Father's Day and Oil
It's almost Father's Day and the golf cliches are building to an unimaginable high. Is it too much to ask to spread out the emphasis a little? Geek dads every where rise up, rebel, let your iphones be heard! Honestly, De Beers look like amateurs compared to the golf lobby who might just succeed in taking over Father's Day. What is the world coming to?
Of course, that's what we should be saying about this oil spill. Americans are demanding that new technologies and science be brought to bear to remediate the oil, but nobody seems to get it. BP has created a disaster it can't afford and doesn't know what to do. That's obvious. The government is in a trickier position of having to explain to Americans that seemingly miraculous solutions for soaking up oil may have more sinister problems. The government would appear to be sticking (hmmm, pun not intended but it works) to conventional approaches which have passed the myriad of regulatory hurtles to show that they make some sense and won't do more harm than good. The reason is obvious: the feds don't want to make things worse - the well known and rightly feared 'law of unintended consequences'.
And so I made the mistake of tuning into Huckabee. Sigh. I got excited when he started an episode with a basin of water in front of him and revealed a studio full of lab-coat clad people all with basins of water and oil samples ready to demonstrate new technologies to remediate oil. SCIENCE, I thought. And so I watched intently...as Huckabee proceeded to roll a previously recorded smear on Obama for several minutes. I think 'ok, I should have expected this, I'll tune back in a few minutes'. So I channel surf for 5 minutes or so, come back hoping to see some creative science and exciting ideas and...Huckabee is running another over-produced smear on Obama for many minutes. So I assume he got to it at some point, but not before over-indulging his political feelings and discouraging me of my patience.
Well dads, as at least a symbolic touch we could all go into our garages and turn in those random jugs of used motor oil we all seem to have. I just did that recently - felt good. This is where I'd really like to cook up some cool idea to use Father's Day to rally a fresh attack to stop the oil in the gulf coast. I got nothing (ok, not entirely true) - but it's not going to be that easy. As for Father's Day, let's reclaim our day : - stop the toil on the golf course.