Any serious travel is looking like it’s some time away at the moment – I’m thinking of New York (and looking through old photos) and wishing I was over there.
This is a remarkable building which still holds its own in a city full of amazing skyscrapers.

Having recently been to (and hated) Las Vegas, I found it fascinating to read this article about a hidden city of homeless living in a network of tunnels beneath the city, including right under the strip.  The scenes described sound like something from a post-apocalyptic film:
There’s a lot of older people, senior citizens, people in [...]

Shamefully, I have never read this before.
Needless to say, it’s a fascinating insight into a strange American era.  The book is filled with tension between the sudden possibilities of life in the postwar United States – the trajectory hinted at in the Great Gatsby followed through to its logical conclusion where cars, sex, alcohol, divorce, [...]

We were stuck in traffic going through the Hoover Dam for nearly two hours – the Nevada police were operating some sort of mysterious checkpoint on the way into the state which slowed traffic to a crawl. Behind us Arizona was covered with scattered thunderstorms. As the sun set the stationary traffic was [...]

As a foreigner, one could be forgiven for having very low expectations of American food.  Mysteriously, what has been selected for export as representative of the USA tends to be fairly vile combinations of grease, beef, sugary bread and fake cheese.  Many, many pre-made US foods contain ridiculously huge quantities of high fructose corn syrup, [...]

Please excuse the recent dearth of posts – I have had some non-swine related health issues.
Normal service to resume shortly, if all goes well, including the fabulous tale of travellers from a far flung outpost voyaging to the New Rome just as the empire begins its decline and fall (translation: we are going to the [...]

Following a link from this post at Skepticlawyer, via TIME to the photographer’s website, I came across these excellent galleries of urban decay: Detroit in decline; East-German industrial wastelands; and abandoned theatres.  It’s certainly interesting to reflect on how our civilization would look as interpreted through its ruins.

Unlike, say, the Romans, many of our large [...]

An update on Harry Nicolaides – he’s set to receive a royal pardon.  Which is great for Harry, but just goes to show that the current Thai legal regime is one in which arbitrary decisions of members of a royal family are more important that principles of free speech or basic human rights.

Pictures like these seem like a good enough reason to continue exploring space – it’s an excellent tool for reflecting the utter triviality of the apparently significant matters with which we fill our days.
Now if only we could find one of those obelisks…

This is disgraceful: a Melbourne man, Harry Nicolaides, has been jailed in Thailand for three years for insulting the Thai royal family in a novel he has apparently written.  The conviction is a result of Thailand’s anachronistic “lese majeste” laws, which make insulting the royals an offence punishable by 3-15 years prison.  As this website [...]

Confirming that the United States still regards the phrase “war on terror” to mean “license for continuing and willful insanity”, a lawyer representing the U.S. in a high profile case in England has indicated that the U.S. view is that the covert abduction of foreign nationals in order to bring them to America to face [...]

Bazooka Circus is what the whole world would be doing on a Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war.
- Hunter S Thompson

Limited/no updates this week, as your author is stuck in Sydney, home of the homeless.
Well, I’m stranded in the city that never sleeps
Some of these women they just give me the creeps
I’m avoidin’ the Southside the best I can
These memories I got, they can strangle a man
Well I came ashore in the dead of the [...]

The lack of updates has been caused by your author’s temporary secondment to the home of closed supermarkets, icy wind and poorly dressed civil servants, Canberra.

 
We live in a political world
In the cities of lonesome fear,
Little by little you turn in the middle
But you’re never why you’re here

Flickrvision is a strangely addictive website. It consists of photographs from the photo-sharing website flickr superimposed over a map of the world as they are uploaded. In other words, as you watch, you see an endless series of photos, with the place in the world each one is from highlighted. The effect is a very [...]