Astronaut’s assessment of Super Typhoon Trami isn’t filling us with confidence

You know you’re in for a rough time when a storm freaks out someone who has literally seen all of the earth.

In what has been an unarguably rough year for the islands of Japan, we now face yet another typhoon of massive proportions barrel down on us with winds of up to 200 kilometers (124 miles) per hour and obscene amounts of rain.

This is all expected to take place this weekend as the typhoon touches down on the southern Ryukyu Islands, rips across the entire nation, and leaves the northern tip of Hokkaido by Monday, just in time for most of us to go back to work.

Thank heavens… for that….

And thanks to the International Space Station and its crew member Alexander Gerst, we are able to get a truly unique look at this force of nature.

As if somebody pulled the planet's gigantic plug. Staring down the eye of yet another fierce storm. Category 5 Supe… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
—
Alexander Gerst (@Astro_Alex) September 25, 2018

These photos show “Category 5 Super Typhoon Trami” appearing to engulf the Earth with a massive eye that Gerst describes “as if somebody pulled the planet’s gigantic plug.”

The good news is that since these images were posted, Trami has been downgraded to a Category 2 or 3 Typhon, and is no longer “Super.” The bed news is that it can still do a lot of damage, especially considering much of the country is still licking its wounds from our own respective disasters incurred over 2018.

The weird news is that this typhoon has been named “Trami,” the Vietnamese name for a certain type of flowering tree. However, when filtered through the Japanese syllabary “Trami” becomes homonymous with “Charmy” and full of all sorts of unfitting connotations better suited to a Fairy-Type Pokemon.

▼ My “Charmy” concept sketch