Some people have rich fantasy lives

I was listening to Colorado Public Radio yesterday. The news segments focusing on regional topics spent a fair amount of time discussing the Trump administration's decision to roll back regulations on clear air requirements for coal burning power plants. In addition, federal lands will once again be open for leases for mining.

Naturally, there are a fair number of people in the Colorado coal industry now doing the happy dance. In the bizarro alternate universe in which they live, they believe the glory days of coal mining are about to magically return. It's odd how people can be given information but be unable to understand its implications.

First, there was a lot of talk about how new access to federal land would give western coal a competitive edge. It's cheaper to mine on land leased from the Bureau of Land Management than it is to try to negotiate leases or purchase agreements for private land. Translation: the coal industry has become so marginal that if it doesn't get subsidized by the government it can't make a profit. If you need welfare to survive, your industry is not particularly competitive.

Second, there are no new coal burning power plants being built. Whatever the domestic market for coal is right now, that's basically it. Coal mines have closed not because they lacked access to ore but because the market for that ore was saturated. The electrical power industry has figured out that natural gas is a lot easier and cheaper to work with. In fact, not only are no new coal burning plants being built, existing ones are being converted to burn gas or biomass. Further, despite the best efforts of the fossil fuels industries to slow down wind and solar power generation, both areas are still growing. Bottom line: there are fewer buyers for coal, at least domestically.

Third, one of the optimistic notes sounded by the coal people was the export market. Well, good luck with that one, guys, when the Current Occupant of the White House is busy ticking off most of the world. It's going to get harder and harder to export anything when other countries respond to Trump's protectionist policies by throwing up barriers of their own. Plus, of course, other countries that do use coal are much more grounded in reality than the U.S. is. Their politicians actually believe in science, which is why China now leads the world in manufacturing solar panels. They're working hard at moving away from coal, and they're not alone.

But, hey, one of the coal mines in Colorado just added 20 people to its payroll -- twenty! -- so obviously massive growth in mining is just around the corner.

The cat came back

I am feeling remarkably cheerful this morning, although I'm not sure why. It was not a particularly fun week at work -- had to do substantive editing (aka major rewriting) on a couple papers to save the authors from potential embarrassment. One schmuck conflated domestic ferrets with black-footed ones, which is a rather wince-inducing blooper when the critters are completely different species. It would be knd of like confusing coyotes and cocker spaniels (both canids, but for sure not the same canid), and definitely not something any thinking person would want sliding into print.

The author, of course, did not fall into the thinking person category. I'm not sure if he's pissed because I changed his precious prose or because I, a nonbiologist, spotted what is an elementary error, but pissed he was. Too bad. I don't particularly care if he makes a fool of himself, but I'm not letting junk science slide into the journal. I have no clue how the blooper slid past the peer reviewers, although to be honest I'm not sure I would have picked up on the error if I hadn't edited a couple of the articles cited in the reference section and knew they didn't say what the author was suggesting they said.

One of my little obsessive-compulsive fact-checking things tends to be the references -- I've never been too keen on authors who sprinkle a lot of citations through an article, dropping numbers here and there like fresh cilantro on a tostada, but clearly don't know what's actually in the stuff they're referencing. I'm not sure if you'd call it tertiary citing or what, but I see authors all the time where something gets cited because somebody else cited it because somebody else cited it. You have to wonder just how long it's been since anyone went back and looked at the original paper. Sometimes it's a token genuflection (must bow in the direction of the Great Man who did the seminal work in this field) and sometimes it's the result of a quick lit search that pulls a list of titles -- and the author says, Aha, this one sounds like it applies to what I did! and plugs it into the citations list without ever bothering to look beyond the title (or to make sure it's in a language he or she is likely to be able to read; the fact the title is in English on PubMed doesn't guarantee the article itself isn't written in Swedish).

Then, on top of dealing with idiot authors too dumb to realize copy editors exist to make authors look good, we've been working short-handed. One of the other editors has been out sick since before Christmas, and it's beginning to catch up with us. We started falling far enough behind schedule on getting things into production that the Editor-in-Chief actually pulled a few things from the Table of Contents to shrink the size of an upcoming issue and give us some breathing room.

So why am I in a good mood?

Captain Jack is back. The Captain is a battered, definitely been through the wars feral tom that's been hanging around this apartment complex since we moved here in 2007. He's a domestic shorthair with Sylvester coloring, a broken tail, and torn ears, is missing an eye, and is covered with scar tissue. He's like an old pirate, hence, Captain Jack. You can tell this guy is a scrapper -- and you can also tell he stays busy. Every time we see feral kittens around, they're miniature versions of Captain Jack.

He's been looking like he's led a tough, adventure-filled life since I first spotted him several summers ago. I'm not sure just how many lives he's burnt through, but it's got to be several. Every time I see him around, I wish I could adopt the dude -- he's earned a soft pillow and a peaceful retirement -- but he's definitely the most feral of the semi-feral cats that call this complex home. There are several clowders living in the crawl spaces under the buildings. The manager tolerates them because he figures they keep rats and mice away. Some of the other cats are mellow enough that they might make adoptable pets, but the Captain doesn't have much use for people.

About a year ago, the maintenance man spotted the Captain sprawled next to the driveway. The cat looked really, thoroughly dead. Didn't move. So the maintenance man got out a shovel, tried sliding it under the cat, still no movement -- he had to grab him by the tail to drag him on to the shovel. The cat remained totally limp. Then he walked across the street and flipped the "body" over the chain link fence into the patch of woods there.

The next day the cat was back, looking like he always did.

I had been thinking maybe this time the Captain was gone for good -- I hadn't seen him around for a couple months -- but when I left for work Thursday morning, there he was, sleeping under my car, no doubt nursing sore feet and a hangover and regretting the latest tatoo.