I read about this guy, the “Mole Man of Hackney” on Boing Boing a while back. Long and short of it is that he’s apparently been digging tunnels under the neighborhood and has been ordered by the council to stop.

Later post on Boing Boing mentioned this story that Seymour Cray, inventor of the so-called supercomputer, was an avid tunneler under his own house too, but someone-or-other refuted it and said it was just some creative mythmaking.

Reminds me of this low-level obsession I have with building underground, just something that has really interested me for a long time but I haven’t gotten started on because I have quite a few other projects that need more immediate attention, like this blog I suppose, though really, creating big underground chambers seems a lot more fulfilling. Howsoever.

Roadside America reports on an attraction called Forestiere Underground Gardens (link to their official, sort of crappy site) that sounds quite nice. Nearly 100 rooms, an 800-foot auto tunnel, a chapel, lots of underground and partially-underground gardens and so forth. All built by some obsessive with more time and energy than I.

A few things really attract me about underground living:

• cool in the summer, warm in the winter
• quiet
• private
• safe from many hazards such as weather, possibly nuclear fallout depending on construction, urban unrest if entrances are properly concealed.

However, underground chambers are potentially very unsafe if poorly constructed - another reason other than laziness and busy-ness that I haven’t begun working on any underground tunnels myself.

I believe I posted elsewhere about the Paris ‘cataphiles’. This is a sort-of interesting Parisian subculture of people who do illegal exploration of the catacombs. Speaking of lazy, here’s the Wikipedia entry on the Paris catacombs. One of the most memorable places on this earth I’ve touristed.

Who knew there was an extensive air-conditioned public tunnel system under Houston’s downtown? I didn’t…

Here’s an excellent piece from Modern Mechanix on tunnel digging as a hobby, as practiced by Dr. H.G. Dyar, international authority on butterflies and moths of the Smithsonian Institution.

Coming up in another exciting blog post: Le parkour! Illegal building-climbing (’buildering’)! Psychogeography! The French!