Fake BP’s Greatest Tweets

Hey Benedick, I’m going to do another BBC interview about this stuff tonight. Any suggestions? Any cool slang expressions I could throw in? Are they still sensitive about that Empire business?

@Dodgerblue: I understand that if you say “Home Counties,” that always gets some kind of reaction.

Or you could just say “David Brent, BP branch manager,” and see where that takes you.

I never understood Aquaman. Kind of a bizarre superhero.

@IanJ: Me, I’m hung up on the 12-cent cover price. My first taste of inflation was when they went to 15.

@Ian J, nojo: I was hauling them in with my fish telepathy out on the trout stream the other day.

/cast, drift, cast, drift, cast – BLAMMO!

Couple of them were “holy shit” sized for the stream, some 12 in monsters (everything is relative). At least two were so small they flew up in the air when I set my hook. I was really unprepared to hook so many fish that day, so about 2/3 got away. Think it was about my second or third day of fishing for the year. Would have gotten started sooner but the ski season ran long.

@redmanlaw: Just wait until BP/Exxon/Shell figures out that there’s oil at the source of major rivers. All the environmental damage with a fraction of the work!

@IanJ: There was a big push by hunters, conservationists, environmentalists, the “hook and bullet” press and state wildlife agencies in the past couple of years or so to keep oil and and gas production down in federal lands containing fragile Western game habitats. It’s my impression that they were fairly successful.

This whole Gulf oil spill thing has me seriously wigged out. I mean, this is exactly like living in a thrilling disaster movie, except that it’s actually happening. This is a speculative fiction piece on the greediness of humanity and its dystopian tendencies, yet there it is, in real life, happening to a major body of water. We’re fucking the planet so actively that you can feel it, and you just know that BP is going to skip away from the whole thing comparatively unscathed.

They were saying on the radio the other day that the oil might continue spilling for months, which is the projected timeline for getting the relief wells set up (apparently the only sure solution to the problem). I don’t know what the current spill rate is, but I vaguely recall it’s around 80k barrels a day. That’s essentially the complete death of the Gulf of Mexico, and it’s hard to see how this can’t slip past Florida and enter the Atlantic. We are well and truly fucked, and there seems to be nothing anyone can do about it.

And the worst part (pardon my comment whoring) is that we, the all-consuming American populace, aren’t doing a goddamn thing about it. I don’t know what else I can change without giving up and living as a hermit — I already bicycle a ton, but it’s not me that has to change, it’s all the people living 50 miles from work, who commute 2+ hours a day in their SUVs, and all the incredibly inefficient infrastructure we have set up. Our whole society seemingly exists to perpetuate the problem.

@Dodgerblue:

Use the phrase “Chav” in reference to the interviewer and say “Bugger” a lot.

@IanJ: When the Ixtoc I well blew out in Mexican waters in 1979 — shallow water, by the way — it took nine months to cap it. Pemex tried all the same crap that BP has tried: booming, dispersants, a version of the “top hat” — with close to zero effectiveness. They even called in famous oil well fire putter-outer Red Adair, who failed. Oil stopped flowing only after Pemex drilled a relief well and shoved enough mud and cement into the wellbore to stop it. Everyone in the oil industry knows this, but nobody gave a flying fuck.

@Dodgerblue: Gawd, haven’t heard Red Adair’s name in years…

Rachel, meanwhile, has been very good about reviving the Pemex story, including NBC footage from thirty years ago.

@Tommmcat Still Gets Carly Confused With Meg: Can I say that BP executives are likely to be treated well by other inmates because, being British, they know a lot of show tunes?

@Dodgerblue: There’s got to be a way to connect this to Fergie’s drunken pimping of Prince Andrew.

@Tommmcat Still Gets Carly Confused With Meg: And “wanker.” I saw Michael Sheen on the Late Late Show the other day and he said that word is more offensive than we Yanks understand.

@Dodgerblue:

It’s a country club for them, if at all. The other inmates will be of the executive criminal class, so yeah, knowing show tunes and prep school fight songs could come in handy…

@Dodgerblue: Oh, don’t even get me started on that. But it’s a perfect illustration of what I’m talking about. This is a known, previously experienced situation, and in 30 years they couldn’t figure out how to put a fucking oilproof condom on their busted well shafts.

