Monthly Archives: May 2010
Sunday Roast: A bit of a giggle
For your Sunday enjoyment, A Bit of Fry and Laurie. Poor widdle Snipper…
Part 1 of 3 (each about 10 minutes long)
Part 2
Part 3
It’s your daily open thread here, you know what to do.
The Legacy of British Petroleum
“the ocean’s dying…the plankton is dying…”
Texas Board of Education Adopts New Math Curriculum
Spider Rolls Are Too Hard
I have about 2 dozen. Anyone have any fav recipes?
The Watering Hole: May 22 – Hey grandpa, what’s for supper?
Yummm...
6 Roma tomatoes, diced
1/2 c. Vidalia onion, diced
3 jalapeno peppers, seeded and diced
1 1/2 t. garlic, minced
1/3 c. fresh cilantro, chopped
1 t. fresh oregano, chopped
3 fresh limes, squeezed
Salt & pepper
Combine the first six ingredients. Add the juice of the limes. Salt and pepper to taste. Refrigerate in a tightly close container; overnight is best.
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Yum, yummy!! What’s cooking in your part of the world these days? Share your recipes here, and you might find a few to add to your recipe box.
This post was inspired and requested by our bloggy friend, Hoodathunk. Thanks for the yummy idea!
This is our daily open thread, so have at it!
Music Night. Happy Birthday, Bill
Bill Champlin, founder and lead singer of the best band from the 60s you never heard of. Never heard of them, that is, unless you lived in Northern California in the late 60s and early 70s, when the Sons of Champlin (later The Sons) were a regular feature at rock festivals. It was an intriguing period, when seemingly out of nowhere, rock music was being played by Big Bands. Horn sections? WTF? The first time I saw the Sons, in fact, it was on a bill with Tower of Power, Cold Blood and Santana, none of whom I had ever heard before and all of whom featured incredibly tight rhythm and horn sections. The music was also being fused with soul music, jazz and Latin, sounding nothing like what had come before. This was the same period that produced Chicago (at one time, at incredible band), which Champlin later joined.
The next time I saw the Sons was at a rock festival in the Sierra foothills. The band didn’t come out until late in the afternoon, by which time they had apparently ingested a substantial amount of recreational drugs. Champlin announced their condition and they proceeded to play one of the worse sets I’ve ever sat through. Hey, guys, are you even on the same tune? More music after the jump. Not much of it, though, because most of the YouTube videos are crap.
The Watering Hole: May 21 – Again. The oil spill.
The oil has reached the Louisiana marshes.
With thick patches of oil now flooding over coastal Louisiana marshes, a haven for migratory birds and rare wildlife that will be nigh-on impossible to clear up, local leaders were starting to despair.
“Twenty-four miles of Plaquemines Parish is destroyed. Everything in it is dead,” Billy Nungesser, head of the parish in southern Louisiana, told US cable news station MSNBC. “There is no life in that marsh. You won’t clean it up.”
“We’ve been begging BP to step up to the plate,” said Nungesser. The slick is “destroying our marsh, inch by inch,” and will keep on coming ashore for weeks and months, he said.
An increasingly desperate BP says a “top kill” operation to try to cap the leak for good by filling the well with heavy drilling fluids and then seal it with cement could begin as early as Sunday.
But for Louisiana’s fragile wetlands the measure may come too late. (read story)
May come too late? Replace that with will come too late.
Meanwhile dead fish are found as far north in the Atlantic as Palm beach FL, It can or cannot be a related incident. I tend to can. The Loop Current passes into the gulf stream and that passes there. And there’s more than oil now in that spill.
Still more disturbing news. Crooks&Liars had this story yesterday:
We will hear from this for a very long time to come.
This is our open thread. Feel free to comment on other topics as well.
When lacking a bus…
All cartoons are posted with the artists’ express permission to TPZoo.
Nick Anderson, Houston Chronicle Editorial Cartoonist and Animation Artist.
For Nick’s animations, visit Nick Anderson: Animation Archives.
For Nick’s cartoons, visit Nick Anderson.
The Watering Hole: May 20, Antidote du jour
I stole that title from Yves at nakedcapitalism.com he always posts one picture with this line, after he linked to some gruesome stories. I stole the pic from Icanhascheezburger, obviously.
So having burglarized the internets, I leave this thread to you all, have fun!
