battered up!

Neptune, a planet associated with a foggy, dream-like energy, was especially powerful this week, with a “station” (appearing to stop in the sky) last Monday and an opposition from Mars on Friday. The week certainly seemed Neptunian...

Of course, the ongoing BP oil spill (Neptune rules oil) still continues to flow into the Gulf of Mexico. Seafood prices are rising, and President Obama is starting to take the heat.

The new Shrek movie seems to have stumbled into an oil slick of its own. First, some theatres announced they would charge $20 per ticket for the movie, but reversed themselves when public reaction was less-than-enthusiastic. Then later this week McDonalds announced a recall of millions of Shrek glasses which are tainted with cadmium, a toxic heavy metal. Incredibly, it turns out the glasses were not made in China!
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But the most Neptunian moment of the week came on the baseball diamond, as umpire Jim Joyce blew a call on the last out of what would have been Armando Galaragga’s perfect game. A “perfect game” is an extreme rarity in baseball, with only 20 having been pitched in the entire history of major league baseball, going back to the 1800s. Oddly, it would have been the third perfect game this season (which is nowhere near half over), with the most recent one occurring just a few days before, on May 29th.

Galaragga will probably not see the umpire’s ruling overturned, and he will become the Neptunian martyr who sacrifices himself... in this case, most probably for a good cause - instant replay reviews of umpire calls.