A twist of irony this morning on the Google homepage, as they honor one of America’s oldest national parks (but which you cannot visit today):

 

The California tech titan’s Tuesday home page features a Doodle honoring one of that state’s true natural treasures: Yosemite National Park, a stunning swath of granite faces and waterfalls and giant sequoias that was established on this day in 1890 — thanks in part to a Lincoln land grant several decades earlier and a project for which the U.S. government showed sustained vision.

In a cruel and coincidental twist, however, Tuesday also marks the first time in 17 years that would-be tourists cannot visit Yosemite because of a shutdown of the U.S. government. Congress couldn’t hit a midnight Monday deadline to keep the government running, so in addition to hundreds of thousands of federal workers being furloughed, the stalemate means that the national parks — like many museums and monuments — will be shut and shuttered beginning Tuesday.

The doodle is supposed to be apolitical message about the 123rd anniversary of the park’s founding on Oct. 1, 1890. But I’d like to think Google wasn’t planning on running this doodle until some bright engineer had this thought late yesterday afternoon…