Tarring And Feathering

      Mob scene from Young Frankenstein (where are the outraged villagers when you need 'em?)


   

Forgive me people but the recent SF Weekly article about the Cosco Busan oil spill made me want to get up on a tower and start shooting oil executives—or at the very least break out my axe handle and start goin’ door to door.  (Read it yourself, click here)  The lawyers for the oil companies involved (you know, the ones who have a great financial incentive to keep the world from knowing just how much damage bunker fuel can wreak on a fragile estuarine ecosystem) are the very types of human beings for whom the lost art of tarring and feathering was invented.  Anyway it may be time for a few midnight visits to these people’s mansions--you know, burning torches, pitch forks, that kind of thing (see photo above).

  
 

Now For A Moment Of Geekhood:

 
 

Greg Luzinski's awesome swing. 

You know that moment in Lord Of The Rings when Aragorn lops off the head of the super ork with a sort of, all for nothing, goin’ for broke, Greg Luzinski, upper-deck, strike-out/homerun swing?  That’s what I’m talking about for these dudes... You know, like let's split 'em all right down the middle--"knave to thrapple" (to quote from the scripture).  Lord how they’d love us to crucify that poor sonofadog who crashed the ship!  Fahghetaboutit.  That dude is toast.  You watch, they’ll stick him with the biggest DUI in world history—even though he was totally sober.  27 years hard labor, his lawn plowed under with salt, his (second) wife and (step) children sold into slavery.  (And really on a certain level these company men have a right to be pissed off at the driver… I mean what a loser this guy must have been.  Over a span of 30 years he successfully docked 200,000 football field-sized vehicles all over the bay and screwed it up something like 5 times. So let’s crucify the bastard.  String him up.  Thumbscrews.  Iron maiden.  Judas Cradle. 

The Judas Cradle... BTW, the Monkeyface Society For The Spread Of World Atheism would like to take a moment to point out that these devices were invented by the Catholic Church and used all over Europe to cure people of their sins--you know horrible things like adultery, homosexuality, witchcraft, believing the planets revolved around the sun, etc.  

 

Still… driving a ship into the Bay Bridge is definitely a boner of Fred Merkle proportions (to understand this obscure baseball reference, go here: Merkle’s Boner).  I mean come on dude.  The fog would have burned off in a couple of hours.  Why were you in such a rush?   And seriously, the guy was on six different prescription drugs… and seemed to lack the appropriate awareness of his vehicle's potential for mayhem… on second thought maybe the Judas Cradle is the way to go here.

 

                                John Cota, the Bill Buckner of Bay Pilots. Thanks a lot dude. 

 

Nevertheless, despite the obvious, it seems to us, here at MFN H.Q. that Cota is a small time player in a big messy game.  Looking for someone to blame?  How about ourselves for blindly supporting the oil industry?  Or how about the lightning response of the Coast Guard clean-up efforts?  Two hours after impact they were still talking about 200 gallons!  Where were the containment buoys, pray tell?  And why the hell did they have to go all the way to Suisun Bay to get them?  Unbelievable.  And now, two years later, the oil companies are strangling the scientific reports.  90 percent of the herring that spawned in the spill zones died or were horribly deformed by the bunker fuel.  And guess what?  The herring still haven't returned to those areas that were most affected by the spill.  No one knows why this is since the oil is gone now.  Perhaps herring return to the exact locations where they spawned?  Perhaps the genetic memory gets wiped clean when you kill off a whole generation and load the benthic/intertidal environment with bunker fuel?  Who knows… but there has not been a spawn on the SF shoreline or Treasure Island since the oil spill, and these were, in the past, two of the preferred spawning locations for pacific herring...  

And that's it for now.

More on this next time...

From the oil slathered and befouled shores of SF Bay, this is Lombard Of The Intertidal, signing out.

Comments

[R-diddly]

They'll be back. Or something will. Generations from now, maybe in a different form, maybe even as one or more completely new species, long after the oil has become too uneconomical to extract, and we and all our bullshit have mostly died off. Have a nice day!

[Scott Parker]

Encourage everyone you know to start adapting to a world that uses less oil. Companies like Bloom Energy have an amazing fuel cell they are coming out with, there are tons of solar energy options out there, Tesla Motors has all-electric cars (pair that with a fuel cell and whoo baby). Just need to get the cost down so that regular Joes can afford some of these newfangled goodies. Imagine if we could convert these giant, fuel ineffecient cargo ships to run on solar energy and fuel cells and electric engines? And just think... no more bunker fuel.

[Trout Fishing in America Shorty]

Invoking Merkle's Boner seems rather harsh. To add insult to injury, you compare John Cota to Bill Buckner, who is immortalized as a victim of the Red Sox Curse in the 1986 World Series.

For me, the event was more like the final result of Dusty Baker's pitching rotation and batting lineup in the 2002 World Series. The Cosco Busan hitting the Bay Bridge was Dustiny. I suppose that makes John Cota the Shawon Dunston of Bay Pilots in my rotisserie league. It was a Giant error.

I've been waiting for the San Francisco Giants to win the Series since Willie McCovey lined out to Bobby Richardson in 1962. I may not be around when they finally do it.

[Finesmell]

How convenient for the oil execs to have these bumbling ships' pilots to hang up on the line to dry ... may oil executives be chased for eternity through humid briar by raging cassowaries!

In re R Diddly's comments, yes life will probably continue on this planet after the extinction of our own species - but, depending on how extremophile bacteria evolve, I wouldn't necessarily expect it to be vertabrate. After our self-imposed demise, the Earth will most likely never again return to the lovely green Eden of our instinctual longing.