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Complex Numbers #995915 added October 15, 2020 at 12:02am
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Desert Ships
Entry #7 of 8 for
 Kissing Camels Surgery Center
Okay, this one I just had to do a search on.
Contrary to an impression I might have given, I haven't been everywhere. Hell, I haven't even been everywhere in the US.
The problem with travel, for me, is that I'm always torn between revisiting places I've enjoyed and experiencing new locales. That's one reason I employ a jolt of randomness in my road trips. This, by the way, is in addition to the problem of deciding between traveling and staying at home. The former is tiring and costs money; the latter can be boring.
Lately it's been all boring, no traveling.
Point is, I looked up what in Newton's name Kissing Camels is, and found that it's a thing near Colorado Springs,which is a place I haven't been to yet (I have, however, visited nearby Denver and environs). And no, it's not an adult version of a petting zoo, or anthropomorphic slash fiction.
Kissing Camels is an example of pareidolia.
Here's a link to a picture of it. 
As far as I can tell (I also found numerous other photos of the same rock formation), that's not photoshopped. Oh, sure, it probably got color-balanced, cropped, contrast-enhanced, etc., but that's approximately what the rocks look like.
So, as is common in these sorts of things, there's a community nearby also called Kissing Camels, and apparently there's a surgery center there. BOR-ing. 
I was hoping it had something to do with when they tried to wrangle camels out West.
Yes. That was a thing. Someone presumably looked around at the Mojave Desert, scratched his head, looked at his horse, looked back at the vast barren wasteland, and then back at his horse, which in his mind turned into a camel, because camels live in the desert, while horses, well, not so much.
Then (in my headcanon), his eyeballs became large dollar signs as he realized that he could make a humpload of money by importing camels from a different desert, and immediately set off to Arabia or Egypt or some such.
Well, no, that's not how it happened at all. It was more of an Army thing. They wanted to adopt the use of camels as beasts of burden in the Southwest, but for various reasons it didn't work out.
So did they return the camels to Egypt or whatever? Oh, no. Not at all. This is America, dammit. They kissed the camels goodbye and the stubborn sand llamas eventually died out.
Or did they? Spend a night in the desert soutwest. Listen very carefully. Look, up on that ridge! Is that a hump, or... ?
The desert is huge, and habitation there is sparse. I like to think that a few survived, bred, and are sitting in the shade of a rock somewhere, plotting their revenge.
After all, "camel invasion" would not be the weirdest thing to happen to us in 2020.
Don't believe me about the camels? |
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