Oil In The Gulf

When the government first said that "80% of the oil in the Gulf is gone" my first thought was, "Who stole it?" My second thought was to check Craigslist for government listings advertising the Brooklyn Bridge for sale.

Then I saw the neat pie chart published by somebody that purported to be part of our government. The smallest slice, the one that always went to the whiny little kid who didn’t do his chores, was labeled “still there.” A big chunk was listed as “evaporated,” which seemed unlikely. That gunk that you can’t even wash off of your hands with gasoline evaporates, does it? Another big chunk was labeled as “recovered.” Right.

The one that totally baffled me was that a sizeable slice, included in the 80% of the oil which is “gone,” was labeled as “dissolved.” Now, I learned way back in high school (yes, it was known even in those days) that if you dump a bunch of stuff in water and it dissolves, it is not gone from the damned water. It is dissolved within the water. You can’t dissolve poison in a drink and tell somebody that it’s safe to drink. “It’s okay, the arsenic is all dissolved, it won’t kill you.” What, only undissolved arsenic will kill you?

The fish from the Gulf are completely safe to eat because they themselves have not been eating any solid oil; they have only been eating dissolved oil. Well, that’s okay then, chow down. You chow down, I’m eating steak.