Mud People
As the BP disaster continues to unfold I’m struck again by the emergence, probably odd to most people, of the universal but bizarrely general term, “mud,” blithely used to describe the many and various goops of the industrial world as though people have any concept of what the hell that means. No one bothers to explain the difference between “drilling mud” and the cement, (which to those of us in the business is mud, too), and this omission leads me to believe that our media is dumber and less curious than my nephews were when they were in primary school.
As usual, I was remodeling their house, and one of them asked me why I called everything from tile mortar, which is sludgy and gray, to drywall compound, which is smooth and white, “mud.” Having been in the construction business for more than ten years at the time, I’d never really thought about it, and it had never occurred to me how weird that term would sound to the uninitiated.
Q: Why do you call that stuff mud, when it”s totally different from those other things you call mud, and none of them are really mud?
A: Well, for people who build things, mud is just mud, and you use different types for different jobs.
Q: But why do you call it mud?
At this point, I decided that I ought to think for a second, and not just say, like I usually would, “because I said so.” It seemed like a Teachable Moment.
A: Well, since humans first started building things, if they didn’t have lumber they built with mud. The first bricks were mud, and they still are, but baked. Concrete is mud, but with sand, rocks, and lime to make it harden naturally. I think the word is so old that it just stuck. Humans like to play in the mud. (They seemed vaguely satisfied with this explanation.)
But today, the implications of the interchangeability of mud maybe need more thorough explication, to the vast majority of us who think mud is just that brown stuff you stepped in that thankfully isn’t shit, and don’t understand that we have more types of mud in the world than Eskimos have snow. The fact that BP got its muds mixed up, repeatedly, is the crux of the situation we have where the Gulf of Mexico is rapidly becoming the Cuyahoga River of the new century, and while journalists and the general public are as naive about mud as my nephews were as children, no one seems capable of plainly explaining these distinctions.
You see, drilling mud isn’t really mud at all; it’s more of a lubricant, and lacks the structural permanence any respectable mud ought to have, so is really only for use in firm materials, not to plug intractable holes. Pumping a bunch of it into a rapidly fissuring seabed is like running a lot of potato peelings down the garbage disposal; it works for a bit, but soon the drain is running again, albeit more slowly. The other mud, the cementitious type which was somehow supposed to harden into a tappable valve for a gigantic geyser in super cold water and thousands of pounds of pressure, wasn’t even tested as to which sort of mud it was, and whether it would do the job. (The building inspectors test every load of such mud that is poured into a skyscraper, for chemical composition and dried strength…) Worse, the suspect mud was poured into forms that were out of whack due to inaccurate placement, and no inspector was there to check this prior to pouring, as they would be if you or I wanted to put in, say, steps to our back porch. So, “big government,” as currently constituted, makes a construction company leap through numerous hurdles to avoid the potentially detrimental effects from a collapsing building or bridge due to the improper or promiscuous defining of the term, “mud,” but lets huge foreign oil companies just shrug and say, “mud is mud,” and be done with it.
I think the BP board, as well as the US government, could use some 6-year olds to ask, “what do you mean, mud?”
What you know about drilling mud, or any other aspect of the drilling business for that matter, could be written on the head of a pin with a felt tip pen.
Besides the constant mudslide of snark you offer here, Tom, what expertise in the real world do you possess?
I’m going to do a crash reading this week-end of The Federalist Papers to see if James Madison or t’ others said anything suggesting clairvoyance on the subject of mud and contingencies associated with burst oil platforms in international waters.
He MUST have said something about how government should stick its head in the sand – or rather, mud, no matter what.
http://www.newsweek.com/2010/06/17/what-would-the-tea-party-do-on-gulf-oil-spill-.html
The Donald’s son, Barron (his yet-to-be-born daughter will be known as Barronette), knows his mud.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-06-18/donald-trump-hayward-and-bp-henchmen-incompetent/?cid=hp:vertical:r
Well, at least Trump knows stupidity when he sees it, even though he sounds pretty cuckoo….
Armey and the gang are digging their own graves with this… Such errant nonsense as a bunch of red staters are about to have their lives permanently altered. I wonder whether they believe their own bullshit or not, and which is worse, stupid or lying?
The overconfidence of the Bush years has never gone away, and continues to make them look like asses.
Believing in the bullshit …
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/greenspan-and-ayn-rand-disciple-or-traitor-2010-06-19?link=kiosk
I know about as much about it as Tony Hayward does, and it isn’t even my job.
the vast majority of us who think mud is just that brown stuff you stepped in that thankfully isn’t shit,
That would be me (the “thankful” part).
Or, as Congressman/Whore extraordinnaire Joe Barton would put it:
Hey, CH, how’re you doing?
Good, T3, except for the fact that we’ve had ten inches of rain in the last month, and that tends to drive me to the bottle, even more than usual.
Those righties are stepping in something that decidedly isn’t mud, and the sooner they catch on to that… well, never mind. Let the Dems have another undeserved, and certainly unfulfilled, victory, due only to the arrogant idiocy of the righties. That’s the drill these days, no pun intended.
How mud evolves …
“I suppose the idea of transformation really interests me. The idea that transformation is in any way optional I find completely bemusing. So to look at conservatism – the effort within conservatism to withstand, or to deny, change – I do really find kind of touching. It seems so much barking up the wrong tree. It feels so painful. It’s such a painful thing to put oneself through, the fantasy that change is avoidable – or is something to be avoided. For some reason it’s always been very clear to me that change is pretty much all we’ve got, and the sooner you make friends with it, the better.”
– Tilda Swinton
– Scottish woman
– Salon.com interview, 6/19/10
Nice observation.
Swinton is a peculiar person–peculiar in a good way; offbeat and etc.–a something of a turn-on for me because of that.
She plays wicked, cold (and with a directness that’s refreshing) like few other actors treading the boards.
After seeing “Michael Clayton,” I have been in complete awe of Ms. Swinton. Her subtlety, even when playing a cartoonish monster, was pure genius, and she certainly takes her craft seriously. More than I could say for certain CEO’s.
Actually, it’s interesting to look more closely at the interview because she indicates she doesn’t really regard herself as an actor.
I think her point there is much more intriguing when you consider that anyone can, with enough focus, “play their life”; that is, move and act in the moment, in every “scene,” just as an “actor” would, and say exactly what you mean and mean exactly what you say: hold the mirror up to nature.
http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/tilda_swinton/index.html?story=/ent/movies/film_salon/2010/06/19/tilda_swinton_interview
When asked about baseball, Tilda had no comment …
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/06/20/lady-gaga-banned-from-yan_n_618671.html