vegas underground

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…

Arizona/Nevada Border

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…

unscheduled delays

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…

amazing photo of obama inauguration

This picture is incredible – I haven’t done the maths to work out if it’s actually the claimed “1474 megapixels”, but it’s a highly detailed panoramic photo of the Obama inauguration. You can zoom from the whole scene in close…

privatising the justice system

An example of why prisons (and police, and prosecutors) are best kept in public hands: making findings of guilt and consequential imprisonment profitable creates an incentive to put people in prison who don’t deserve to be there, which leads to…

fukuyama on the decline of the American brand

I found this article by Francis Fukuyama to be a very worthwhile read on the subject of the current financial crisis and it’s implications for US politics at home and abroad.

It’s written with a clear-eyed understanding of modern…