The petro pong was stronger than ever before in Mid-City last night. Instant headache. Best guess is a biiiiiig controlled burn yesterday.
Not that that worries me so much. Now that Fin called.
Fin's probably my favorite polymath, and not just because I taught him everything he knows. It's the whole teacher's joy at the student surpassing thing. I mean, when he stumbled into my studio, he didn't know what an input gain pot was for. Now he's got Grammys and I don't, so there you go.
But, while my admiration for his main gig accomplishments is boundless, it's really his other interests that fascinate me. Cosmology and urban planning. Comparative interpretations of Buddhist thought and the history of computing. He's just a thinking kind of dude.
Which was why I was so jazzed when he called me yesterday. Even though he called me with troubles. Price of admission, I figure. There's work stuff, existential angst (he's big on that) and, of course, like everyone else here, The Thing Out There. No matter what else is going on in your life these days, every spare minute's thought tends to turn to Petro the Slime Monster. And Fin, being the thinking kind of dude he is, gave me something new to think about.
Like the rest of us, he's worried about the crude, and the dispersants, and the toluene and hydrogen sulfide. But, being a physics junkie, he's wondering a lot about N.O.R.M., or naturally occurring radioactive materials.
"Anytime you go poking around a couple thousand feet into the earth, you'll be bringing up radionuclides. Cleaning them out of drilling tools and pipes is a regular part of the maintenance. We haven't heard anything about measurements for N.O.R.M. in this."
Probably for many reasons. BP has not demonstrated much transparency and good faith regarding any aspect of this ongoing hell, particularly when it comes to potential threats to wildlife and human health. I doubt if they're all that eager to start monitoring for contaminants that are commonly ingested through respiration and concentrate in bone tissue, where their alpha particles go about the ugly business of tearing apart healthy cells.
Not that I'm all that worried. The stank had died down here by midnight, so no problem, right?