China's Yangtze River Turns Red 272
redletterdave writes "The Yangtze River, the third longest river in the world traditionally known as the 'golden watercourse,' mysteriously blushed for the first time on Sept. 6. Residents in the surrounding area near the city of Chongqing, where the Yangtze connects to the Jialin River, literally stopped in their tracks when they noticed their once golden river had turned a shocking shade of red. Residents have carefully crept down to the riverbanks for the past few days to save some of the red, tomato juice-like river water in bottles. Early predictions from scientists say the red water was likely a result of pollution, but investigators are still investigating the unknown cause."
sounds familiar (Score:5, Funny)
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Soon Moh She will lead the workers out of their factories and part the Yellow Sea.
Which, if this is pollution related, may in fact actually be "yellow" by then!
Now, if the yellow area just makes it down to the mouth of the Yangtze River we might get a nice swirled paisley effect...
Tie Dyed ocean, could there be better proof of God's Love?
Re:sounds familiar (Score:5, Funny)
Obvious propaganda is obvious. (Score:4, Funny)
Obvious propaganda from the chinese communist party.
Re:Obvious propaganda is obvious. (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh right, commemorating the great events of September ???, lessee, when was that?
Huge earthquakes [huffingtonpost.com], near Yiliang County.
Followed by heavy rains.
Large landslides.
117 miles south of a major Yangtze tributary into which local rivers drain.
Far more likely an industrial spill or iron ore laden mudslide.
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Jeez dude, lighten up, and enjoy some good old-fashioned Communist Propaganda. [youtube.com]
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synchronizing periods
Story said this was the "First Time". Had it been a monthly occurrence it wouldn't be news.
Re:Obvious propaganda is obvious. (Score:5, Funny)
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Worse.
Finally china's population density has brought about a horrific consequence, the land itself is synchronizing periods with the local population.
Those poor bastards, may god have mercy on their souls...
China's population density is about 1/3 that of Japan, Korea, and India, and about half the density of the UK. Does god have enough mercy for all of those souls as well?
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China's population density is about 1/3 that of Japan, Korea, and India, and about half the density of the UK. Does god have enough mercy for all of those souls as well?
Big difference. India and UK have lots of flat arable land. China is covered in mountains and desert.
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That's true, that makes the population density in China less harmful than that in the UK and India and so on. Because condensing the area people live on reduces their energy needs. If every chinese household had a car and a need to use it, then that would be a problem - but due to the lack of "lots of flat arable land", they don't need to drive to get their needs filled. Same goes for a lot of other things... Granted they still need to work on the efficiency of their production chain and on reducing the cra
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Nothing to do with population density. This is simply what you get when you combine psychophysically run corporations with an autocratic corrupt right wing government, China simply flipped from a left wing to a right wing government, without changing the name plates. The net result of corporations running without any regulation, sure the laws are there but a few dollars and they disappear.
So how much will settle in the riverbed taking decades to either be buried on to reduce to less problematic levels an
Re:Obvious propaganda is obvious. (Score:5, Insightful)
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There most likely is no god
Why are you trying to turn this into a religious argument? There most certainly is a god, and I've got a Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] article that proves it.
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Great, another dumb FSM heretic. You can run but you can't hide, She [wikipedia.org] will punish you for your beliefs and you'll never see her coming!
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ya, except it isn't.
Theism is the belief in a god. The A, means no or not. I don't believe, I'm not making a statement for or against.
A philatelist is a stamp collector. I am an 'Aphilatelist'. Am I making any type of assertion of a negative?
Of course there is a difference, I can actually see stamps. Kinda helps with the credibility. That and no one is killing anyone else over invisible stamps.
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It appears you don't even understand your position. As an a-theist, it isn't that you don't believe in god, you believe there is no god, otherwise you would be an agnostic. Atheism takes a position, one which cannot be based on knowledge*, which renders it belief.
That and no one is killing anyone else over invisible stamps.
You flatter yourself based on mistaken belief.