This is our open thread, don’t hesitate to let us know what you think!
The mother may in fact die…
Apparently, the Roman Catholic doctrine is “shit happens.” At least, shit happens to women. From NPR:
Last November, a 27-year-old woman was admitted to St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix. She was 11 weeks pregnant with her fifth child, and she was gravely ill. According to a hospital document, she had “right heart failure,” and her doctors told her that if she continued with the pregnancy, her risk of mortality was “close to 100 percent.”
The doctors’ recommendation, which is credited with saving the woman’s life, was to terminate the pregnancy. The decision was approved by hospital administrator Sister Margaret McBride, under a US Catholic directive that allows the fetus to be killed to save the life of the mother. Phoenix bishop Thomas Olmstead “automatically” excommunicated Sister McBride, the greatest penalty the Church has.
“She consented in the murder of an unborn child,” says the Rev. John Ehrich, the medical ethics director for the Diocese of Phoenix. “There are some situations where the mother may in fact die along with her child. But — and this is the Catholic perspective — you can’t do evil to bring about good. The end does not justify the means.”
At the NPR link, you can hear the arrogant little prick explain why the greater good is to allow a woman to die.
Rev. Thomas Doyle, a canon lawyer, not only points out that the bishop had any number of alternatives to excommunication, but that Olmstead’s actions exemplify the most egregious hypocrisy in the Church.
“In the case of priests who are credibly accused and known to be guilty of sexually abusing children, they are in a sense let off the hook,” Doyle says.
Doyle says no pedophile priests have been excommunicated. When priests have been caught, he says, their bishops have protected them, and it has taken years or decades to defrock them, if ever.
“Yet in this instance we have a sister who was trying to save the life of a woman, and what happens to her? The bishop swoops down [and] declares her excommunicated before he even looks at all the facts of the case,” Doyle says.
Smug Rev. Elrich says he can’t make a distinction between pedophile priests and the hospital administrator. In other words, saving a woman’s life is as least as great an Evil as buggering little kids.
I find it appalling, not only that a Catholic bishop would so arbitrarily boot a hard-working nun out of the Church and forbid her from receiving the Sacraments, but that the “medical ethics director” would approve and rationalize such behavior. It certainly reveals the contempt in which the Church holds women.
The photo ops are down, so it’s all good!
All cartoons are posted with the artists’ express permission to TPZoo.
Jack Ohman, Portland Oregonian
What’s the difference between a pig in lipstick and Sarah Palin? Nothing.
All cartoons are posted with the artists’ express permission to TPZoo.
Paul Jamiol, Jamiol’s World
As long as it’s OUR extremist…
All cartoons are posted with the artists’ express permission to TPZoo.
Steve Sack, Minneapolis Star-Tribune
Spike in deaths of sea turtles?
Photo by nwmuse
As oil spill grows, sea turtle strandings increase sharply
There have been 162 sea turtles strandings this month along the coast from Florida to Louisiana, national wildlife officials said Tuesday, a number much higher than any May total in the last five years.
Officials said that 156 of the turtles died.
While noting the higher rate of strandings, the same officials stopped short of blaming the ongoing oil spill, adding that there were no visible signs of oil on the turtle carcasses…
Is this just the beginning?
Most of the dead sea turtles recovered since April are juvenile Kemps Ridleys, which have been on the endangered species list since 1970. Beach surveys are ongoing to locate turtle nests.
Rowan Gould, acting director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife service, said multiple state agencies are documenting impacts and working to understand the long-term effects of the spill.
“We’ve recovered a relatively small number of visibly oiled birds in this spill,” Gould said. “The visibly oiled birds are only a small part of the concern. What concerns us most is what we can’t see — the probable effects of the spill on the coastal environment.”
Of immediate concern, Gould said, are dozens of local bird species that breed along the Gulf Coast: “We expect they’ll bear the brunt of the immediate impact of the oil. I don’t know if we will ever know the full impact of oil on the birds.”
So… Then what happens if they CAN’T cap or stop this gushing leak..?
(Gould:) “We are preparing for the likelihood that (the spill) will persist in the gulf ecosystem for years to come,” he said. “This spill is unprecedented. We may never know the spill’s full impact on birds and marine mammals.”
