'Vermillion 398' Oil Rig Explodes in Gulf of Mexico

Oh brother. Here we go again! There was an explosion and fire on a rig known as ‘Vermillion 380′ in the Gulf of Mexico. Early reports are that it’s not an active rig. And luckily, no one was killed. The rig is located about 90 miles south of Vermillion Bay, and it is owned by Mariner Energy (out of Houston). And the rig is There’s not a ton of information yet, but here are some links to news stories about the explosion:

• Coast Guard responding to rig fire Gulf of Mexico (nola.com)
• Gulf oil platform explodes, burning off La. coast (yahoo.com)
• Oil rig explodes in Gulf of Mexico (wafb.com)
• Offshore oil rig in Gulf of Mexico explodes: Coast Guard (theglobeandmail.com)
• Another Oil Rig Explodes in the Gulf of Mexico (theweeklyconstitutional.com)

UPDATE (9/2/2010 @ 4:30pm EST): Early reports said that the rig was Vermillion 398, but more recent reports all claim that the explosion and fire was on the Vermillion 380 rig.

'Vermillion 398' Oil Rig Explodes in Gulf of Mexico

It’s about damn time.

July 15, 2010: BP caps the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico

But we’re not out of this mess just yet. Now people are worried that the pressure in the well may cause another leak somewhere else (link). Sheesh.

Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling unit on fire 2010

I’ve been doing some research on the interwebs, and here is the stuff that is really scaring me. A lot of the information I found is alarming. To be clear: I do not know if any of this information is true. Please give this a read. Please feel free to comment with other resources. Let me know if the information in this post is on target. Hopefully, this entire blog post is completely false.

This is why our entire planet should be concerned about the oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico:

1. That’s really deep, dude.
BP was drilling in an area where it is about a mile from the platform to the ocean floor. That means they had to go down 5,000+ ft just to get to the ocean floor. Humans can’t even go down to that depth because of the near-freezing temperature and the pressure.

2. The Russians did it on land. Maybe we should try it in the water.
Once they reached the ocean floor, BP was trying to drill a superdeep well – maybe as deep as the Russian’s Kola SG-3 borehole which reached 40,000ft deep back in 1989. Basically, BP was drilling somewhere in the range of 25,000-30,000ft below the ocean floor. Apparently that is REALLY deep. And from what I can find, drilling to those depths has never been attempted in the Gulf of Mexico.

3. Who needs an anchor anyways?
To make things even more unsafe, the BP Deepwater Horizon platform was a floating platform that was kept in location by a sophisticated GPS system. That means the the BP platform was not even anchored to the ocean floor, and that is not a very stable/safe way to drill for oil in deep waters.

4. Under Pressure
Typical oil pressures (pounds per square inch aka psi) are in the area of 1,000 psi. BP had reached such a depth that they were seeing anywhere from 20,000-70,000 psi from this oil well. Some geologists predict that the psi at such depths would actually be in the range of 80,000-100,000 psi.

5. Epic Fail-Safe Fail
Due to the massive pressures, every one of the fail-safe measures and valves on the BP platform failed. And there is even a rumor that BP was warned beforehand about a warped fail-safe valve by one of their own employees. Regardless, they are fairly certain that nothing could have stopped that oil because the pressures were too high. We simply don’t have anything that can stop that type of pressure.

6. Oil, Volcanoes, and New Theories
Why would BP want to drill so deep? Well, there is a theory that petroleum oil does not come from dinosaur fossils. To the people who subscribe to this theory, they believe oil is actually “abiotic,” which means that it is continually being formed deep within the earth’s crust by some sort of chemical process. (This same theory appears to be a pillar to other theories that say the energy/oil shortage is entirely false. If oil is continually being formed from some chemical reaction involving magma, then all that stuff we hear about oil peaks is completely fabricated. But that is another story altogether, and like most of this post, it could be completely false. BTW, some people think that if they drilled into an area where magma is creating petroleum oil, they could have possibly drilled into a volcano. Oh good.)

