I think we do have to admit the collective trauma caused by library disasters, I know I’ll never forget the New York Public Library catching fire and sinking, spewing books into the environment for months, the incalculable loss of literature, the science collections, oh the humanities…

Don’t forget the Great Bacon Explosion of 1835. And there’s hamburger all over the highway in Maine.

Of course the obvious question for whoever wrote this is how “bringing an end to offshore drilling” would somehow allow production platforms to continue to be built, as if the two are entirely unrelated. You can just hear them saying “Bwaa ha haa, stupid hippies, they thought by banning drilling and drilling rigs they’d stop oil platforms from being built but we just found a way to go straight to production platforms and skip the drilling part, we just feed the oil reservoir Wingnut logic until its head explodes and then we cap it off and start collecting. So there.”

Do you all recall the year that Macy’s imploded right after the Thanksgiving Day Parade? Oh, the balloons that died that year… They barely got Santa out alive.

Probably we need to recall the Great Boston Molasses Disaster of 1919 to think of a similar threat to wetlands and wildlife

As long as it doesn’t interfere with the view from the Vineyard, there is no problem,

Or Whiskey Fire.

Why are you downplaying the environmental consequences of all those tortillas littering the AZ desert? They are a clear and present danger to us all!

Why isn’t the company called Verbillion’s anyway — what, they’re afraid to be seen as successful capitalists? Oh, wait: “Automated shutoff equipment on the platform safely turned off the flow of oil and gas [...]“ — What a total waste of money, eating straight into Vermillion’s profits. If only we’d had a little more deregulation there’d have been no shutoff equipment on the platform.

Ugh, that photo. The one silver lining about my leukemia-wracked mother passing away in January, is that she wasn’t around to see those images of pelicans in such heart-wrenching distress.
She loved pelicans.

Parallel Universe RedState Wingnut:

“The recent nuclear meltdown disaster has some people calling for no more nuclear power plants to be constructed. This only displays what know-nothings they are, since the meltdown wasn’t in a power plant that was being constructed, it was one that was up and running.”

It’s too bad there are not more oil industry insiders like recently passed Matt Simmons who are willing to come out publicly about the crisis we are heading toward. Wish I’d known about him before reading this tribute. His knowledge of the biz, and his conservative Republican credentials, rendered him impervious to charges of being just another business-hatin’, tree-huggin’, socialeest, JimmyCarterAlGore* wannabee (*who’s also fat and/or wimpy, dontchaknow). Not that it would have stopped the Red State Trike Force from trying anyway, of course, but he was too knowledgeable, well connected, and genuine for serious leaders of any political stripe to ignore.

Don’t forget the Great Bacon Explosion….

Mmmmmm, bacon, a true WonderFood, good either wrapped around butter or butter-wrapped!

nom nom nom

I read somewhere about a HousingBubbleExplosionThingie a while back, but, thankfully, nobody got hurt. In fact, it rained money all over HedgeFundAvenue which is almost as good as bacon falling from the sky….

Not Maine — Mystic, Connecticut. Don’t forget the Big Light in the Sky either.

Let’s not forget the Sears clothing rack collapse of 1949 in Chicago. Where do you think they came up with the term ‘domino effect’? Thousands perished between the racks. Some people say the carnage was horrendous.

The Etat Rouge Farce de Fappe stages another ninny-ja raid and demonstrates the awesome power of its hara-kari.

Damn, you’re right. And of course, those sonic booms that scared minority groups in Sector B.

I don’t know about the tortilla manufacturing industry, but the number of reportable blow-outs from the nation’s Taco Bells easily dwarfs the oil producers’ accidents.

Dang, you beat me to it! (of course, it was several hours ago, too)

Also toward the end he was nuts.

The very sympathetic tribute I linked definitely didn’t go there, so to speak, but did state that Simmons went too far regarding some BP/Deep Horizon-related accusations, and also implied that the wind farm effort bordered on obsessive.

Is that what you are referring to when you say he was nuts toward the end? And is that nuts as in clinically, neurochemically-based mentally ill? Or as in insanely obsessed beyond all reason? I could see either one being the case, and as I said, I only became familiar with this guy by stumbling on the Alternet piece.

It would be a shame if, despite strong evidence of veracity and urgency, any legitimate warnings being sounded by Simmons were to be rejected based on the erratic behavior of his final days. ‘Twould be going the wrong way on (IMO) a very important issue.