This thing, known as McBarge by Vancouverites, is the hulking remains of a floating McDonalds. It was custom-built for our Expo ‘86 World’s Fair and then carelessly left rusting in the harbour for 23 years as some sort of ghost ship. I hadn’t thought about it until this week when I saw a funny conceptual artwork by Kate Sansom in the current exhibition Science Fiction_01  at Vancouver’s Or Gallery, where the artist has set up an office inside the gallery as a research base for tracking down McBarge’s mysterious current owners and discovering what they ever intend to do with it. This is also how I found a funny web photo essay, at the aptly named wraiths.ca, describing a recent unauthorized reconnaissance  - okay, a break-in – of McBarge’s rundown interior. I remembered this barge as an eyesore, but the thing is, with the golden arches gone and all its red-and-yellow, ketchup-and-mustard colour scheme removed, its design elements aren’t bad. If someone offered it to me, I’d take it. Think what you could do with it! But I have a hankering to see the owner of this thing eternally bound to atone for its careless waste by wandering around telling his/her cautionary tale to unwilling strangers, like the Ancient Mariner. Couldn’t someone have at least donated the use of this thing for some useful purpose? Photos of McBarge above are by Ashley Fisher (unk’s dump truck), Matt Hoekstra (the blurb) and Roger (Rog45) by permission. I took the last photo on Sunday, June 28, 2009.

This post is sort of a follow-up to a previous post with a similar thesis: that the 60s and 70s aren’t dead, they’re alive and well and living on tumblr. These photos of geodesic dome interiors and exteriors are just a small selection from randomfriendly,  nomadicway, julesandnicho, standardgrey and cerebralmuseum. Curious fact: Buckminster Fuller was not the inventor of these structures. The first geodesic dome was built 30 years earlier “by  Walther Bauersfeld, chief engineer of the Carl Zeiss optical company, for a planetarium to house his new planetarium projector,” according to Wikipedia. However it was Fuller’s utopian PR for his domes that fed these 60s and 60s-style experimentations. Welcome to the pleasure dome – though I’m sure these are not what that song is referring to.

The above by standardgrey really made me laugh, even despite an allergy to lolspeak (click on photo to see other amusing judgments passed on this thing). So many of these glass domes were eventually painted for privacy and shade, but this one takes defeating the purpose to a new level. The 1976 dome fire below, “Buckminster’s blaze,” is via standardgrey via mcslo and is originally from the Montreal City Archive. See some funny remarks about this, and about domes in general, here. PS. check out this Buckminster Fuller collapsing table.