesting. Some “tips” are very simple descriptions that might have been ripped from Wikipedia, containing little in the way of insight. The tips we like are short and sweet—little bits of information about bars, neighborhoods, museums, and local drinking habits, to name a few.

Tips are categorized logically, with eating, accommodation, bar, and budget categories the most popular.

Our verdict: nothing beats a source you can trust—be that a guidebook, an expert, or a friend—but gosh can you learn a lot from your fellow travelers.

Popularity: 1% [?]

As we’ve already reported, paying €2.20 for a rather thin daily newspaper is simply foolish.

In addition to the browsing English-language journals at the Museum of Parisian Architecture, there are several other ways to fulfill your free press needs in Paris. First off, always check your hotel lobby for free English dailies. Many hotels provide copies of the International Herald Tribune in addition to the Le Monde and some other French regulars.

Those looking for city papers with Paris-based stories and reviews should look no further than The Paris Times, a free monthly paper found in Anglophone haunts throughout the city. Also available is the bi-monthly Paris Voice magazine and the classified-based FUSAC, which has been an Anglophone Parisian staple since 1988. Be on the lookout for all three at bookshops, cafes and galleries throughout the city.

Save the €2.20 you would have spent on an overpriced newspaper and treat yourself to an espresso.

Popularity: 2% [?]

photograph courtesy of ullamaaria 

The weekend Financial Times just isn’t what it used to be. While we truly enjoy Chrystia Freeland’s The A-Train column, we miss the column hers replaces—namely, her fellow Canadian Tyler Brûlé’s Fast Lane column. A mishmash of product recommendations, travel advice, urban planning prescriptions, and narratives of one jet-set life, his column was informative and irritating both. While we enjoyed eating up his urban planning suggestions, we found the details of his dietary regimen tiring. Tyler’s final column can be found here.

An altogether less frivolous venture, a new publication called Monocle, launches on Thursday. Brûlé’s goal with the publication is to establish a new sort of newsmagazine—a serious one in which not a single story is generated by a public relations agency, according to his description here, a more visual version of The Economist and Der Spiegel.

Monocle will retail for £5 in the UK.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Elizabeth Gorman’s ghostly capture of a photograph of Hemingway and Gelhorn 

The Cervantes Institute’s current exhibition, “Correspondents in the Spanish Civil War,” documents the lives of journalists in Spain during the War. Big hitters Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell—both of whom took up arms—were just a few members of the A-list writers’ club whose harrowing work is on display in its original format.

Leave it to Hemingway, the only one with a car, to woo his (third) wife on the Spanish battlefield. Martha Gelhorn, an American journalist covering the war for Collier’s, was one of a handful of international journalists and writers who ended up at the Hotel Florida, just off the capital’s Gran Vía and a walk from the grandiose Telefonica building, where foreign correspondents filed their dispatches.

Despite the shootouts and aerial bombings, Madrileño life went on as normal during the Civil War. Just down the street from the institute is Museo Chicote (Gran Vía 12. +34-915-326-737), perhaps the most famous bar in the world—voted MTV’s best—where a good menú del dia can be had for just €10. Here the historic pack of journalists gathered, drank, and waited out the fuselage like rain on Gran Vía.

Popularity: 5% [?]