Because yesterday I was offline most of the day and the RSS flood backed up again.
– My friend Roz gets her poetry published in The Guardian. Cool stuff!
– My friend Neil gets the first chapter of his Hugo Award winning novel, American Gods, published in The Guardian (which is, of course, all to do with the One Book, One Twitter thing).
– Michael Moorcock has a new non-fiction book coming out, and John Coulthart has done some utterly amazing design work on it.
– The BBC has been to Sci-Fi London and reviews a Swiss science fiction film (though sadly the director is dreadfully ignorant about science fiction in Switzerland — how can he not have heard of Maison d’Ailleurs?).
– And finally, Deep Sea News has a depressing but probably accurate assessment of how BP will get off the hook as regards environmental damage from the Deepwater Horizon spill because the Bush Administration gutted the country’s environmental agencies and fostered a climate of disbelief in science. (Then again, maybe because BP are “foreigners,” the Rethuglicans will support going after them. I’m waiting for Sarah Palin to demand that all foreign oil assets in the US be nationalized.)
Having just returned from a week in the US it was noticeable in their news that politicians both R and D were backing away from past support of offshore drilling. Also, the news presenters and politicians were all pointedly referring to BP as “British Petroleum”, even though it hasn’t been called that for over a decade.
The owner of the oil rig (not BP) was, today, given a 400 million dollar insurance payment.
The news is being overshadowed this morning by some homeland security failures (they can keep some innocents out for silly reasons, but they can’t check a no-fly list before a plane boards), and a bomb scare on a greyhound bus. The company was “lucky” in that.