League of Militant Atheists [wikipedia.org]
Documentary on Militant Atheism in the Soviet Union [youtube.com]
Militant Atheism in the USSR [youtube.com]
Tortured for Christ in Atheist Romania - Richard Wurmbrand [youtube.com]
* ~ 10^11 galaxies in the universe
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Atheism does indeed imply a strong belief in the non existence of a deity exactly as the opposite view of theism
It's just a definition, though, not that it matters that much in this conversation
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In a narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities.
(second sentence of the article)
here is the companion article [wikipedia.org] that also agrees with what I said (which is just what I have been teached at some point anyway, it could be 'wrong')
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China's population density is skewed by large tracts of comparatively empty provinces. Instead of comparing it as a country to other countries, stick to the provinces with high populations.
Isn't that better for the environment? Areas of very dense population large areas of mostly undeveloped land? I'd bet that if their population were more evenly distributed across the country then there'd be more environmental destruction.
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Sorry, the color red no longer belongs to socialism. It's been take over by a totally different movement [reddogreport.com].
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It was news media that assigned the colors. It was GOP blue and Dems red when I was a kid, then they switched it for what I'm sure are curious reasons.
Re:Obvious propaganda is obvious. (Score:5, Informative)
I don't remember the parties having any colors when I was a kid, though according to WP, the Dems and Reps did indeed sometimes use Red and Blue respectively. And of course everywhere but here, the left is "Red" and the right is "Blue". I think this has to do with the left being fond of waving red flags (an old symbol for a fight to the death) and the right usually being associated with asserting traditional hierarchies, which originally meant rule by so-called Blue Bloods — people who had the right ancestors.
But the red flag became the symbol of the socialist movement, which has always been unpopular in the U.S. I think American liberals consciously avoided using red, so as to avoid assisting those who defined a commie as anybody to the left of Genghis Khan. So the standard color scheme never really caught on here. Meanwhile, the world socialist movement fell out of favor after the biggest Marxist state collapsed and the second-biggest basically switched over to intensive capitalism — pretty much destroying the whole red-versus-blue image. Since Americans aren't great at historical memory, they were now free to re-invent the color scheme.
It's true that the current Red-State/Blue-State thing started out on TV. (WP says it was first used in the 2000 presidential coverage). But I think the main credit for its spread goes to the right, which embraced an image [wikimedia.org] that neatly illustrated their claim that liberals represent a group of people living in a few prosperous coastal states, and who completely ignore the needs of Americans in flyover states.
Note that redstate.com is an influential political blog, while bluestate.com belongs to an obscure lighting and design firm whose web site has been in parking mode since 2007 [archive.org].
Apple has finally done it !!!! (Score:5, Funny)
They've unleashed gods wrath on us with their patent wars....
And now for a musical interlude (Score:5, Funny)
When Android was in China's land ... let my cell phones go! .. let my cell phones go!
Just trolled so hard they could not stand
Go down, Samsung, way down in China's land,
tell ol' Jintao to let my cell phones go!
(Nah, it just doesn't quite have the same ring to it)
Red? (Score:4, Interesting)
Maybe my eyes need to be checked, but it looks brown to me.
Re:Red? (Score:5, Informative)
I was thinking the same thing then clicked the link in the article and that was where the red pictures were, the page we are linked to has the before pictures.
It's pretty unmistakeably red if you can see red.
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Re:Red? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Red? (Score:5, Informative)
Quite obviously photoshopped. Look at the photo with the two men, one holding a bottle. Now look along the left side of the bottle. Look at the men's left arms. Screaming fake. If you inspect some of the other pictures closely, you will also find other areas where color manipulation is evident.
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Yeah even I have to agree to that. I sent a message to my friend who lives in Chongqing, after a long night of partying I got a reply of "what happened?" I guess he didn't even know about it.
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Wow, no joke, that's some shoddy PS job. Also the shore-side water in the background between the two men's heads. They forgot to paint that part.
Re:Red? (Score:5, Informative)
It looks to me like they tweaked the saturation. I was wondering about that because I saw the same pictures elsewhere and the color is not nearly so dramatic -- at least if you're not conditioned to having the river look one way or the other.
