if god was real and happened to be a sci-fi fan i reckon the cadet chapel at the air force academy in colorado would be his chapel of choice. it looks like no place of worship you’ve ever seen and from the outside resembles a row of 17 angular spacecraft sitting on their back-ends, ready to shoot off at any minute. the chapel and its surrounding complex was designed by walter netsch of architectural firm skidmore, owings & merrill and construction was completed in 1963. no sooner had the 150ft high spire-fest been announced than the public outcry began: as the chapel was a government-funded religious building, members of congress were opposed to the fact that more than $3m was to be spent on a chapel with so many spires when, ’surely’, only 1 was needed. they ultimately lost the battle but succeeded in cutting the amount of spires from the originally planned 19 to the still extravagant 17 you see today.

all things considered, this chapel is nuts, brilliant and ridiculously dramatic. the fact that it also sits amongst jets, helicopters and soldiers on a daily basis makes it all the more likeable and surreal. if you don’t feel the drama yet, watch the clip below: the soundtrack is an inspired choice that, at one point near the start, caused me to believe the building was about to launch. it also shows off the interior which wouldn’t look out of place on the starship enterprise.

incredible.

all photos from the united states air force academy’s official site.

the ‘maha kumbh mela’ takes place once every 12 years in allahabad, india, and is the largest of 4 gatherings which make up the hindu pilgrimage known as kumbh mela.

pilgrims travel from all over the world in order to bathe in the sacred ganges river as they believe that doing so frees them from past sins.

in 2001 the most recent maha kumbh mela took place and over a period of 6 weeks 70 million people attended, 30 million alone on january 24th. below is an incredible satellite image of the 2001 gathering, the dark red specks being the thousands waiting to bathe in the ganges, the white dots boats.

click on the photo for a bigger, zoomed-out version.

1. meoto iwa

situated just off the coast of mie, japan, meoto iwa (wedded rocks) are meant to signify marriage, the larger being male and the smaller female. the rope connecting the rocks (the shimenawa) weighs over a ton and is replaced throughout the year during various ceremonies.

2. kjeragbolten

wedged between the walls of a mountain crevice in norway is a rock called kjeragbolten. the rock is often stood on by tourists for a crafty photograph whilst attempting not to look down at the 3000ft+ drop. i’m assuming the sheep/goat in the picture below was a local.

3. the idol rock

this precarious little bugger is a member of the brimham rocks family in north yorkshire, 50 acres of strange rock formations visited regularly by members of the public. the idol rock pictured weighs 200 tonnes and balances on a rock a fraction of its size.

4. kyaiktiyo pagoda

situated in burma, the rock at this incredible buddhist pilgrimage site was (according to locals) placed on the cliff edge by spirits and the pagoda resting on top apparently contains a hair belonging to the buddha.

5. mushroom rock

this brilliantly eroded mushroom rock formation resides in the aptly named mushroom rock state park in kansas. the park doesn’t just contain rocks shaped like mushrooms though, apparently there’s one that resembles a giant shoe.

6. rockall

rockall is an unsurprisingly uninhabited sea-rock in the north atlantic ocean and is also the most isolated part of the british isles. numerous landings have been made on the rock and various disputes have arisen over its ownership, a matter which is still unresolved.

7. piedra del peñol

i couldn’t find much information on the intertubes about this beast so forgive me. all i know is that you have to pay to get to the top and that the stairway that sits in the rock’s crevice must’ve been an absolute ball-ache to construct. click on the pic for a larger version and you’ll realise just how mental it is.

sources: 1, 2, 3, 4

it’s incredible. and hilarious. and frightening.

62ft tall and 8 tonnes.

[update]

thanks to madmolecule, here’s another fantastically surreal statue that can be found outside the ‘world overcomers outreach ministries church’ in memphis…

incredible.

anyone know of any more?

