slant operation

As collective outrage rallies for more than cosmetic changes to allowances for off-shore drilling, reinstating the ban, leving windfall taxes, and British Petroleum is gleeful claiming that by early next week, virtually all oil will be virtually contained, but if one was not watching carefully, it may be missed since after the news item tumbled into achival obscurity, it seems that the company bought off internet seach engines in order to re-direct people from the negative press.  I suppose that's a very bad thing, trying to muzzle the interwebs, but I guess it's not the worse thing they have done: the worse thing would be the oil spill.  There is still a big impact zone that will not recover for years, and the oil clean up operation negates all other good intentions of sound environmental policy and stewardship

shortfall

The Local has a fairly good breakdown of the austerity measures that the German government enacting in order to allign its budget within EU standards.  Meanwhile, economists within the Treasury are projecting that US debt to earnings are continuing rise and spiral out of control.  These are very different metrics and with different intentions, but it seems that German cut will do more than stave off the enevitable insolvency, compared to the grim prognostication of the Americans.

peppermint disco

Today was Tom Jones' birthday.  The normally sedate and conservation German news radio station that I listen to during my commute to work announced this and really made my morning super-charged.  Last week I mentioned the virtue in being disabused from misheard lyrics but could not summon up any other examples, but now I recall that I always thought the song Sex Bomb was actually Sex Bot, as in robot or Adrienne Barbeau-bot with baby you can turn me on and other references to satillites and infrared vision.

status nascendi

New Scientist and several other sources are excitedly citing findings on a chemical, topographical study on Saturn VI (the moon of Titan) from Strasbourg's Space University (that's a pretty snazzy alma mater) as possibly indication of alien life.  Akin to noting that concentrations of oxygen were inexplicably less at the surface of the Earth, research has revealed that there may be a respiratory exchange of hydrogen for methane on Titan, for which life forms could account, from unexpectedly low concentrations below at certain altitude.  I imagine that such aliens would be like nothing decades of sci-fi fandom have primed us for, no humanoids that are political animals in any familiar way or disembodied intelligences, but delicate membranes carried aloft on the wind like jellyfish in the sky.  After all, humans are still only just recognizing that whales are not just prey or dolphins not just gay sharks, not to mention the wealth of living things that lie just below our line of sight.  Nonetheless, it is certainly news to get goosebumps over.

ancient chinese secret, huh?

This is still the year of the Tiger, and I wonder if some of what's happening around the world would have been predicted according to the trends expected in the lunar year.  Hindsight is delightfully useful in these sorts of things.  Soothsayers forewarned that it would be turbent for global economies and the Tiger is the steward of things chthonic, elemental and buried.  The same soothsayers urged investment in gold and other metals, which was not really going out on a limb with that one.

I wonder, however, given that there's all this news that lingers--and it seems no one has the tolerance or the attention span for protracted, drawn-out hearings or middling suspense any more, if Tiger can be blamed for that too.  The network news cycle does not even have the stamina for economic collapse day in and day out and soon turns its gaze on other things--but it seems like the disruptions of air traffic from the volcano in Iceland, a series of earthquakes, and now the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico are not flagging. 

Of course, few stories end really once their notoriety runs out, and most people tend to forget about the recovery process, missed opportunities for revenue-generating, or environmental impact right away, despite hearteninged attempts to the contrary.  I wonder what else the year of the Tiger has in store, Golems that awake and slither from the underground.  Maybe the big lesson of the times, is not to be complacent about one's surroundings