7.  Don’t Hold Your Breath
Oil isn’t the only thing coming out of that well. It turns out that other stuff comes out with the oil. Specifically, we are talking about Hydrogen Sulfide, Benzene and Methylene Chloride. (link)

• The concentration threshold for people to experience physical symptoms from hydrogen sulfide is about 5 to 10 parts per billion. But as recently as last Thursday, the EPA measured levels at 1,000 ppb. The highest levels of airborne hydrogen sulfide measured so far were on May 3, at 1,192 ppb.
• Testing data also shows levels of volatile organic chemicals that far exceed Louisiana’s own ambient air standards. VOCs cause acute physical health symptoms including eye, skin and respiratory irritation as well as headaches, dizziness, weakness, nausea and confusion.
• Louisiana’s ambient air standard for the VOC benzene, for example, is 3.76 ppb, while its standard for methylene chloride is 61.25 ppb. Long-term exposure to airborne benzene has been linked to cancer, while the EPA considers methylene chloride a probable carcinogen.
• The one we should really worry about is benzene. Acceptable levels of Benzene are 0-4 ppb, but some people are reporting Benzene levels near the Gulf of Mexico in the range of 3,000-4,000 ppb.

8. What “they” are not telling us
According to some people, the levels of those 3 chemicals in particular will cause a massive increase in sicknesses, cancers and deaths for people in the southeastern United States. Of course, the EPA is not reporting on the levels of these chemicals in the air right now. Why would they? It would probably create a panic.

9. Nuclear Bombs Fix Everything
If BP did get to those superdeep depths of 30,000+ ft… Because the pressure is so high down there, humans don’t really have anything that can seal that well. There is talk of using a nuclear device to “fix” the problem, but many people claim that would only make everything worse, as it is a last-ditch effort that is not a certain fix. (That kinda reminds me of the movie Independence Day when the government decides to use a nuclear weapon on the ship over Houston. It didn’t work, and it blew up the entire city.)

10. Years and Years and Years
The publicized estimates (in the media) of how much oil is leaking every day are dramatically conservative. Again, many think this is to avoid a panic. The actual amounts could be in the vicinity of 4 million gallons per day. This superdeep oil well could possess over 1 trillion gallons. If we can’t stop the leak – this oil well could be spewing oil for years and years and years. In that worst case scenario:

• The oil would eventually kill the entire Gulf of Mexico. And then it would continue spreading to other oceans.
• The oil would reach Europe in a few years.
• That amount of oil floating on the surface of the Atlantic Ocean would cause all sorts of massive problems. For example: If lightning struck the ocean’s surface, it could spark an oil fire. That fire would eat up a lot of the oxygen in our atmosphere. Obviously, that scenario is problematic for several reasons.

11. Fissures don’t sound good at all
What else? There are things called “sea floor fissures” (i.e. fountains), where oil often seeps up through the ocean floor into the world’s oceans. According to some news articles, this happens naturally from time to time, and minor amounts of oil can be seen seeping on the ocean floor in certain places around the world. However, right now in the Gulf, they are starting to see fissures that are leaking alarming amounts of oil up to 5 miles away from the BP well (link). This is very problematic, and it could point to something even more devastating than the blownout BP well. If the casing was damaged below the sea floor, “basically, you‘ve got uncontrolled [oil] flow to the sea floor. And that is the doomsday scenario.” (link)

Did I miss anything? Let me know.

PS. The information I listed in this post comes from a variety of websites. A lot of this information fits into a doomsday scenario. And then some of it is textbook conspiracy theory. Regardless, there is something really bad going on down in the Gulf of Mexico. It could be something that we really have no way to stop. I hope and pray that we find a way to get ourselves out of this mess. It’s bigger than BP. It’s bigger than us. If even a few points in this post are true, we are going to need a miracle.

