During these dog days of August, we take note that both NASA and the Japan Meteorological Society have confirmed what many enduring the Middle Eastern “heat dome” may have long suspected: July, 2015 was the hottest on record.
Here is an eye-in-the-sky representation of what this looked like in the vicinity of the Tigris and Euphrates:
SCORCHED
The month’s heat fired up the imagination of one Sean Mulryan of the Ballymore Group, in concocting a new development named Embassy Gardens, with its two towers linked by a “sky-pool swim-bridge”, or some such luxe-marketing blubber.
DO YOUR LAPS IN THE LAP OF POWER
Conveniently located next to the American Embassy in London, the acrylic water tube will pose a variety of technical challenges. Not to worry – engineer Brian Eckersley is all over it, like melted plastic. As he recently oozed to the BBC:
Alas, the distortion of the interface ought be the least of Mr. Eckersley’s worries; if he wishes to focus his considerable intelligence on a subject worthy of his anxiety, he might consider the fate of Gunther Anders’ inverted utopians, for whom he is such an eloquent if unwitting mouthpiece.
LIQUIDATION OF THE SELF
Meanwhile, in an abandoned swimming pool from another era, a different sort of engineer proposes an alternative diversion for our boiling Anthropocene:
UNABLE TO IMAGINE THE THINGS WE MAKE?
JUST LIKE THIS, BANKSY NAILS OUR SPIRIT TO THE TIMES
Desperado Philosophy 
September 23rd, 2020 at 11:52
[…] James Berger, author of the excellent After the End, offers a few helpful insights in an interview that first appeared a month or so before Covid 19; we relay a reprise below, with images from the now dismantled Banksy Dismaland. […]