Over the weekend, an anonymous email landed in my inbox. That’s not especially unusual: I subscribe to several community newsletters, and most emails arrive without the addy of the original sender.

Anyway, this one was talking about the deadly toxicity of the oil from the BP leak and about the fact that the U.S. military is preparing for massive evacuation of the Gulf Coast. He (or she) concluded the email by saying something to the effect of, “I know this sounds crazy, but my source on this is really, really good.”

Now, I may be crazy myself, but I’m not so completely out to lunch that I can’t spot a rumor born of mass hysteria. It often happens in the face of major disasters — we saw it after Katrina, with reports of carjackings and muggings and breakins amid the normally peaceful suburbs of Baton Rouge and Lafayette and the other places New Orleanians fled to. But as stressed out as we were then, we could see that such rumors were utter fabrications.

Still, just because I can spot them doesn’t mean I can shrug them off so easily. Things are tense here now, and they’re getting more so, and honestly, the last thing we need is a bunch of Cassandras running around, screaming in our ears. I can overlook the message, but shouting and mob mentality makes me want to cut a bitch.

Thankfully, Glenn had the good sense to share a link to American Zombie, which shed a little more light on the situation. Apparently, the whole thing started with a poorly researched, dodgily sourced, sloppily written article in the Washington Post (yes, that’s redundant). The author, Joel Achenbach, set the ball rolling by reveling in extreme case scenarios:

Week by week, the truth of this disaster has drifted toward the stamping ground of the alarmists.

The most disturbing of the worst-case scenarios, one that is unsubstantiated but is driving much of the blog discussion, is that the Deepwater Horizon well has been so badly damaged that it has spawned multiple leaks from the seafloor, making containment impossible and a long-term solution much more complicated.

Video from a robotic submersible, which is making the rounds online, shows something puffing from the seafloor. Some think it’s oil. Or maybe — look again — it’s just the silt blowing in response to the forward motion of the submersible.

More trouble: A tropical wave has formed in the Caribbean and could conceivably blow through the gulf.

“We’re going to have to evacuate the gulf states,” said Matt Simmons*, founder of Simmons and Co., an oil investment firm and, since the April 20 blowout, the unflagging source of end-of-the-world predictions. “Can you imagine evacuating 20 million people? . . . This story is 80 times worse than I thought.”

To which I say: FUCKTARDS.

American Zombie’s response is a little more nuanced:

And how is that a financial trader who is known for promoting the highly contended notion of “Peak Oil” (basically states the planet’s oil needs have now surpassed it’s capacity) knows what the emergency preparedness plan is for the entire Gulf Coast?  If the story is “80 times worse” than he thought, I’d like to know who wrote that story for him and informed him of DHS’s game plan.  If the WaPo is breaking this news via a financial oil trader, buried seven paragraphs into the story, I’m not only questioning their integrity I’m questioning their business acumen.  If this claim is true, it should be a headline on every news resource on the planet and the WaPo may have just landed the scoop of the century.

To make matters worse the very next paragraph quotes Coast Guard Admiral, and point man for the disaster, Thad Allen, talking about the integrity of the wellhead.  Achenbach just prints the entire Gulf Coast will have to be evacuated in the wake of a tropical event, then instead of confirming that claim with Allen, he shifts the story to the integrity of the wellhead and the efforts on drilling the relief well.

Bottom line: I can handle realism, I can even handle pessimism, but I swear on my my collection of science fiction first-editions, I’ve nearly had it with the alarmists.

*Naturally, survivalists and Unibomber-types just eat Simmons up with a spoon.

Bitches be hatin’:

Advertising Agency: AlmapBBDO, Sao Paulo, Brazil
Chief Creative Officer: Marcello Serpa
Executive Creative Director: Marcello Serpa
Creative Directors: Luiz Sanches, Dulcidio Caldeira
Art Directors: Marcos Medeiros, Danilo Boer
Copywriter: André Kassu
Illustrator: Marcos Kotlhar
Typographer: José Roberto Bezerra
Planner: Cintia Gonçalves
Advertiser’s Supervisor: Antonio Camarotti
Account Supervisors: Felipe Bartholomeu, Camila Figueiredo

The past few weeks, I’ve wondered what, if anything, other major oil companies are doing to address BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster. Have they been asked to help? Are they providing supplies or manpower to plug the leak or drill a relief well? Have they encouraged their employees to volunteer for cleanup efforts along the coast?

