Instead, I want to share a shocking and surprising fact that I’ve discovered: People are Stupid.<\/p>\n
Actually, that’s not true, it’s really more like “People are Lazy, and Thinking is Work”, but “people are stupid” is easier to say.<\/p>\n
Today’s illustration of this principle includes a visit to the former town of “Metropolis, Nevada<\/a>” (link goes to Google Maps image, centered in front of the hotel. Should pop up in a new window.).<\/p>\n Yes, evidently a bunch of developers from New York thought it’d be a great idea to build a big city in the barren deserts of Northeastern Nevada. This is where the “stupid” comes in.<\/p>\n Check out that map, zoom out and look around. What do you see? Yes, that’s right: sand, sagebrush, and dead grass.<\/p>\n There’s something downright appalling about the way people in the Western United States (where I’ve lived, in various places, for the last couple of decades) romanticize living in the middle of a desert, while at the same time trying desperately to pretend that they’re NOT living in a desert.<\/p>\n Here’s the story of Metropolis, as I understand it, in short form: Bunch of New York developers decide to build a big city for Mormon settlers. In order to pretend they’re not living in a desert, they figure they’ll just dam a spot on the small river to the northeast somewhere so that can stop enough water to keep themselves running.<\/p>\n Now, plunking down in the middle of the desert and pretending there’s nothing odd about building a large water-demanding city in it is a time-honored tradition of the American West, so why didn’t it work here?<\/p>\n Apparently, it’s because somewhere in the Lovelock, Nevada area a bunch of people said “Hey! We were here using that river’s water to pretend we’re<\/em> not living in a desert first, so you can’t take it away from us by damming the river up there! So there!”. And the courts agreed.<\/p>\n You might think the teachers at the local school would be educated enough to know that “desert” means “lack of water”. I went over to ask about this, but…:<\/p>\n I guess school’s out for the moment. I wonder what their sports mascot was. “The Metropolis Dustbunnies?”<\/p>\n I was reminded of all of this by a recent story that was going around about some developer who thinks it’d be a great idea to build a 100,000,000 gallon-per-year water park in Mesa, Arizona<\/a>. Which, for those unfamiliar with the area, is a desert just like Metropolis, only substantially hotter.<\/p>\n He’s not the first one though. Palmdale, California – out on the edge of the ‘Los Angeles area’ of California, appears to have the aptly-named DryTown Water Park<\/a>. Palmdale is in the area of the Mojave desert. I have no idea how much water it<\/em> uses up. I’m certain there are numerous others in the Los Angeles area alone.<\/p>\n It’s something to think about if you find yourself wondering why<\/span> the Los Angeles area continually induces the shunting of water from other parts of the country to itself, like a cancerous tumor inducing blood-vessels to form<\/span> in order to feed its own growth.<\/p>\n It’s probably obvious that I’m tired of living in deserts…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Two weeks of midterms, and now it’s finally Thanksgiving Break week. In honor of this celebration of my second most favorite deadly sin, I was going to do a food post, but I’ll save that for later. Instead, I want to share a shocking and surprising fact that I’ve discovered: People are Stupid. Actually, that’s … Continue reading Superman is Homeless!<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27,13,32,24,34,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-97","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-me-me-me","category-people-are-stupid","category-politics","category-pretty-pictures","category-where-was-i"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bigroom.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bigroom.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bigroom.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bigroom.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bigroom.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=97"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.bigroom.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bigroom.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=97"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bigroom.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=97"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bigroom.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=97"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Composite](\"http:\/\/www.bigroom.org\/images\/MetropolisHotelPanorama-sm.jpg\" "\\"Metropolis")
<\/p>\n![\"The](\"http:\/\/www.bigroom.org\/images\/metropolishighschool.jpg\" "\\"All")
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