PS2. Here are some other articles and sites that have information about drilling:

• Nigeria’s agony dwarfs the Gulf oil spill (Guardian.co.uk)
• 20,000 Leaks Under the Sea (Slate.com)

UPDATE:

• Scientists: Oil leaking up to 2.52M gallons daily (SFGate.com)

As if our world needs any more disasters after the Haiti earthquake, it seems that there was a massive earthquake in Okinawa, Japan today. The epicenter is the Ryukyu Islands, about 50 miles off Naha, in Okinawa. Check out the USGS information.

February 26, 2010: Massive Earthquake Strikes Near Okinawa, Japan

Here’s the story from CNN:

A 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck Japan’s Ryukyu Islands early Saturday, the U.S. Geological Survey reported.

The quake was centered about 6 miles (10 km) deep and struck at 5:31 a.m. about 53 miles (85 km) from Okinawa.

From @BreakingNews on Twitter:

First tsunami waves expected on Okinawa Island about 4:05 p.m. ET – NHK

From Breitbart:

TOKYO, Feb. 27 (AP) – (Kyodo)—A strong earthquake jolted Okinawa Prefecture early Saturday morning, the Japan weather agency said.The 5:33 a.m. quake registered lower 5 on the Japanese intensify scale of 7.

The Meteorological Agency issued tsunami warning off the main Okinawa island.

From the BBC:

A tsunami alert has been issued in Japan after a powerful earthquake struck near the Okinawan coast.

The Japan Meteorological Agency gave the strength as 6.9 while the US Geological Survey put it at 7.3.

It struck at 0531 (2031 GMT), 84km (52 miles) east of Naha, on the island of Okinawa, 29km (18 miles) below the seabed, Reuters news agency reports.

There were no immediate reports of casualties or damage in the country, which is often hit by earthquakes.

In 1995, a magnitude-7.2 quake in the port city of Kobe killed 6,400 people.

Mag-7.3 Earthquake Hits Near Okinawa, Japan

From MSNBC:

A magnitude-7.0 earthquake struck off southern Japan early Saturday, and Okinawa’s seashore was evacuated after Japan’s Meteorological Agency issued a tsunami warning.The Japanese agency predicted 3-foot waves following the quake, which hit just east of Okinawa and Ryukyu, south of Japan’s main islands. Tsunami waves also were expected on the islands of Amami and Tokaro.

There were no immediate reports of damage or casualties, and the Tsunami Warning Center in Oahu said waves generated by the earthquake were not expected to be destructive.

Update: @BreakingNews First tsunami waves minor; warnings lifted for all but Okinawa; advisory in effect for several islands

To be clear, I am not a comic book guy. In high school, I read one issue of The Silver Surfer. That is pretty much the extent of my experience with comics. I was, however, a collector of baseball cards, so I do know the excitement involved in collectibles. I always hoped that my Ken Griffey, Jr. rookie card would help me pay for my first car. Or maybe my Jim Kelly autographed football would put me through college. But no. That is not how it works. Well apparently it does not work that way unless you have invested in some extremely rare, near-mint comic books.

In the past few days, there have been two astronomically-priced comic books up for sale. The first was Action Comics No. 1. It was first issued in June 1938, and it was the first appearance of Superman. Someone dished out $1,000,000 for this comic book, which was sold at ComicConnect.com. Don’t look now, but that is 10 million times the comic book’s original price in June 1938!

ComicConnect advertised this sale as a world record price for a comic book. This was the first comic book to ever sell for $1,000,000. Here is Action Comics No. 1 featuring the first appearance of Superman:

Action Comics No. 1: The first appearance of Superman in a comic book (June, 1938)

As it turns out, records are made to be broken. According to a Dallas Observer blog post, a copy of Detective Comics No. 27 sold yesterday for the price of $1,075,500. This comic book is famous because it featured the first appearance of the Batman. And like the Action Comics sale, this issue of Detective Comics sold for over 10 million times the original sales price of $0.10. And to make it even more astounding: the seller picked up this issue 40 years ago for $100. Now that is a hefty return on investment. Simply amazing.

