My Sick Mind

Hey, remember that big oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico? I do . Suddenly, we don't hear anything about it. Since Chevron put the cement cap in the well the news from the area has slowed to a ... drip. As is the usual, our federal government may have withheld some information from us when the well initially started leaking, as a panel reported today : WASHINGTON - The Obama administration blocked efforts by government scientists to tell the public just how bad the Gulf of Mexico oil spill could become and committed other missteps that raised questions about its competence and candor during the crisis, according to a commission appointed by the president to investigate the disaster. In documents released Wednesday, the national oil spill commission's staff describes "not an incidental public relations problem" by the White House after the April 20 accident. Among other things, the report says, the administration made erroneous early estimates of the spill's size, a...

Damn those researchers and scientists. If you can't trust your government, can you trust researchers and scientists? Yeah, probably. Researchers are claiming that the Gulf oil spill is bigger than the government claimed, and that at least 80 percent of the oil is still remaining in the waters. Wow, who'd-a-thunk? Me and you, I'd guess. Consider this: "The oil is not gone, that's for sure," University of South Florida's David Hollander said Tuesday. "There is oil and we need to deal with it." University of Georgia's Samantha Joye said: "It's a tremendous amount of oil that's in the system. ... It's very difficult for me to imagine that 50 percent of it has been degraded." Marine scientist Chuck Hopkinson, also with the University of Georgia, raised the obvious question: "Where has all the oil gone? It hasn't gone anywhere. It still lurks in the deep." They say most of it is lurking underneath the surface...

Similar to those new traffic lights that spring up at suddenly "dangerous intersections," the region is now being alerted to several fiduciary indiscretions committed by the Delaware River Port Authority (lovingly referred to as the DRPA) ever since one of their legions loaned an EZ-Pass placard to one of his relatives a few months ago. Ever since the Inquirer reported this incident, the headlines have been rife with stories about misspent money and other such problems with an agency that sees fit to charge $4 to cross a bridge and pay about $3.50 of that to the people who take our money. Similarly ... WASHINGTON – The government said Monday it is toughening environmental reviews for all new deepwater oil drilling, ending an easy path to oil riches that allowed BP to drill its blown-out well in the Gulf of Mexico with little federal scrutiny. The step is meant to help redress a history of lax oversight leading up to the April 20 explosion that killed 11 workers and led to t...

ON THE GULF OF MEXICO – Key ships stationed over BP's crippled well in the Gulf of Mexico were ordered to evacuate Thursday ahead of Tropical Storm Bonnie , and engineers have grown so confident in the leaky cap fixed to the well head that they will leave it closed while they are gone. Tropical Storm Bonnie,, which blossomed over the Bahamas and was to enter the Gulf of Mexico by the weekend, could delay by another 12 days the push to plug the broken well for good using mud and cement, retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen and BP officials conceded. Even if it's not a direct hit, the rough weather will push back efforts to kill the well by at least a week. "While this is not a hurricane, it's a storm that will have probably some significant impacts, we're taking appropriate cautions," Allen said in Mobile, Alabama. Significant impacts? You betcha. What are high winds and storm surges going to do with all that oil floating on the surface of the Gulf? I don...

Tonight saw me at another Wilmington Blue Rocks baseball game. One of the charms of minor league baseball is the proximity to the playing field. A treat for a baseball geek like me is to go down toward the bullpen and watch the starting pitcher warm up before the game. From there, you can see his grip on the ball and watch it head toward the plate. That's Blue Rocks pitcher Chris Dwyer on the right. He pitched 5 innings and gave up 2 runs. The best thing about being at a baseball game is that it makes me forget about what else is going on in the world. NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (AFP) – Tropical Storm Alex veered away from the Gulf of Mexico oil spill Saturday but experts warned that strong waves and winds could still upset efforts to halt the environmental disaster. With oil continually gushing into the fragile waters after 68 days, President Barack Obama's pointman on the disaster cautioned that volatile weather conditions could set back oil recovery operations for up to two...

This is about as bad as it gets. Those are recent images from the Gulf of Mexico where a breached oil well has been spewing oil into the Gulf for two months non-stop. Non-stop. It is estimated that 125,000,000 gallons have flowed into the water so far, with no end in sight, Kevin Costner notwithstanding. Imagine being a turtle or a sea bird and waking up in the morning (or whenever turtles and sea birds wake up) and finding your home awash with a substance that is the direct opposite of the water that gives you life. You look around and it is everywhere. The more you swim, the worse it gets, and you find that as you struggle your work is harder and it appears that the very work you do to extricate yourself worsens your dilemma. As an inhabitant, you are rightfully confused. What you call home is now a poison to you and it is killing you. To accurately place yourself in their position, imagine that from above, millions of gallons of oil were poured into your house while you were...

I'm never sure what is supposed to go in this space. Sometimes I have a coherent thought that spews out onto the page rather easily. Sometimes the page is left open for hours until I can string together 500 words that make both grammatical and logical sense. It ain't always easy, gang. Today, I think I'll just spew at random, if you please. The oil is still gushing out of that pipe in the Gulf of Mexico. You've seen it, right? The incredible thing to me is that the oil has enough built-up pressure to continue to leak out of the pipe without being pumped. That's amazing to me. It would have been great if they could just turn off a pump, but the earth is spitting it out at a pretty nice pace. I'd think that the earth would be interested in keeping it in, since it's a form of slow suicide. It is barely being collected faster than it is coming out, and it will be until Tuesday before another effort is made to stop it. The mind boggles at what effect over 100 mi...

President Obama: "Hey, come here and smell my finger!" OK, so it isn't very funny, but then again, neither is thousands of barrels of oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico. You know you're in trouble when three people in business-casual clothing are walking the beach with police tape in the background. That's the shitty part about being president, or the CEO of British Petroleum for that matter. Somebody makes a big mistake and you're left walking the beach picking up clumps of washed-up oil trying to think of something to say to the American public that won't make it sound like the Gulf coast is about to become the world's biggest waterproof beach. Such is the peril of delegated authority.

It has to be a real pisser to be sitting around your office, doing whatever , when the phone rings and you're told that millions of gallons of oil are spilling into the Gulf of Mexico with no end in sight. The plan: to lower 74-ton, concrete-and-metal boxes into the gulf to capture the oil and siphon it to a barge waiting at the surface. Whether that will work for a leak 5,000 feet below the surface is anyone's guess; the method has previously worked only in shallower waters. If it doesn't, and efforts to activate a shutoff mechanism called a blowout preventer continue to prove fruitless, the oil probably will keep gushing for months until a second well can be dug to cut off the first. Oil giant BP PLC's latest plan will take six to eight days because welders have to assemble the boxes. I realize that the world runs on oil, but I wonder if the risk of drilling for it so close to land is worth what we get out. Even President Obama has given his official "okey-do...