Stop the world - I want to get off!

Ever wondered how we're all going to respond to an increasingly hostile physical world?
What path we'll go down as we confront the dire consequences of our own collective actions?
In the face of one monumental environmental disaster the only psychological defence left for some is laughter:

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) – At a conference of oil leak experts in Washington today, attendees proposed plugging the massive oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico with executives of BP, the company responsible for the catastrophic spill.

"We've tried containment domes, rubber tires, and even golf balls," said William Cathermeyer of the National Oil Leakage Institute, a leading consultancy in the field of oil leaks. "Now it's time to shove some BP executives down there and hope for the best."

Submerging the oil company executives thousands of feet below the ocean's surface could be a "win-win" situation, Mr. Cathermeyer said.

"Best-case scenario, they plug the leak," he said. "And at the very least, they'll shut the fuck up."

But even as the oil leak experts proposed their unorthodox solution, environmental expert Marilyn Sufranski warned of the possible negative consequences of plugging the oil leak with BP executives.

"The Gulf of Mexico is slimy enough already," she said.

The Daily Examiner in Grafton holds its own in APN regional circulation breakdown

A general gloom still lingers over falling circulation numbers for major Australian newspapers, which this last quarter have been blamed on a slow news cycle as well as the proliferation of free online news and comment sites.
However for some regional mastheads it is slightly a different story.

The Daily Examiner on the NSW North Coast holds its own against larger newspapers within the APN group which in the week ending Saturday 22 May 2010 had a combined paid sales figure of 882,161 copies for its fourteen dailies.

The Daily Examiner which has been publishing in the Clarence Valley since 1859 came in with a daily circulation of 5,604 in 2010 year to date (YTD) terms. This showed a small percentage increase of 0.75%, which made it the only newspaper in the APN stable to be in the black for the year thus far.

Well done to the team at DEX.

The Clarence River as part of Earth's big picture

Clarence River mouth from the air at Blue Skies

From the abstract for Continental rifting and drainage reversal: The Clarence River of Eastern Australia by R. J. Haworth and C. D. Ollier, Department of Geography and Planning, The University of New England, Armidale, New South Wales 2351, Australia:

The Clarence River on Australia's east coast has an anomalous drainage pattern. Its right-bank tributaries are markedly barbed, suggesting reversal, whereas Tertiary volcanism has disrupted its left-bank drainage. The southeast-flowing Clarence is closely aligned with the northwest-flowing Condamine River just across the Continental Divide. The Condamine-Clarence alignment is continued by a large southern tributary, the Orara River, which flows northwest, away from the sea, to meet the southeast-flowing Clarence. A broad river with a quite different character flows east from near the Orara-Clarence junction to the sea. This is essentially an overflow channel.
This series of aligned streams, the Condamine-Clarence-Orara, represents the remains of an earlier northwest-flowing stream that extended the full length of the Clarence-Moreton Basin, an eastern extension of the Great Artesian Basin. During the Jurassic, the Clarence-Moreton Basin was filled with sediments from the surrounding highlands, including those to the east of the present coastline. Continental rifting from Late Cretaceous times onwards led to the opening of the Tasman Sea, causing the reversal and beheading of the original northwest-flowing streams and the formation of the Great Escarpment.
The evolution of the Clarence River does not fit into most conventional geomorphic paradigms such as cycles, climatic geomorphology or steady-state landforms. It is the result of a succession of unique events on a very long timescale, and as such is a classic example of evolutionary geomorphology.

Water spouts on the NSW North Coast

Local photographer Steve Young manged to catch these two water spouts and the Coffs Coast Advocate reported last Friday:
"Coffs Harbour Bureau of Meteorology duty observer Roger Brown said water spouts were uncommon here but not rare.
“They usually form in a thunderstorm,” Mr Brown said. “It is a type of tornado, although they are usually much less potent than the ones we see in the mid-west of the US. We probably see a couple every year – when they’re forming you often see a couple at a time.”

Here's another pic from Port Macquarie on the mid-North Coast in 2007, found at Flickr's 'australia waterspout' tag:


Pics by Steve Young and beachcomberaustralia