Wednesday, December 2, 2009

A picture REALLY is worth at thousand words.

I do not care how cliche the above title is, it's completely valid, and has been proven by exploring several blogs this morning. By looking at photography, you can discover so much about people and the environments and cultures they come from, and the experiences they have to endure. 

One blog that really catches my attention is The Big Picture and its "article" on the 25th anniversary of the Bhopal Disaster in India. Twenty-five years ago on Dec. 3, 1984, water entered a tank at the Union Carbide factory in Bhopal, India. That water reacted with the methyl isocyanate inside, raising temperature and pressure so high that it began to vent enormous amounts of gas composed of methyl isocyanate, phosgene, hydrogen cyanide and more. The poisonous gas infected neighborhoods near the boundary wall, disrupting residents with burning throats and eyes, killing about 4,000 people only within the first few hours. Over the next few years, the lingering effects increased that toll to about 15,000 dead. 25 years later thousands of people are still struggling with the effects of the world's worst industrial accident and the continued effects of the VERY TOXIC pollution. Union Carbide was bought by Dow Chemical in 2001, and Dow seems to think the legal case was resolved in 1989, with responsibility for continued cleanup now falling to the local state government. Viewing these photographs, it is very obvious that matters are nowhere close to being resolved.
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Do you ever feel like you were born during the wrong era? Well, I've been thinking that since I listened to my first Jimi Hendrix song, and while feeling so connected to his soulful music, I also felt a little sad that I would never have the opportunity to experience artists like him, Clearance Clearwater Revival, Grateful Dead, and other 60s psychedelic and folk artists first hand. I know with all of my heart, that if I were alive during the time Woodstock came to be, I would go. However, when I look at various photos of the event, I almost feel as though I was there. I discovered a pretty cool blog that shows some of the performances at Woodstock. Check out these pics!

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