You’d think I’d taken a sudden interest in sinkholes — actually, there’s a small one on my tree lawn that the city and sewer company have been amusingly* haphazard about addressing — but the one in Guatemala City is worth posting about, as it looks positively like science fiction.
…and at that link the Christian Science Monitor (a name I’ve always loved) provides a slideshow of other sinkholes around the world (delightfully titled, “Sinkholes Around the World”), some similarly frightening and some bewilderingly deceptive.
So again I return to the theme of how mind-blowing they are on the spectrum of natural disasters. There is no “nice” natural disaster — though The Weather Channel’s month-long “Great Tornado Chase” orgy might lead one to think otherwise. But somehow I can comprehend floods, tornadoes, hurricanes and even earthquakes more than the earth literally dropping out from underneath me.
It’s like, yeah, I can even imagine my house being shaken to bits by The Big One that the Midwest will see some millennium now or later. But picturing it falling into the earth?
That one’s a little tougher to conceptualize. It’s cognitive overload. Far out, man.
Fall of Because 
As much as it would suck to be involved with a sink hole, I find them deliciously entertaining and much more mind-blowing than any other natural disaster (okay, second to big-ass electrical storms).
This here is the earth reminding us that as much as we fill it in with foundation, pave over it’s surface with our flexible asphalt, and try to out-smart it with our earthquake-absorbing structures, it is still a living, changing organism that we can never fully overpower. Sinkhole!
And so here I thought it’d be a good idea to just buy a boat and live on the ocean. We’d just float around the earth and go with it’s flow – you know, work with it instead of against it . . . we thought this plan would keep us far away from the Stupid People and their awful disregard and disrespect for the earth and fellow humans . . .
but now, see what humans can do to the Ocean! Assholes.
I don’t want to be there when earth “gets us back” for fouling her Gulf with oil – though it will be a mighty sight to see. I imagine a big fireball explosion that ignites the oil and blows up the gulf from the inside out. That’ll teach us. ;-P
Word. Cool way to look at it, for sure — and I definitely get a “By the way, just reminding you all who’s boss” vibe from it.
So I can call you Noah, right? And Noah when you call me, you can call me Al.
Cool photo. Far out? Or maybe it’s far IN, man. yuk yuk
Why the asterisk on “amusingly”? Is that like, instead of finger quotes?
Baha! I could have sworn I deleted that asterisk. Incredibly, I meant to delete it because I completely forgot what it was supposed to reference.