A Noxious Environmental Disaster in Houston
(Permanent Musical Accompaniment To The Last Post Of The Week From The Blog’s Favourite Living Canadian)
Dave Sirota and the people over at IBT/Newsweek have done a great job backgrounding the regulatory neglect and the outright contempt for public safety that led to the explosions and fire that occurred at the flooded Arkema chemical complex in Crosby, Texas. Their latest report is that seven first-responders have sued the French company that owns Arkema.
Those allegations come after Arkema and its lobbying group, the American Chemistry Council, lobbied to kill a federal rule designed to require companies to better coordinate and inform first responders about the toxic compounds at chemical plants. The rule would have taken effect in March. The EPA’s rule, which included a series of other safety provisions, was ultimately delayed to February 2019 by the Trump administration, with the support of top Texas Republican lawmakers - many of whom received large campaign donations from the chemical industry.
Let us leave Arkema to Sirota and his team and move on to a place called Dickinson, a few degrees east of Crosby in Galveston County. Dickinson was briefly famous during the Harvey deluge because one of its nursing homes was inundated and CNN was there. Everybody got out and CNN went off to get more cool videos, but I have a feeling that we’re all going to be hearing about Dickinson again because, down under all that water is another one of those environmental land mines just itching to go off. And, like so many of these land mines, it’s located in an actual neighborhood called Hall Street. From the Texas Department of Environmental Quality:
In 2009, as part of the RI, the TCEQ oversaw cleanup operations involving the excavation of former waste pits containing soil, liquid contaminants, and buried drums. Approximately 9,187 tons of excavated waste were transported and disposed of to an approved landfill. Backfilling with clean soil was completed to fill in the excavations.
Somewhere, beneath the waves, there lies buried a smorgasbord of noxious and poisonous goo. Also down there, I suspect, are about 20 Pulitzer Prizes. This story is not going away. Nor will the story of Irma, or Jose, or Katia, or...
I did not realize that Friday was the anniversary of the first airing of Star Trek. As should be obvious by now, my fandom extends only a bit beyond what has become known as TOS into what has become known as TNG. The rest of the shows, except for this intriguing new one that CBS is running on its boutique channel, I’ll leave to the younger crowd.
I like how they’ve managed to spiff up the FX on the old episodes, although I am truly nostalgic for the original cheesiness of it all. (What would the Trek be without a badly painted Talosian sky?) In honor of the anniversary, here are my three favorite eps of the ol’ Tos. I’m afraid they’re fairly conventional.
1) City On The Edge of Forever.
2) The Trouble With Tribbles.
3) Requiem For Methuselah.
I’ll grant that the third one is reasonably obscure, but I like the idea of one guy being all those famous people, although why he was Brahms and not Beethoven, or Little Richard for that matter, I never could quite determine.
I have to give TNG credit for coming up with the two best villains: the Borg and Q. (Q occasionally gets a little Squire of Gothos for my taste, but John de Lancie is a real hoot.) The worst villain is now and has always been Landru, and the Red Hour during Return of the Archons is the most hilariously bad scene in the history of American network television.
In a related story, Sirius/XM’s Beatles Channel ran a poll of the 100 most beloved songs by the Fabs and spent Labor Day weekend playing the final list on a show hosted by Peter Asher, half of Peter and Gordon and onetime near-brother-in-law of Paul McCartney. "A Day In The Life" was the top choice, and I have no real objection since I get more enthralled by the sheer audacity of that piece of music every time I hear it.
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But one of the standing rules in the shebeen is that, except for "Revolution No. 9," there is no wrong answer to the question, “What is your favorite Beatles song?” Some people are big fans of the chunky acoustic Beatles. Other people swear by the psychedelic Beatles. I have a real sweet-tooth for the cuts that show what a kickass bar-band they must have been doing 18 sets a night on uppers seven nights a week in Hamburg. All of these genres are well represented on the list. My own favorite - "Paperback Writer" - checked in at 43. I don’t care that it came in 14 places behind the goopy "The Long and Winding Road." The way McCartney zooms Entwistlishly on the bass still makes me smile.
