Jackson Hole, China 2024 Nov 27
Chinese real estate developers back in 2004 recreated Jackson Hole, Wyoming about two hours north of Beijing. Linked is a YouTube who goes there to visit and is underwhelmed by the town square but impressed by the houses' dedication to mimicking America's west. It all looks a little ... flat, to me. The true mark of a great city is when a copy of your city is made into a casino in Las Vegas (Venice, New York, Paris, Egypt, Lake Como's Bellagio... did I miss any? Where's our Kremlin-themed casino?) and this imitation Jackson Hole from the video reminds me less of those and more of the "Wee Britain" joke in Arrested Development.

Darién Gap 2024 Nov 11
Speaking of dying in Panama, the Darién Gap – that inhospitable, entirely undeveloped stretch of dense tropical rainforest-covered mountains outside the reach of civilization that separate Central America from South – had a record 520,000 people cross through it last year, more than double 2022 numbers and up from only 24,000 in 2019. The reasons for this are many, but two large ones are the 7 million people fleeing Venezuela and those, oddly, fleeing China. Them, plus others seeking refuge in North America, are forced through this lawless region where all the horrific things you expect to happen in a lawless place are taking place.

Holy City 2024 Nov 10
San Jose's very own utopia-slash-cult, taking a spot in 1919 just south of Los Gatos. Founded in San Francisco by a white supremacist misogynistic bigamist, the cult made money by masquerading as a roadside tourist trap on the route between San Jose and Santa Cruz, complete with carbonated liquor and peep shows. It was granted California's second ever radio station license, somehow getting the callsign KFQU, which became known for drifting away from its assigned frequency. By the time Highway 17's completion bypassed Holy City in 1940, their reputation for supporting Hitler's Nazi Germany had already set the place on the path towards destitution.

The land has since changed owners several times, but game respects game, and it is now owned by the Church of Scientology.

The surprisingly contentious boundaries of Santa Cruz County 2024 Nov 10
Linked is a recent blog post about the history of the borders of Santa Cruz County, since while we've always known where the city of Santa Cruz lies, we have not always agreed to what extent those smelly hippies should tame their surrounding chaos.

Zayante Tunnel 2024 Nov 10
In the 1880s, the Southern Pacific Railroad was built from Oakland to Santa Cruz. To reach through the Santa Cruz Mountains, tunnels were dug. One particular tunnel, a short 250-foot span in Zayante, isn't terribly remarkable. Except that, because it was bored through solid granite, when the railroad closed in 1940, the tunnel was deemed stable and sturdy, and the railroad left it open and intact.

And that way it stayed for twelve years, until, in the Cold War's escalating paranoia, a document retention interest purchased it and turned it into the Western States Atomic Vault Company – an underground vault not for people, but for documents. Eventually purchased by Iron Mountain, the facility is no longer in use, but this is a recent development, with day-to-day operation ending only in 2017.

Sacred Stones 2024 Nov 6
There is apparently, a little north of Chico, California, a Trappist Monastery. It's in a town called Vina, on land once claimed by Peter Lassen and later purchased by Leland Stanford who used it to create the largest vineyard. Their abbey built in a classic Cistercian style, with stones illegally imported from an abandoned 800-year old Spanish Cistercian monastery. William Randolph Hearst boonswaggled the stones out of Spain 99 years ago in order to build a swimming pool and bowling alley at his Wyntoon mansion. His plans were canceled however by the Great Depression, and in a deal to abate taxes he surrendered the stones to the City of San Francisco. The city held them in Golden Gate Park until the monks in 1995 negotiated with the city to use them to build their chapel, on the condition that the chapel be open the public. Securing funding only in 2004, with the help of Sierra Nevada Brewing, they used 1,300 stones (of the original 10,000) in the construction. Finally completed in 2018, the chapel is now, as they agreed, open to visitors.

Republic of Molossia 2024 Oct 30
On May 26, 1977 someone broke away from the State of Nevada to make their own country. It's current population is 39 (35 humans, 4 dogs).