Here is the Detective Comics No. 27 comic book that was sold for $1,075,500 yesterday at Heritage Auction Gallery in Dallas, TX:

Detective Comics No. 27: The first appearance of Batman in a comic book (May, 1939)

Now go forth and keep collecting. Look for deals. Who knows? Maybe in 40 years, you will have a piece that is worth $1 million dollars. Good luck!

"Yo Tiger, you have a great swing and Imma let you finish, but Elin had the best drive of the night! OF THE NIGHT!

By now, you have all heard that Tiger Woods crashed his car into a fire hydrant and a tree last week. And his wife Elin apparently came out of the house to “rescue” him. Yeah, she rescued him by smashing in his rear windshield with a golf club and then pulled him out of the back window.

Me thinks not all is well in Woodsville. Where there is smoke, there is fire. Personally, I think Tiger needs to admit to his alleged affair with Rachel Uchitel. By lying about it, the story is being dragged out over a week’s time frame. Alex Rodriguez admitted to using steroids. The story died. David Letterman admitted to having sex with a coworker. The story died. Tiger should take a lesson from those guys. Their PR people obviously know how this game works. And now with the 911 call, a voicemail and text messages making the news, as well as another woman who is claiming to have had an affair with Tiger, the lie will have to end.

Elin & Tiger Woods pose for a recent picture

I’m still a Tiger Woods fan. Everybody makes mistakes. I can forgive. And I’m glad to see that people can joke about this news. Isn’t it good to be able to laugh a little bit?

• Apparently the police asked Tiger’s wife how many times she hit him. She said “I don’t know exactly… but put me down for a 5.”
• Tiger Woods is so rich that he owns lots of expensive cars. Now he has a hole-in-one.
• What’s the difference between a car and a golf ball? Tiger can drive a ball 400 yards……..
• What were Tiger Woods and his wife doing out at 2:30 in the morning? They went clubbing.
• Tiger Woods crashed into a fire hydrant and a tree. He couldn’t decide between a wood and an iron.
• Phil Mickelson contacted Tiger’s wife to pick up some tips on how to beat Tiger!
• What is the penalty for getting it in the wrong hole? Ask Tiger, he knows.
• Elin’s excuse? She had to play a bad lie.
• We now see that tiger woods drives very well on the fairway but doesn’t fare very well on the driveway.
• What does Tiger have in common with a baby seal? They’ve both been clubbed by a Norwegian.
• Whats the difference between a golf ball and a caddy? Tiger can drive a golf ball.
• Tiger Woods wasn’t seriously injured in the crash, but he’s still below par.
• What was Elin doing out at 2.30 in the morning? Clubbing.
• Why did Tiger Woods crash into a fire hydrant and a tree. He couldn’t decide between a wood or an iron.
• It’s been a tough year for tiger. 2nd time he has been beaten by a nine iron.
• Nike wants to drop their endorsement, apparently Tigers balls go everywhere.
• Apparently, Tiger had a 2:30 Tree Time.
• Did you hear that Tiger is changing his nickname? Yeah, it’s still in the cat family: Cheetah.
• All of this happened because Tiger picked up another birdie.
• Tiger Woods is apparently giving up pro golf. According to him, “My putting is still good, but I keep driving into the trees.”
• The Bitching wedge would have been another solution.

Ken Ober - Host of MTV's Remote Control 1980's Game Show

Well, another part of my childhood is gone. Ken Ober, host of the 1980′s MTV game show, Remote Control , died on Sunday, November 15th. He was 52. It was an awesome game show/party from back when MTV was awesome and original. Adam Sandler and Colin Quinn were regulars on the show. Anyways, I’ve gathered a collection of pictures of Ken Ober and all things Remote Control. It’s like a picture tribute to a man and a show that was the funniest of its day. I hope you enjoy them.

