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Friday, July 11, 2003
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D-Day Redux (or, re: ducks)
From Yahoo:
By GREG SUKIENNIK, Associated Press Writer
BOSTON - Being thrown from a container ship, drifting for more than a decade, bobbing through three oceans — it's enough to turn a rubber duckie white.
A floating flock of the bathtub toys — along with beavers, turtles and frogs — is believed to be washing ashore somewhere along the New England coast, bleached and battered from a trans-Arctic journey. Oceanographers say the trip has taught them valuable lessons about the ocean's currents.
The toys have been adrift since 29,000 of them fell from a storm-tossed container ship en route from China to Seattle more than 11 years ago.
From a point in the Pacific Ocean near where the 45th parallel meets the international date line, they floated along the Alaska coast, reaching the Bering Strait by 1995 and Iceland five years later. By 2001 they had floated to the area in the north Atlantic where the Titanic sank.
"Some kept going, some turned and headed to Europe," says Curtis Ebbesmeyer of Seattle, a retired oceanographer who's been tracking the toys' progress. "By now, hundreds should be dispersed along the New England coast."
Ebbesmeyer has been able to track the toys with the help of duckies that washed ashore along the way. He said they have been a useful tool in teaching oceanography, and have shed light on the way surface currents behave.
They are also a sobering reminder that about 10,000 containers fall off cargo ships each year, creating all manner of flotsam and jetsam.
"When trash goes into the ocean, it doesn't disappear," Ebbesmeyer said. "It just goes somewhere else."
Fred Felleman, of the environmental group Ocean Advocates, said container ships carry 95 percent of the world's goods and are stacked higher and wider than ever before, raising the odds of spillage.
"Some 30 percent have hazardous materials in them. They're not just spilling Nikes," he said.
For what it's worth, shipments I have helped facilitate have fallen victim to being washed overboard, usually via storm. But piracy is also rampant in certain areas of the world, especially in the South China Sea, and many containers are opened and sent over the edge depending on it anything valuable is inside. Yaaarghhh!
3:33:18 PM 
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I Can't Write About Baseball
A friend asked me today if I still follow baseball.
Yes, I do. Every day. Every night. I scour the box scores, the transaction wires. I read Baseball America and Baseball Prospectus and TwinsGeek and get into unhealthy discussions on a Twins board.
I do these things every day. I also listen to the Twins every day they play. 162 times a year, minimum.
I'm too close to it to write about it. I can't subject you to that. Baseball has become strangely personal for me. I'll talk baseball with like-minded folks in a personal setting, if the opportunity arises. But not in this forum. I just can't. I think if you're going to write about baseball, you should only write about baseball. My friend Sean does it right.
There are so many great voices on baseball, I've just decided that mine isn't necessary. I'd rather sit back in the depths of my garage or basement and listen to my team go down the tubes. It's just me and them. To subject you all to that sometimes unhealthy relationship wouldn't do any of us any favors.
1:57:29 PM
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Bush's Rebuttal on Africa
We knew this wouldn't take long. Bush and Condy Rice have both given statements today detailing the level of CIA involvement in the preparation of the State of the Union Address. Rice's comments are especially detailed, saying that there were specific discussions about quantity and amount of yellow cake, and that some things were stricken from the speech at the CIA's behest. After that, according to Rice, the speech was approved by the CIA.
Hard to know who's right about that. There are some other very well-documented instances where the CIA did ask for language connecting African uranium and Iraq to be toned down or removed completely from addresses and British reports. But what about the State of the Union Address? It almost sounds like the kind of thing where Bush could plausibly say that wires just got crossed, at worst. Or, Bush and Rice's version of events could be completely true; it could be that the CIA people reviewing the speech just didn't make the specific demands. But note this quote from Rice:
``The C.I.A. cleared the speech in its entirety,'' Ms. Rice said in a nearly hourlong interview aboard the president's plane. ``If the C.I.A. - the director of central intelligence - had said, `Take this out of the speech,' it would have been gone.''
Hmm...that's interesting, if you are of a mind to read between the lines. Did they not strike it because the request didn't come from the head of the CIA? Were people lower than the director doing the speech review? That seems likely to me, but I surely don't know.
In any event, this has clearly gotten the Bush team's attention. I wonder if there's going to be enough of a smoking gun to ever say that they blatantly included false information in the Address. Doesn't seem likely at this point, but there is still plenty of other WMD-related speculation to go around that the Administration can't be feeling too comfortable yet.
Now, for a slightly different angle on this Iraq business. I read a headline in the USAToday from Colin Powell, wherein he says that there was no effort to deceive on Iraq. I read that, and my first thought was one of comfort: If Powell says it, I'm inclined to believe him.