From Kansas City came some chortling about the unexpected result of Thursday night’s football game. An investigation by shebeen personnel revealed that the source was the blog’s official musical archivist, the great and powerful Oz, who earlier sent along this terrifically goofy cover of Rainy Day Women, #12 and #35, which nobody ever confused with the Missa Solemnis in the first place. Alex Smith brightened up the Oz’s week and that makes me an Alex Smith fan for a day at least. My only concern is that New England’s next opponent is the New Orleans Saints, and that Drew Brees may watch the game films from Thursday night and collapse in helpless laughter. The injury to Dont’a Hightower is a killer for the New England defense. Also, this alert from Massachusetts state officials: Boston sports radio has been declared an environmental hazard for the next 10 days.
Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: “The Millionnaires’ Holiday” (Combustible Edison) - Yeah, I still pretty much love New Orleans.
Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: This is the 55th anniversary of Trinidad and Tobago Independence Day. Since the folks down there are a trifle too busy to celebrate, here’s a clip from 1929 in which a Hindu temple is dedicated in Trinidad, or it might be the celebration of a Muslim holiday. Pathe seems unclear on this, the imperial mind at work. History is so cool.
There were some serious shenanigans going on in the House Ways and Means Committee on Friday. Congressman Bill Pascrell, Democrat of New Jersey, who has been tilting at the windmill of the president*’s unreleased tax returns from hell to breakfast, tried again, arguing that the upcoming debate on tax “reform” presents the president* with a perfect opportunity to release those fabled 1040s. From NBC News:
Pascrell, who’s measure demanded Trump’s personal and business returns, argued, “How can we debate tax reform proposals without seeing the president’s tax returns? […] Congress has the authority and the duty to obtain and review President Trump’s tax returns to ensure there are no potential conflicts of interest in the tax policies he is proposing.” This, evidently, did not prove persuasive. The Ways and Means Committee voted 21 to 14 to reject the New Jersey Democrat’s motion, which would’ve directed the Treasury Department to provide the documents to Congress, with literally zero Republicans breaking ranks.
We are never going to see these things unless Bob Mueller pins them to a lamp-post on Louisiana Avenue some morning.
The ever-incompetent Betsy (Grizzly) DeVos made some noise this week when she announced that she was going to roll back some of the Title IX regulations put in place by the last administration on the issue of sexual assaults on campus. I have to admit. It has been my experience that colleges and universities are really lousy at putting together disciplinary institutions. (I watched a great kid nearly get ground up by this process in his senior year.) And the “war” on drugs has made me suspicious of any jerry-rigged legal proceeding that considers due process and the privatization of the ability to abridge the Bill of Rights. That said, DeVos is so toweringly incompetent, and her half-baked cultural conservatism so indigestible, that it’s hard to see her announcement as anything more than the devaluation of rape victims on campus. She will botch this, and she will botch this in very much the wrong direction.
After scoffing at hurricane warnings all week, Rush Limbaugh apparently evacuated. He left his house in Florida, too.
Is it a good day for dinosaur news, L.A. Times? It’s always a good day for dinosaur news!
Lescaze discovered that a huge amount of work created behind the Iron Curtain in Soviet Russia had never been reproduced or professionally photographed. This led her to one of her favorite artists in the book, Konstantin Konstantinovich Flyorov. She came to love his work because he used “extremely audacious shades of marigold and saffron, and the scientific aspect seemed to be an afterthought.”
Of course it was, because dinosaurs lived then to make us happy now.
The Committee has a terrible jones for the classics, having learned to read out of an old textbook entitled, Myths and Their Meaning. Anybody who drops a little erudition into the boiling pot of comment stew naturally gets a leg up. So it is with this week’s Top Commenter Of The Week, Top Commenter Bob Brault, who was moved to philosophy by the post about the fantastical “coup” being raised against the Speaker of the House.
As Erasmus told us, “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” And also, "I am No-man" said Ulysses to the cyclops, Polyphemus. And somewhere on the road, John Boehner is filled with joie de vivre.
Here are 74.35 Beckhams to enjoy while you eat your lotus, Bob.
I’ll be back on Monday with what I am sure will be some desperate Trump Reaches Out gobshitery from the usual suspects. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snakeline, or I’m going to have some Russian draw you with really big teeth.
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