Dirty, Dirty Oil.

source: celsias.com

Canadian author Andrew Nikiforuk's latest book, Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent, investigates the threats and viability of the Alberta tar sands.

America’s increasing reliance on Alberta’s tar sands directly challenges President Obama’s vow to break the U.S. addiction to “dirty, dwindling and dangerously expensive” oil.

For this reason, the world’s largest energy project will likely dominate political discussions between Canada and the United States for a long time.

Seven years ago, Canada quietly surpassed Saudi Arabia as the United States’ major supplier of oil by rapidly exploiting shallow deposits of a tarry bitumen that industry calls “difficult oil.” This badly degraded, unconventional resource has little market value unless extensively upgraded and refined. It won’t even move through a pipeline without being diluted by light oil.

A switch from bloody light oil to dirty heavy oil has many defenders. For starters, Canada’s tar sands, the world’s second-largest petroleum reserve, are a vast and secure resource. No money spent on Canadian bitumen would be redirected to fundamentalist sects or Middle East insurgencies.

But replacing Saudi Arabia’s tainted light oil with bitumen is no direct pipeline to energy security. It’s more like switching your family’s mortgage from Countrywide Financial to Bear Stearns.

The million-barrel-a-day project, which produces the world’s most expensive oil, is creating monstrous environmental problems. While dinosaur-sized shovels and trucks excavate city-sized mines, energy-guzzling steam operations must heat up deeper formations to 500 degrees Fahrenheit. Since the 1970s the open-pit mines have moved enough earth to build seven Panama Canals.

Incredibly, the steam operations will consume nearly $200 billion worth of natural gas in the next decade and now threaten groundwater throughout the world’s third-largest watershed.

One of the biggest costs of bitumen extraction remains toxic waste. The bitumen mines make ungodly lakes of pollution that are as poorly regulated as coal-mine tailings in the United States. Today, more than a dozen toxic ponds—among the world’s largest impoundments of such waste—now occupy both sides of the Athabasca River.

They contain bitumen, phenols, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, cyanide, and naphthenic acids (carcinogens and fish killers all). When I wrote Tar Sands, these ponds occupied 23 square miles of forest along the Athabasca River. They now cover 50 square miles and contain enough sludge to fill 300 Love Canals. Even Canada’s timid National Energy Board calls the buildup of these leaky ponds “daunting.”

Unlike oil from Texas or the North Sea, bitumen contains a hellish number of carbon atoms and requires prodigious amounts of energy to produce.

Although no agency or government has yet done a reliable study on mine-to-car emissions from the tar sands, industry experts have a good idea. They estimate that North Sea oil has a carbon dioxide footprint of about 20 pounds per barrel. In contrast, bitumen wrenched from the boreal forest ranges from 100 to 650 pounds of carbon dioxide per barrel.

Meanwhile, the carbon intensity of the $200 billion project has paralyzed the Canadian government. It now behaves much like the Bush-Cheney administration or as apologists for climate change deniers.

In the last ten years, Canada has spent $6 billion on climate change programs but not met a single target. The tar sands now emit more carbon than the entire nation of New Zealand. In the absence of any national energy plan or even renewable energy targets, Canada has placed all of its hopes on an expensive and unproven funeral service: carbon capture and storage.

Bitumen also eats water. Production of one barrel of bitumen requires approximately three barrels of Athabasca River water. A report issued last year by the U.S. Congress questioned whether there was enough water to keep the river healthy or “meet future needs of ... industry.”

The project, which plans to grow to 3 million barrels a day, now runs on natural gas as a feed stock. Every day, the steam plants in the tar sands gobble enough of the blue flame to warm 6 million Canadian homes. In many ways, Canada is now sacrificing its energy security to fuel a continental addiction. Many industry executives bluntly compare the use of natural gas in bitumen production to burning all the Picassos in a museum in order to keep the visitors warm.

Global investors, environmentalists, aboriginals, and Canadian auditors are asking hard questions about the unconventional water, energy, and carbon footprint of bitumen. The U.S. Congress recognizes that environmental liabilities attending Canada’s tar sands extraction might well curtail excavation of the poorer-grade deposits in nearby Utah.

In the end, Canada’s tar sands won’t solve any of America’s critical energy problems or fund a greener and more independent economy. But for the short term, the future of tar sands production really rests in the hands of U.S. policymakers and consumers.