So far, it’s looked as if most were laying low, trying to fly under the radar and avoid the wave of distrust that’s been directed at the oil industry. But if we’ve learned anything from, say, Toyota’s recent recall troubles, we know that companies can profit from their competitors’ misfortunes — the trick, of course, is not looking like Mr. Schadenfreude while doing so.

Chevron has mostly avoided public comment, although the company’s CEO, John Watson, did manage to throw BP under the bus during last week’s congressional hearings when he said that the Deepwater Horizon disaster was “preventable”*. More to the point: “The expectation we share with the American people (that) the energy that we need will be produced safely and reliably … did not happen here.” That’s a little shady, but we’ve seen worse. And of course, testimony broadcast on C-SPAN isn’t quite the same as a national commercial.

Speaking of national commercials, this Royal Dutch/Shell ad jumped into rotation a couple of weeks ago. It doesn’t mention BP by name, but it certainly avoids mention of oil and focuses on clean energy:

Shell’s brand manager says that the campaign has been in the works for almost a year — and I have no reason to doubt her. I mean, it doesn’t exactly look like the sort of thing a major corporation could conceive, shoot, edit, plan, and distribute in the space of two months. However, I would like to know if any last-minute changes were made to the ad copy or the video editing to finesse the message. Hell, for all I know it could’ve started as a commercial about oil drilling in the Pacific.

ExxonMobil has taken a different approach: Ken Cohen, the company’s vice president of public and governmental affairs (i.e. the man behind ExxonMobil’s army of lobbyists), has launched a blog called ExxonMobil Perspectives. He’s gone to great lengths pointing out that ExxonMobil feels the pain of BP, its employees, and Gulf Coast residents, but in his first real post, Cohen also says that the disaster could’ve been prevented if BP hadn’t been so sloppy:

ExxonMobil and others have, over the course of many years, developed and implemented procedures and equipment that have proved very effective in safely managing our offshore wells. What we do know is that when you properly design wells for the range of risk anticipated; follow established procedures; build in layers of redundancy; properly inspect and maintain equipment; train operators; conduct tests and drills; and focus on safe operations and risk management, tragic incidents like the one in the Gulf of Mexico today should not occur.

And how, you ask, does ExxonMobil have the balls to talk about spills and cleanups when half the company is responsible for the second-biggest oil disaster in U.S. history? Simple: because they learned so much from the Valdez that it will never, ever happen again. Ever. Which is good, because the Valdez and the brand damage it caused was in some small part responsible for the ExxonMobil merger, and if ExxonMobil had another problem and had to merge with someone else, I don’t think the name would fit on business cards.

Oh, in case you’re wondering, ConocoPhillips CEO James Mulva also bashed BP in front of Congress, but at least he had the guts to say that more regulation would be a good thing. Whether he believes that, however…

As for the 46 other oil giants, I couldn’t say. Maybe someone should place a call to Iran or Iraq or Venezuela or…oh, right. Nevermind.

*Presumably, Shell would’ve avoided BP’s problems by using its disaster response plan — you know, the carbon copy of the response plan that’s employed by every other major U.S. oil company, which seems to have been drafted by some secretary at the White House in 2004 and filed away in a vault until last week.

Some of my friends are throwing a benefit tonight for performance artist Antonio Garza. The guy — whose cojones are clearly bigger than my own — plans to ride his bike through the Arizona desert next month as part of a rolling one-man show that protests Arizona’s strict new immigration laws.

The benefit kicks off at 8pm with complimentary jambalaya tacos (yes, I think that’s “jambalaya tacos”) and beer, and the suggested donation is a wee $10. If you’re not already planning to come to our show — and of course, you’ve already seen it, right? — I highly recommend this one. Here’s the skinny.

In July, Antonio Garza will travel through the blazing Arizona heat on bicycle with his one-man show “Men in Uniform” to tell Arizonans what it is like to grow up hassled by authorities who did not think he looked American enough. His idea? Turn up the heat on Arizona’s new law, SB1070, which makes it legal for police to demand “documents” of anybody they think might be an illegal immigrant.

Antonio first performed “Men in Uniform” at the 2008 New Orleans Fringe Festival. The Fringe Alternative Theater Incubator (FATI) is now helping Antonio take it on the road by cosponsoring a fundraiser, 8 pm, June 25 at the Shadowbox Theater, 2400 St. Claude Ave, to show support for his ride from Phoenix into the Arizona hinterlands to perform wherever he can – at cafes, bars or churches. Doors open at 8 pm with free all-you-can-eat-and-drink jambalaya tacos and beer, and at 9 pm Garza will present a special performance of “Men in Uniform”. Suggested donation of $10 will help Garza cover the costs of bike tires and power bars to fuel his ride.

