On "Biblical Proportions"

"This city is headed for a disaster of biblical proportions."

"What do you mean, 'biblical?'"
"What he means is Old Testament, Mr. Mayor, real wrath of God type stuff."
"Exactly."
"Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling!"
"Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes…"
"The dead rising from the grave!"
"Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together … mass hysteria!"

- Ghostbusters

I'm pretty sure the initial thought was placed in my head by something I heard on television. Maybe a joke on The Daily Show, perhaps an awkward comment somewhere, I don't really remember.

What matters is that I don't have the meteorological wherewithal to refute this idea that's gotten into my head:

1. The Gulf of Mexico is filled with a massive oil spill.
2. Everyone is worried that as hurricane season approaches relief efforts will have to cease.
3. Hurricanes have massive lightning strikes.
4. People are fearing the ocean catching on fire.

Now that's pretty terrifying in general, but we're all pretty aware that heavily polluted lakes and rivers and such can catch fire, and in more fun cases it is actually possible to burn seawater by bombarding it with science- microwaves.
But we all seem to be forgetting something else hurricanes do:

• Produce water spouts.

Yes, hurricanes suck water up out of the ocean and then rain it down over the course of hours or days. If that water is filled with oil, and if at any point that oily water is ignited by one of the many lightning strikes between the interior of the hurricane and the ocean, we will be getting killed by a giant raging firestorm of fire.

Almost.

And where do most hurricanes make landfall? The Gulf. Often Louisiana. Don't think this is a likely possibility? Here's a video of oily backwash raining down in Louisiana last week.

Now, I'm not usually one to buy into any of that "God is punishing us for our promiscuity and The Gays and harboring Jews" malarkey, but even I have to admit New Orleans is getting shit on pretty bad by the universe, lately. I mean it's one thing to write off the flooding as being well deserved after you built an entire tourist city below sea level, but the flooding lead to power and light outages, skin irritation and lung damage/death from mold and bacterial, and widespread famine. More recently they've been dealing with tornadoes and now it's fucking raining fire.

FUCKING RAINING FIRE!

Seriously?! So that's flooding, famine, lesions, darkness and fiery death. We were like four plagues into the story of Passover and the universe just skipped straight to Sodom and Gamorrah.

I don't know about you all, but I want to see the government step in and fix this shit while footing the bill to BP before we have to find out if two-month old moonshine counts as a first-born son.

On the Oil Spill

I was asked tonight to explain the oil spill, not so much how it happened but how so much oil could be coming out so fast for so long.

The way I explained it was like the opposite of when you get a break in your drinking straw. It's fine at first, but then you drink the waterline down below the break and suddenly your getting all this air along with your drink. The BP oil spill is kind of like that but backwards; instead of air seeping in through a break above sea level, oil is spilling out because the break is below.

But how can it come out so fast?

I dunno, man, underground pressure maybe? I mean, we drilled it it shoot oil up out of the ground. Now the derrick is just burned and collapsed into the sea and we put a ring of floaties around it. Like those little hats you give kids to keep the soapy bath water out of their eyes.

But how have we not fixed it yet?

No one's, uh, ever had to deal with one this big before. Pretty much every solution's been failing spectacularly. We put a ring on top of it, the oil's clumping underwater and flowing outside the ring before surfacing as giant goobers. We drop a giant concrete box on it, it's still spewing. We poor tons and tons of mud and cement down its fossil hole, great, now it's spewing a lower ridiculously large amount of oil into the open sea per hour. Great.

I read the other day that the BP oil spill is sending enough raw crude into the ocean now to match the entire 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster every three and a half days or so.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't we go ape shit over that? Weren't there massive repercussions? Didn't we all come together to help clean up the water and, only after containing what we called "an ecological disaster," blame people accordingly? Where the fuck did all that go? Where's Argentina and Russia and all those people familiar with oil drilling to fix this?

But we've never dealt with one this big before!

I know, I said that. That's why you had like, a month to figure shit out. How is no one on top of this kind of thing? Where's Sweden? "Oh, hey, we know we're Sweden and everything but, I mean, we've got this thing? We used it back when our entire nation went solar back in 1975? And, well, we just thought maybe you guys could use it right now."

Thanks a fucking lot, Sweden. Assholes.

Seriously, though, is there some mad businessman just waiting for the last possible moment to gouge us on anti-petrol breathing masks for fish or something? Is someone out there just waiting to Lex Luthor us and make a fortune?

Can't we send anyone to fix this?













"Send me.…GWOAN!!"