Earthly concerns

I hate to sound like a doomsday alarmist here, but is there a chance the earth will deflate if we don’t cap the Deepwater Horizon soon?


Really, I can’t think of anything that gets punctured and begins ceaselessly gushing vital fluids that doesn’t go vvvfffftt.

It happens with gunshot victims, faulty waterbeds and certainly with balloons.

Understand, I don’t think the earth is going pop. That’s silly.

My fear is it’s going to scoot merrily around the solar system the way balloons do when you blow one up to near capacity and just let the thing go. What follows is about .8 seconds of magnificent chaos.

That would, of course, be cataclysmic if it happened to earth, but no one can dispute it would be great fun to watch from some safe moon perch.

I look to inner Earth to solve many of man’s problems, not create more of them.

Really, space isn’t the final frontier. Been there. Done that.

But how much do we know about the enormous mass just beneath our feet? It’s mostly scientific speculation. No one’s seen it. There’s no spelunking equivalent to Lewis & Clark who’ve boldly gone and explored more than a couple thousand feet or so.

Who knew there was so much oil? The gulf catastrophe is the result of a break in a pipe that is a mere 6.625 inches wide. Yet 800,000 gallons a day are spewing into the gulf. There’s no end in sight.

And there are thousands of wells just like it in the gulf alone

It’s like some pimply kid popped one zit and the thing turned into a disgusting geyser no one can stop -- and, boy, does that example bring back memories. It happened to me every year the day before it was customary to start asking for prom dates.

Just how much oil is down there?

And what else is down there?

I’ve heard that there is only enough oil to last another 120 years or so, but it seems like there’s enough oil to last until man renders the planet uninhabitable, something we’re on pace to achieve in about 15 years.

Don’t get me wrong. When it comes to advocating alternative fuels, the Jolly Green Giant isn’t as green as me (or as jolly).

Our addiction to oil is poisoning the planet and makes a folly of any sensible U.S. foreign policy. It’s the culprit behind the melting polar caps and rising oceans.

Here, again, I look to the earth for a solution. I’ve always believed there has to be some kind of undiscovered drain in each of the oceans.

Fundamentalists and atheists can agree that no one in a world that makes any sense would create bodies of water as enormous as oceans without including some sort of drain.

I figure we’ll find it just as the waters start to crest above the nose on the Statue of Liberty. But, clearly, there has to be a drain somewhere to let a little water out when things get too full.

Failing to include a drain would be as stupid as digging dangerous wells a mile below the surface of the sea and not installing a series of fool proof failsafes that would prevent an oil spill in the event of a disaster.

That would be ridiculous.

My drain theory got a big boost last week when the loony show “Lost” came to its dizzy conclusion.

I wisely opted out after the show’s second season, but my wife was hooked even as the baffling show infuriated her right up to the very end.

I asked her about the finale.

“Well, a bunch of stuff happened, the people on the island all got together and one guy saved the planet.”

Sounds like a pretentious sort of “Gilligan’s Island.” How’d the guy save the planet?

“Oh, there was some plug he needed to put in to keep all the bad stuff from coming out.”

Eureka! Somebody needs to tell BP engineers to get “Lost!”

I just wish someone would have told them that when they assured everyone their deep water drilling techniques were perfectly safe.