Australian Central Western Standard Time 2024 Oct 30
This time zone is an obnoxious UTC+8:45 (yes, really) and covers a tiny and nearly-uninhabited strip along Western Australia's southeastern-most coast. But not entirely uninhabited, clearly, or else why exist? So for these few hundred people, they live in a world where their clocks are 15 minutes off the hour.

Perhaps this is less a weird time zone, and more a community staunchly holding out against the idea of time zones in the first place, back when each community set their own local noon and inter-state commerce just happened when it happened.

New Mexico is not named after the country of Mexico 2024 Oct 27
They probably teach you this if you go to school in New Mexico, but somehow this information is new to me. "New Mexico" predates the country of Mexico by several hundred years.

New Mexico received its name long before the present-day country of Mexico won independence from Spain and adopted that name in 1821. The name "Mexico" derives from Nahuatl and originally referred to the heartland of the Mexica, the rulers of the Aztec Empire, in the Valley of Mexico. Following their conquest of the Aztecs in the early 16th century, the Spanish began exploring what is now the Southwestern United States calling it Nuevo México. In 1581, the Chamuscado and Rodríguez Expedition named the region north of the Rio Grande San Felipe del Nuevo México. The Spaniards had hoped to find wealthy indigenous cultures similar to the Mexica. The indigenous cultures of New Mexico, however, proved to be unrelated to the Mexica and lacking in riches, but the name persisted.

Why Diego Garcia? 2024 Oct 16
There's a tiny little scrap of dry land in the middle of the Indian Ocean named after two of the first people to report seeing it: Diego Garcia. It's an atoll a thousand miles from nowhere administered as a lingering remnant of the British Empire. Mauritius really wants Diego Garcia and the rest of the outlaying nearby atolls for itself, though, the Mauritius-ites saying they were promised the isolated atolls when they split off from the British Empire and became a country 50-someodd years ago.

So why not give Diego Garcia et al to Mauritius? Well, famous British frenemies USA! USA! USA! have built quite the military base on the island, using it for our favorite Just Superpower Things: housing all sorts of fun toys up to and including nukes. Because of course we have.

But I guess the powers that be have finally figured out a deal. As of earlier this month, after decades of bickering (including UN resolutions calling the UK a bunch of wankers for kicking out the islands' original ~1,000 inhabitants) Mauritius, the UK, and the USA have come to an agreement. Mauritius gets the Chagos Archipelago, but can't settle anyone on Diego Garcia (the biggest atoll), and the American military base gets an "initial" lease of 99 years (making this the next generation's problem).

Why do I care? Well, its interesting, in the way all edge cases are interesting. But it's also interesting in that this struggle of tiny population of Chagos Islanders versus big old mean Britain has recently adopted the narrative of colonized versus oppressors, even though (in my opinion) that's not really what happened here. The Chagos Islanders aren't exactly indigenous to the islands, having their own inhabitation of the place only date back a few hundred years, and Britain didn't exactly colonize Diego Garcia as there is no colony there, only a military base. But there's no arguing against the narrative, I suppose, and so after an increasing Mauritian PR campaign against the UK, and the UK looking for international support on its other concerns, the British Empire has peacefully surrendered one of the last remnants of its once-massive holdings.

Don't worry, though, about the Falkland Islands. Saith the Falklands governor, Alison Blake: "The UK’s unwavering commitment to defend UK sovereignty remains undiminished."

Appendicitis Mountain 2024 Oct 13
Journeying my way around Google Maps, as one does, I did a double-take when I stumbled across a mountain in Idaho with an unlikely name: Appendicitis.

Well, as this link describes, that's what happens when the government surveyor sent to measure the mountains gets struck by a sudden case of Appendicitis while out surveying. The surveyor, Bannon, survived thanks to a local doctor, and and its been Appendicitis Mountain ever since.

