Happy Canada Day! Almost typed Canada Dry, whom we all know makes the best ginger ale. Here’s Living on Video from one of my favorite 80s bands, the Quebecois Trans X. Lyrics suggest they invented the internet, too.

Don’t you hate it when news outfits won’t just report the, uh, news and even the better ones succumb to the cute wordplay angle or feel that they have to cast current American events in a larger political light? For the love of information, does everything have to be couched in re-electability, i.e. how a given political figure’s reaction to a given issue positions them on the Upcoming Elections Risk boardgame?

Like today’s NPR Morning Edition segment on Bobby Jindal: Oil Spill Crisis Puts Jindal Back On Center Stage.  I think they played “again a rising star” three times in the lead-up. And they even put up the Messiah Bobby picture on the web edition.

Let’s see how the governor has really been doing, shall we?

NYTimes | Louisiana Wants U.S. Help, and Its Own Way

[I]nterviews with more than two dozen state and federal officials and experts suggest that Louisiana, from the earliest days of the spill in the Gulf of Mexico, has often disregarded its own plans and experts in favor of large-scale proposals that many say would probably have had limited effectiveness and could have even hampered the response.

CBS | Gulf Coast Governors Leaving National Guard Idle

But nearly two months after the governor requested – and the Department of Defense approved the use of 6,000 Louisiana National Guard troops – only a fraction – 1,053 – have actually been deployed by Jindal to fight the spill.

Businessweek | La. gov’s budget vetoes hit his political foes

Coastal parish lawmakers argued local communities can’t afford to float [$24.9 million] for response efforts and wait for reimbursement.

“The local governments are crying for financial help, and apparently the governor’s decided to let them go cry to BP and let the chips fall where they may,” [Louisiana House Speaker Jim] Tucker said Monday.

Sensuous Curmudgeon | As the Gulf Gushes, Jindal & Creationists Pray

The only thing that surprises us is how such a misfortune could have occurred at all ” and to Louisiana of all places. Surely, with the concentrated spiritual power of that state“s creationist population, they should have have been immune to this kind of thing.

Jeffrey with the wrap-up

In other words: Now, you listen here, he’s not the messiah. In fact, he’s a very naughty boy. Now go away!

Not that I don’t care any more. I care too much. It’s why I can’t write and research and collate about it like I did. At least not right now.

With each day’s developments, a blog post like this one goes through my head. Sometimes it gets typed, most of the time it doesn’t.

This also ties in with a problem I’ve had for … well, forever. There is so much to say because, no matter how out of sorts you are and how much this or that depresses you, what’s happening is so much bigger than you are. And then, something like that media-circus congressional hearing happens followed by a godawful TED hipsterthon. One two.

And you stop.

You wonder: Is this it? Then your brain slaps you and says: Of course it’s not. And you wonder again, But what is it?

It’s like a giant reset button in your head was pushed.

And you stop.

And you send more money to the bird washers.

LiveScience

A new study of samples from these more leisurely fault sections has revealed that tiny particles of clay [less than 100 nanometers thick] keep these sections lubricated and less likely to violently shake.

… Some have speculated that fluids facilitate slippage, while others have focused on serpentine ” a greenish material that can chemically react to form talc (the mineral that in loose form is commonly known as talcum powder).

But geologist Ben van der Pluijm and colleagues at the University of Michigan and Germany’s Ernst-Moritz-Arndt Universität Institut für Geographie und Geologie found that neither of these was the explanation.

Cool. Nanocoating as lubricant.

Also cool: SAFOD or the San Andreas Fault Observatory at Depth.

Came very close to attending graduate school at Michigan to work with van der Pluijm, co-author with my undergraduate advisor, Stephen Marshak, of Earth Structure – An Introduction to Structural Geology and Tectonics. Good thing I didn’t or I’d have been a … no, don’t say it … Wolverine.