America’s appetite for oil will likely determine the pace and scale of tar sands production.

With undisciplined consumption, the American people will accelerate and expand this environmental freak show in much the same way they funded Saudi extremism. But if they limit their use, gasoline buyers could transform the project into a temporary supply while the continent rapidly renews its economy with green power.

President Obama faces a stark choice: either end the United States’ slavery to oil or became a slave to the tar sands. If America is serious about lessening its deadly dependence on oil, dirty or bloody, then U.S. dollars must support green energy.

The worst alternative is to get stuck in Canada’s sandbox.

Building around a tree.

source: New York Times

James MacKinnon wanted to add a bedroom to his modern glass-and-cedar house in the Hollywood hills of Los Angeles. There was only one problem: his wife at the time insisted that they save the 65-foot sycamore tree out back. So the new addition was built around the tree, a task that would prove difficult. The trunk grew at a 45-degree angle and a tangle of roots was six feet below grade, according to Mr. MacKinnon's architects, Mike Jacobs and Aaron Neubert.

Though Mr. MacKinnon now lives alone, the tree remains a steadfast companion. The tree, which predates the 1957 house, "has more right to be here than me," he said. He originally bought the post-and-beam home, a cozy two-bedroom that sits on a steep slope on Runyon Canyon, for $940,000 in 2003.

Floor-to-ceiling glass panels overlooking the canyon forest give the home a tree house feel. An open layout was particularly important to Mr. MacKinnon. "I hate, hate, hate walls," he explained. Mr. MacKinnon took pains to blend the new structure with the old. He used the same red cedar siding and matched the blue-gray glass tiles in the new bathroom and pool with those on the original kitchen backsplash.

To save money, Mr. MacKinnon acted as the general contractor for the project, his woodworking skills gleaned from his father, a cabinetmaker. Friends from the set of the television show "CSI: NY," where he worked as a makeup artist, helped frame the windows and doors and fabricate the metal support beam for the tree trunk. The 800-square-foot addition quickly went over budget, forcing Mr. MacKinnon to downsize from a full-size pool to a 10-by-8-foot hot tub. But he couldn't be happier with the result.

For the full story with images, go to:
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2009/03/26/garden/20090326-onlocation-slideshow_index.html

Scientists Aim to Replicate the Sun

source: upi.com

LIVERMORE, Calif., March 15 (UPI) -- Scientists in California say they're trying to replicate the power of the sun by firing laser beams at a tiny pellet of hydrogen.

Physicists at the National Ignition Facility in Livermore say the nuclear fusion experiments may offer the world a clean source of energy, The Times of London reported Sunday.

The hydrogen pellet will be hit with 192 laser beams capable of generating 500 trillion watts -- 1,000 times the power of the U.S. national grid, said the scientists.

"We hope the ignition experiments will show that we can generate more power than we put in and that fusion can be the source of a supply of carbon-free energy," said Ed Moses, director of the facility.

Science is at least 25 years away from building fusion power stations that could provide a clean alternative to fossil fuels. Those power stations would use hydrogen atoms extracted from sea water as fuel to generate carbon-free electricity with minimal radioactive waste, Moses said.

Lighting controls from Square D

During these difficult economic times, lighting control retrofits and upgrades are an opportunity for savings. General capital expenditures may be down, but money is being allocated for energy saving projects. Lighting control in a home or facility is a great way to conserve energy, and you can offer fast ROI (return on investment) solutions using Square D lighting control products.

Lighting controls add value to buildings. Energy efficient buildings are worth more than inefficient buildings, making lighting controls a great investment. Building owners are under increasing pressure to control operating expenses and offset the rising cost of energy. Lighting can typically account for 40% of the energy used in today's commercial buildings. Managing these costs requires a lighting control solution that provides immediate payback without sacrificing productivity or occupancy comfort. In addition, a lighting control solution must comply with the prevailing energy and electrical codes, and possibly integrate into an existing building automation system.

Lighting controls are a proven means to quickly lower energy costs. Occupancy sensors easily retrofit into existing offices, classrooms and warehouses, reducing energy consumption 25-50% in most spaces. Lighting control panelboards can retrofit in existing panelboard enclosures, controlling lighting in large areas such as open offices and common areas, as well as outdoor parking lots and garages. Energy efficient lighting controls achieve payback periods of 2-3 years on average.

