Besides corgis, women who read books, animals in costume, and Cold War trivia, one of my biggest fascinations is the California desert. Living in the Mojave for more than three years cultivated my interest in everything from the Amboy crater to Joshua Tree to the Mojave phone booth to forgotten mining towns like Kelso and Cima. I found the the video above, about a trip to the abandoned settlement at the Salton Sea, both haunting and fascinating. [via BuzzFeed]
Infidel-ity. The best of Twitter’s #binladenporntitles hashtag. [Uproxx]
Look at this dog! I can’t get over how much I love this dog’s face. He must really love popsicles. [The Daily What via Reddit]
The 2011 World Beard Championships. Meet 2011 champ Elmar Weisser, plus all the best entries from this and previous years. [With Leather]
The ‘Star Trek’ porn parody, minus the porn. All the painfully bad acting with none of the sex and nudity. It’s like a CBS broadcast of “True Blood.” [Gamma Squad]
Thor wins weekend box office again. Bridesmaids, which I’m not seeing until tomorrow so SHHHH, came in second with a respectable $24 million. [FilmDrunk] (Related: Thorgi)
‘Simpsons’ correct spelling mistake with chalkboard gag. They misspelled guest star Kristen Schaal’s last name “Schall.” [The Comic's Comic]
Watch promos for all of NBC’s new shows. “Awake,” from the creator of “Lone Star,” looks promising. I can’t say the same for the laugh track-laden sitcoms. [Inside TV]
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“Bridesmaids, which I’m not seeing until tomorrow so SHHHH”
checks Author tag, sees it’s Matt
\moves on
So the Salton Sea is like the Detroit of the California desert, only nicer.
So that’s what a dog having a brain freeze looks like.
I’ve been fascinated by crazy utopian desert developers in AZ, NV, and CA for years, and have been out to the Salton Sea “beaches” a number of times. The Sea and the Imperial Valley as a whole is not as desolate as the video would have you believe. OK, not all of it is as desolate.
Anyone ever seen the movie Salton Sea? Crazy shit.
My own California desert story: I live in Nashville. Several years ago, my girlfriend’s company sent her to work in their corporate office in LA for a week and, having never been to Cali, I decided I’d go with her. While she worked, I rented a car and drove all over southern cali. I went to Venice, visited the Santa Monica pier, went to Huntington beach one day, went to a Dodgers game, and one day I decided to go to Joshua Tree to hike around for a day. So I drive what feels like to this city boy out in the middle of nowhere and, at the corner of dirt road and smaller dirt road, I see this little store. I stop at the store to grab some water for the day hike and when I go in, it’s a straight up head shop (beads everywhere, incense burning, new age music playing, and this little hippie chick with dreads sitting behind the counter all by herself). As I walk in, she looks at my t-shirt, which was a Planet Hollywood: Nashville t-shirt (it was well after the restaurant closed). She said are you from Nashville. I said yeah. She said, cool, I’m from Gallatin (a small suburb of Nashville). After chatting with her for about an hour, we discovered we even knew some of the same people. Small damn world, I tell ya.
/cool story, bro.
Bridesmaids spoiler: Get it? Women are just like men!
For a gutpunch-sized dose of malaise, look at the aerial photos of the sandy, undeveloped tracts in Salton City (around 33.31,-115.96, for the nerds out there). It evokes all the depressive apathy of the Rust Belt, but with an extra sense of loss for the desert that’s now littered with Rascal scooters and doublewides. Sigh.
Thanks for the reminder that I need to return to Joshua Tree to get my sneaker back from that coyote! *shakes fist, points at bare foot.
Matt- If you like creepy old rundown shit from all different eras you’ll like this site. Dude has updated it in quite some time but the archives go back pretty far.
[www.artificialowl.net]
Actually, I like any human structures reclaimed by nature. My favorite part of taking the train from NY to DC is seeing the urban decay in Baltimore. Anyone else who is similarly weird-minded should check out Fuck Yeah Ghost Towns:
[fuckyeahghosttowns.tumblr.com]
I just spend the last 30 minutes reading about that phone in the mojave desert.. brilliant.
If I had known about it last year I would have visited it..
Love that Salton Sea video too.. Detroit has a lot to offer in terms of urban decay.. check this album: [www.flickr.com]
I also just read a bunch about the phone booth, and tried to find it on Google Earth, but discovered the phone company removed it a while back. To drown my sorrows, I did a low pass by Area 51 in the Google Earth flight simulator F-16. So rad.
On the “reclaimed by nature” note, Pripyat, Russia is fun to read about. I think it would be a sweet place to visit for 7, 8 minutes tops.
In that case Matt if you ever come out to Arizona we’ll go look at abandoned shit in the middle of nowhere and shoot guns at said abandoned shit. And I promise I won’t kill you and wear your skin like some kind of Ufford-suit. I’d have the good sense to have you taxidermied and mounted on the wall.
It’s too bad the jackrabbit homestead shacks are disappearing from Wonder Valley. That wasteland was a photographers best friend.