Beaver hiding

With all the bad news about oil spills, earthquakes and tornados this little guy looks like he's hiding. Now when does hurricane season start?

More later...

Bolubaise and other stinky stuff

All you shrimp lovers need to hit the market asap. in a week or two you will have no alternative but to buy the overpriced scampi from the already polluted waters off Vietnam. You say you'll buy American and just have some forty weight with that shrimp cocktail? I wish you well.
Problem with trying to "clean up" this disaster is that there's only so much that can be done. I've done oil spills on the Puget Sound. I say from experience that even under the best of conditions it is no easy task and the end result is capturing about 10 to 20% of a spill. I haven't checked yet but they are reporting that this spill will make landfall in the next few days. But the real problem is that there is no way to cap this blow out. It's pumping out 5000 gallons of crude per day. My guess is that it will cost at least $500 million to get what they can. The aftermath will take years much like Prince William Sound in Alaska which to this day still remains poisoned.

In other news and other odoriferous things I see the Republicans have "their own plan" to fix Wall Street. Popped over to Think Progress and found a link to their plan or at least their outine to the process. Looked like it had been written by a college freshmen pulling an all nighter. To summarize their little plan is to basically do nothing except of course add a few more agencies tied into the SEC and FDIC. After you read everything you get the impression that they have no clue as to how the system works or should work. I've got a real good idea for you guys. For seventy years we had rules that kept everything running smoothly. How about bringing them back? That way you'd only have to do minor tweeks to the system. But we all know how this will work out. We'll get some watered down bill written by the banks and investment companies that won't do much and the game will continue until the next collapse which shouldn't be long in coming as Wall Street continues selling the crap that got us in the mess in the first place.

Correction The amount of oil spilled is 210,000 gallons per day. Not the 5000 which was the number of barrels reported. Sorry for the mistake.

Come on baby light my fire

Is it me or is it getting warm around here. Greece has a financial fire and Europe wants to put it out with buckets of money. The Gulf has a massive oil spill so we'll just set it on fire. Drill baby drill..."oops ya got it all over me" says mother nature. How perverse no? And who is going to light that cross on fire in the Mojave National Preserve? You know they want to. Fire hazard high in northern Minn. How's that climate change working for you? Nah, must be a fluke.

So fire it up or you'll get fired. Hey I just don't have the motivation because I'm just one of those lazy unemployed that'd rather sit here and watch soaps all day. Hey can I have your six figure salary Lt. Gov. so I can sit on my ass and tell those out of work what slackers they are? Oh I thought not. Because once you did get a job they'd expect you to actually produce something. Something you haven't done in years. Line them all up and light them on fire I say. We'll make today fire day. Just a taste of the hereafter for you religious guys. You guys seem to like fire and brimstone.

How about a wall of fire on the southern border? Nobody gets in and nobody gets out. And like musical chairs those seated get to keep their seats. Any criminals would be put on a nest of fire ants or given the option to fight forest fires in the west.

And if it wasn't bad enough homeless are being set on fire. Life's hard enough without being under fire.
Haven't seen any fireflies lately. Must be extinct.

Put a fire under your butt or fire up a butt or just fire one up. There's no more fire in the belly.

Now have I covered this firey subject well?

Hot one comin right up ("Shitty Deal")

Don't get confused about derivatives and CDOs and all that, it's all quite simple. Here's a quick lessen of the complex financial mess that stands before us.

That wonderful product that you bought on late night TV seemed like the greatest thing since sliced bread. Surely the glamorous Hollywood star wouldn't lie to me. But somebody way down the line overlooked the fact that substandard parts were used and at one point the pizza delivery guy was used in the assembly process. Hey he was handy at the time because we were short on personnel. And they knew damn well that this was a dog since their QC checker was on the payroll and the regulators were too busy watching porn to be bothered. Why bother when everything was running very well and everybody was making a ton of money. But as the process evolved other manufacturers wanted in on the action. They could get rid of the shitty material that had been sitting in the back room collecting dust. So they just made a deal with the rating guys to beef things up and slap on a AAA . "This stuff isn't bad" they were told because the stockroom guy mixed it with just enough good stuff to fool his own mother.