Ken Ober - MTV's Remote Control Game Show Host

MTV Remote Control at Home Board Game

Bonus Round on MTV Remote Control

MTV Remote Control Needs Contestants Flier Ad

Ken Ober on set at MTV's Remote Control Game Show

MTV Remote Control Logo

Nintendo Game: MTV's Remote Control

Nintendo Game Screenshot: MTV's Remote Control

MTV Remote Control T-Shirt

Ken Ober - Host of MTV's Remote Control 1980's Game Show

Ken Ober on MTV's Remote Control (Sing Along With...)

Ken Ober on MTV's Remote Control (Wheel of Jeopardy)

RIP, Ken. We’ll miss you. Thanks for all the great memories.

Controversy: Eva Mendes & Calvin Klein team up for this sexy billboard in SoHo, NYC

Remember this controversial, sexy Calvin Klein billboard? Well, it seems Calvin Klein is at it again in SoHo, NYC. Only this time the billboard ad features superhot Eva Mendes. And. She. Is. Hot. This billboard covers the entire side of a building at the corner of Houston Street and Lafayette Street in SoHo. I’m booking a flight right now. I’ve gotta go see this in real life. And what’s with the controversy? What’s wrong with beautiful people selling products? In fact, what’s wrong with half-naked people using their sexual energy and passion in a billboard advertisement to sell products for a company that makes sexy products? Isn’t that smart marketing and advertising? I guess that’s just the way it is. Like Tupac said.

BTW, this is not the first controversial CK ad featuring Eva Mendes. Previously, Eva was featured in a CK commercial for the Calvin Klein fragrance, Secret Obsession. The ad was pulled in the US, but you can see it here (thanks to the miracle of YouTube).

I don’t know about you, but I like memes. Yesterday’s Balloon Boy news created a great scenario for a meme. And wouldn’t you know it, the Balloon Boy Meme is official. Falcon Henne of Fort Collins, Colorado is a star. And even though we know it was a hoax, the meme is still pretty funny. Enjoy!

I want to believe (Balloon Boy Meme)

Thank you! But your child is in another hot air balloon. (Balloon Boy Meme)

To infinity and beyond! (Balloon Boy Meme)

Go Falcon, Go! (Balloon Boy Meme)

Fresh Prince Theme Song (Balloon Boy Meme)

Fresh Prince Theme Song (Balloon Boy Meme)

Grounded (Balloon Boy Meme)

I just wanted to do hoodrat stuff with my friends. (Balloon Boy Meme)

Yo Balloon Kid, Imma let you finish, but Baby Jessica was the best... (Balloon Boy Meme)

Meghan McCain's boobs (Balloon Boy Meme)

Never Forget 10/15/2009 (Balloon Boy Meme)

Oh hai! (Balloon Boy Meme)

You got punk'd! (Balloon Boy Meme)

Inquisitive Raptor (Balloon Boy Meme)

Twitter Status Update (Balloon Boy Meme)

Disney Pixar - Up (Balloon Boy Meme)

I heard you like balloons, so.... (Balloon Boy Meme)

How about that?!?!! Balloon Boy is a hit!

The Sun is reporting a massive UFO sighting over Moscow last Wednesday, October 7, 2009. They have a picture, and here is the video:

Is it an alien mothership? Or is it another weather phenomenon? Personally, I’m not sure. However, given the fact that this thing does not move, it is very likely that it is some strange result from the cloud cover. I am not a meteorologist, but that explanation makes sense to me. However, even though we have pictures, a video and potentially tens of thousands of people witnessing this event, we need more evidence. Did it fly away rapidly? Did it simply fade away? Did it move at all? Was it visible from all angles?

In some ways, I’m on the fence about finding conclusive proof of extraterrestrial life. Think about this: If we have a sighting that is indisputable proof of alien life, then it is very likely that our time is about to end. Maybe it will be better for us to have these mysterious sightings.