Reply #48: Well, this certainly makes me look like a complete fool...or does it?

[newswolf56]

I wrote the above post (#21) before anybody else had responded to the pictures. But because I was thinking about what I might suggest that could help the photographer market the work, I didn't put my post up on this thread until I had e-mailed the link to my friends. Thus I hadn't seen the other posts and didn't know I was the victim of a hoax. As so often is the case, no good intention goes unpunished: my punishment the damning but wholly false appearance I was heedlessly babbling on in stupefied enthusiasm -- stubbornly ignoring the fact the hoax had already been revealed by Nadinbrzezinski (to whom my heartfelt thanks).

Thus I was mortified (and not a little hurt) when I read the remainder of the thread -- the 20 comments I suddenly discovered had preceded mine. Even so, my vexation with the hoax's perpetrator is minor compared to my contempt for the poster who called me (and others like me) "basically retarded."

What I assumed we were looking at was not the whole hurricane, which I think all of us know was far too huge to fit into such photographs, but rather the leading edge of the hurricane's weather system, which (depending on the conditions it is displacing) can indeed breed the sort of spectacular scenes shown in the pictures. I have seen such episodes myself: huge frontal systems from the west invading the Pacific Northwest coast (though never anything quite so monumentally powerful as in these pictures). The OP, an Alaska resident, has no doubt also witnessed such scenes -- and was therefore all the more easily taken in.

I suspect others made similar assumptions: that these photographs were various views of the oncoming storm-front, a sequence photographed over a considerable distance (as from a speeding vehicle), the work ending after a tornado finally put its foot down in the last image. This assumption was made all the more plausible by newscasters' oft-repeated descriptions of tornadic storms and other such activity as typical of the hurricane's approach.

To call our gullibility "basically retarded" therefore reflects both a limited knowledge of nature and a truly breathtaking ignorance of the human thought-process -- an ignorance that is contemptible in its lack of empathy, repugnant in the offhanded haughtiness of its elitist scorn, and offensive in its malicious belittlement of those of us who were (very understandably) taken in by an exceptionally clever hoax.