BP = evil/ Old Spice = good

I don’t for a minute believe BP when it says it’s capped the well. I think they have a stage set with a Top Hat rig in a pool about 20-feet deep they’re using to simulate competence.

Look carefully enough at the tape and in the dim background you can glimpse BP men walking around on their way to meetings where they plan wars, famine and the futures of men like LeBron James.

Who knows what kind of menace you’ll see if you look deeply enough into BP?

This is a company of such grandiose evil you have to believe Darth Cheney’s somehow involved.

Now comes the news that BP was behind the release of murderous terrorist Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi -- and I hate him even more now that I had to type and spell check such a long and awful name.

It’s outrageous.

I understand a certain ruthlessness is required to run a global conglomerate that earns obscene profits that number in the billions.

You need to deceive governments, your customers, your stockholders and daily do unethical things that would cause terminally poor men like me to lose sleep at night.

But this deal with Libya goes beyond the pale. What business in the name of profit leans on a government, in this case Scotland, to free a man responsible for the terrorist deaths of 270 innocents?

And what government says, yep, sure, you can go free and live out your years in the comfort of your loved ones where you’re considered a hero for your deadly villainies.

In America, this would be an impeachable offense.

I don’t cast my votes in Scotland and am in one of those all-too-common situations where I want to lash out at a target too nimble to hit.

I don’t drink Scotch, preferring all-American bourbon, so I can’t hit them there.

The boycott BP movement isn’t satisfying either. That’s taking it out on the little guy who runs a mini-mart that just happens to be linked to what is right now is the world’s most damaged brand.

I doubt any mom ‘n’ pop started their franchise by saying, “Pa, what the good people in this neighborhood really need is a place to buy good ol’ BP gas. It’s the best gas. It’s good for their cars and the BP rep gave me his word the company will never do anything to disgrace our affiliation.”

The guy’s probably like me. He couldn’t care less if he sells BP gas, Exxon or some other petroleum product.

Gas isn’t like underarm deodorant, a product that requires some brand loyalty. Like my dad, I’ve always been an Old Spice man, a patronage that’s currently being rewarded by its association with the funniest ads ever seen on TV.

(“Swan dive! Into the best night of your life!”)

I buy gas based on need. When the gauge starts to edge toward “E,” I pull over to the nearest filling station. I don’t feel like I’m being disloyal to Sheetz if I stop at the Get Go. I don’t think the car’s going to run angry if I fill up with Exxon instead of Chevron.

I couldn’t care less.

So there’s nothing a guy like me can do to punish BP for its treachery.

All I can do is hope that one day, and I pray it happens soon, we find a cheap and clean alternative to oil that is at the root of so many environmental and foreign policy problems bedeviling this godforsaken world.

And I don’t want something incremental. I want it to be an overnight sort of sensation.

I’d love to see President Obama break into programming with a stunning announcement that tomorrow at noon every car in America will be fitted for free with glove box converters that will allow vehicles to run in perpetuity on just one slim dispenser of Old Spice High Endurance Deodorant Stick.

Know what I’ll do?

I’ll buy everyone at the bar a shot of good ol’ Kentucky bourbon and together as one we will swan dive into the best night of our lives.

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.

Costner to the gulf's rescue!

I had one thought when I heard Kevin Costner has $26 million worth of oil separators in his garage:

Man, we’re paying way too much for movies.

Who can afford a hobby like that?

But right now starstruck BP engineers, men and women who’ve devoted their lives to complicated formulas and chemical equations, are asking the man who played John Logan in “Sizzle Beach USA!,” “Uh, now explain again how this is supposed to work?”

For those of you too young to know -- and you haven’t missed a thing -- Costner was a big deal about 20 years ago.

He is a professional actor. And in my opinion he’s been acting like he’s an actor ever since they yelled, “That’s a wrap!” on the set of “Silverado” way back in 1985.

He still has a lot of ardent fans, but I’ve never understood his appeal. His looks to me are oatmeal bland. Even in his prime, he never had the devilish dash of men like Paul Newman or Johnnie Depp, a trait that makes women swoon.

He never had the mischievous edge of someone like Jack Nicholson, which appeals to men.

And he never displayed any of the spastic humor of madcap Robin Williams, which appeals to people who’ve suffered repeated brain trauma.

Plus -- and to me this is a sin -- he took himself way too seriously. At the height of his fame in the early to mid-‘90s, he made a string of big boring movies (“Dances with Wolves,” “The Postman” and “Waterworld”) whose sole purpose seemed to be giving Costner a preening opportunity to celebrate being Costner.

