The Lost City of Atlantis...
Or an oil refinery?

You know that oil refinery off Hwy 52 between Rochester and the Twin Cities? Which my family has always called "The Stink Plant" (due to its stinky odor)? You know, the one that Sarah lovingly refers to as "The City of Lights"? [Liz, what does your family refer to it as?] Anyway, it occurred to me today that at night, when it's all lit up, it looks a lot like the city of Atlantis (from Stargate). Maybe the visual arts dept for Stargate based the city on an oil refinery. :)

I wanted to compare the two (Atlantis and the oil refinery), but man...it was harder than I thought finding pictures of either of those things. I remembered Sarah taking pictures of The Stink Plant/City of Lights one night on the way back to Rochester from the Cities (on my camera), but I couldn't for the life of me find those pictures. Which was bothering me to no end. But then I realized that the pictures were taken out of a moving car going 70 mph at night with the flash off. So really...even if I found the pictures they'd probably be super crappy and look more like an abstract work of art than an actual oil refinery at night. So I probably deleted them right after uploading them into my computer, actually. So then I just googled for images of "oil refinery night" and found one that looked close enough like the one on Hwy 52.

And while it was very easy finding pictures of Atlantis in the daylight, I had a surprisingly hard time finding a picture of it at night, all lit up. I finally found one, and although not ideal, it was good enough for me.

Here's a picture of Atlantis:

Here's a picture of an oil refinery:

And here's a picture of the oil refinery that I photoshopped on a body of water to make it look more Atlantis-like. Pardon the shitty photoshop job, but I wasn't really concerned with making it look good: