Italian Politician 'Cursed' After Orangutan Remark

Roberto Calderoli, an Italian Senator, apparently said something last year that has gotten him into a whole lot of trouble. It seems the Senator mentioned that the new Italian Integration Minister, Cecile Kyenge, who is Italy's first black minister by the way, reminded him of an orangutan.

I assume that Ms.Kyenge didn't appreciate being compared to a species of the great ape family and she apparently mentioned this to her daddy, Clement Kikoko Kyenge, who is a minister of the religious kind residing in the African Congo.

At his next prayer meeting, Preacher Kyenge said a prayer in which God was asked to free Mr. Calderoli from his evil thoughts. A photo of Mr. Calderoli was then placed before an altar dedicated to the ancestors of the village, and the same request made.

All of a sudden, Senator Calderoli appears to have begun having all sorts of strange things happen to him. According to the Senator, over the past year he's incurred a series of misfortunes including six hospital operations, the death of his mother, two broken fingers and two broken vertebrae, all of which he says prove that he's been cursed by Mr. Kyenge.

To cap his year of bad luck, Mr Calderoli this month tweeted a photo of himself holding a six foot long snake he said he had found and killed at his home in Italy. He apologized to Ms. Kyenge, but that didn't seem to help very much.

Mr. Calderoli also told Oggi magazine that friends from Naples had given him a lucky charm in the shape of a red chili pepper – believed to ward off evil spirits – only for it to mysteriously snap in half a day later. A mystic, he added, "saw a tremendous force active around me."

Mr. Kyenge denies any curse had been placed on Mr. Calderoli. "We are Christians like him, we have forgiven him and our prayer was only meant to encourage him to make statements befitting his role," he said.

Mr. Kyenge said that if Mr. Calderoli had been sincere in the apology he made to his daughter after the orangutan remark, the case was closed. If, however, Mr. Calderoli had not been contrite, "the ancestors may become nervous," he said.

Ms. Kyenge, who has lived in Italy since 1983, is an Italian citizen and now a European MP, dismissed all talk of curses. "I ask myself what religion Mr. Calderoli practises," she said. "I am Catholic and therefore do not believe in many other practises and rites and I don't agree with his statements, which I consider irreligious."

Senator Calderoli is now facing prosecution for his remarks. Perhaps he owes Ms. Kyenge a more sincere apology?

Solar Powered Death Ray Frying California Birds

There's a solar plant out in California that generates electricity a little closer to the old fashioned way, by using mirrors to concentrate sunlight on water towers - the water boils and turns turbines and voilà, electricity! It works pretty well too, except for one tiny thing. It fries birds in the process.

Federal investigators have requested that BrightSource, owner of these thermal solar plants, halt the construction of any more of the plants until their impact on wildlife has been investigated a little further. Unlike most other solar plants that use solar panels, the one in Ivanpah has hundreds of thousands of mirrors, each the size of a garage door, and together, they cover about 3,500 acres. Each mirror collects and reflects solar rays, focusing and concentrating solar energy from their entire surfaces upward onto three boiler towers, each looming up to 40 stories high. The solar energy heats the water inside the towers to produce steam, which turns turbines that generate enough electricity for about 140,000 homes. 

It appears that in the process, the concentrated solar energy chars and incinerates the feathers of any birds passing through these death rays. BrightSource estimates about a thousand birds die this way every year, but an environmental group claims the real number is much higher.

Hey, what say we set up a barbecue on their roof and toast some hot dogs & marshmallows? Well, maybe not if we have to watch out for the falling birds ....

Booze & Underwear Delivery Begins in L.A.

Welcome to the future. The future of delivery services. Beginning tomorrow afternoon, in the City of Angels, in the most forward-thinking state of our Union (other than Colorado and Washington), a delivery company will arrive on Los Angeles doorsteps offering to bring you alcohol and underwear at the same time.

The company, Saucey, an alcohol delivery service, has partnered with MeUndies, a Los Angeles-based underwear company, to bring us a week-long promotion where customers can order their desired booty shorts and boxers along with their favorite bourbon and beer.

