Motus Mentis

Traffic has been creeping up around here lately, and now is more than double what it was a month or two ago. I was glad to see it at first, thinking my humble star was ascending, but then I realized it was due to the World Cup’s official theme song, whose title is roughly congruent to this website’s.

So, to all of you mis-directed World Cup fans: welcome. Regrettably, I have nothing whatsoever to say about football, and my coverage of Shakira is scanty at best. Do feel free to poke around, though, and to give the View a Random Post link a click. Comments are welcome, and there’s no charge for the extra Waka.

For weeks now, boffins examining the BP well-head videos with such techniques as particle image velocimetry have insisted that the rate of flow has been a good deal greater than the official estimates. Now the U.S. Geological Survey has joined them, saying that prior to the latest cap-and-suction manoeuvre the rate was probably in the order of 40,000 barrels (1,680,000 gallons) a day. That is a lot of oil. If this number is correct, then even with the cap in place the leakage is still over 20,000 barrels a day. (There is also a second, smaller leak that may be contributing another 20,000 barrels or so a day.)

I’m generally not given to doomsday-mongering (except when it comes to the downfall and decomposition of Western civilization, of course, which is already well under way) — but we are in, if you will forgive the metaphor, uncharted waters here. The world’s fisheries were already sorely stressed before this agony began, and it is impossible to imagine that bubbling over two million barrels of crude oil up from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico will not have widespread lethal effects far beyond the surface-level fouling we have already seen. That it is bubbling up from the sea-floor, rather than spreading across the surface like most spills, surely makes things far worse; it seems clear that there is already extensive underwater contamination as well.

We simply have never seen anything like this before, and nobody knows how bad it will get. The pocket of oil punctured by the well is so deep, and under such enormous pressure, that it may even turn out to be impossible to stop it with anything short of a nuclear explosion.

It is certainly at least plausible that this disaster might kill so much marine life as to ripple fatally across the food-system of the entire world ocean. If that happens, folks, things are going to get very nasty indeed.

Blogging can be a dispiriting business, and most of us scribble away in near-perfect (and perhaps well-deserved) obscurity. Existentially speaking, it can feel rather like shouting up a drainpipe. So it’s encouraging to see a hard-working blogger’s voice rise suddenly above the din, particularly when it’s a voice that was deserving of wider attention all along. Meet Edward Hugh.

It appears that our good name (which, along with our tag-line, owes its derivation not to Pac-Man, nor to the Muppets, but to the song Coffin for Head of State, by the remarkable Fela Kuti) has now taken on a somewhat unsavory connotation in our deteriorating popular culture.

Oh well, between this and Shakira, maybe I can cash in somehow. Meanwhile, listen to the real thing here.

A reader sends along the widely circulated image below, with which the U.S. continues to burnish its gleaming international reputation for the education and intellectual engagement of its citizenry:

(I see the predicted low temperature was 49°. How I wish; we’re sweltering here.)

Paul McCartney was honored with the Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song at the White House yesterday. He is only the third person to receive it, and he certainly deserves it. (The first was Stevie Wonder, and the second was Paul Simon, who by the way performed at our son’s commencement exercises two weekends ago.)

But reading about the ceremony in the Times today, I was dismayed to see the following from Sir Paul:

A few minutes after the concert, Mr. McCartney returned to the microphone, thanking the Library of Congress and adding, “After the last eight years, it’s great to have a president who knows what a library is.’

It is one thing to express, as Mr. McCartney did at other moments during the evening, fawning and fulsome praise for President Obama. But for an Englishman, while accepting an award of national honor from the American people, to stand in the White House and gratuitously insult a former President (and one, for that matter, whose wife holds a master’s degree in library science) is appallingly bad form. Very, very bad form indeed.

Mr. McCartney should be ashamed of himself, and he owes Mr. Bush, and the rest of us, an apology.

To those of you who send me comments and other tidbits by email: I’ve been having technical problems, since Wednesday morning, that prevent me from accessing my main email account from my network at the office. So far I have resisted acquiring an email-equipped cell-phone, but these corporate-firewall issues may push me over the brink, especially since I seem to be spending awfully long hours at the office lately.

Frequent emailers will know that I generally respond promptly; until I figure out how to sort this out, though, I am incommunicado until I get home each evening.

This sort of thing is terribly annoying. I must remind myself that when I was a boy there was just the daily mail, and a telephone statically affixed to the kitchen wall (without even an answering machine, which had yet to be invented). Somehow we managed, though now I can’t imagine how.

Readers, what do you make of this?