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macho and girlie pizza Friday, May 7 2010
Today the weather took a turn for the rainy, which suddenly made our lawn green again after having taken on the olive-tan hue of dead grass (because of the sheer mass of grass that had to be cut in yesterday's suburbia conformance effort).
Tonight was pizza night and so Gretchen went beyond the call of duty, making not one but two pizzas: a girlie one with vegan ricotta and olives and a bigger tough-guy macho one featuring pickled jalapeños and vegan sausage. They both had mushrooms and vegan cheese, but she only sprinkled a tiny amount on mine. I loved cheese back when I ate it, but I've generally found the vegan substitutes to be unsatisfactory. Instead of learning to like them, I've gradually come to like cheeseless pizza instead. This news would horrify the person I was back in college, when I used to look with pity upon the sad sad protovegans and their cheeseless pizzas on Harkness pizza night. Then again, those pizzas were kind of sad even when they had cheese on them (at least until Miranda took over as pizza cook and started sneaking white flour stolen from other co-ops into the crust recipe).
Regarding that oil spill gradually swelling in the Gulf of Mexico around an exploded exploratory drilling platform, does anyone think we'll see the footage that was shot for Extreme Engineering (assuming there was such footage) now that there are eleven dead humans and over ten billion dollars in ecological damage? That particular show likes to build up tension about the possibilities of disaster if, say, the wind should blow too strong or ocean currents should get too strong. But the possibility of such disasters never seems to interfere with a happy outcome. That could all change if just once we could see a show whose ending is a Chernobyl-scale disaster.
On Facebook and the Web generally, there is all manner of viral paragraph-passing about how best to clean up the spill. The latest I've seen focused on human and animal hair. But that presupposes the existence of an enormous amount of such hair, which I doubt. When it comes to generating products in quantity, it's always best to look as low as possible on the food chain, since that's where the pyramid is widest. (Yes, this mixes metaphors; but "food pyramid" means something unrelated.) Meanwhile my father is all worked up about getting the word out that hay and straw be used to soak up the spill. It's unusual to read him writing with such certainty about an engineering fix for an environmental problem, but perhaps he is on to something. As for me, I'm curious why the military doesn't just explode a huge bomb next to the leaking bore hole, which would seal it nearly as well as the strata was sealed before the hole was bored in the first place.
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