A Protest County 2024 Oct 11
Protests take many forms. But rarely, I would imagine, do protests take the form of a state legislature creating a county. Yet exactly that happened in Nevada in 1987, when the federal government planned a nuclear weapons waste dump at Yucca Mountain. Nevadans, not wanting to be the country's nuclear trash dump (understandable), used some political funny business (the legislative vote took place at 3:45am, for instance) to create a the tiny "Bullfrog County" directly around Yucca Mountain, with prohibitively high property taxes which would go directly to the state government.

Nobody actually lived in Bullfrog County, and so its county seat was placed at the far-away state capital, Carson City, and officers were appointed rather than elected, and the rules allowed a single person to sit in multiple (or all) the offices. There were no courts, no paved roads, no buildings, and almost all the land was closed to the public. And it was entirely an enclave inside Nye County. So Bullfrog County was a county like none other.

This created problems. The lack of courts created a legal paradox. As the taxes flowing directly to state government now incentivized the creation of the nuclear dump they originally sought to dissuade, there were political problems. And there were government problems, as the Department of Energy was not happy about this development (understandable) and redirected their funding to Clark County.

But mostly, Nye County residents, who existed and were not happy about this new lawless, people-less enclave popping up in their territory and potentially robbing them of the economic benefits of having a nuclear dumpster in their backyard (a federally funded nuclear dumpster, I should say), challenged Bullfrog County's very existence in court. And they were successful. The Nevada Supreme Court ruled Bullfrog County to be unconstitutional, as it had no residents and thus no representative government. And so Bullfrog County was dissolved two years after it was created, and Yucca Mountain went on to be selected as American's nuclear weapons garbage repository.

Good news, though. Due to political complications, the nuclear dump has yet to be built, and since its funding has been eliminated, maybe it never will. And so we bury our nuclear weapons trash instead two thousand feet beneath New Mexico in a salt... thing, as the Founding Fathers intended.

Nuclear waste no-go zone 2024 Sep 25
Lest you think Chernobyl-ish zones of nuclear radiation-emitting contamination are only the trappings of the Soviet Union, be aware that there's a few thousand acres just northeast of Denver, Colorado that are similarly forbidden territory. The site of a factory under control of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, they so mishandled the facility that it was eventually raided and then shut down by fellow government agency FBI. Of course this came only after numerous, numerous whistleblowers and public protests lasting decades. No accident, though, Rocky Flats contamination was criminally negligent or just straight-up deliberate, all done in the service of the Cold War and forever expanding America's arsenal of nuclear weapons. So, a real lose-lose situation.

Now it's a "nature reserve." Though, seeing as it's not safe for humans to visit, what the hell else would it be?

The worst place in California? 2024 Sep 20
Is the tiny city of Trona, California the worst place in the state? Well, according to the description on Tobias Zielony's photography book about the place, it is "possibly the worst place in America, if not the world." Enter the link, a 2019 "Anomalous Phenomena Investigation" free Wordpress site article by Cindy Nunn talking about a possibly haunted home in the town. The haunting isn't terribly interesting on the surface – it's all circumspect speculation and 'bad energy' – but keep reading until you get to the article's post-script, because this is one of those situations where the post-script overwhelms the original text.

Apparently, after posting her Trona ghost-hunting piece, Nunn received a wealth of hate for her article's description of the town's destitution (although the blog's comments do not reflect this, maybe she deleted them?), and here in the post-script she responds by citing many, many source texts which don't pull punches in their disgust with Trona, and then she's wholesome enough to ask the haters for an apology. But these quotes she finds are amazingly bleak, describing a town ignored by law enforcement, with meth usage in abundance accompanied as it always is by petty theft and assault and burned buildings. And the cherry on top is that "dominating the landscape [is] the Mosaic Company chemical plant, which spew[s] noxious white smoke into the air. There [is] a sulfur-like aroma." Ahh, paradise.

Santa Rosae 2024 Sep 5
The four northernmost Channel Islands of California used to be, until about 7000 years ago when the sea levels rose, one bigger Channel Island which geologists have named Santa Rosae. One of the oldest human remains in North America has been found there. Something similar happened on Maui.