We'll have more product on our site very soon. Come back to see more from HID, Square D, Pelco, t.a.c., Belimo and all the rest.

What is LEED certification.

LEED is a green building certification program created by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) in 2001 to create a national standard for what green building means. For a new green building to qualify, it must meet certain minimum requirements for indoor air quality, energy efficiency, recycling and pollution prevention during the construction process.

In addition, buildings can earn up to 69 individual points for implementing a variety of green strategies to accomplish such ends as improving indoor air quality, reducing energy and water consumption and choosing sustainable building materials.

To be LEED-certified, a new commercial building must obtain at least 26 points total. A higher number of points corresponds with a higher level of certification.

• Certified: 26-32 points
• Silver: 33—38
• Gold: 39—51
• Platinum: 52—69

The LEED New Construction Checklist shows all potential points for a new building.

The LEED New Construction Rating System is a 78-page PDF explaining the requirements for each point in detail

Come to midwestBAS.com, browse our ever-expanding catalog. Contractor? Apply for contractor pricing. Like what you see and anticipate growing your relationship with midwestBAS? Fill out our credit application. Bidding a job? Use our quote request form, we save the quotes online for you until you order or you tell us someone else got the bid. Contact us if you have any questions!

New and updated mounting kits and linkages from t.a.c.

The AV-607 and AV-609 TAC DuraDrive Globe Valve Linkages have been replaced by the AV-607-1 and the AV-609-1. The updated AV-607-1 and AV-609-1 linkages have been updated to accommodate either one or two TAC DuraDrive actuators for high close off and for retrofit applications.


The AM-620 and AM-621 are new from TAC.

AM-620 TAC DuraDrive Application Single/Dual Actuators Remote Mounting Kit

Application – Remote Mounting of one or two TAC DuraDrive high torque actuators with linear movement pushrod connection to damper or jackshaft.

Compatible Actuators - Mx41-715x, Mx40-717x, and Mx41-634x TAC DuraDrive Actuators (dual actuators must have the same input signal and torque ranges, and be wired according to their General Instruction Sheets)

Parts included - Comes with all clamps and accessories to connect to a 5/16” diameter pushrod

Other Parts Required – 5/16” pushrod (AM-125, AM-125-048, AM-125-600 or equivalent) and crank arm or damper clip at the damper end (second 5/16” ball joint linkage provided with AM-620 for the damper end), to avoid buckling with rods longer than 36”, enclose control rod in
tubing (1/2” EMT) with end washers.

AM-621 Application TAC DuraDrive Actuators Over the Shaft Dual Actuator Mounting Kit

Application – Over the shaft mounting of one or two TAC DuraDrive actuators on a common ½” round shaft, can also be used for extending the shafts of short shafts for use with one actuator

Secondary Application – Heavy duty ½” shaft extender for short shaft applications where standard shaft extenders are not strong enough

Compatible Actuators - Mx41-715x, Mx40-717x, and Mx41-634x TAC DuraDrive Actuators (dual actuators must have the same input signal and torque ranges, and be wired according to their General Instruction Sheets)

Parts included - Comes with all necessary parts including clamps and anti-rotation brackets

Other Parts Required – none

If you have any questions, feel free to drop us a line.

Have a large order or see business down the road? Request a quote and/or apply for contractor pricing.

Thanks for giving us a look!

Pelco Sells Intelli-M Electronic Access Control Business Unit to infinias

source: securitymagazine.com

Pelco has signed an agreement to sell the Intelli-M® Electronic Access Control product line to infinias, LLC. The deal which will include intellectual property, assets, and products in development related to the Intelli-M product line is set to close on or around March 16.

Infinias, LLC a newly formed and independent company, will focus on the development, growth and support of the Intelli-M business, while maintaining integration with Pelco video security products. Until the transition is complete Pelco dealer and distributor customers will continue to purchase products and obtain support for warranty and repairs direct from Pelco. At the close of the sale, infinias, LLC will take over all sales and support, including warranty support for Intelli-M products previously sold by Pelco. Pelco customers can expect the same level of support from infinias, LLC as they have been receiving through Pelco.

