petroleum brunch

Oceans of Waste
SOMETHING RED CAUGHT Ellen Anderson's eye. (...) She stared, shocked: A dead bird, its exposed belly filled with shiny bits of plastic. Chunks yellowed like old teeth, a perforated pink rectangle, hairy tan slivers. A red shard had first captured her attention.
"My gut hurt. It was a glorious day, sunny, a treasure in May. Everything was great. And then I saw that bird and I was sick to my stomach," Anderson recently recalled. "You jump to conclusions. Like, did the bird eat all that plastic? I was hoping it hadn't been consumed by the bird, that somebody planted it there as a joke or something."
...
"Yes — Ellen — it is just as you suspected," wrote the Conservancy's Charles Barr, in a reply echoed by the others. "Seabirds are eating plastics that become lodged in their stomachs, causing death. I have seen dozens of photos such as this one — most of . . . dead albatross on the Pacific Islands of Midway and the Northwest Hawaiian Islands. . . . Many of the albatross will even return to their nests to feed, by regurgitation, plastics to their chicks."
...

Ebbesmeyer is not an optimist. He's seen too many studies that never went anywhere.
"If you could fast forward 10,000 years and do an archeological dig, a core sample down through the beach, you'd find a little line of plastic," he says. "What happened to those people? Well, they ate their own plastic and disrupted their genetic structure and weren't able to reproduce. They didn't last very long because they killed themselves.

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Nice article in the Seattle Times about the opportunities to feast on oil products directly, rather than waiting for them to be cycled into corn. Leave it to the birds, little eyes aglitter as shiny flotsam drifts along the waves, to lead the way.

You thought the dinosaurs were extinct? Almost. Almost. We're working on it, one seabird at a time.

I guess this explains Piñatas.

Plastic is Forever
Sam Phillips

my t.v. doesn't listen when I give it pieces of my mind
it keeps making everything the same size
pain is pleasure when it's televised
plastic is forever

artificial florists
sell you flowers that will never die
they cut down the real forests
for paper petals engraved with (...) lies