1. (exodus 7:14-25) rivers and other water sources turned to blood (’dam’)

for his first trick, god, in a roundabout way, caused the water in the nile to turn to blood. this in turn caused all the fish to die and a powerful stench to fill the air.

these days we’ve got mass pollution of rivers all over the world, the effects of which are pretty similar to the scenario above, sometimes exactly the same (but without the magic, or blood).

the photo above is of the yellow river in china, 2006 (the official news agency in china said this particular accident had caused the river to ‘turn red and smelly‘), the red colouring caused by a leak from a heating factory. china has some of the most polluted in the world with an estimated 21′000 chemical factories positioned along the country’s rivers and coastline.

as for dead fish caused by river pollution…

another red polluted river can be seen here.

2. (exodus 7:26-8:11) reptiles (commonly believed to be frogs) (’tsfardeia’)

next on the big man’s list was frogs. he ’simply’ caused hordes of them to swamp egypt for a day, probably causing hell.

these days a group of frogs is known as an ‘army’ of frogs and it seems that’s apt in hawaii.

(pic: one of the troublemakers - name witheld)

it’s not widely known but back in 1994 the mayor of hawaii declared war on the local frog population whilst officially declaring a ‘civil defense national emergency‘ due to the ever-growing infestation of hopping amphibians. specifically, the unarmed culprits were, and still are, coqui frogs: these frogs are so-called due to the extremely high pitched sound (”ko-kee!, ko-kee!”) the males constantly emit during the night and only moved onto the island at the beginning of the 1990s. due to the lack of any notable predators on the island, it’s possible for tens of thousands of the little singers to inhabit just an acre of land and local real estate experts believe the frogs will eventually drive down property prices.

(pic: the hard facts. the locals don’t seem to be very effective killers)

i found an old anti-coqui blog started by what seems to be a local of the area here. it hasn’t been updated for a while (perhaps the frogs caught wind of the blog and snapped) but you can still read the informative section entitled ‘how to kill invasive coqui tree frogs’ here.

3. (exodus 8:12-15) lice or gnats (’kinim’)

after lunch god told moses to instruct aaron (that’s delegation for you) to turn the dust into a mass of gnats, presumably to cause a bit of havoc with the egyptians.

in modern times? i’ve never known of dust transforming into gnats, through magic or otherwise, but i do know of a gnat that’s been causing immense problems for a huge amount of time…

mosquitoes are responsible for one of the biggest killers on earth: malaria.

in africa, where 90% of the world’s malaria cases occur, nearly a million people die from the disease every year, or around 2700 per day. i reckon that constitutes a plague.

4. (exodus 8:16-28) either flies, wild animals or beetles (’arov’)

beetle plagues occur all through the year in different parts of the world and the shiny-backed monsters are some of the most destructive creatures in the world.

just as an example, last year in colorado bark beetles destroyed 4.8 million of the area’s pine trees. in 2005 the toll was 3.8 million and they’re steadily getting worse: boffins believe they could wipe out 90% of colorado’s pines pretty soon. in the western us and canada combined the beetles have apparently affected ‘36′000 square miles of forest’.

i’ll really start to worry when a plague of these hit manchester…

more photos of the beast (thankfully the biggest beetle in the world) are here.

5. (exodus 9:1-7) disease on livestock (’dever’)

the next plague was aimed at livestock, the aim quite cruelly to destroy all that belonged to the egyptians.

there are a huge amount of diseases which affect livestock these days but the most damaging in recent memory has to be foot and mouth disease, an extremely contagious viral disease which affects most livestock (and hedgehogs for some reason) and on very rare occasions humans (that’s us). this little bastard of a disease had quite a low profile until 2001 (the year, not film) when the uk became the naughty kid of the school and experienced an enormous outbreak. the result was a staggering 11 million slaughtered livestock and a british meat ban pretty much everywhere before you could say “moo”.