Nevermind I'm lying I forgot sea level rise is a hoax.

Terminal Island: Touring The Edge of America 2024 Sep 4
As I have been lately complaining, Terminal Island on the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach is a difficult yet fascinating place to visit. So while it may be a trick for us to get there, we can always live vicariously, such as through this Center for Land Use Interpretation guided tour back in 2005.

Los Angeles Export Terminal 2024 Sep 4
In 1997 the city of Los Angeles spent considerable money building these two huge hemispheres out on the port to facilitate the export of coal. Just as they were completed, the coal export market collapsed, and then domes then of course became mired in a complex web of lawsuits. But here, on this page, in full 360-degree interactive panoramas, let us remember the time Los Angeles built on its coast a pair of gigantic breasts.

The Fake Resorts of Long Beach 2024 Aug 31
Off the coast of Long Beach are the strangest thing – artificial islands made to look like resorts.

The State Home at Eldridge 2024 Aug 30
On the topic of insane asylums, I don't believe in haunted buildings except here, at the home founded as "California Home for the Care and Training of Feeble Minded Children." They even called the town its in "Eldridge" – and you though Lovecraft was making this shit up. Buried in the woods, the place is positively eerie. Don't believe the lies on this historical society page, the real history of the facility is as full of abuse and horror as it looks, although it took until 2012 for the state to finally shut the place down. Jack London even wrote an escape story about inmates of this place.

Agnews East 2024 Aug 30
Santa Clara Valley famously was host to the "Agnews Development Center" – a euphemism for what they used to call insane asylums. The main "west" campus still stands, once a Sun Microsystems and now an Oracle campus. But less famous is the secondary "East" campus, which kept operating until 2011 and still exists, although only in ruin. It's abandoned and covered with graffiti, the last great palace of urban exploration in the South Bay.

The Nearby Wilderness: Seeking Solitude and Serenity in the Orestimba 2024 Aug 29
Another musing about the Orestimba, this one from a decade ago but no less poignant for the fact. The author is well familiar with the land:

The Orestimba is a wilderness in the fullest meaning of the word. As a longtime volunteer at Coe Park, I have visited the Orestimba Wilderness many times over the last 20 years. I have startled groups of tule elk, seen countless coyotes, bobcats, and golden eagles. In spring, when the hills are green and the creeks are running, I have crossed fields ablaze with shooting stars. I have watched the setting sun ignite the Rooster Comb, and a little later, I have lain down beneath a star show of stunning clarity. In most wilderness areas in the lower 48 states, there would probably be another camper a mile or two down the trail. Not here. In the Orestimba Wilderness, I’m not far from home, but the solitude is so complete, it’s almost unnerving.

Orestimba Wilderness 2024 Aug 29
I am a poor outdoorsman but I'm strangely drawn to this enormous block of wilderness just an arm's reach away from this congested, dense, metropolis in which I live. And so I thrive vicariously, through articles like this. Although I do not rule out one day wandering around the hills that I look at daily from my home.

Mark Bixby Memorial Bike Path 2024 Aug 18
It is very difficult to be a pedestrian on Terminal Island. The ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles dominate Terminal Island, and are largely responsible for the island's very existence. But the place is covered in "No pedestrians allowed" signs.

In May 2023 that changed with the opening of the Mark Bixby Memorial Bike Path. Offering a bike and pedestrian route from Long Beach and across Terminal Island, it has unique views and impressive backdrops. However sometime after it's grand opening, it closed due to "construction." I can find no mention of this construction online. I believe it's a conspiracy, that the Port Authorities objected to having pedestrian access to their ports and so begrudgingly opened the Bixby Path with some fanfare and then quietly closed it again as soon as nobody was looking.

But maybe I'm reading too much into it. (I'm not, I'm just trying to not appear unhinged.)

SP Crater 2024 Aug 6
Why is there a crater in Arizona named "SP"? Isn't that a strange name for a Volcano? Why, yes, it is.

