But with the news that the containment chamber is clogged with ice slurry and that oil continues to spew into the Gulf, coupled with the shortage of booms to protect the coast, I’m not laughing now. I’m getting ready to schedule a hair cut immediately.
A hair boom is a low tech device to absorb oil. Hair, as we all know, absorbs oil. That’s why teenagers are maniacal about the shower. Matter of Trust, a non-profit environmental organization in San Francisco, has come up with a way to recycle all the hair from salons and dog groomers into oil absorbent booms that can help catch the oil as it comes ashore.
It’s ridiculously simple. Stuff hair into panty hose legs, tie the end closed. That’s it. Hair booms were used by grassroots groups to help sop up the oil from the 2007 tanker spill in California.
Currently the Ritz-Carlton hair salon in downtown New Orleans is the only salon accepting donations of hair, fur and panty hose to construct hair booms. But I don’t know why ever hair salon in town isn’t stuffing their sweepings into hose. The latest predictions from NOAA have the oil spill flowing west, toward Atchafalaya Bay. Which means everyone with a boat in Acadiana is soon going to want to be on the water, helping contain the spill before it reaches the wetlands here in southwestern Louisiana.
I know it sounds quixotic, but doing something helpful, even a small something, is better than sitting at your computer all day reading bad and worse news and falling into a post-Katrina, post-Rita depression all over again. And another good aspect is the incentive to groom your sheady dog more often. His hair can go to work as well, and there will be less vacuuming to do. That in itself is reason enough to get to stuffing a hair boom today.
Is it a crime for citizens to photograph, video, or take notes of a police officer in the line of duty, or a right protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution? Locally, such activity, as witnessed recently, will at the very least result in a night spent behind bars.
David Calhoun and Elizabeth “EB” Brooks are the first two employees of Lafayette Central Park Inc., the nonprofit charged with turning Lafayette Consolidated Government’s 100-acre Johnston Street Horse Farm property into a passive public park. Calhoun was named executive director, and Brooks is director of planning and design.
At Thursday's State of the Economy luncheon, LEDA President and CEO Gregg Gothreaux said PXP has already quietly hired 180 people for its Broussard expansion.
Episcopal School of Acadiana’s Dr. Joshua Caffery, chair of the school’s English Department, is headed to Washington, D.C., and the Library of Congress as the latest winner of the Alan Lomax Fellowship in Folklife Studies.
This year’s Cool Town issue is all about people who are not native to South Louisiana but made a conscious decision to be here, to be among us, to participate in our culture and contribute to it.
A shelved ordinance transferring $200,000 from a northside drainage project to a south Lafayette development may not break any laws, but it stinks to high heaven.
An effort to restore a shuttered dancehall and document other vacant or razed honky-tonks could serve as a model for saving an endangered species of entertainment.
Lafayette’s gene pool has been host to a long line of eccentric characters who have blurred the lines between crazy, genius, disturbed and curiously entertaining.
Subscribe to this comment's feed