And in the meantime, the head of BP, Tony Hayward, is out there saying this:
“I think the environmental impact of this disaster is likely to have been very, very modest,” Tony Hayward said. “It is impossible to say and we will mount, as part of the aftermath, a very detailed environmental assessment but everything we can see at the moment suggests that the overall environmental impact will be very, very modest.”
“The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume.”
Oh… I feel so much better now.. Though, I don’t quite sense any remorse in these statements. No comprehension either. Either Mr. Hayward doesn’t get it, or he flat out doesn’t care (or both).
So long, Arlen…
All cartoons are posted with the artists’ express permission to TPZoo.
John Cole, Scranton, PA Times-Tribune
The Watering Hole: May 19 – The Barn Door
The reaction by BP to the BP spill is horrific and brings to mind an old axiom, “Why close the barn door after the horse(s) have escaped?” This in turn brings to mind the following image:
This describes the state of the Deepwater Horizon well.
Well, some horses are out and very little is being done to fix the problem while more horses are still leaving the barn.
This is our open thread. Please feel free to offer your own comments on this or any other topic.
Priorities…
Where Does GOP’s ‘Tough On Terror’ Talk End?
When it butts up against pandering on the 2nd Amendment, of course. …
… You have a constitutional right to be presumed innocent when you’re buying a gun, but not when you’re being arrested. By this logic, potential terrorists should by all means be able to get their hands on a gun, but should they attempt to use that weapon in some act of terrorism and be apprehended, then they don’t have any more constitutional rights and can’t be mirandized.
Because we don’t want them to actually be prosecuted? Of course, if a suspect isn’t mirandized, evidence obtained against them could be thrown out in court. …
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Created for TheZoo by Paul Jamiol
All cartoons are posted with the artists’ express permission to TPZoo.
Paul Jamiol, Jamiol’s World
The time to act is now!
Just do it!!
All cartoons are posted with the artists’ express permission to TPZoo.
Paul Jamiol, Jamiol’s World
Politics, as usual…
All cartoons are posted with the artists’ express permission to TPZoo.
Jeff Danziger, Syndicated Political Cartoonist
Teachable Moment
All cartoons are posted with the artists’ express permission to TPZoo.
Matt Davies, NY Journal News
The real cost…
All cartoons are posted with the artists’ express permission to TPZoo.
Steve Sack, Minneapolis Star-Tribune
The Watering Hole: May 18, Red Adair
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Am I the only one who keeps thinking Red Adair would know how to help? I don’t know if he would, but the gulf oil spill is huge enough and menacing enough to wish for a hero who just takes over and gets the situation under control like in the movies. Red Adair was one of the American Heroes we over here in Europe admired so much when I was a teenager. Quite a while ago.
The situation is indeed desperate. BP is celebrating the fact that they now syphon off 1’000 barrels a day from the leak, which spills at least 5’000 if not 26’000 per day. If that doesn’t make you wish for a hero, knight in shining armour, what would?
So what are the options?
For some days there is chatter out there, that BP is not considering the option of closing the leak by a controlled explosion, because it would finally seal the oilfield and thus their profits.This makes for good copy, bad corporations and all that, but I am more inclined to think all involved are at a complete loss for what to do.
I doubt there is someone out there who knows how to controlledly blow up an oil well in a deep sea level environment. Suggestions run from nuking the well, to a controlled explosion using plastic explosives. President Obama has involved the Pentagon right at the beginning of the catastrophy in April, and while this was initially to enlist the navy for oil spill containment, it would be naive to think, in a situation as desperate as this, they are not considering their options to stop the spill either. They have a huge arsenal of explosives from conventional to nuclear. I seriously doubt BP would get a say in whether the well was sealed by any explosion if this was really considered a viable way to do it.
The sad truth is: Nobody knows what to do really. Offshore drilling in such depths is a risk mankind took but has never assessed properly before the drilling started. (Like so many things we do.) Now we are out of our depth to find a solution to a self made problem.
So. Where’s Red? Red’s dead and heroes like the one we’d need now, really only exist in movies and books.
While I was writing this another 850 barrels (medium estimate) of oil have spilled from the leak.
This is an open thread. Feel free to somment on this or anything else that’s on your mind.
Aostentatious Austerity
All cartoons are posted with the artists’ express permission to TPZoo.
Jeff Danziger, Syndicated Political Cartoonist
Please help..
