The hostage situation at the Discovery Channel headquarters today was tragic. I’m not talking about the demise of the gunman, James Lee, who was shot dead by police. And I’m not talking about the three hostages, who made it out unharmed. I’m talking about the kids who had been in a day care program in the building when the whole thing went down:

A day care inside One Discovery Place was successfully evacuated, and the children were moved to a McDonald’s restaurant, authorities said. Witnesses said some of the children were in cribs on wheels, and that people pushed the cribs out of the building to safety.

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Tags: environment & nature, trusted media & news
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10. Order all your martinis “neat”.

9. Make your morning coffee using lawn dew.

8. Only flush on alternate Thursdays.
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Tags: Bob Sullivan's top ten everything, ends & odd, environment & nature
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10. “It’s so hot, I just killed a guy for asking, ‘Hot enough for ya?’.”

9. “It’s so hot, Mel Gibson actually appreciates the cold shoulder his ex-girlfriend is giving him.”

8. “It’s so hot, the cows are giving evaporated milk.”

7. “It’s so hot, my car’s GPS lady keeps directing me towards Canada.”

6. “It’s so hot, Amy Winehouse tested positive for Slurpees.”

5. “It’s so hot, the fish are sweating.”

4. “It’s so hot, I saw a squirrel handling his nuts with tongs.”

3. “It’s so hot, President Obama’s motorcade was spotted outside a Dairy Queen.”

2. “It’s so hot, Dick Cheney was caught waterboarding himself.”

1. “It’s so hot, Lindsay Lohan said she was actually looking forward to spending some time in the ‘cooler’.”

Bob Sullivan’s Top Ten Everything appears every Monday.

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10. You’re also supposed to wait half an hour after making love.

9. We could be just like that scene out there: buoy meets gull!

8. Okay if I rub this suntan lotion places the sun doesn’t reach?

7. That white stuff on my nose isn’t sunscreen.

6. How would you like to be Hasselhoffed?

5. I’ll show you a pool toy you can play with.

4. Wow! Your body can be used as a flotation device!

3. Help! I’m drowning!…In your eyes!

2. My high chair or yours?

1. Okay if I practice my mouth-to-mouth?
 

Bob Sullivan’s Top Ten Everything appears every Monday.

Tags: Bob Sullivan's top ten everything, ends & odd, environment & nature, travel & foreign lands
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10. You have a mirror strategically placed on the ceiling so you can watch television over the pile of junk between the couch and the t.v.

9. Your bathroom has hot and cold running roaches

8. Is cheese supposed to make noise?

7. Your Christmas tree is still up – from the Reagan Years

6. You’ve given your dust bunnies names

5. After photos of your home were posted online, you started getting Care packages from Haiti

4. When you open the fridge door, the light makes all the food suddenly stop moving

3. You’ve taken up sculpting, building your sculptures from lint and dust

2. BP Oil executives have officially declared your kitchen/bathroom area ‘unsalvageable’

1. Even Jehovah’s Witnesses won’t come inside
 

Bob Sullivan’s Top Ten Everything appears every Monday.

Tags: Bob Sullivan's top ten everything, advice, environment & nature
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The Department of the Interior — in the wake of the tragic Gulf oil spill — has created a new government agency to oversee offshore drilling.

Sorta.

Actually, what it did is rename an old agency. An agency that has been cited for its utter incompetence and corruptness. [Read more →]

Tags: environment & nature, politics & government
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According to this post by the Wall Street Journal reporter and blogger Benoit Faucon, “the April 20 spill on the Deepwater Horizon is being reinvented in Planet BP as a strike of luck.”

According to Faucon, the article in BP Planet — a BP online, in-house magazine — reports “much of the region’s [nonfishing boat] businesses — particularly the hotels — have been prospering because so many people have come here from BP and other oil emergency response teams.”

Well, that’s one way of looking at it, I guess. So what do you think? A gutsy and uncompromising move by BP’s media office in the face of withering criticism, or a level of spin that would put even a West Texas tornado to shame?

Tags: environment & nature, trusted media & news
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Up until last week, 2.1 million gallons of crude oil per day had been pouring into the Gulf of Mexico. Since then BP and the Coast Guard have done some to siphon the leak, yet millions of gallons of oil, in hundreds of thousands of patches, float throughout the Gulf. They hurt and threaten tourism, fishing, and ecology. BP suggests that the leak might be almost completely stopped within a month. However, nothing is really certain of the future of the leak or the spill and its effects. [Read more →]

Tags: environment & nature, politics & government
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Federal officials have finally gotten a handle on the oil catastrophe. No, not the catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico, but an apparently much more important catastrophe — the olive oil catastrophe. [Read more →]

Tags: environment & nature, politics & government
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Reuters has a disturbing story today about the stock price of BP. It is “plunging”:

BP fell close to 17 percent in London trading, wiping $23 billion off its market value, on weekend news that its latest attempt to plug its blown-out seabed well had not worked sparked fears oil could leak into the Gulf until August.

