"Wait ... Is this from the Onion?" I ask myself at least thrice per day, and the answer always leaves me SMDH.
If you ever doubted that humanity is determined to wipe itself off the planet (deservedly) as fast as humanly possible, look no further than the Rosemont Hotel in Dubai, which is building a "high tech rainforest" inside of itself, in the middle of a desert.
YES, fine, they are apparently recycling some of the water, and I can't claim a featherweight carbon footprint either. But a "prehistoric Jurassic-inspired marsh?" A "sandless beach, splash pools, adventure trails, and a rainforest cafe?" All because the hotel does not sit on beachfront property. So they had to do SOMETHING, for fuck's sake!
Here in Juneau, we could use an "advanced sensory rain system" that "detects people" and leaves us with the "sensation of being surrounded by rainfall without actually getting wet." But no, we just have an actual rainforest that's not inside a hotel--or at least we do for now.
Don't worry people. Rapists serve sentences shorter than a juice cleanse; people care more about a football player dissing a song than they do about a dictator taking over America; there are too many major international crises to name; and a temperate rainforest caught fire in the Pacific Northwest for the first time in living memory.
But again, there's nothing to fear, because a giant hotel is making Jurassic Park in its lobby. I know I sound cynical but I'm completely serious. It's almost like the designers of this project have come to accept that the world is past the point of no return and are just like ... weeelp...YOLO!!!!!