6. (exodus 9:8-12) unhealable boils (’shkhin’)

next up was a splattering of boils. all men were given a skin disease, the symtpom of which was a large number of boils on the flesh.

from what i’ve read, the place that seems to suffer from boil epidemics the most is alaska. in 1996 in a village in alaska, the local doctor alerted the authorities after he treated 80 boil outbreaks in quick succession. and this wasn’t the first time. whilst not as extreme as the entire male population of egypt being affected it’s still pretty grim.

turns out the outbreak was caused by locals not sitting on their own towels whilst at the communal steambath.

consider yourself warned.

if for some reason you want to look at pictures of extreme boils, go here.

7. (exodus 9:13-35) hail mixed with fire (’barad’)

this plague was quite a feat. god managed to cause a storm that combined hail and fire, the damage to crops, humans and livestock extreme.

believe it or not i couldn’t find an instance of this or anything similar happening anywhere so i have to admit defeat. i will now present some extremely tenuously linked events which have actually happened.
i found orange snow that fell in russia in february (it looks like it could be hot)…

as for scary rainfall, there’s obviously acid rain which whilst not being immediately damaging can reach the same acidity as vinegar (ph 2.4) and very rarely as low as ph 2.2 (the acidity of lemon) and can definitely harm crops and wildlife.

there’s also the radioactive rain that still falls on parts of europe as a result of the chernobyl disaster over 20 years ago. from new scientist…

‘clouds of tiny sand grains are sucked high up into the atmosphere during periods of low pressure over the desert. they are blown over europe and then washed out by the rain. scientists from aristotle university of thessaloniki, greece, sampled the sand that fell in the city in april last year. they found that it contained 26.6 becquerels of caesium-137 per kilogram, which could only have come from the explosion at chernobyl’.

8. (exodus 10:1-20) locusts (’arbeh’)

next, god commanded moses to summon a strong wind which brought with it a swarm of locusts. the locusts ate all the egyptians’ crops.

this one’s easy. locust swarms occur throughout the year in different parts of the world.

in 1954, a desert locust swarm covered an area of 200 km2 in kenya and estimates have since put the number of locusts within that swarm at 10 billion. during that year, 50 locust swarms were recorded in kenya and some experts have somehow worked out that the weight of all the locusts in all 50 swarms would have come to around 100′000 tonnes.

holy shit. that’s more than the weight of 13 eiffel towers.

also bear in mind that a locust can, and will, eat its own body weight in food during a single day.

the video below is planet earth - deserts, narrated by david attenbourgh. if you don’t have time to watch the whole thing (nearly 50 mins) fast forward to about 44 mins to watch some great footage of swarming locusts in action.

9. (exodus 10:21-29) darkness (’choshech’)

after the locusts had disappeared god decided to plunge egypt into complete darkness for 3 days.

in modern times it’s pretty impossible to find somewhere that suffers a complete blackout for more than a few minutes. if your main power source goes off you might have a backup generator, failing that you use matches and light a candle. there’s a solar eclipse but that only lasts for minutes too. anyway, i searched for the longest power blackout in history and it seems to be the auckland blackout of 1998 that wins.

things started turning on january 20th when one of only 4 cables that supplied the whole of downtown auckland failed. by february 19th, all 4 cables had given up and no-one had power for 5 weeks.

there’s an old cnn report from february 24th 1998 here.

10. (exodus 11:1-12:36) death of the firstborn (’makat bechorot’)

for his worst and final trick, god killed all male firstborns.

thankfully i couldn’t find much to compare with a whole nation of male babies suddenly dying and i didin’t want to to spend too much time searching deeper.

one of the biggest killers of babies however is sudden infant death syndrome (sids), also known as crib death and cot death.

conclusion

i’m not a scientist (decieving huh?) but i’m pretty sure the only one we’re never even going to get close to experiencing is the hail and fire storm, unless you’re standing in the path of a volcanic eruption just as hailstones start pelting you and your cattle.