In today’s world, oil products – whether they be the petrol, diesel or fuel oil most directly obtained from refining crude or the plastics, chemicals, medicines etc derived by further processing – are the most sought after substances; excepting (possibly) illegal drugs.
So with markets like that, how the hell can an oil refinery go bankrupt?
To be fair, the headline on the news was a little misleading. It is the parent company which owns the refinery which has gone bust.
But the point still applies.
There has been a lot of scaremongering about the possible effects as the refinery supplies 20% of south-east England’s fuel needs; scaremongering no doubt put about to raise fuel prices. I would expect that some other company will take it over sooner rather than later.
The Coalition cuts are working well to reduce the debt then, aren’t they?
I also see UK growth was -0.2% for the last three months. Not much scope for joy there.
Why are these idiots repeating the mistakes of the 1930s?
*That amount being illustrated on the BBC news last night as £1,000,000,000,000 is, to my old fashioned eyes, actually a million million or what we used to call a billion. Well, it was before we took up US descriptions of such things.
The Silver Wind by Nina Allan (Interzone 233, TTA Press)
The Copenhagen Interpretation by Paul Cornell (Asimov’s, July)
Afterbirth by Kameron Hurley (Kameron Hurley’s own website)
Covehithe by China Miéville (The Guardian)
Of Dawn by Al Robertson (Interzone 235, TTA Press)
I have read none of these as yet but only The Copenhagen Interpretation is not available online via the BSFA page linked to above. Presumably the booklet of nominated stories that the BSFA has produced for the past two years will be repeated this time around, too.
This is really weird. It’s a storm on Saturn, located at its north pole. The source as usual is the Cassini probe.
Quite how a storm can result in a hexagonal pattern is puzzling. More puzzling still is how it has lasted – since it was discovered in the 1980s flypasts.
This is the same storm in infrared (from APOD of 3/4/07.)
This links to a photo of hexagonal cloud forms on Earth, the nearest similar meteorological phenomenon.
Here’s a time-lapse film of Saturn’s north polar storm. Don’t blink or you’ll miss it.
In his recent Bengal Station trilogy Brown has been revisiting some of the conventions of Pulp SF. He has also treated us to a Big Dumb Object novel in Helix. In Guardians of the Phoenix, he has turned his attention to the disaster novel, or rather, to the post-Apocalypse tale. Here too, though, there are faint echoes of Pulp SF in the Phoenix of the title.
The Earth is parched, the oceans boiled away. Resource wars and plagues have reduced humanity to dreams – and fears – of the old times. In a handful of small communities sparsely spattered over Europe a few surviving humans cling on, barely scratching a living from the harsh, sun-battered environment.
To begin with there are three main viewpoint narratives. With large animals extinct and plants beyond scarce, Paul traps lizards on the girders of the Eiffel Tower to feed his dying mentor Elise. In Aubenas the locals net bats for food and their leader quietly supplements their diet with a little cannibalism. A band of renegades has kidnapped the daughter of one of the elders of the decimated community in Copenhagen.
The action kicks off when the renegades turn up in Paris to seek out the rumoured food horde in a bank vault. A group from Copenhagen has pursued them. In the resulting gunfight the chief renegade, Hans, escapes and Paul, who had fallen into his clutches, is rescued.
Since Elise has died Paul joins the Copenhagen group’s onward trip to drill for water below what had been the Bay of Biscay. Hans returns to his former home in Aubenas just in time to join an expedition to Bilbao to find the remains of an abandoned project designed to save humanity from extinction.
As usual with Brown the focus is mainly on the characters, who are well rounded – the relationship between Dan and Kath from Copenhagen is particularly well laid out and Hans makes a convincing psychopath – though Paul, even given his earlier relative isolation, is perhaps still a little too naïve. Given the above the book’s plot has to follow certain lines but there are twists and turns along the way. The resolution is saved from being a bit of a deus ex machine by very short premonitory chapters featuring members of the Bilbao project, which however give the Phoenix game away somewhat.
As an adventure story the novel works admirably but I found I couldn’t quite buy the scenario – an Earth where the water has evaporated from the oceans would admittedly have a consequent runaway Greenhouse Effect but unless all the atmosphere had gone along with them it would surely be more like Venus, constantly overcast, and hence sunburn would be no problem. (I also wondered how in a parched world as depicted would plants be able to photosynthesise and thus keep O2 levels up? Though animals to breathe it in have of course mostly disappeared.) These quibbles aside however Guardians of the Phoenix is fine entertainment.
There always seemed to me to be something Calvinistic about Focus’s music, a touch of rigidity: predestination even. Maybe it was because they were Dutch.
It was particularly so of Eruption, the long track that made up the whole of side 2 of the LP Focus II (Moving Waves).
It is also true of their biggest UK hit Sylvia but perhaps less so of the earlier Hocus Pocus.
At the time of writing Wikipedia is blacked out as a protest at the impending legislation in the US about online piracy and intellectual property protection.
Many people seem to be of the opinion that these bills could infringe unacceptably on free expression and lead to even such a humble website as mine being targeted for closure due to a perhaps unintended or even unwitting infringement of the proposed acts.
Not being a US citizen I have no direct input into this but add my sympathy for the action Wiki has taken.
This building’s main claim to fame is that the Beatles once played there. I think it was when they were just on the cusp of fame. I wasn’t around at the time. (Not in Fife anyway.)
Like many cinemas it failed to survive the changing times and is now demolished.
