Advertising ague

There's a Google ad at the bottom of this page, you may have noticed. It would be more trouble than it's worth for me to actually deal with the pittance I could get as a commission, but I leave it there.

Think of it as a canary in my coal mine. Google's algorithms try to parse what's posted here for key words, guess who is reading it, then come up with advertising that will make your mouse finger twitch. Good luck with that: I don't know my next subject until I find it. It is somewhat useful to be reminded that I'm becoming obsessive about a subject, and hey, I don't want to feel like I'm getting free bandwidth from Google.

Non sequitor

Immigration seems to be on my mind these days; at least an immigration ad keeps popping up offering legal advice. Free legal advice. Sam Goldwyn is supposed to have said "A verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's written on." I haven't been able to trace the similar saw 'Free legal advice is worth what you paid for it', but I tend to agree. Listen, by all means, but don't sell your farm without more information.

Since this is written in the CNMI, you might jump to the conclusion that I'm talking about Howard Willens in the Governor's Office and Deanne Siemer at the Department of Labor. I'm not. Well, I am, but not specifically. I really don't want to jump into that turgid, turbid and torrid river of prose.

More advice is coming as this is written. A plethora of people are discussing DOL's Umbrella Permits at American Memorial Park. I'm confused about them, with a wait-and-see reaction similar to Saipan Writer.

Beautiful ugly pictures

All of that was just a meander in my stream of thought anyway, brought on by advertisements for Chinese chemical companies when I was tracking down these Chinese photographs. Those ads, and others from chemical companies, were very poor product placement by Google. (It always seems to be about China with that company, doesn't it?)

Lu Guang's powerful, disturbing photos brought to mind the cliche "a picture is worth a thousand words" (It's often called a Chinese proverb, but modern usage seems to be derived from an advertising slogan.) I read about parts per million of pollutants and pore over articles about their horrendous pollution, but you can almost smell and taste the chemical stew he portrays.

The subject isn't academic for people in the Mariana Islands. When we get our 'volcanic haze' warnings, it seems like it's usually a burp from Anatahan piggybacking on a noxious air current emigrating from Asia.

It's all about us

Follow the link to the photos (Please!) and you'll get a bonus: self-centered politicopaths, mostly from the U.S., arguing about socialism, communism and capitalism. Silly me, I thought pollution was caused by uncontrolled development, not ideology. They're crying 'poor me' instead of 'those poor people'.

That's another form of pollution.

Now it's jellyfish

Saipan is lucky jellyfish are just a nuisance instead of the growing problem found elsewhere.

There are more of them and they're showing up in new places, according to the New York Times.

Scientists are blaming it on the usual suspects: warming oceans, pollution and overfishing.

"While no good global database exists on jellyfish populations, the increasing reports from around the world have convinced scientists that the trend is real, serious and climate-related, although they caution that jellyfish populations in any one place undergo year-to-year variation," according to the Times.

A report is due in the fall from the National Science Foundation listing problem areas as Australia, the Gulf of Mexico, Hawaii, the Black Sea, Namibia, Britain, the Mediterranean, the Sea of Japan and the Yangtze estuary.

Jellyfish have only become a problem in Hawaii in the last 20 years. Still, the state is luckier than most victims. Their visitors are like a tour group: arriving on schedule the ninth or tenth day after a full moon.