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Monday, May 31, 2010

Surreal photo from Guatemalan disaster

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This has got to be the scariest fucking picture I have seen all year. In terms of enormity. it doesn't begin to touch what is happening these days in the Gulf of Mexico courtesy of BP and the Reagan Revolution. But just look at it! Imagine how you would react if the maw of hell opened outside of your picture window one evening. I would run until I dropped, then think about running until I fell exhausted into nightmares about running some more, never getting far enough away.

BoingBoing, where I saw the article a few minutes ago, states that this image is not a Photoshop job, but a real picture from the Guatemalan government's Flickr feed depicting a colossal sinkhole that spontaneously formed in Guatemala City after days of saturating downpours from Tropical Storm Agatha. BB says that other sinkholes like this are rumored to be forming as well. And, as you can read clicking through the first link in this paragraph, the storm hit 2 days after the nearby Pacaya volcano erupted.

I know it's a holiday weekend here in U S A !  U S A !  And I'm pretty unplugged, by choice, from corporate media outlets. But as of a moment ago there still wasn't a peep about this on HuffingtonPost or TPM, both of which have ample space on their front pages for breaking news headlines. Yes, I know there were other important things happening this Memorial Day, but a volcano, tropical storm, and horror movie sinkhole affecting a capital city on our hemisphere warrants attention even on a day when a U.S. official claims that yet another "Al Qaeda No. 3" has been killed, yet again.

Immediate update: actually, HuffingtonPost has an item about the Guatemalan tropical storm way, way down near the bottom of the page, the third subhed in a series of three related to the start of a new hurricane season, after one about Haiti and one about the BP oil spill. I wonder why I didn't see it earlier.

3 comments:

  1. RubberCrutch got punked again. What this is is a chalk drawing on the street that a guy does. It's art. I'm surprised all that rain didn't wash it off.

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  2. looks like a giant rabbit hole...

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  3. Big Otis: hahaha! I hadn't completely abandoned the idea that the picture had been photoshopped until I saw the same picture in the Times. So it has to be true because it's fit to print.

    59er: hahahaha! Way to skeeve me out! If the hole was inhabited by giant "bunnies," then I'd sure hate to see the size of the flies buzzing around it today --- probably the size of a condor.

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