I previously wrote a post on the Tennessee coal spill that happened a few days before Christmas last year and just came across an interesting article on Scientific American which updates the situation. I’ll post a few noteworthy excerpts below, though you should probably read the entire article, it’s pretty good.
But some area residents aren’t so sure that they are safe from the effects of the spill, which is estimated to have been over 40 times bigger by volume than the infamous Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989. Calling it an “environmental disaster of epic proportions,” Carol Kimmons, a local resident who works at the non-profit Sequatchie Valley Institute, told reporters that the nasty black ash flowed into “the water supply for Chattanooga and millions of people living downstream in Alabama, Tennessee and Kentucky.” She added that the spill was 70 percent bigger than a similar one in Kentucky in October 2000 (306 million gallons) that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) referred to at the time as “one of the worst environmental disasters in the Southeastern United States.”
“Coal contains huge amounts of heavy metals, and when coal is burned, the organic matter burns off, but many of the nasty chemicals stick around, in higher concentrations,” said Kimmons. “Also, coal is ‘washed’ using some really nasty chemicals, which are also left over in coal slurry.” The bottom line, she concluded, is that “coal slurry is really, really toxic stuff.”
In the past year or so I’ve had friends of mine tell me that if I enjoy Thomas Pynchon‘s work then I should look in to the works of David Foster Wallace. I had heard his name before but dismissed it because I had no time or even the thought that anyone could be compared to Pynchon turned me off–as bad as that sounds. A few weeks ago I was in the local bookstore and one of the store’s employees had set up a small David Foster Wallace display. I walked up to it and started thumbing through his book Infinite Jest and was immediately struck by its overall size. The damn thing is 1079 pages, with footnotes! An employee saw me thumbing through it and came up to me and asked if I’d ever read and of DFW’s work. I said that I hadn’t and she said too that if I enjoyed any of Pynchon’s work, that I’d definitely like DFW’s work and especially Infinite Jest. So I purchased it and started it last night.
What immediately arrested my attention was Wallace’s deep, dense, and gorgeous prose. He uses words that I admittedly have never heard before–which is a great thing for me as a reader and developing writer–and I frequently found myself reaching for a dictionary. After a few times of looking up novel words, I thought it’d be a good idea to make a list of these words along with their definitions and share them, hoping that someone might be enriched by a new word or two.
Read more…
I’m sitting here realizing for the first time since earlier Jaunuary that I have absolutely no obligations or expectations. I can do whatever I want and it feels great. I’m still getting used to it, actually. I remember less than a week ago I was telling myself that the night of the last day of my finals I would finally pick back up Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day and read it for a few consecutive hours. But right now I’ve chosen to just bask in the rays of obligation-free bliss and do nothing. And I’m perfectly okay with that.
A few coworkers and I have started a fun and meaningful blog called Flog ‘N Blog and I’ve just written the first flog. It’s a flogging of Miss California and you can read it here and hopefully laugh your balls off, even if you’re a woman.
–T.R.
Copyright © The Economist Newspaper Limited 2009. All rights reserved.
Another brilliant cartoon from KAL. So true too. I wonder how much of the defense budget is spent on cyber warfare? This cartoon also reminded me of an article I read on how the soldiers who operate the man-less drones over Iraq and Afghanistan learned how to do so by playing Xbox!
Crazy shit.
Also, whatever happened to that Conficker worm that was supposed to bring down the internet on April Fools Day?
I just had a brilliant idea. In order to ensure that I get page hits from humans as well as crawling web-bots on a daily basis, I will post some of my favorite passages from Finnegans Wake and attempt to explain what the hell I think Joyce is trying to say. Please, as you read, don’t get turned off by the amount of links I provide throughout the post. I include them only for your curiosity and because I personally feel that this is what Joyce wanted us to do with this book: find as many connections as humanly possibly, even if Joyce didn’t intend for our later connections to be made. That is the concept of human evolution I believe.
Read more…
