The Windkey and the Lamplighter

So, between Cake Wrecks and Photoshop Disasters, my mornings are well supplied with schadenfreude, but this doughnut really takes the cake (so to speak). The ad would be a Photoshop Anti-Disaster if the real thing weren’t so sad.
Go art director! Beautiful soft focus, appetizing-looking frosting, nice coloring and good background color.

Maybe we need to talk with the bakery staff.

Before:

Gilchrist, Texas before Hurricane Ike, from Google Maps via WunderBlog

Gilchrist, Texas after Hurricane Ike, National Geodetic Survey via WunderBlog.

Google Map of Gilchrist, Texas

This is Gilchrist, Texas. (hat tip to Wunder Blog for the pictures) Or, at least, it was. Now, it’s completely gone. No structures, no wreckage, no anything. Swept into the sea.

Putting aside the completely wrecked bridge, look at the places that used to be beachfront walkways. Where those houses were is *underwater*. I guess this is the risk you take when you build on a sandbar, but I can’t imagine losing my home in that way. I hope most of those people evacuated, and that they were summer homes with relatively little property left in them, but I bet some of them didn’t and some of them weren’t. I like the Jeff Masters’ idea of buying that land (where there is land, anyway) from the homeowners and making it a park (a la the Fire Island National Seashore). I think that’s a much safer way to help these people who’ve lost their property—without setting up the bad incentives which will cause it to be repeated in the next hurricane.

I wonder how much it would cost to buy all of NOLA and turn it into a park…

The Boston Globe’s Big Picture feature is neat. (Thanks to my favorite Bad Astronomer, Phil Plait, for the link to the volcano pictures, which got the RSS feed into my newsreader!)

But even better than volcanoes is volcanoes on Io:

The rest of the Jupiter pictures are also fantastic.

Rainbow in Sudbury

Originally uploaded by katsniffen

Little bits of beauty in the midst of suburban desolation make commuting bearable. I pulled into a parking lot to take this one.