That's my reaction with certain people, Colin Powell being one of the current examples. For reasons I can't really identify, I trust Colin Powell. I don't see him as a politician so much as I do a very smart man who knows his business, and speaks and acts with authority and respect. And so, when people like that say things, I'm inclined to feel like it gives me that little bit of insight into something about which I really will never know the real facts about, barring a national revelation. Powell's a barometer for me; we all have them.
But then I thought about that a bit more. Why do I trust Powell? More specifically, why do I believe Powell would not say anything that would impugn his own personal integrity?
Let's say that Colin Powell really believes that the best thing for this country, this world, is to help stay the course with the current Administration. It doesn't mean he agrees with how things have gone, necessarily. It just means that perhaps he thinks that the appearance that the U.S. was acting on the straight and narrow with regards to Iraq is better than the alternative, which would be pretty monumental given that it meant that a President lied to get us into a war.
If Powell really felt that the world would be better off thinking that Bush was on the up and up, wouldn't it be amazingly selfish for him to come and expose a lie just to save his own credibility?
I mean, think about it. We're talking about the world. Not just him. Not his family. The world. Everyone that you and I and Colin Powell and Boog Powell have ever known. All the memories and sacrifices of people that have come before us. All the people to come. The species.
Seem dramatic? We're talking about nuclear weapons and CBW's here. Big stuff. Insane people with righteous agendas. And that's not even counting the U.S. If Powell really felt that exposing the lies of an Administration, even if he weren't involved in them, would in any way jeopardize international stability, would you really expect him to put that all aside for something like personal integrity?
I wouldn't. In fact, I would hope like hell that he doesn't make that choice. What is integrity? Is it never supporting a lie? Or is it sacrificing yourself and your own values in order to avoid a possible disaster on a global scale? How could he look himself in the mirror and say "Well, I may have destabilized the world in some way, and made further chaos and war a reality in the near and long term, but damn if I don't have integrity"? He can't. He shouldn't.
I believe in Colin Powell. Don't know why, but I do. And now I realize that because of that belief, I don't know if I can believe anything he says.
12:52:06 PM
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New Brand Image
Please note that you are now encouraged to "Tap In" to the Pipeline. We found that this tested well with our key demographics, due to it's combination of proactive connotation, as well as the tangential references to always-popular things like tap dancing, bugel-playing, Timothy Hutton and Magic:The Gathering.
The phrase will soon be available on T-shirts, playing cards, flyswatters and other material available at the Pipeline Store, set to open in Fall, 2003.
10:39:49 AM
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Seasonal Affection Disorder
I have been thinking about Fall lately. I don't know why. I get so nostalgic for Fall. There's something about the way the air smells, the way the wind blows through the trees. And of course the leaves, the beautiful leaves. It makes me think of football and heavy sweaters and the very real sense that time is precious. And it is, especially in Fall. Those idyllic Fall weekends are too few and fleeting; one cold weekend, and it's done. One windy weekend, and all those beatiful leaves mean to you now is that you are behind on your raking. You might get three or four in one season where you can really be out and do it right, you know?
I'm not talking about anything big, really. You might go to a pumpkin patch. You might jump in some leaves, or go for a drive along the river to look at the trees. Maybe you just go for a walk, knowing that your time for doing such things is fast drawing to a close, and you'll have to hunker down for the winter for the next five months.
Yeah, five months. Can you believe that? It took me awhile to warm to the charms of the mean season here, but I certainly have. Winter is like going back into an incubator. You rest up. You read. You learn something new about the world and yourself. You build something.
And you wait. And then you emerge, ready to start it all over again.
So, really, Fall is the end, and Winter is the slow burn of a beginning, a time to think about all those things you'll do and be when the weather gets right again.
Spring? Spring is an amazing thing after a Minnesota Winter, but I rarely find myself yearning for Spring in the midst of other seasons. In Winter, I don't think of Spring so much as I do Summer, when I can stand in my yard at night without a shirt on and sweat and look at the satellites pass over my head.
But back to the beginning: Now that Summer is in full, I find myself thinking of Fall. I can't recall a time I've felt this so strongly so early, in the middle of July. It feels wrong, of course. I have long known that Fall was probably my favorite season, but a part of me just didn't want to admit it. How can you not love Summer? Summer is no school, baseball, cracking-wise by the pool or lake, and halter tops.
Don't love Summer? Then you didn't grow up right, in my book.
But the last few nights, I've layed in my bed with Lily on my chest, and we have pressed our heads to the screen. And we breathe in the Summer. We feel the unusually cool July breeze, and hear the wind move the trees. Well, one of us does. The other one just sleeps and grabs my chest hair.
And I don't know if it's just me, or the coolness of the nights, or something to do with Lily, but I keep smelling that wind, expecting to catch that first scent of Fall. More than that, I'm waiting for it. I'm ready for it. I don't know why.
10:29:55 AM
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© Copyright 2003 Doug Hennessee.
Last update: 8/1/2003; 1:13:18 PM.
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