I’ve mentioned before how little I care for newspapers. Not the writing itself, but the medium: I shouldn’t have to get my hands filthy just to get my morning news. Mostly I get my news from the radio, and today I got another example of why this medium is not only less messy, but often\u00a0more\u00a0fun.<\/p>\n
I was listening to a Morning Edition article<\/a> about the issue of off-shore oil\u00a0exploration\u00a0and how the Presidential candidates will have to deal with it. Personally, I’m not sold either way on this topic. Off-shore oil platforms have a safety record that seems comparable to that of oil tankers\u2014200,000 gallons of oil lost in the oft-cited 1969 Santa Barbara oil platform rupture versus 10.8 million gallons from the Exxon Valdez\u2014and performing the off-shore extraction under strict government regulation here rather than off the coast of Nigeria might very well improve that record dramatically. And personally, I don’t think that their presence on the horizon of any given coastline is such a monstrous detriment to the esthetic of the area. Certainly no more than one of those awesome off-shore wind farms<\/a> that are gaining in popularity, and I would approve one of\u00a0those\u00a0off my<\/em> coast in a heartbeat. On the other hand, the total petroleum to be gained from such a venture is in all likelihood quite low, so this is absolutely no solution to the greater problem of our dependence on a finite, environmentally hazardous energy source. I hate wasting time bickering over the latest and greatest aspirin tablet when what we really need is a big ol’ ampule of Interferon.<\/p>\n Anyway, none of that has much to do with the point of this entry. The real<\/em>\u00a0reason I wanted to jot this down had to do with the difference between listening to a person’s voice and reading printed words on a page. At one point in the story, we heard encouraging words about off-shore oil extraction from Scott Smith, vice\u00a0president\u00a0of the\u00a0energy engineering and construction company Black and Veatch<\/a>.<\/p>\n After I got out of the tub I had to go look the article up online, because to the uninitiated ear, the name of Mr. Smith’s company sounded for all the world like “blackened beach”.<\/p>\n See, this kind of thing just doesn’t happen with newspapers. I wouldn’t trade that experience for all the smudgy fingertips in the world. \ud83d\ude06<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’ve mentioned before how little I care for newspapers. Not the writing itself, but the medium: I shouldn’t have to get my hands filthy just to get my morning news. Mostly I get my news from the radio, and today I got another example of why this medium is not only less messy, but often\u00a0more\u00a0fun. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-899","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-roominations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.uncle-andrew.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/899","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.uncle-andrew.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.uncle-andrew.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.uncle-andrew.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.uncle-andrew.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=899"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.uncle-andrew.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/899\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":903,"href":"http:\/\/www.uncle-andrew.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/899\/revisions\/903"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.uncle-andrew.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=899"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.uncle-andrew.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=899"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.uncle-andrew.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=899"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}