The smoke is clearing as 18-year-old Ben Shugar emerges from the live fire training facility on Pender Island. He’s tired but energized. “Live fire, yeah, I’m really into it,” he says. “I love the feeling. There’s so much adrenalin but you also have to take deep breaths and calm your mind so you can think clearly.” Ben and his buddies have just tackled a simulated house fire, coming to grips with heat, smoke and working in a confined space.

It was simple curiosity that drew me into the unassuming farmhouse and driveway just off Slea Head Drive on Ireland’s Dingle Peninsula. The sign said Beehive Huts Fahan Group. Beehive huts? What are beehive huts? And then I saw them, a group of stone huts in the shape of beehives in the middle of a rocky sheep enclosure.

June 12, 1942. Russian pilot Nadezhda Popova and her navigator Sofia Vodyanik climb into their twin-cockpit Polikarpov Po-2 biplane fueled, armed, and waiting for them at their base in eastern Russia. As members of the recently-formed, all-female 588th Night Bomber Regiment, their mission is to harass German units crossing the Muis and Donets Rivers in southern Ukraine.

Back in LA on a short-term contract, I grabbed my coffee from the multi-tiered shopping mall at Hollywood and Highland and ambled down the steps to the Boulevard and the Hollywood Walk of Fame. It was a whirlwind of activity, the busiest part of the strip. This is where tourists gather to board the tour buses and take photos of the more recognizable five-star brass stars embedded in the terrazzo sidewalk.

Internationally recognized as one of the most important artists of his generation, 87-year-old Robert Murray, Canada’s foremost abstract sculptor, shows how ingenuity conquers the impossible in Between Earth and Sky, on view at Vancouver’s Paul Kyle Gallery until July 29. The show includes a selection of small sculptures, reliefs and drawings, demonstrating Murray’s mastery of material and technique.

The mid-1960s were heady times in rock and roll, attracting a pantheon of photographers who sometimes became as noteworthy as the talent they were following. One of the first was English photographer Barrie Wentzell. “We were out there discovering bands,” he says of the days when he worked as chief photographer for Melody Maker, an influential British music magazine that predated Rolling Stone. “Nobody was really famous, apart from the Beatles, and even they were very sweet.”

Silverton, Australia, a lonely, outback outpost 335 miles northeast of Adelaide, isn’t much to look at - a hotel and bar, three art galleries, a tea room and surprise, surprise, the world’s only Mad Max Museum. It’s hot, humid and I’m surrounded by hundreds of fat, hungry flies as I make my way across the town's dusty main street. Why the hell am I here? And then I remember. I’m here on a pilgrimage because of my love for Mad Max movies.

Slightly inebriated from the champagne she consumed the night before , Priscilla Tempest, the newly installed Press and Public Relations Officer at London's prestigious Savoy Hotel scrambled up to the seventh floor. She stands astride as the lifeless body of international arms dealer Amir Abrahim is wheeled out of suite 705.

Kitschy-kan? "Yeah, kitscny-kan," the local high schooler repeated. "This place is so damn kitschy." He put down his half-consumed can of Coke and jumped off the bridge, clothes and all, into the marina below. Even at this latitude, the summer heat was driving the teen and his buddies into the water, an unusual occurrence here in Ketchikan, famous for its fishing and lately, much to the chagrin of many locals, tourists. The gang had now grown to about 12 adolescents united in their contempt of day-trippers.