Within the Southern Desert National Museum in Arizona there is one of the largest stockpiles of tyres in the United States. There are millions of discarded tyres lying around. The area belonged to a company that had been going to recycle the tyres but which went bankrupt when the state of Arizona shut it down due to breaches of fire regulations.
An attorney from the state of Arizona presented an estimate that, if a fire broke out there, it would continue to burn for about ten years. In 1999, there was a similar case somewhere in Ohio and it took 250 firemen 5 days to get it under control; and it took another nine years (as well as millions of dollars) to clean things up.
Sunrise in San Francisco. Copyright by pbo31 at Flickr.
This week’s photo impression: A reader lost in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. And what else could it be? The author, J.K. Rowling, can find her name on eight spots in the top 50 book charts this week (!), because the release of the new book has also resulted in people buying the older books. What a cash cow.
Photo of Hamburg’s harbor at night:
Fish markets are somewhat fascinating to me. You walk by all those market stands with tables, boxes and barrels filled with fish, and you see these colors that have an earthy but at the same time aqueous tone. Wherever you turn and look, you see this gory gloom, and you smell the dead fish as it overwhelms your sense of smell. Fish markets offer a raw picture of human life with all those people from different countries doing the same thing, selling dead fish and seafood, and chopping off fish heads and grubbing in bowels, which is probably the reason why I’ve always been fascinated by them. And there is this strange feeling to be followed, because there are thousands of dead eyeballs with dull expressions looking at you from all directions in every instant you are in the market. It’s a weird feeling that makes you concentrate on yourself and you realize that you can barely return the look of the dead fish’s eyes, it’s a feeling as if the fish and these other strange creatures from Davy Jones’s locker were first judging and then disapproving you, which is absurd, of course, but you can’t help it. Then, when you leave the market, you turn around, because you want to steal just one more glance at this surreal world, this coexistence of life and death.