And so the hot potato was born and it was mixed many times as it was passed from one seller to the next buyer. Neatly packaged in shiney foil wrapping with a nice pink bow. And who wouldn't want one of these neat presents with GOLDman stamped on the side? It must be mmmmm good. Even though this tater was a hot one everybody wanted one but knowing how greed works they just couldn't hold on for long. Just had to flip it to the next buyer (er sucker) and make that quick short term profit. So the tater was tossed around and around working it's way through Great Britain, France, Iceland and beyond. Until one day the potato cooled off enough for the buyer to look down to see what he'd bought. And he realized what he had was rotten. But he really wasn't worried because he had bought insurance on the potato. And it was only when he went to collect on his policy that the whole thing unraveled. For you see the insurance companies hadn't bothered to have enough to cover a loss when most of the potatoes went rotten. They too were making tons of money selling insurance and wallowing in the cash. That is until the foreign buyers realized what they had and wanted to file a claim. And that is when everyone realized that nobody could make fries or even mashed potatoes out of this rotten mess.

Misc. madness

Proposal Worries Banks Boo hoo. Congress wants to take away the banks' gambling money. Derivatives would be done by an outside company. Republicans are of course against any regulations. So where do you think they get all their money? And the Dems aren't much better in that respect.

We have the Ipad and Russia has the Club-K. What's a Club-K you ask? It's two cruise missiles packaged in a truck trailer container. They plan to sell it for 10 to $20 million each to countries like Iran and Venezuela. Great now any small country can have destruction in a box. I hear this thing can take out an aircraft carrier. And since this thing looks like your average ocean type shipping container it would be easy to hide in plane sight.


Bush has a book coming out in November. Gee and I don't have any crayons.

Still no work and on that note I must say the actual unemployment figures are far more than reported. I'd say more like 16 or 17%. Guess I'll just go eat some chocolate.

Deadly Fungus coming your way!

Okay now that I have your attention I lied. This fungus has a mortality rate of about 25%. That is if you were exposed. To be exposed you would have to either be a lumberjack and have the misfortune of cutting down the wrong tree or you replaced the tires on an affected car carrying the spores. It was studied between 2002 and 2005 in British Columbia,Canada. All of the fear mongering came out when a Duke University student published the findings in a paper he had written. I did dig through an analysis of the study by the CDC and came upon a neat summary. Hope it's not too technical for you:

Patterns of C. gattii Colonization

Figure 2. Distribution of positive and negative environmental samples for a systematic sampling along a 35-km traffic corridor traversing National Topographic System of Canada...

We initially investigated longitudinal patterns of C. gattii tree and soil colonization. Figure 1 illustrates these colonization patterns. Consistently positive swab and soil results were observed for some trees and their rhizospheres over 2–3 years, and these were designated "permanently colonized." For other trees, an initial positive swab result was followed by a series of negative samples, which indicated a transient presence of C. gattii in these locations. Intermittently positive swab and soil results were also observed, in which the series of samples effectively oscillated between positive and negative for C. gattii over time with no discernable seasonal pattern. This intermittent positivity was probably due to fluctuations in the cryptococcal population over time, above and below limits of detection. This situation might arise following the introduction of C. gattii to a new location or substrate.

Simply put they did a couple of hundred samples. Some of the samples came up positive and some came up negative. It seems this fungus either dies off or is crowded out by other molds. I've studied molds over the years. You wouldn't believe the number of types and sub types there are. There are literally tens of thousands of them but there are only about 8 known types that can make you sick. The most known is black mold Stachybotrys chartarum. The CDC reports that these types of molds are not really toxic. I say bull! I've seen several cases of people exposed here in the Puget Sound area and must say the symptoms are not pretty. They included memory problems, headaches,bloody nose, and blood coming from the eyes and ears. In fact during a recertification class I was told to use not only the usual moon suit,gloves and respirator but ear plugs as well.

How do you get rid of mold? A cup of bleach to 1 gallon of water will kill it on hard surfaces. I've found that even small amounts mold on drywall can hide the fact that the backside is totally mold covered so you may want to cut out a section and check. On things like carpet or porous materials you'll need to throw them out and replace.

Keep your drums upright.

Let's all play pick the criminal!

You're a police officer crusing the drag down in Az and you see all of these men. Which one would you pull over to check their papers? One is a criminal. One may soon be a criminal and the other two are innocent.

Answers in the comments much later.

Update: Okay pencils down answers in the comments.