“Pelco decided that the best way to serve our customers is to stay focused on our core video products, and to spin off the access control business unit to infinias, LLC who, as the current development team, are best suited to maintain and expand the Intelli-M access control business.” said Dean Meyer, President and CEO of Pelco, Inc. “We will work with infinias, LLC to ensure that this transition is as smooth as possible.”

Wayne Jared, Pelco Vice President of EAC Engineering will lead infinias, LLC, as President and CEO, once the transaction is complete. Other key members of the Pelco EAC team based in Indianapolis, Indiana will join the new company as well. “Infinias, like Pelco, is committed to our customers and to providing continued support for today’s Intelli-M products.” says Jared, “We will also develop new simple, scalable and secure products to meet the future needs of the EAC market.”

The Intelli-M product line consists of the eIDC a cutting-edge Ethernet enabled integrated door controller which is one of the first POE door controllers introduced to the security market; and Supervisor Plus® a full-featured scalable security management software system that integrates access control, intrusion detection, photo badging and digital video. A new addition to the Intelli-M family will be announced at ISC West.

The illusion of clean coal

The world is investing too much cash and hope in carbon capture and storage.

source: The Economist print edition

“FACTORIES of death” is how James Hansen, a crusading American scientist, describes power stations that burn coal. Coal is the dirtiest of fossil fuels, producing twice the carbon dioxide that natural gas does when it is burned. That makes it a big cause of global warming.

But some of the world’s biggest economies rely on coal. It provides almost 50% of America’s and Germany’s power, 70% of India’s and 80% of China’s. Digging up coal provides a livelihood for millions of people. And secure domestic sources of energy are particularly prized at a time when prices are volatile and many of the big oil and gas exporters are becoming worryingly nationalistic. It is hard to see how governments can turn their backs on such a cheap and reliable fuel.

There does, however, seem to be a way of reconciling coal and climate. It is called carbon capture and storage (CCS), or carbon sequestration, and entails hoovering up carbon dioxide from the smokestacks of power plants and other big industrial facilities and storing it safely underground, where it will have no effect on the atmosphere. The technologies for this are already widely used in the oil and chemical industries, and saltwater aquifers and depleted oilfields offer plenty of promising storage space. Politicians are pinning their hopes on clean coal: Angela Merkel and Barack Obama, among others, are keen on the idea.

But CCS is proving easier to talk up than to get going. There are no big power plants using it, just a handful of small demonstration projects. Utilities refuse to make bigger investments because power plants with CCS would be much more expensive to build and run than the ordinary sort. They seem more inclined to invest in other low-carbon power sources, such as nuclear, solar and wind. Inventors and venture capitalists, in the meantime, are striving to create all manner of new technologies—bugs for biofuels, revolutionary solar panels, smart-grid applications—but it is hard to find anyone working on CCS in their garage. Several green pressure groups, and even some energy and power company bosses, think that the whole idea is unworkable.

With the private sector sitting on its hands, Western governments are lavishing subsidies on CCS. Some $3.4 billion earmarked for CCS found its way into America’s stimulus bill. The European Union, which already restricts greenhouse-gas emissions through a cap-and-trade scheme, unveiled further incentives for CCS last year. Britain, Australia and others have also vowed to help fund demonstration plants partly because they reckon the private sector is put off by the huge price-tag on a single CCS power plant, and also in the belief that the cost of CCS will fall with experience.

Burning cash

The private sector, however, is reluctant to fork out not just because of the upfront cost of power plants, but also because, tonne for tonne, CCS looks like an expensive way of cutting carbon. The cost of it may fall, but probably not by much, given the familiarity of the technologies it uses.

Politicians should indeed encourage investment in clean technologies, but direct subsidies are not the way to do it. A carbon price or tax, which raises the cost of emitting carbon dioxide while leaving it up to the private sector to pick technologies, is the better approach. CCS is not just a potential waste of money. It might also create a false sense of security about climate change, while depriving potentially cheaper methods of cutting emissions of cash and attention—all for the sake of placating the coal lobby.

North Pacific Gyre

source: Vice

The problem with all the bravado on both sides of the ecology debate is that nobody really knows what they’re talking about. Trying to form opinions on climate change, overpopulation, and peak oil hinges on ginormous leaps of faith based around tiny statistical deviances that even the scientists studying them have a hard time understanding. It gets so convoluted with all the yelling and the politics that sometimes you just want something huge and incontrovertibly awful to come along for everybody to agree on.


