I’m fascinated by the most bizarre things

I admit it.  I’m kind of odd.  Strange things interest me.  In addition to being kind of obsessed with good music, movies, and television, I’m also a bit fascinated by things that most people aren’t even remotely interested in.   

For example:  In 9th grade, our Biology teacher gave us extra credit to read The Hot Zone, by Richard Preston.  Since then, I’ve been completely obsessed with the Ebola virus.  It’s a freakin’ cool virus.  It turns your body into gumbo.  It does what the AIDS virus does in 15 years in less than 15 days.  It’s cool.  Even if it’s gross and icky and disturbing.  But I’ll save that for another day. 

Another thing that interests me are abondoned places.  As amelie knows, I like to take pictures of abandoned things.  One of my subjects in photography class was an old abandoned cotton gin in the Mississippi Delta that I found while randomly driving around one afternoon.  I took like, 23,049,823,408 rolls of film there.  I think abandoned places are hauntingly beautiful (shout out to HIMYM’s Pineapple Incident episode!).  And creepy.  Ghost towns and old abandoned buildings are interesting and creepy and I can’t help but wonder what makes people abandon something that they took the time to buy and build and whatever else.  What makes people leave? 

Which brings me to my current obsession:  Chernobyl.  (The whole abandoned ghost town thing is what got me interested in it in the first place.)  Can you imagine having to leave everything you own?  Photographs, clothes, money?  Everything?  The mere idea baffles me.  People always think about what they would take with them if they could just grab a few things if their house was burning, or if there was a hurricane coming, but what if you couldn’t grab anything? 

Chernobyl is the ultimate ghost town.  Or maybe I should say ghost area, since it made an area half the size of Italy uninhabitable.  So anyway, I started googling images of Chernobyl, and I found this website:  http://www.kiddofspeed.com/chapter1.html.  If you’re bored and you’re a dork like me, read it.  It’s interesting, and you can tell that she know’s what she’s talking about (mostly because her dad is a nuclear physicist or something like that).  It’s basically the story of this woman named Elena who lives in the area who has gotten permission by the government to visit the areas that had to be abandoned because of the nuclear power plant.  She takes her camera and her motorcycle and drives for however long you can physically be in the area without damage, and she takes pictures and documents the story before getting the hell out of Dodge. 

What I found REALLY interesting is this little little bit of info right here (which is in chapter 2 from the link above): 

In Ukrainian language ( where we don’t like to say “the”) Chernobyl is the name of a grass, wormwood (absinth). This word scares the holy bejesus out of people here. Maybe part of the reason for that among religious people is because the Bible mentions Wormwood in the book of the revelatons – which fortells the end of the world….

REV 8:10-11 And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters; And the name of the star is called Wormwood: and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter.

Then (either in another website or hers, I can’t remember–I don’t feel like looking it up, sorry) I read something that mentions that the weight of the concrete sarcouphagus that is on top of the nuclear reactor is so heavy that it’s causing the ground to sink.  What I read said that there is a good chance that the reactor will sink so much that could poison most of Europe’s underground water supply.  And the Bible verse above mentions Wormwood causing the water to become bitter and causing many people to die. 

Then, yesterday I read a news article that talked about how they’re finally replacing the cracking sarcouphagus that is currently covering the reactor with a better one that weighs freaking 20,000 tons!  Now if that doesn’t cause the ground underneath it to sink, I don’t know what will. 

Creepy, right????! 

Things like that have always fascinated me.  Because I’m strange and I’m a dork. 

Also creepy is some of the grafitti in Chernobyl:   

Other cool pictures:  http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/06/in_pictures_chernobyl0s_lost_city/html/1.stm (I actually like these better than the one from Elena’s website, but her photos come with a story that’s pretty interesting to read.  If you’re a goober like I am, you should check out both.