@TJ/ Jamie Sommers /TJ:

Doesn’t it just mean “one who masturbates”? Why is that offensive? Everybody masturbates…

@Tommmcat Still Gets Carly Confused With Meg: That’s what I thought too, but Sheen never explained what the problem was.

Okay, let’s find something semi-authoritative about Canadian relief wells:

Environment Minister Jim Prentice said the situation in the Gulf of Mexico has underlined for Ottawa the importance of maintaining environmental safeguards for offshore drilling rather than accepting the industry’s arguments in recent months that it should back off.

The oil sector wants the government to ease regulations on offshore drilling in the North, in particular those that require relief wells to be drilled within months of constructing a primary well. Relief wells are used to contain an oil leak by taking pressure off the primary well so it can be capped after a rupture.

“Within months.” Not sure whether that detail would have affected BP.

@nojo: I didn’t ever have the impression that this was a new well, just an established drilling platform that had some shit go wrong and unleash the biggest environmental disaster in a generation (in the US at least — someone mentioned fleeing Iraqis spilling 18 billion gallons of some variety of hydrocarbon so the invading Westerners couldn’t get their mitts on it).

@IanJ:

There’s some interesting history of the well on Wikipedia – this was apparently a new site, only acquired back in 2009.

One wonders about the choice of (as the article puts it) the name of a “cursed town” to apply to an oil drilling area. Tinfoil hat engage. :)

On a lighter note, did anybody else read “Smack the Greasy Manatee” and think that it would be the sort of thing HF might have encountered at IML? Just sayin’.

@IanJ: @nojo: The BP well was an exploratory well. It never went into production, and so I’m not sure that the Canadian system would have helped. Ironically, BP was in the process of putting a cement cap on the well and moving the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig elsewhere when all Hell broke loose. If the various Rube Goldberg capping efforts and the relief wells don’t work, oil will keep spewing to the surface until its pressure, originally about 21,000 psi, is finally overcome by the roughly 2,500 psi pressure on the seabed. No one has any idea how long that would be.

I had no idea oil was under such pressure. That explains the “gusher” stereotypes and cartoons. I’d always thought it had to be laboriously pumped out of the ground.

@Dodgerblue: Tell those assholes that just because they couldn’t take New Orleans in 1814 doesn’t mean they can just destroy its environment with a corporate proxy. Also, let them know we’re going to nationalize BP and enslave all its employees who were not born in the USA. That should get you some press attention.

@FlyingChainSaw: “In 1814 I took a little trip / Down with Colonel Jackson down the mighty Mississip . . .”

@IanJ: Sometimes it does. Depends on how much pressure is left; it dissipates over time.

Who Wants to be a Spillionaire?*

*Bloomberg Businessweek’s NY Post-ish headline for a story about all the tort lawyers who’re gearing up to sue the living shit outta everyone involved. At this rate, Congress’ll cut a $10 billion bail-out check to BP for their pain and sufferin’.

If you want to take a dump in the ocean, here are the rules:

it is legal to take a dump if you are in the ocean; it is legal to take a dump directly into the ocean (hanging your hiney off the side of a boat); it is illegal to take a dump in a bucket, and dump the bucket into the ocean; it is illegal to wash out the bucket that you took a dump in in the ocean.

This is for real. It is legal to allow gray-water to go into the ocean (the water from your kitchen sink, for example), only because the DEP has granted a blanket wastewater permit for the recreational boaters. Technically, rainwater that falls on your boat, and then runs off into the water, is a pollutant discharge, but the blanket permit covers that, too.

@IanJ: Uh, yeah. You know, all that environment stuff happens over there.

@Original Andrew: There’s nice socialist blather about the impossible possibility of nationalizing common resources (i.e., BP’s oil/gas leases) “temporarily”, much in the same way we “fixed” GM. Somehow I doubt such proposals will go anywhere.

The spill itself seems too big to fail.

@Promnight: If you want to take a dump in the ocean, incorporate. Then you have all the benefits of a person under the law, yet surprisingly (ha! ha! ha!) almost none of the responsibilities.

So take a dump in that bucket, if you’re a politically well-connected member of the oligarchy. Let’s see if the Coast Guard boards your sailing yacht to chastise your lack of respect for the environment.

