All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Thursday, July 14, 2005
In my last post I mentioned how acts of man made destruction came to resemble natural disasters due to their lack of pattern or conventional design. I was reminded of this, when a friend mentioned how someone had mistaken this picture of the Roman city of Timgad for a picture of post-war Germany. The comparison reminded me of something else; how the nearest analogy to the firebombing of German cities in World War Two would have been the destruction of Pompeii. The firestorm had similar effects to the pyroclastic flows, with suffocation killing a great many of the inhabitants while they sheltered:
"Living beings were erased from the world with a deadly wind. In fire bombing as in nuclear war very little blood flows. Rescue workers in Hamburg report that the hurricane-like, blazing gusts of air reached hundreds of people one later found lying naked in the streets. Their skin was allegedly of a brown texture, their hair in good condition, their mucous membranes in their faces dried up and incrusted."