As long as BP is losing money, it cannot muster the resources necessary to pay for the spill cleanup. And if the spill isn’t cleaned up, I think we all know it’s the children who will suffer the most. Well, that, and our faith in our institutions.

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Tags: environment & nature, politics & government
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In 1979 it was decided that the decades-old practice of naming hurricanes after women was unfair. Whether it weighed down the moral standing of women to associate them with inchoate and uncontrollable mayhem or if it was man-kind who was shorted by being overlooked, we cannot say but we have long exercised gender-blindness using alternating male and female names alphabetically so it is no surprise that early in the storm season we should be battening hatches against Hurricane Barack. [Read more →]

Tags: environment & nature, politics & government
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10. The price of sardines should come down, with no need to pack them in oil

9. It makes Katrina seem less severe

8. The British Petroleum backlash should help U.S. gas stations

7. It provides a new topic for New Orleans blues singers

6. It’s good practice for the next oil spill

5. It’s a great sales opportunity for manufacturers of 4-story 100-ton steel-and-concrete domes

4. With all this cleanup practice, there might be a spillover effect on BP gas station restrooms

3. So far, FEMA isn’t involved

2. Free gas for people on the Gulf Coast

1. The oily bird catches the worm
 

Bob Sullivan’s Top Ten Everything appears every Monday.

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There are two trees — one on my front lawn and one in my backyard — that insist on dropping spiked gumballs all over the place. The spiked balls start out green in the summer and after dropping turn brown and hard. Many of them stay in the trees through the fall and turn brown there, and then, in the winter when it snows or rains hard, they start to fall. In the spring as new leaves grow in, some of the spiked balls fall and the trees wait until the older spiked balls have been cleaned up before letting others fall. The trees are mean like that. [Read more →]

Tags: diatribes, environment & nature
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Congressdude James Oberstar, whose last name in German I think means either “superstar” or “cow dung” is trying to amend the Clean Water Act, which allows the EPA to regulate navigable waterways; that is, places through which boats can pass. Oberstar wants to get rid of that inconvenient “navigable” part, which will allow the EPA to regulate any and all bodies of water.

Which would include pools. And bath water. And perhaps even that perspiration forming underneath your arms. [Read more →]

Tags: environment & nature, politics & government
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Another Earth Day has come and gone. As I sit here reflecting on this day, the fortieth anniversary of the first Earth day in 1970, I think about my carbon footprint. My windows are closed and my ceiling fans are on full blast. My clothes are tossing in the dryer. I just took out the trash, full of my child’s disposable diapers and maybe some plastic bottles that I “accidentally” dropped in the can. I used paper towels to wipe off the kitchen counters. And now I am watching television as I type this, which is to say that I am not watching television, but have it on as energy-wasting background noise. [Read more →]

Tags: diatribes, environment & nature
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 Quick ….. picture an ‘environmentalist’ in your mind, and what do you see? ….. Who are these people, anyway? ….. And where do they get their crazy ideas?
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Like millions of my fellow denizens of this deeply troubled planet, I’m looking forward to purchasing an iPad. And then, three or four years from now, I’m going to throw it into the garbage or, as we euphemistically like to refer to it, the “recycling bin.”   [Read more →]

Tags: environment & nature, technology
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Recently I have had nothing but grave news. Two weeks ago I was describing to friends how it was our hour of need as the Norskies defended the peak of the gold medal mountain in the new Cold War, in Vancouver. Then it was just last week that my clarion call was sounded regarding the now 7-year-war against wild animals (10/03/2003 — Never Forget). These two very serious issues were weighing on me heavily. And then I heard that the Earth’s day is now shorter.

The earthquake in Chile changed the axis and sped up the Earth?! What? I’m sorry, come again? Why hasn’t there been much gnashing of teeth and such? The fifth most feasible way to destroy the Earth is to overspin it until it tears itself apart! [Read more →]

Tags: black helicopter watch, environment & nature
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Three months ago, I wrote about some of the problems with the global warming debate, not the least of which is that we were only being exposed to one side of the debate, namely, the doom-and-gloom types of arguments. I questioned a couple of assertions being made by the anthropogenic global warming crowd, and concluded the piece with the observation that we never hear about any of the possible benefits of the Earth heating up.

Thanks to the implosion of the Green-as-the-new-Red movement, due to the Climategate scandal, my point is finally being considered by the mainstream!

