Nothing But Love :: golf blogger

Methane Blows!

I read every newspaper in the surgery center waiting area. There was an article in one of the papers about a new shopping center starring, SURPRISE, Wal-Mart.

Back in the day when I was in high school and there was no EPA, there was a group of guys, star athletes all, who extended an open invitation to me to join them out on "the moon" for drinking and merriment on spring and fall weekends. I've never been into drinking and what kind of merriment could go on with eight, 10, 12 guys getting hammered, unless that was the puking part, I really don’t want to think about.

"The moon" was a euphemism for the landfill, which was itself a euphemism coined by the owners of the landfill to convince an unbelieving public that dumping millions and millions of cubic yards of rotting, sticking garbage just west of their backyards was a beneficial thing. It was creating new land for posterity, or so the owners reclaimed.

We've moved away from there, both physically and temporally. But progress … as defined by whoever wants to define it … never stops.

Now, there's an EPA; and the EPA has given a developer permission to re-break ground for Wal-Mart and some other stores. Apparently, some time last year, digging started at the site. A large "garbage dome" collapsed, releasing all kinds of liquefied putrefaction into ground water and streams nearby and a lot of combustible methane into the air. The EPA stepped in.

With pilings sunk deep into the unstable ground to support building foundations and an untested ventilation system fresh off the drawing board to suck away explosive methane gas, the EPA says the buildings won't collapse on shoppers and won't explode either, unless there is a massive power failure causing the ventilation system to fail, which is highly fucking unlikely, given the safeguards in place by power companies.

That black-out we had … yeah, that big one, the biggest in the history of the universe … was caused by the power company servicing this new shopping center. And there’s a nuclear power plant this same company owns … acidic water leaked out of a pipe and corroded the containment vessel … millimeters from a big melt-down. Highly fucking unlikely? I’ve already got a solution. “In case of power failure, do NOT use your cell phone. You may cause an explosion.”

And what about the ever-present stench?

More interesting than this story was the one I read in an abandoned Weekly World News. No, it's not the article about Bigfoot running into the burning camper and saving little 6-month-old, Katelyn Miller, daughter of Jarod and Mary Ellen Miller, of Greeley, Colorado, that I'm talkin' about.

It's the story about some weird experiments that were taking place on Arizona's death row that really piqued my curiosity. Wacky scientist, Jordan Ellison, whose grant to find a cancer cure was revoked, turned convicted murderer, Bobby "Killer" Caine, into a "large, green, living tree-man," whose new prison cell "has a southern exposure so he gets daylight most of the time." Unfortunately, Caine's "head is now a gnarled leafy bush" with no mouth. Prison guard Munsey Wagner thinks that it's pretty sad that the "only kisses [the tree man will] ever get are from woodpeckers."

Sad. Very distressing story. Stem cell research ... this must be the reason George W. Bush is against it!

Posted by Bill at March 25, 2005 05:18 PM