Some photos from around the world
I’ve been storing up a few photos over the past couple of weeks — they’re not mine, they’re just great photos from various news sources. Think of this as a very small National Geographic, with no where near as much editorial.
The first up is this startling picture of self-mutilation — it might look like tomato juice, but it’s actually blood. Shiite Muslims mark the end of Ashoura — the anniversary of the prophet Mohammed’s grandson’s death, Imam Hussein — with a sword-carrying procession that involves self-inflicted slicing. I assume no one actually dies, and they’re just mere fleshwounds. He sure looks fairly laid back!
The next pictures come from our friends at English Russia — not only do they provide glorious pictures of long-legged Slavic beauties, they also publish photos of… napalm-testing caves? It seems the Russians developed an alternative to napalm which would (or could) be used inside buildings. They wanted to test the effect on brick, and these are the results when used on an abandoned Russian fortress:
Finally, again from Russia, a ‘one in a billion chance’ has recently been unearthed: two bullets, Russian and French, that collided mid-air 150 years ago during the Crimean war! Apparently the chance of this happening is pretty damn unlikely — somewhere around one in a billion. English Russia has a few more pictures, if you’re interested.
Who would’ve thought that so much has happened there? I guess when you cover about an 8th of the world’s total land mass, a lot of incidental things can occur!
Related posts:
- Treading in the shadow of my ancestors and standing where Hitler begun his world war
- My weekend in bullet points (with photos)
- When we were young the world was so beautiful
I don’t care much for the first one.
But the second two are amazing!
February 25th, 2009 at 4:23 pmI included the first purely out of… disbelief. Check out some of the other pictures from this news source: http://www.sun-sentinel.com/sfl.ro.ashura1216.pg,0,1803711.photogallery (they’re not as… visceral… but they still tell an interesting story)
February 25th, 2009 at 4:29 pmFirst picture is SCARY, Seb!!
February 25th, 2009 at 4:38 pmBut he’s really enjoying the juice!
February 25th, 2009 at 4:52 pmugh…the first pic is gross! I hate blood…
February 25th, 2009 at 7:16 pmit’s more than jut a mere flesh wound too! haha. that reminded me of monty python.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have said it was blood — it’s not the first thing you think of when you see the photo. It would’ve been more interesting if people thought it was from the Spanish tomato festival, or even paint!
February 25th, 2009 at 7:19 pmyou totally should have gone with the tomato festival! haha
February 25th, 2009 at 8:04 pmI want to go to it one day… (I love tomatoes)
February 25th, 2009 at 8:21 pmIt is a gross photo…. but I can’t actually SEE a wound…..
February 25th, 2009 at 9:04 pmYeah… I looked through some others, and it looked like they had a few cuts around their bodies, on their backs and stuff — but not sure how he got blood on his face…
He must’ve bathed in the blood of those that fell beneath his blade.
February 25th, 2009 at 9:10 pmThe first photo is splendidly illustrative of religion’s obsession with violence.
I choose to be somewhat generous and not refer to any specific religion.
March 1st, 2009 at 7:09 amIt is certainly odd how various interpretative readings of religious texts result in completely different religions… pacifists and self-mutilators. It’s a shame that if there once was a God (or gods), people are so much further away from him/them than they perhaps once were.
March 1st, 2009 at 12:27 pm