For more information, please visit http://www.nofringe.org/antoniogarza.html or contact Antonio Garza at antoniogarza@gmail.com 504-915-3539.

Can’t make the fundraiser? Send a friend in your place and support Antonio’s ride with an online donation (all donations will go directly to his project)!

And for those who came here hoping for a glimpse of cute servicemen, here’s one sans uniform:

One year ago, I was sitting quietly in my office when a Skype window popped up:

“HOLY SHIT. MICHAEL JACKSON IS DEAD.”

That came from my friend Marty, who probably should’ve been doing more business-y things than cruising TMZ, but I was enjoying a YouTube video of kittens at the time, so I wasn’t in a position to point fingers.

Naturally, I did some due diligence and scoped out other news sites to verify the MJ story, but TMZ was so far ahead of the game that CNN and NYTimes hadn’t even touched it. It took several more hours before everyone came onboard and reached the conclusion that Jackson had died, and possibly ODed.

Earlier this week, Awkward Boners opted to pay tribute to the erstwhile King of Pop on the first anniversary of his death. And since I’m not much of a Jackson fan (apart from maybe “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough”, a title that would probably read “don stop til u git enuf” if it were written today), I figured it’s as fitting as any:

BP PLC and other big oil companies based their plans for responding to a big oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico on U.S. government projections that gave very low odds of oil hitting shore, even in the case of a spill much larger than the current one.

The government models, which oil companies are required to use but have not been updated since 2004, assumed that most of the oil would rapidly evaporate or get broken up by waves or weather. In the weeks since the Deepwater Horizon caught fire and sank, real life has proven these models, prepared by the Interior Department’s Mineral Management Service, wrong.

[full story at WSJ]

In other news, apparently neither the Wall Street Journal nor NOAA think Louisiana’s coastline has been affected by the oil leak:

I know it’s last minute, but for the Vodou fans I thought I should mention that tonight is the annual St. John’s Eve Headwashing Ceremony on Bayou St. John. If you’re a cutter, or an epileptic, or a tailor, or if you’re positively terrified of hail, you might want to head on over. Alternately, you can catch the repeat performance tomorrow at the International House Hotel. Details below.

St John’s Eve Headwashing Ceremony
Date: Wednesday, June 23, 2010
Time: 7:00pm – 10:30pm
Location: Footbridge over Bayou St John

Sallie Ann Glassman and La Source Ancienne Ounfo celebrate St. John’s Eve with their annual Headwashing Ceremony (form of Vodou baptism) dedicated to Marie Laveau. The ceremony will take place on the footbridge over Bayou St. John, near Cabrini High School. Attendees should:

• Wear all white, and bring a white scarf or rag for your head. (It will get dirty.)

• Bring an offering for Marie Laveau. She likes flowers, blue and white candles, Creole foods, hair ribbons and hair dressing supplies (she was a hairdresser), Vodou-esque items (dolls, potions, gris-gris bags, etc.), or images of Marie Laveau.

St. John’s Day 2010
The same ceremony will be held Thursday June 24th at 6:00 pm at the International House Hotel.

What would you do if you could travel back in time? Assassinate Marilyn Monroe? Go on a date with Hitler? Obviously. But here’s what I’d do after that: grab all the modern technology I could find, take it to the late 70’s, superficially redesign it all to blend in, start a consumer electronics company to unleash it upon the world, then sit back as I rake in billions, trillions, or even millions of dollars.

I’ve explored that idea in this series by re-imagining four common products from 2010 as if they were designed in 1977: an mp3 player, a laptop, a mobile phone and a handheld video game system. I then created a series of fictitious but stylistically accurate print ads to market them, as well as a handful of abstract posters (you know, just for funsies).

[more at AlexVaranese.com, via Tyler]

[via SocialiteLife]

Dear Crude Boys:

Thank you for your support of the Gulf Coast ecosystem during this trying time. I think it is very important that we Americans stick together right now, even though the cooking oil in which you’re wrestling kind of prevents that from happening.

Surely, the Florida Wild Mammal Association appreciates the money you’ve raised, and surely, the wild mammals of Sam Clam’s Disco appreciate the sight of grown, mostly naked men in lacy underthings wrestling on Visqueen on a Sunday afternoon, so, you know: carry on.

[SFWeekly via Towleroad]