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Tags: environment & nature, politics & government
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Tilikum the killer whale, I think, has put his employers in an awkward position.  I mean, a killer whale is not an employee that you can fire, or take away his quarterly bonus.  And there is, of course, the awkward press conference where you explain, as if it’s the most normal thing in the world, that “in July 1999, security guards found a naked dead man draped across the orca’s back one morning.”  Sure, the guy sneaked past SeaWorld security and apparently died of hypothermia, but it’s awkward when one of your employees was found wearing a naked dead man as a hat.

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Tags: animals, environment & nature
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Tomorrow is a moderately biggish day for me.  We’re installing a forest management demonstration project on a 40 acre block here on the research station where I live and work.  We’ve got a forested stand that has a mix of oaks (Quercus spp.), hickories (Carya spp.), pines (Pinus spp.), and red maple (Acer rubrum), and our goal is to 1) divide the forest into management blocks, 2) identify and implement appropriate silvicultural practices, and 3) monitor and maintain these blocks for use as a guide during our various field days, 4-H programs, school tours, and other forms of community education.

We’re currently in the middle of step 2, and tomorrow looks like it may be the day when we implement the most entertaining silvicultural practice of them all: prescribed fire!

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Tags: environment & nature
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Weren’t snow days wonderful when you were a kid? I can’t remember a sound from my childhood more beautiful than a phone ringing at 5:00am and the subsequent disappointment in my mother’s voice as she grumbled to my dad those seven magical words: “The kids are home today. This blows.” I hate to say it but now that I’m 30, snow days kinda suck. [Read more →]

Tags: environment & nature
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Is it me, or were snow days way more fun when we were kids? Now? Not so much.

I remember being a kid, growing up in Rockland County, NY — ya know, the place that gets all the snow the city hears about. We averaged 6 inches every time it snowed, at least — and that was nothing. I remember waking up at 6 in the morning on snow days — earlier than I ever  woke up, including these days — just to turn on RKO radio — the AM station every kid gathered around the radio to listen to, fingers crossed, praying to hear their school’s name called out during the list of cancellations. Man, those were the days. Nothing beat a snow day… as a kid. As a parent? Fuck. That. Shit. [Read more →]

Tags: environment & nature, family & parenting, going parental
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Dramatis Personae
Barack Obama, President of the United States
Al Gore, Former Vice-President of the United States

GORE: Mr. President, we must send a manned mission to Pluto at once. And I graciously volunteer to head it.

OBAMA: Pluto? Why Pluto?

GORE: Have you not read? There’s global warming on Pluto! [Read more →]

Tags: environment & nature
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Got hold of a new tidbit that I found interesting.  The Ozone Layer’s hole, which is closing, is now being reported as “causing global warming”.

<Insert Homer Simpson’s “D’oh!” here.>

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Tags: environment & nature, politics & government
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If you live in the Northeast part of the United States, you’re probably up to your eyeballs in snow. Certain areas, including mine, have been socked with the second snowmageddon within a week. It’s creating a lot of stress for mothers everywhere — schools are closed and toddler classes are canceled. The roads are impassable, and even if they weren’t, it’s impossible to dig the minivan out from the mountain of snow anyway. What’s a mother to do with an endless stretch of days indoors with a bunch of kids? Here are some ideas to keep your children entertained and you stress-free while stuck in the house. [Read more →]

Tags: advice, environment & nature
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February 3, 2015

A Culvert County second-grader is in critical condition tonight after a SWAT team shot him four times in the process of serving a warrant to check his home for illegal light bulbs.

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Tags: environment & nature, politics & government
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10. It’s so cold, people are hugging Ted Williams’s head just to keep warm

9. It’s so cold, aquariums no longer really need the glass

8. It’s so cold, flashers are running up to women in Central Park and just describing themselves

7. It’s so cold, it would be colder than Glenn Beck’s heart — if he had one

6. It’s so cold, the Statue of Liberty decided to hold her torch under her robe

5. It’s so cold, Rod Blagojevich was spotted with his hands in his own pockets

4. It’s so cold, all Sarah Palin could see from Alaska was more snow

3. It’s so cold, people are hanging around the set of The View just for the artificial warmth

2. It’s so cold, a temperature was actually recorded that was colder than the shoulder Tiger Woods’s wife is giving him

1. It’s so cold, Al Gore came out in favor of global warming
 

Bob Sullivan’s Top Ten Everything appears every Monday.

Tags: Bob Sullivan's top ten everything, ends & odd, environment & nature
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If you asked me what to do with Detroit, my suggestion would probably be to hide funny and/or surprising objects in the rubble, so that future archeologists will get a chuckle while they excavate. I would definitely not have thought of turning it into an enormous urban farm for the same reason I would not like to discover that my girlfriend is washing our dishes in the toilet.
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Tags: environment & nature, politics & government
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