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I've been following the recent Gulf of Mexico oil spill news closely lately for a couple reasons. Our Florida beach vacation is only a couple months away and it's hitting close to home. I'm always saddened by news destroying the environment and animals and this is a big one. I still cut up coke rings so the circles won't get stuck on birds still growing and suffocate them. But I can't do anything about a bird getting coated with oil and no longer able to fly. How many years has there been drilling in the ocean and how many spills have happened, and we still seem far behind on the technology to clean it up. I know the large oil companies have huge profits but I wonder how much of their budget goes to researching cleaning up technologies if any at all. 5,000 barrels a day (thats 210,000 gallons a day) [as of 5/14/10 - some Purdue Univ. experts watched video of the gusher and they estimated 70,000 barrels a day] are spilling out of that leak and their little underwater robots have failed to find it. I think I read where they had never been tested at depths of anything close to what they were being used at. I could go on a rant, but I'll save that talk for the experts. What I do have experience in is growing up near and visiting beaches where baby oil was a staple for the beach bag. Not baby oil for suntanning purposes, but to get the black tar off your feet. Yes, you go swim out in the ocean and come back to play in the beach sand and everywhere you have to avoid chunks of black sticky tar. It was gross! The only thing that would get it off your skin is baby oil or gasoline (yep, we used that too - yuck). Ofcourse I was a naive innocent kid that didn't pay attention to news so I don't remember hearing about this, but this MSNBC article mentioned a 1979 spill in the Gulf that released 140 million gallons of oil to Mexico and Texas shores. I saw those effects through the 80s at all the Texan beaches I grew up visiting several times a summer. Now that I live closer to the pristine white sandy beaches of the Florida panhandle I really hope those don't get contaminated and filled with tar chunks.