Quoth the Volcano Adventure Guide from 2005:

It is located on private ranch land and was named by the original owner, C.J. Babbit, in the 1880s. He was not, alas, as poetic as [the man who named the similar-looking Sunset Crater]. The bowl-shaped crater and the black spatter on the rim reminded this earthly person of a pot of excrement, and the name stuck. Mapmakers couldn't bring themselves to spell out the name, so it became "SP" – probably the only volcano in the world to be called after a rude acronym.

"Shit Pot". "SP" stands for "Shit Pot."

Congress's Cold War-era nuclear hideaway 2024 Jul 31
You can't just keep your telephone infrastructure safe from nuclear attack, you've got to unfortunately keep your Congress safe, too. And that's why the Greenbrier Resort in the Allegheny Mountain town of White Sulphur Springs contains a secret 1,100-bunk wing of the hotel behind a huge blast door and buried 720 feet underground. What used to be a national secret was exposed in 1992 by an anonymous government employee and now-a-days if you go there, you can take a tour.

This river doesn't exist 2024 Jul 26
Early in the days of European exploration of America the surveyors hoped for and desired for and even drew onto maps a great river running from the Rocky Mountains and out west into the Pacific Ocean. A river such as that would've been very useful to their goals of providing easy transport to settlers fulfilling Manifest Destiny. They even named this river: the Buenaventura.

But the map, clearly, is not the territory, and the Buenaventura as we now know does not exist. As the many, many expeditions sent to find it proved, The Great Basin exists, the Great Salt Lake, while big, is not actually the Pacific Ocean, and the Sacramento, while mighty, flows only from the Sierra Nevada.

It took intrepid explorer and asshole John C Fremont himself to talk President Polk out of this riparian denial, that drawing lines on a map cannot simply conjure up a river. Although all this desire to get people going west did inspire Fremont to invest heavily into railroads... which would have made him rich, had he speculated on the correct railroads.

Sri Lanka's Mythical Bridge Over the Ocean 2024 Jun 3
Sometimes legend does align with the geologic record, as in the case with Adam's Bridge, a shallow landform connecting the island of Sri Lanka with the mainland Indian subcontinent. Myths say it used to be walkable, and geologists who have studied it confirm this, that sea levels have risen to cover what used to be a very large isthmus.

Notes on El Salvador 2024 May 18
I've linked this series before, but this new El Salvador writeup is something else. He explains the history and politics of the country with a clarity and directness rarely found when researching any country, let alone a relatively small Central American state.

Glendenning Barn 2024 May 9
The Apple spaceship campus in Cupertino is the cutting edge of private, hyper-modern, secretive technology company campuses covered in the the most advanced, updated buildings money could buy, and one old barn. Why one old barn? Turns out, it was less of a pain in the ass to just let it continue to exist and use it for its original function.

Santa Justa Lift 2024 Apr 11
There's a beautiful and fantastical industrial age elevator in Lisbon, Portugal that's still operating, partly as a tourist attraction but also as a real part of the city's public transit network. Imagine if we took such care and interest to pedestrian needs in America.

Barcelona’s famous Sagrada Familia will finally be completed in 2026 2024 Mar 25
The famously incomplete basilica is scheduled to finally be "finished" (by which they mean, the 18th and final spire completed, ending major construction) in a couple years. Neat! Also the article spuriously refers to the building as a "cathedral" which even this Jew knows is wrong, as "cathedral" doesn't mean "big church", it means "building which hosts a cathedra (throne of a bishop)". It is accurately a "basilica" though, since it has been designated as such by the pope because of its importance.

Abandoned partially-built skyscraper in LA now covered in graffiti 2024 Mar 24
The title about sums it up. Oceanwide Plaza is a $1B construction project that stalled in 2019 leaving downtown Los Angeles with a half-built collection of towers. Now graffiti artists have taken over, producing some dramatic images of huge skyscrapers covered in street art.

Like out of a cyberpunk novel.