There is a Texas-size section of the Pacific Ocean that is irretrievably clogged with garbage and it will never go away. And I have seen it with my own eyes. Case closed. Oh, you want to hear more? OK, fine.

In the middle of the 90s, Charles Moore was sailing his racing catamaran back to California from Hawaii and decided on a lark to cut through the center of the North Pacific Gyre. The Gyre is an enormous vortex of currents revolving around a continuous high-pressure zone—if you think of the rest of the Pacific as a gigantic toilet, this zone would be the part where your poop bobs and twirls before being sucked down. Boats typically avoid it since it’s essentially one big windless death trap, so when Moore motored through it was just him, his crew, and an endless field of garbage.

As long as it’s existed, the middle of the Gyre has been a naturally occurring point of accumulation for all the drifting crap in its half of the ocean. Once upon a time, flotsam circled into the middle of the Gyre and (because up until the past century everything in the world was biodegradable) was broken down into a nutrient-rich stew perfect for fish and smaller invertebrates to chow on. Then we started making everything out of plastic and the whole place went to shit.

The problem with plastic is, unless you hammer it with enough pressure to make a diamond, it never fully disintegrates. Over time plastic will photodegrade all the way down to the individual polymers, but those little guys are still in it for the long haul. This means that except for the slim handful of plastics designed specifically to biodegrade, every synthetic molecule ever made still exists. And except for the small percentage that gets caught in a net or washes up on a shore, every chunk of plastic that’s dropped into the Pacific makes its way to the center of the Gyre and is floating there right now.

After watching junk lap against the side of his boat for the better part of a week, Captain Moore decided to convert his boat into a research vessel and make semiannual trips into the Gyre to study the trash. I tagged along on his most recent voyage, joining a divorced, 40-something doctor and a Mexican chemist and mother of two as his crew. It was like a family vacation, but with more science and way more bummers.

The garbage patch is located at one of the most remote points on earth. It takes a solid week of sailing just to get there. Considering how torturous the average daylong car trip gets, you can well imagine the kind of zap job that seven days on a 50-foot boat will do to your brain. You lose sight of land the first day, then you stop seeing other ships, then you stop seeing anything at all except for endless waves and occasionally a seabird, which, after days of nothing but water, becomes as exciting as spotting a UFO. Right at the point where you’ve come up with a separate song for every bird in the ship’s guidebook and have begun integrating them into a full seabird opera, you start seeing the trash.

I had assumed (completely without any basis in research or common sense) that there was some contiguous mass of concentrated garbage the captain was steering us toward, but (sadly?) this was not the case. The debris patterns shift with the currents, so you just have to aim the boat in one direction and hope for crap. Every so often we’d spot a few different pieces of garbage floating sort of near one another, but for the most part it was just a steady stream of junk, passing one piece at a time. It was a little underwhelming at first, but keep in mind we were cutting a razor-thin course through one of the biggest expanses of open water on the planet. The fact that we couldn’t look out the window for the better part of the trip without seeing some piece of junk bobbing by holds some seriously ugly implications for the rest of the ocean. The first few times we spotted garbage, we made a big production of stopping the boat and going out to scoop it up. Then we began just picking up whatever trash we could snag from the front of the deck. Then we just grabbed whatever looked interesting.

Some of the flotsam is fun stuff that fell off the side of container ships, like entire crates of hockey masks and Nikes. You might have read about the shipment of rubber duckies that got lost in a storm back in 1992 and have been used by oceanographers to more accurately plot the movement of water currents. I guess that’s something of a silver lining to the situation, although it’s a lot like thanking AIDS and cholera for all the advances they’ve provided to epidemiologists.

Before we became equal parts bored and depressed with hauling garbage out of the sea all day, we managed to score a motorcycle wheel, a hard hat, and some children’s life preservers with shark bites in them. We also narrowly missed running into what was either a ship’s mast or a telephone pole. The majority of our haul, though, was just average crap like Coke bottles and grocery bags. A lot of it seemed to come from Asia, meaning it had to have traveled at least 5,000 miles just for us to find it. The scary, staggering thing to consider while holding this stuff is that only a fifth of it is tossed from boats. Most of it is land-born trash that somehow ended up in a waterway and worked a slow path out to sea. As the captain said a good ten or so times, “The ocean is downstream of everything.”

