Mark Nelson’s Pripyat series on flickr is full of the pictures of desolation that people seem to be looking for as we solemnly honor the twentieth anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster.

Google added high-resolution satellite photos of the area yesterday, and Pripyat.com offers both stories and photo galleries to help us remember.

It is there that I learned that Rimma Kiselica, the woman who has guided so many of those who’ve reported from the dead-zone, died on March 19.

Meanwhile, it turns out that people have started to graffiti the town. Mary Mycio, who wrote Wormwood Forest: A Natural History of Chernobyl, takes great offense at such things:

For someone like me, who considers Pripyat a monument — with universal lessons about folly, tragedy and our complex relationship with our planet — this approaches desecration.

While I respect Pripyat as a monument, Mark’s picture above does make me wonder. In a command economy, who orders somebody to make bumper cars or other carnival rides? How did the Soviet system work for such things?

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Today, on the twentieth anniversary of the disaster, Google has added high-resolution satellite photos of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant and the abandoned town of Pripyat.

Above is the plant; the damaged reactor is on the left. In Pripyat, the ghostly ferris wheel was easy to find, but where’s the vehicle graveyard? Update: here it is. Hat tip to “di” and “pero69″ for their comments.

I won’t say why I went looking for pictures of people getting poked with sticks (but you’ll figure it out in a later post). I will say I was happy to find these from the Poke-A-Spontaneous-Combustion-Member-With-A-Stick-Day at Rice University. Look, they even have a price list that includes:

• $1
  • poke with a stick
  • song/poem on demand
  • two minute massage
  • lick a SC member
• $2
  • picture with [unreadable]
  • kissing
  • whack with a stick
• $3
  • marker tattoo
• $4
  • attempt hedge jumping
• $5
  • human piñata
  • shave a leg
  • we wrestle each other
• $15
  • jump into hedges

Nowhere on the site does it note how much the fundraiser netted for “Rice’s best (only) improvisational comedy troupe.”

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Warren is blessed with a rocket. It was once a intermediate range ballistic missile, but it’s basically the same rocket that launched America’s first astronauts Allen B. Shepherd and Gus Grissom into sub-orbital space. It’s enough to be proud of, anyway.

RoadsideAmerica.com has a story on our rocket, but it’s based on reader reports and it seems people just don’t know what town they’re in when they see the thing.

New:

These pics have moved to my Redstone Rocket gallery on Flickr

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