Unfortunately, The Week in Pictures is all too reminiscent of the movie “Apocalypse Now,” or worse the mythological concept – the Ragnarok  being a favorite theme of Hati and Skoll.  Among this weeks news pictures we’ve got wars (you almost lose track of all the wars), we’ve got fires, we’ve got desperate parents in Nigeria, and we’ve got natural disasters floods and earthquakes. I thought that representative all this misery is a stunningly and therefore, hauntingly beautiful, photograph by Stuart Palley for the EPA.   It is an  extended time exposure showing smoldering remains of overnight fires on the hillsides of San Marcos, California, early on May 16. Firefighters are deparately battling fast-moving wildfires in southern California. The light in this image is amazing.  The blue is an unworldly iridescent shade, perhaps contradictory in that this kind of blue more often depicts water and wetness, not fire, heat, and dryness.  The rocks in the foreground combine with the morning light to evoke the sense of an other worldly lunar landscape – the ultimate in lonely isolation.

Sorry people, I know that I could have chosen the sloth!