My mother and her partner just took a road trip down to New Mexico to check out an Earthship: a passively-heated and -cooled, semi-subterranean off-the-grid house made largely out of used tires, glass bottles, and other recycled materials. You can see some photos here.

Figure 1. The bridge.

In the current hemisphere-wide heat wave, a life underground is starting to look pretty attractive . . .

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If you rewind to the beginning of the slideshow you’ll see some very Iain Banks pictures of Hoover Dam; or if you go forward a little you can see photos of the very same café where Kelly and I frantically tried to finish our Rio Hondo stories while Gavin watched the footie.