Well, it appears that enough people bitched about this (including the mayor of Chicago) to cause BP to rethink its plan to expand its refinery in Indiana. They’re still going to expand it but now they’re saying it won’t increase the volumes of mercury and ammonia that they dump into the lake.

Chicago Tribune Story

So I’ll reduce my indefinite boycott to a 6 month boycott. In other words the earliest I’ll be buying anything from a BP station is February ‘08.

I hate the spoons they give you at Wendy’s when you buy a frosty.

They’re too narrow at the end and the plastic is too thin. They hurt my lip.

Oops I forgot to update last week. I was out of the office for most of the week. Oh well.

So there’s this 90 year old lady who lives in my building. She moved to Chicago (to be closer to her daughter) from Maine after her Baptist Minister husband passed away.  She’s a perfect example of the traditional “nice old lady” persona. She would probably mend my socks for me if I asked nicely enough.

Anyway, a month or two ago a 3-wheeled pedal bike (A tricycle for adults, apparently) appeared in our building’s courtyard, chained to a pole outside her door. A couple days later I saw the old lady slowly wheeling it out the front gate.  I helped her get it out onto the sidewalk and she told me that she got the bike so that she could ride it in the park nearby. I told her that sounds like fun and we went our separate ways.

Skip ahead to last week. The bike is gone. Minor mysteries always bug me so I immediately set to wondering what had become of it. This lady is so incredibly slow and feeble that she has no business riding any kind of bike around Warren Park. She’s barely able to move the thing up the two small steps that lead out of our courtyard.  The bike either got stolen from where it was chained, stolen while she left it unattended in the park, or stuck somewhere she couldn’t move it and subsequently abandoned (she rides at 6:30 am when nobody is around to help with that sort of thing.)

I don’t want to ask her what happened because I know I’ll get lassoed into a 20 minute conversation about everything that’s wrong with the building.

I have a formula that governs my response when a merchant gets my goat. Minor incidents such as a restaurant fucking up my order or a rude clerk at the supermarket result in a 3 to 6 month boycott, depending on the severity of the infraction.

Today I add a business to the list of places I will never patronize until they literally clean up their act: BP. You know BP…they run those annoying fucking commercials with the cute little cartoons pledging to “make the day a little better.”

“Look over there in Chicago. It’s a bunch of ignorant assholes buying our gasoline AND drinking the water we dump our filth into! Let’s sing!”

Apparently their method of “making the day a little better” is to dump a bunch of toxic shit into Lake Michigan. Way to exploit that loophole, assholes.

And for the record, yes, I drive a gas-powered car. I’m saving for a Hybrid. Until then I’ll continue to be a sucker buying too much gas.

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!

DAY: RUINED.

Now you see why all clowns (except Krusty) must die.

http://www.savethespindle.com/index.html

Apparently a developer wants to tear this down so they can build a Walgreens in it’s spot.

The more I think about it the more I realize how little I care. If you care you can hit the link at the top of the post.

I’ve been looking forward to the release of a handful of board games (not that I’ll have time to play any of them half as much as I want to.)

Duel in the Dark - A 2-player strategy game in which one player is the RAF trying to bomb targets in Germany and the other player is the Luftwaffe trying to make sure those targets don’t get bombed. Did I mention that it takes place during WW2? I suppose it wouldn’t make much sense otherwise.

Last Night on Earth - A multiplayer co-op Zombie survival game. The co-op part is optional as it appears that players may choose to play as survivors or zombies. I’m looking forward to running this game with teams; perhaps 3 players as zombies and 3 as humans. I’m hoping that the rules allow for antagonism between the human players so it’s possible to do 2 players as good humans, 2 as evil humans and 2 as zombies.

I also want to play Memoir ‘44. Aside from really liking the title, the thing that interests me in this game is that its creator emphasizes its simplicity from a rules standpoint. Good wargames with simple rules are not at all common. This one is actually currently available.

For some reason I meet with resistance when I try to introduce a casual gamer to certain games. This is not a recent observation; I’ve been at it ever since high school. I would want to play a complicated, multi-session Battletech game but we always ended up playing Monopoly or Risk.

Overall, games like Settlers of Catan are generally well received but whenever a game has a soldier or a dragon or a spaceship or an alien on the box people assume that its gameplay will take a back seat to its theme and subject matter.

I’m a scientist who studies foodborne bacteria so every once in awhile I like to post about issues in food.

Today’s topic is meat migration. Meat migration describes the situation in which eating a sandwich at one end slowly causes the fill ingredients to slide out the other end. You end up with either a big chunk of meat, cheese, and lettuce sliding out onto your lap or a similar chunk remaining after you’ve reached the end of the bread.

I’ve figured out that the most common cause of meat migration is improper stacking of the sandwich elements during construction combined with an overabundance of condiment.

Some establishments have tried to solve meat migration by toasting their sandwiches but from time to time I find that it still occurs (especially in Potbelly’s sandwiches.) The nationwide chain Jimmy Johns, in my opinion, is responsible for the most incidents of meat migration but since their sandwiches are so tasty I generally let them slide (pun intended.)

A skilled sandwich maker can overcome the tendencies of meddlesome migratory meat. For example, the staff at the Jimmy John’s near my work (79th and Harlem, next to the Gamestop) have not sold me a meat migrating sandwich in weeks. They may have developed a cure which I pray they’re going to publish in all of the scholarly sandwich journals.

I don’t eat at Subway enough to know if they’ve cracked the problem but I do know that they have a problem with Dairy Overlap. It’s possible that Dairy Overlap is the solution to Meat Migration but, like I said, I don’t eat at Subway (ever since I went in there and ordered an Italian sub and the guy looked at me like I was fucking crazy.)

I saw this on Wired. I think it might have come from the Chicago Tribune but I’m too lazy to log into their site to look.