[quote=Aecetia]
April 13-14 2010: Iceland Eyjafjallajokull volcano erupts again, and its volcanic ash goes over Europe over the next few days and grounds airplanes at airports across Northern Europe. [/quote]
I don’t know about the rest of your post – I ain’t an environmental scientist – and this is a bit off topic, but I’m stuck in London right now and this whole grounding of airplanes was bullshit from the start. I missed getting out of Heathrow by five hours – doh! – but the first thing I noticed after seeing that my flight was canceled was the clearest blue sky I’d ever seen in London. (Which is part of the problem, as rain and wind would have helped dispurse the ash particles.) The first thing I thought was, “Hmmmm… is someone covering their ass here?” And as it turns out, the answer was, “Yes.” There was never any evidence at all that low levels of volcanic ash would be at all harmful to airplane engines – but because two planes had had problems in the past (but didn’t crash) after flying directly through highly-concentrated ash plumes, the EU took a “zero tolerance” policy toward flying in volcanic ash, which is absurd. It’s like not allowing an HIV+ child to attend school because s/he could conceivably through some bizarre set of circumstances infect another child. Anyhow, just a short screed on bureaucratic incompetence since I’ve been on the wrong side of the pond now for almost a week… with several more days to go before my thrice-rebooked flight will leave. What a clusterfuck.
In the News of the Predictably Weird, Keifer Sutherland was stuck here too, as evidenced by the fact that he was “thrown into a taxi, shirtless and intoxicated, at 4am last Saturday by four bodyguards from a Covent Garden strip club.” I have to admit, that really made me laugh.