Socotra 2024 Mar 3
Avid travel blogger WRenee shares her experience going way, way off the beaten track in a solo trip (guided) to the Yemeni island of Socotra. The entire island is a UNESCO World Heritage site and GWB Huntingford – the English anthropologist who studied east African languages and people – called it "the most alien-looking place on Earth."

Corralitos California History 2024 Jan 26
This tiny homegrown website has an enormous wealth of information about Corralitos, California, a small town wedged into the northern part of the Monterey Bay between Santa Cruz and Watsonville. Corralitos is unincorporated, rural, and neither heavily populated nor touristed, but here on this internet of ours is evidence that it is loved.

USS Thompson (DD-305) 2024 Jan 3
There's a shipwreck in the South Bay? How have I never known this?

Quoth Jan Lettens writing in 2009:

After her sale, she served as a floating restaurant in lower San Francisco Bay during the depression years of the 1930s. In February 1944, the Navy repurchased the ship and partly sank her in the mud flats of San Francisco Bay, south of the San Mateo Bridge, where Army and Navy aircraft carried out bombing runs with dummy bombs. Portions of the wreck remain above the waterline to this day. She is commonly referred to as the 'South Bay Wreck' and many tide tables reference her as a reference.

Slanic Prahova Salt Mine in Romania 2023 Dec 25
I visited the famous Wieliczka Salt Mine outside Krakow, Poland way back in 2011, and thought that was the pinnacle of salt mine tourism. But I recently stumbled across the existence of this possibly equally-impressive salt mine in Romania, one of a series open to tourists in the region. It'd be cool to visit one day.

The most expensive building in the world is the Great Mosque in Mecca 2023 Dec 19
According to Wikipedia, anyway. Interestingly, the Great Mosque of Mecca isn't just the most expensive building, but more expensive than the next four buildings combined, all of which are nuclear power stations. The top ten are in fact all nuclear power stations or buildings in Mecca. The eleventh is an underground military airport, like something out of a comic book. And then the list becomes the expected arenas and hotels and corporate headquarters garbage.

Saudia Arabia is spending $1T to create an arcology 2023 Nov 20
And nobody told me??? How rude!

This country existed for only seven hours 2023 Nov 7
I don't know if this is the shortest-existing country of all time, and maybe calling this a "country" is a stretch, but the Republic of Benin (not the other Benin, which wasn't called "Benin" until later) was organized and existed in the midst of the Nigerian Civil War right as the Nigerian army was marching its direction.

Notes on Ghana 2023 Nov 7
This is a long but fascinating exploration into Ghana's recent history and politics written in an easy-to-follow narrative style, including some of the author's personal insights based on their recent visit. They also have other "Notes on" articles for other countries which I recommend as well.

Ukraine Interactive Map 2023 Oct 27
What's going on in the Ukraine-Russia conflict? Here's a map showing exactly that answer. Also has tabs for some other ongoing conflicts.

Denver Airport's website has a page listing the conspiracy theories about it 2023 Oct 25
The reptilian overlord's tail is in its mouth tonight. This is obviously a counter-informational campaign designed to make those who know the truth look like fools. How deep does the rabbit hole go?

Bir Tawil 2023 Sep 18
Apart from Antarctica, every piece of land on the planet is part of a country, right? Well, every piece of land, except this one. Due to a border dispute between Egypt and Sudan stemming from their joint history with English colonialism, there is an 800-square-mile quadrilateral of uninhabited, hot, dry desert which is claimed by no country.

The Mystery of the Bloomfield Bridge 2023 Aug 30
In case yesterday's confounding dive into local trivia merely whetted your appetite for following bunny trails to their conclusion, I present to you the "mystery" of why this pedestrian footbridge in suburban Minneapolis was built. A long and exhaustive read, but one which is ultimately fruitful.

This desolate English path has killed more than 100 people 2023 Jun 26
The Broomway is a public path in England that's over 600 years old and lies 440 yards off-shore. Accessible only during low tides, a travel writer visits The Broomway in this article and talks about the reality of transiting a byway that may very well sweep you out to sea.