Once we were firmly inside the patch, Captain Moore rigged up a trawl and started taking water samples in little petri dishes. I figured these would be snoozers without a microscope, but when the first one came in it was more horrifying than anything we’d seen floating past.

There were a few water striders and tiny jellyfish here and there, but they were totally overwhelmed by a thick confetti of plastic particles. It looked like a snow globe made of garbage. Based on previous samples, Moore estimated the ratio of plastic to the regular components of seawater in what we were pulling up as 6 to 1. As we moved closer to the middle of the Gyre, the ratio got visibly higher, until we started pulling in samples that looked like they contained solely plastic.

This is the part of the trip that weighs heaviest on my mind. It’s terrible enough to litter sections of the planet with things that can conceivably be removed—I mean, even oil spills and radioactive dust can be cleaned up to a certain extent. But to fundamentally alter the composition of seawater at one of the farthest points from civilization on the globe is a whole different ballpark of ruining the planet.

But wait, here comes the scariest part.

Once the plastic confetti gets small enough to fit inside a jellyfish’s mouth, it gets sucked in and starts its way up the food chain back to us. As the jellies float out of the debris field, little fish eat them, absorbing all the built-up plastics. Then big fish eat a bunch of little fish, even bigger fish eat a bunch of big fish, and by the time you get to the point where we’re hoisting creatures out and eating them, you’re looking at entire milk crates’ worth of particles built up in their fat. It’s the cycle of life reimagined as a dystopian sci-fi cliché. We are eating our own refuse.

Aside from clogging up the digestive tract (biologists in the Pacific have found the bodies of birds who starved to death because their stomachs were completely packed with trash), degraded plastics also have the tendency to sop up foreign chemicals that have leached into the water. There’s a whole class of pesticides and solvents called persistent organic pollutants that are basically tailor-made to attach themselves to loose synthetics and wreak havoc on whatever living thing happens to swallow them. The chemist on our boat was studying a pair of the most prevalent of these pollutants in the Pacific water, DDE and DDT. Yep, the same DDT that kills baby eagles. It’s also a probable carcinogen with links to diminished sperm counts and developmental retardation. The ocean is brimming with this stuff.

What’s worse is that even when the plastic is free from outside toxins, its components can potentially wreck your body. Bisphenol A is a compound used in things like Nalgene bottles and massagers. It’s also a synthetic estrogen and can completely derail the reproductive system. Dr. Frederic vom Saal of the University of Missouri has been studying the effects of bisphenol A on lab mice for the past decade and has noticed ties to its exposure with an absurd suite of health problems including low sperm count, prostate cancer, hyperactivity, early-onset diabetes, breast cancer, undescended testicles, and sex reversal.

Vom Saal’s research is at the center of a messy dispute because it involves exposure in such infinitesimal quantities and nobody is exactly sure how the endocrine system works. There’s also a tricky “magic bullet” sort of quality to his findings, but after talking with him it seemed like even he was a little taken aback that this one chemical could be at the root of almost every major US health crisis of the past 30 years. And even if he’s only right on one of the above counts, yeesh.

Still worse than any of this is the possibility that the same chemicals can simultaneously trigger massive disruptions in DNA. “All it takes is one misaligned chromosome and you’ve got things like Down syndrome,” vom Saal says. “If you examine the genetic material in animals exposed to low doses of bisphenol A, it looks like someone fired a shotgun into the chromosomes.”


On the outer edge of the Gyre, we ran smack into the white whale of the maritime trash world: a ghost net. Ghost nets are loose tangles of fishing line and nets that float freely across the ocean, snagging anything in their path. They are the langoliers of the sea. Ghost nets have been found that are miles long with oars and sharks’ skulls and full turtle skeletons peeking out of their knots. The one we caught wasn’t anywhere near that big, but it was easily twice my size, weighed 200 pounds, and housed both a toothbrush and its own school of tropical fish.

There was no way we could tow the massive clump of nets to shore, so we hoisted it onto the back of the ship, attached a GPS tag so that oceanographers could track its movement, and lowered it back into the water. Our camera guy, Jake, jumped in after it to film it drifting away in a cloud of slaked-off string and plastic. When he hopped back on board it looked like somebody had smeared body glitter across his chest. It was tiny chunks of plastic.