There’s so much I could have written about. From the local, much heralded, 17 different types of food carts that were due in Vancouver (only 2 of 17 are ready http://www.cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia/story/2010/07/30/bc-vancouver-food-carts-not-ready.html), to the incredibly humours parody of Jay z’s song New York entitled Newport embedded below:
On the other end of the spectrum, there’s the ever so distressing oil spill in China. It’s a bit of a coincidence that the two largest consumers of oil have both had their country’s largest spill in history and they’ve had them almost back to back. I posted the 2 above “stories” to put things in perspective. One’s important to us on a local level, we all want good food; variety is long overdue and hotdogs are kind of boring. The Welsh, apparently have an excellent sense of humour. But I’m really, truly at a loss for words as to how distressing this oil spill is in Dailan, China. The stark contrast between how it’s cleaned up in the Gulf of Mexico vs. China. Here (in North America) the Coast Guard has cutters that go out with long booms, vacuums and barges and it’s all very scientific. The workers on these boats are clad head to toe in plastic suits with the wrists and ankle’s duct taped closed so no oil can get in and they wear masks. In China? Not so much.
The local fisherman that collect the oil are trying to save their shellfish farms and their beaches. They wear only their underwear and they wade out into the oil slicks to collect it, often times, by hand. Sometimes they have the benefit of cutting buckets in half to use as makeshift shovels to scoop the oil they’ve loaded loosely onto their boats into yet more buckets to haul up by crane and by hand to the shore. Once on shore, they load the buckets onto flat-bed trucks and the government “pays” (there are rumours that collection is a challenge) them for each bucket.
I really have no words to describe it. The BBC went to take a look, it’s pretty mind-boggling.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-10818270 for a look at the compelling video.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-10819987 and here’s a look at the accompanying story.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, take a look at Indonesia’s sale of the rarest tortoise in the world with less than 200 known to be in the wild. It doesn’t matter though, for $1700 you can take one home. It’s sickening.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-10815983
But wait, there’s more! Here’s an article posted today, also at the BBC, about how Chinese Emergency teams are looking for barrels of “missing” chemicals. I know where 3000 are. In the river. Yuck!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-10815376
I hope you enjoyed the Welsh parody, because that’s all the good news that seems to be out there at the moment. 😦
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