@Dodgerblue: Sorry I missed your shout-out, yo. But if you’ve been paying attention you’ll know by now that the best way to handle the English is to call everyone Darling. However, that does not work with the Scots. They will headbutt you or suck out your eyeballs. But you’ll know they’re scottish because they’ll be drunk and you can avoid them. Otherwise, just treat them the way you would any other visitor from a 3rd world country. They’ll want to know about all the shops and taxis and stuff and be walking about looking at all the tall buildings. No doubt they’ll have spent all their spare cash on ‘designer’ jeans and ‘Rolexes’ to impress their friends. So you might not want to tell them that Canal Street is not actually one of Manhattan’s premiere shopping spots. And try not to look anyone in the teeth.

Inmates of the Beeb used to love it when one referred to ‘Steam Radio’. I’m not sure why but it makes them all snigger into their warm beer. I hear they have real TV now. Call everything ‘brill’. They like that. They will most likely offer to make you ‘Spotted Dick’ and then all snigger some more and drop Marmite sandwiches in their lap. Pay no attention. If one of them rears back and starts hooting at you through its nose just say “Get you Ada for ninepence.” That usually shuts them up.

Let us know when you’re on.

@Benedick: Well, after my self-important woofing yesterday, the Beeb kept me on hold for about ten minutes at midnight, my time, and then blew me off, claiming that they had encountered time management issues due to “that Israeli thing.” Things really haven’t been running smoothly over there since they sacked Churchill.

@Benedick: Now BBC Wales wants to talk to me. Would sheep jokes be appropriate?

@Dodgerblue: Maybe BP could use Welsh wool to absorb the oil?

@Dodgerblue: Incest. They’re famous for it.

“From the earliest times the Welsh have been looked upon as an unclean people. It is thus that they have preserved their racial integrity. Their sons and daughters rarely mate with humankind except their own blood relations.”
— Evelyn Waugh

Evelyn Waugh on the Welsh, some of the funniest prose ever written, these are the remarks of a Waugh character, the headmaster of a lower-tier public school, who had extensive opinions on the topic, this is Dr. Fagan from Decline and Fall:

“I often think,” he continued, “that we can trace almost all the disasters of English history to the influence of Wales. Think of Edward of Carnarvon, the first Prince of Wales, a perverse life, Pennyfeather, and an unseemly death, then the Tudors and the dissolution of the Church, then Lloyd George, the temperance movement, Non-conformity and lust stalking hand in hand through the country, wasting and ravaging. But perhaps you think I exaggerate? I have a certain rhetorical tendency, I admit.”
“No, no,” said Paul.
“The Welsh,” said the Doctor, “are the only nation in the world that has produced no graphic or plastic art, no architecture, no drama. They just sing,” he said with disgust,” sing and blow down wind instruments of plated silver. They are deceitful because they cannot discern truth from falsehood, depraved because they cannot discern the consequences of their indulgence. Let us consider,” he continued, “the etymological derivations of the Welsh language….”

Now I must go find Waugh on Kindle.

@Benedick: This is very helpful because I can accurately describe the past relationship been the oil industry and their supposed regulators as “incestuous.”

Waugh describing the Welsh members of the Llanabba Silver Band:

“Ten men of revolting appearance were approaching from the drive. They were low of brow, crafty of eye, and crooked of limb. They advanced huddled together with the loping tread of wolves, peering about them furtively as they came, as though in constant terror of ambush; they slavered at their mouths, which hung loosely over the receding chins, while each clutched under his ape-like arm a burden of curious and unaccountable shape. On seeing the Doctor they halted and edged back, those behind squinting and moulting over the companions’ shoulders.”

Now thats fucking snark.

@Prommie: Resembles opposing counsel in the case I just tried.

@Dodgerblue: he he.

@Prommie: There’s no one better on the horror of being English than Waugh – being more than a bit of a horror himself. He can do a deadpan on English racism that is all the more unnerving for being more than a little too real. My fave usage quote from OED is in the appendix for the word Abroad. A major-general is quoted from 1947 using the word thusly:

Frogs are better than wops or hun. But Abroad is unutterably beastly and all foreigners are fiends.

The English would reckon the Welsh to be foreign because they didn’t go there to shoot or fish as they did Scotland.

@Dodgerblue: There you go. And if your interviewer is female you might trying calling her Blodwyn.

@Benedick: Where did I hear the phrase “all wogs begin at Calais?”

@Prommie: From an Englishman, I should think. The phrase I know is Wogs begin at Calais. Like a loyal toast.