Yes, get ready for the phone lines to be swamped with orders! The alcohol and undies are being sold in special Sleepover Packs that are going to cost you between $40 and $100, depending on the number of customers who order.

Each pack will include a fresh pair of underwear, socks, a T-shirt, sunglasses, a hangover-fighting vitamin (?) and your choice of alcohol and mixers, according to a report in the Los Angeles Times.

Saucey will start delivering the booze-and-briefs packages at noon, but discerning customers may want to target their orders between 4 and 9 p.m. according to the report since that's when the company plans to have at least some of the Sleepover Packs delivered by underwear models in nothing but their skivvies. Hurrah! Hurrah! ;-}

RIP

Robin Williams

1951 - 2014

More of Our Junk Found in the Oceans

The ocean might look clean to you, except for all that stuff you see floating on top from plastic ducks and nuclear disasters, etc., but what you probably don't know is that the surface is covered with tiny fragments of paint and fiberglass as well. That's the finding from a study that looked for plastic pollution in the uppermost millimeter of ocean done by a laboratory in Korea, and their ocean is connected to ours. The microscopic fragments come from the decks and hulls of boats, and they could pose a threat to zooplankton, an important part of the marine food web.

No, we're not all going to die from this. Well, not yet, anyway. The discovery is “continuing to open our eyes to how many small synthetic particles are in the environment,” says Kara Law, an oceanographer who studies plastic pollution at the Sea Education Association in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and wasn't involved in the study.

The researchers focused on the ocean's microlayer and collected water samples along the southern coast of Korea, up to 16 kilometers offshore. Examining the samples in the lab, the researchers found well-known kinds of plastics: polyethylene, polypropylene, and expanded polystyrene. But, to their surprise, these made up just 4% of the particles.

Eighty-one percent of the synthetic particles in the microlayer consisted of alkyds, a binder in paints. Another 11% were polyester resins used in paint and fiberglass. On average, a liter of water from the microlayer contained 195 particles—this concentration is 10 to 100 times higher than microplastic particles in water collected by other methods.

The paint and fiberglass particles are coming from the more than 17,000 small fishing boats that ply these waters, the researchers determined. Under the microscope, the fragments were dark green and dark blue, typical colors for the boats. In addition, a laboratory test using infrared spectroscopy matched the particles with paint chips that the researchers collected from local shipyards. Alkyd paints are used above water, so these coatings (and the fiberglass) end up in the water after being abraded by nets, ropes, or anchors, or when the boats are scraped and repainted.

The researchers now plan to study the metals and organic chemicals on the paint particles and determine whether they can harm marine life.

U.S. Exports Oil First Time in 40 Years

For the first time in 40 years the U.S. is exporting oil, effectively ending a half-century ban on selling American oil abroad and opening the door for a radical transformation of the world economy. The BW Zambesi, a Singaporean tanker, set sail from Texas headed for South Korea late Wednesday night, carrying some $40 million worth of American crude oil.

Who cares, right? Well, it's a big, big thing. The U.S. has not exported crude since the 1970s, when an embargo led by the Arab members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries pushed gasoline prices to unsustainable levels. The embargo prompted Congress to pass a law forbidding the overseas sale of American oil. The ban was instituted at a time when U.S. oil production was in steep decline. But now, the opposite is true.

New technologies have made it possible to extract oil from places where nobody would have thought to look in the 1970s. Hydraulic fracturing, or ‘fracking,’ injects water and chemicals into the ground at very high pressures, literarily extracting oil and natural gas from rocks. Of course it creates earthquakes in Oklahoma, Ohio and everywhere else, but money talks and the oil guys got there first, OK?

This increase of production could have huge political consequences, as the U.S. becomes less and less dependent on foreign oil and gas, much of which comes from volatile regions where America has few friends — think of Iran, Venezuela, and Russia. But it could also pose big problems. The environmental consequences of fracking are not clear (except for the folks in Oklahoma, Ohio and everywhere else where homes are disappearing into the ground). What's more, the sudden surplus of oil could also hurt the U.S. economy. In what may be the ultimate first world problem, having too much oil can push prices so low that drilling for it is simply not worth it anymore.