My wife is a physical oceanographer and her first reaction when she heard about this is that it was some kind of phytoplankton bloom. Some pictures I've seen make it look like some kind of dye, which is more plausible than you might think.
When my brother was a civil engineering co-op student he caused a local news sensation . He'd been given the job of doing a dye study looking for illegal sewer connections. What happens is that developers assume the first pipe they come to is the right one to hook the sanitary sewer lines up to. He only needed half a teaspoon of dye powder, but the smallest quantity he could order was a two gallon pail. So he flushed the whole pail down the toilet, and hit the jackpot, dyeing the whole harbor of Salem Mass fluorescent green.
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My wife is a physical oceanographer and her first reaction when she heard about this is that it was some kind of phytoplankton bloom
That's what I was thinking, it's the right time of year and they are not uncommon in China (recall the massive bloom they were cleaning up around the time of the Olympics).
Re:Red? (Score:5, Informative)
AC Parent is a liar
No, he's not.
Take a good look at the area under the bottle in this image [dailymail.co.uk]. Some of the water remains brown, yet parts of the two men's arms are the exact same color as the water.
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oh, haha. and look at the area around the thumb of his left hand
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Have to agree. Obvious photoshop job is obvious. Which doesn't necessarily mean that the whole thing is a hoax. It probably just means that the pictures they took just didn't look as red/orange as they had to the naked eye, so they modified them a bit. Probably to the point where it looks even brighter than it actually appeared to the naked eye.
Re:Red? (Score:5, Informative)
Use this link:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2199800/The-river-DID-run-red-Residents-Chinese-city-left-baffled-Yangtze-turns-scarlet.html#ixzz25u00nD4M [dailymail.co.uk]
No idea why the story insisted on linking to a secondary source.
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Red and brown are pretty much the same color at different brightness. Weird, but true.
Some photos obviously enhanced (Score:5, Informative)
I was looking at some of the photos linked in that article, and I noticed that some of them [dailymail.co.uk] are pretty obviously photoshopped. I'm sure the river was red, but I'm not so sure it was such a dramatic shade of red. You can see where the editing was sloppy and bled over into the arm and thumb of the person holding the bottle, and the arm of the guy behind, as well as some sections that are probably the actual shade of red that the river turned.
Re:Some photos obviously enhanced (Score:4, Insightful)
>>>bled over into the arm and thumb of the person holding the bottle
Wow. Okay so what motive would the Daily Mail of the fine and prestigious UK have to colorize these photos? Hmmm.
Re:Some photos obviously enhanced (Score:5, Insightful)
We don't know but the guy does have a point, that picture was photoshopped.
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I'm pretty sure that was intended to be read with a sarcastic tone. Though I'm from the States, from what I've gathered the Daily Mail is like the UK's version of the National Enquirer--correspondence of their articles to actual reality is purely coincidental.
And, like the Enquirer, the more fantastic (in the literal sense) the story, the better.
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Re:Some photos obviously enhanced (Score:5, Informative)
On the captions you see it's by China Photo Press/Barcroft Media, which means DailyMail bought them from 3rd party photo journalists, who obviously were looking for a quick sell and weren't concerned with some color enhancement. Here's a phone camera video taken yesterday http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XNDQ3ODM2NDUy.html [youku.com] It's not as red as the photos, but still very red. The locals who are talking to the guy filming say it's the first time they've seen anything like this, so it's not a total fake either.
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And it's the first photo you see when you go on their website http://en.chinafotopress.com/ [chinafotopress.com]
Probably some local Chinese photographer wanted a quick buck from some gullible Britons.
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Hahaha. It's the Daily Mail- they don't need a motive to make shit up, it's second nature!
But if you want a motive, try- the pictures weren't dramatic enough, the real world colouration being not that drastic, and they really want their article to be linked all over the internet so that they get more page views?
Re:Some photos obviously enhanced (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm so upset that I didn't even bother to read more than a few sentences of the article given the topic we're having.
"Nobody is quite sure what caused the color change."
