The meeja

Shazzle was disappointed not to get a photo of the dead body featured in my last post. But as anyone who's ever been whitewater rafting knows, you can't bring a camera with you (duuuh) because it'll just get all wet and ruined. However, if it's photos of dead bodies you're after, I knew I wouldn't have to wait too long to satisfy the bloodthirsty hoards. I monitored the papers day by day, knowing the right one wasn't far away, and lo, just three days after the request, Mr. Meeja comes up trumps.
Here's a photo of three dead bodies.


The headline, as I'm sure you figured out, reads "Bloodbath!" And the text beneath, which Spanish speakers will be zooming frenetically to decipher, tells us that the three men pictured, and a female friend, were standing outside a pool hall when two guys dressed as police passed in the back of a pick-up and sprayed them with bullets from their AK 47s.

There's no taboo whatsoever about showing dead people in the Honduran media (the TV news is worse). So when we stumbled across that man on the rocks the other day, he looked strangely familiar. The convention is to pull up the shirts of the corpses - particularly bullet-riddled ones - for the photos: the gents above got away lightly having their clothes left on. I think since all three have blood spurting from their heads, they've done their bit.
It's the car crash mentality gone mad: the only thing they seem to report is violence. "Keep people scared" our driver said to me this morning when I pointed out the picture. Scared is right. Imagine someone opening fire outside a pool hall in suburban Dublin. No, yes, I know, they shoot people everywhere. But with kalashnikovs! The odd thing is that so many things here are just like suburban Dublin: friendly people, nice cars, kids out having a few drinks. And then someone drives by in a pick up, dressed as a policeman, and opens fire on the kids (they were all in their early 20s) with an AK. And the next morning, arranged neatly radiating from beneath the feet of the police, their corpses appear on the front page of the newspaper.
On a regular, regular basis.

The other big story that sells papers is dengue. We're all obsessed with dengue. Even simp, when a little fluey a few weeks ago, self-diagnosed with dengue. Remember when you were in secondary school, and you were a world record, Mastermind expert on meningitis? Like that. But with pictures:
For those of you who've been put off your breakfast by all this ailing human flesh, here's a nice soothing picture of me asleep.

PS: Can anybody tell me how to upload pictures in portrait form to the interweb? No matter how fully rotated they are, they always come out on their sides.