People are amazing- Bombay Beach

I've been meaning to write this for a while, and while my daughter is watching Dora, now seems as good a time as any.

On Mentalfloss.com I found this article.
According to Ransom Riggs:

Bombay Beach may be the most famously depressing place in California; the poster child for the post-apocalypse. On the edge of the dying Salton Sea, an enormous body of water half the size of Rhode Island and so salty and polluted that by 2030 no fish will be able to survive in it, there is a town. There are several towns, actually, along the Salton’s 70+ miles of rancid coastline, but the most in tact, the most iconically awful, is Bombay Beach.

It’s a 10-by-10-block square of squat houses and mobile homes that was somebody’s idea of paradise back when the town was incorporated in 1929. A beachy getaway 150 miles from the Pacific, it was supposed to be Palm Springs with water — but decades of hyper-saline farm runoff and other problems turned the sea into a nightmare; plagued by fish and bird die-offs and outbreaks of botulism that leave its banks littered with corpses and its beaches smelling like hell, all but the hardiest tourists and investors had fled the scene by the late 60s. Even worse, the Salton began to overflow its banks, flooding the bottom part of town repeatedly. The remains of dozens of trailers and houses that couldn’t be saved still sit rotting, half-buried in salty mud, along what used to be the town’s most prized few blocks of real estate.

So here are some pictures from this place.

Dry

Same place flooded

So you would think in a place as crappy as this, people would have abandoned it, but nope, the house that has "The Hills Have Eyes" spray painted on it has people living in it.

That's not sand, that's fish bones. The constant stench of rotting fish must be overwhelming. This is the worst place on the planet, and yet, people live there, they haven't left. It's the their home. Human's need to have a place they connect to runs deep and through all cultures. It might be left over from our primate days.

This picture I think is the most interesting, no matter how isolating the location, no matter how horrible the conditions, we seek each other out. We find comfort in being a group. Sure, some of us might be shy, but when you live in the middle of the desert, it's nice to know, you're not completely alone.

There are about 300 people who live there in 2000. Some people might find this depressing but I find it to be amazing and hopeful. Human's don't give, we don't leave, we stick around because we need each other.

For more about Bombay Bay, you can read the whole article here.

Humans we're pretty cool

So I've decided to focus my blog for the next few entries on how people are pretty amazing.

First of all, we are interested in everything! Look around your desk, see that roll of tape that's been sitting there for 3 years and rarely used. You know what? Someone on this planet SOMEWHERE knows everything about that roll of tape.
Who invited tape?
Why was it invented?
Different types of tape.
The process that tape undergoes to be made.
The process that tape undergoes to be distributed.

You see tape, someones sees a whole career.

If I was a really good blogger I'd give you the history of tape, but since you found this blog you're capable of using the internet you should google it yourself. I did.. there's a PDF all about it.

Humanity has a wide variety of skills and we were not all born equally.

Proof: I was taking an exercise class and during the cool down the instruction was stretching her legs in a full split and her chest was flat against the floor.
I was so far away from the floor I needed my glasses to see it.
I looked at her and thought, "there is no way we are the same species." No other animals on this planet have such a wide variety of skills. If we were different animals would she have an evolutionarily advantage, would she be able to live longer and would I be picked off by a predatory?

Lesson of the day: Humans are awesome