The movies were very PC and larded with sullen messages about our need to treat each other and Mother Earth with greater respect.

He was an actor, for crying out loud. What an ego! His biggest hit was an Iowa pseudo-baseball movie that could be called corny in every sense of the word. What, he thought we needed a guy like him to save the planet?

Well, batter up!

The only way I’d be more surprised was if the potential gulf savior was Pee Wee Herman, another actor now better known for his more unusual hobbies.

His business partner, John Houghtaling, told the LA Times that while Costner was making “Waterworld” in 1995, he became so troubled by oil spills that he began developing an ingenious system to cruise the surfaces of oil polluted waters.

“The machines are essentially like big vacuum cleaners,” Houghtaling said. “They sit on barges and suck up oily water and spin it around at high speed,” Houghtaling said. “On one side, it spits out pure oil, which can be recovered. The other side spits out 99% pure water.”

It’s all very noble, but I wish he’d have been as troubled at the time about how the distraction was going to eventually ruin one night of my life and cost me about $12 the night I took the missus to see “Waterworld,” to this day a mainstay on all the worst-movie-ever-made lists.

This is exactly the kind of news I’ve been hoping we’d hear. It could change the world for the better in so many ways.

Just imagine, a machine that separates out all the offensive crap and leaves behind only the good and useful.

It’s just too bad he never thought to apply that sort of technology to some of his scripts.

Refined solutions to crude spills

The optimist in me says that any minute a giant oil-devouring robot is going to be deployed to clean up the spill in the gulf. It will scour the shores, cleanse the waters and sip crude off the tender wings of endangered Snowy Bayou Plovers.

If that happens, then the pessimist in me believes that man will have forgotten to install an “off” switch and the insatiable robot will turn inland to devour refineries and gas stations and won’t stop until it immobilizes my Saturn.

And the news junkie in me would prefer that to the drip, drip, drip of inaction coming from this disaster.

The whole story has such a primitive ‘70s feel to it.

The 1870s.

How is this happening in the 21st century? In the 1970s, my teachers all assured me by now we’d all be zooming arout the skies in jet packs fueled by things like grass clippings. Of course, these were the same teachers that assured me one day I’d be using the metric system to measure things like kilometers per liter.

Like my mythical oil-sucking robot, it seems like somebody forgot to include an “off” switch on the oil platforms that robotically suck fossil fuels from deep beneath the earth.

You mean no one saw this coming? No one thought to put a series of fail-safes in a mile-long straw stretching through choppy waters routinely ravaged by hurricanes?

We make a mistake entrusting these sorts of operations to people with more degrees than sense.

Me and my fellow idiots at the bar were talking about it just yesterday.

“You’d think they’d -- just in case -- have some sort of really big cork or seal that automatically deploys if the really big straw breaks off at the top,” said a regular Joe conveniently named Joe. “And then -- just-in-case -- you put another one down below that.”

“And then to be really, really, safe -- just-in-case -- you put one down at the very bottom so that if, God forbid, the whole thing breaks off you can just shut it off and start sweeping up the debris.”

Really, can such simple safeguards be that difficult to include in construction mandates with something so potentially devastating?

I think this gulf catastrophe would be working out differently if Jed Clampett was still involved in the oil industry.

He’d be full of common sense suggestions that infuriate investment bankers like Mr. Drysdale, but would ultimately prove beneficial.

Now they’re talking about lowering a giant dome over the source of the leaks. I like this idea, but wonder why each rig doesn’t come equipped with its own telescoping gigantic dome that it can drop atop leaks the instant they are detected.

Sure, hasty deployment might doom handfuls of adventurous scuba divers, but I’ll take a host of loggerhead turtles over scuba divers any day. No loggerhead turtle’s ever ruined my backyard barbecue by boring me with dozens of deep sea pictures from his last dive.

The whole industry seems rife with arrogance that, c’mon, nothing like this is ever going to happen, and if it does it’ll be minor and we can deal with it in a jiffy.

And up from the ground comes a bubblin’ crude.

I keep thinking the world changing innovations are just around the bend and I keep getting slapped in the head with stinging reminders that the bend is no where in sight.

We can only hope this spill will hasten our wisest intentions to slip free from technologies that were new about 50 years before our great-grandfathers huddled around sitting room radios to hear FDR talk about war effort oil rationing.

And, until then, we can all do our part.

Me, I’m going do a pencil drawing of what my giant oil-devouring robot will look like. Later I’ll ask the boys in the bar where they think we should put the big off switch.