Friday, March 18, 2011

Speaking To A Less-Than-Half-Capacity Crowd

...Ezra admitted...

Actually, an interesting bit in the comments:

Levant spent the majority of his lecture covering the four criteria, calling the word “tarsands” a politically-engineered phrase that acts like a tell in poker: “When you hear it, you know someone with an agenda is about to speak,” he said.

When I was in high school, more than 40 years ago, the deposits were known as tar sands. There was, IIRC, a mastodon preserved in the tar sands and the same geology in other parts of the world was referred to as tar sands or tar pits.

So - no engineering, political or otherwise, nor an agenda for those that use the term tar sands.

I'm not quite that old, but that's how I remember it as well. For example, the La Brea Tar Pits, which I believe is what the guy above is thinking of.

PS. Confirmed here by wikipedia.

5 comments:

aardvark said...

I worked for Shell as a research chemist in the VERY early days of development.
"Tar Sands" was the only term I ever heard used. Ezra is incorrect.

dizzy said...

“When you hear it[tar sands], you know someone with an agenda is about to speak,”

And when you hear "ethical oil"?

Northern PoV said...

And in Orwell's "War is Peace" dep't,
a hopeless shill says that the traditional name for the geological deposit of tar sands was engineered while in fact it is the "Oil Sands" moniker that was dreamed up by the marketing wiz-kids.

WesternGrit said...

In the early 70s in Sask we used to get a "handbook" at school that was quite obviously funded by big brands. I wish I still had a copy. It was an alphabetically arranged ad blitz targeting little kids. It started with A for "Alcan", worked it's way through "C" for Crest, and so on... It mentioned the Tar Sands and actually spoke of "the Story of the Tar Sands".

Someone whose name starts with an "E" and ends in "a" is a principle-less, manipulative propagandist... He works on the ignorance in parts of the right to attract his followers. I'm sure Harper and Co are happy to have him out of office - so he can get hyper-vitriolic as much as he likes...

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