So in the rush to get there first with the reporting race, someone couldn't be bothered to give a college chem lab student lunch and an hour to get a chemical composition of the water? Oh, right, that would actually take journalism work.
Re:Some photos obviously enhanced (Score:5, Interesting)
The same already photoshopped picture is available from both China Foto Press and Barcroft Media, which are credited in the Daily Mail picture. Sloppy screening on the Daily Mail's behalf, but the image manipulation appears to originate closer to the source.
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Could someone with a knack for photoshop re-color the water in the picture to a nice blue color, with a caption saying both images are photoshopped? The "original" definitely looks photoshopped, but I admit I wasn't looking for it and I didn't notice until someone pointed it out. To see the the same photo with a sparkling blue river would be a great reminder that we have to keep our skepticism active at all times.
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No. It's a lousy Photoshop job. Zoom in on the lower part of the picture. You can clearly see the bad strokes made by the person who did the "enhancement".
Re:Some photos obviously enhanced (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm willing to bet that anything that could change the river to a color like this would probably stain the skin a bit.
That doesn't explain why there is a patch of un-brightened water under the guy's forearm, the line of which exactly matches up with the patch of orange on his arm itself.
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> It isn't 'obvious' to me that that image has been manipulated.
No offense, but are you blind? Here are the areas highlighted in red that show obvious signs of being manipulated.
http://imgur.com/d5vKF [imgur.com]
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Ukraine (Score:5, Interesting)
Here is a picture that I remember from way back [pikabu.ru] - this is a red river in the city of Zaporizhia [wikipedia.org] in Ukraine, this city has (or had) a number of factories, smelters, motor factories, I think most of them were just dumping the waste right into Dnepr (the main river in Ukraine) and then all that water flows into the Black sea.
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Is there a reason Roman is getting trounced?
Probably his reputation. To some people mod points are a weapon to use on their "foes", I don't agree with roman_mir 99.9% of the time he opens his mouth about politics, but there is always a lot more to a person than their political opinions. Down modding his interesting and on-topic post above is just petty vindictiveness from someone he has offended in the past. Slashdot really isn't that much different to a village in the dark ages, some people get noticed more because of what they regularly talk about.
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That's nothing serious (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm from Cleveland. Call me when the Yangste is on fire [ohiohistorycentral.org].
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Came here to say this. The Cuyahoga caught fire in 1969. How long will it take China to start taking their environment seriously? I can't believe that they would let this go on forever, but it isn't a democracy and money makes people blind to the effects of their actions.
Re:That's nothing serious (Score:5, Interesting)
How long will it take China to start taking their environment seriously?
China's environmental record is similar to the US in that it is full of contradictions. Look up the Loose (sic?) plateau in NW China, it's an area the size of France that 20yrs ago looked like an Afghan desert and today is one of the world's largest apple producing regions, goats are now fenced in, the hills now have trees and wild life, the land has stopped eroding away faster than anywhere else on earth, locals were given land to farm in exchange for caring for it in the prescribed manner, and the average income of the locals has quadrupled (after taking inflation into account). The entire thing cost $500M and was done with hand tools using local labor. However these were all secondary aims of the project, the primary aim of the project was to stop silt filling up the three gorges dam. ;)
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When it is, can we toss the idiot who photoshopped these in it? [dailymail.co.uk]
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Seems to me a good way to catch your fish precooked...
Iron oxide, maybe a spill from an aluminium plant (Score:5, Informative)
Aluminium plants produce a huge quantity of "red mud" which is red from iron oxide. A spill could well color the whole river red.
See e.g. here where the mud spilled through a broken dam in Hungary: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/gallery/2010/10/05/GA2010100502818.html [washingtonpost.com]
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And those photos are a lot closer in color to the un-enhanced spots on the Daily Mail shots. No doubt it was orange, but not the bright pumpkin orange from the daily mail shots (not that the DM necessarily touched them up, they obviously belong to a Chinese outfit).
Actually, no (Score:2)
Red mud is dangerous because of two reasons: first, it contains sodium hydroxide which is a chemicale base and caustic so that the pH is somewhere betwee 10 and 13. However, I would suppose that the pH drops quickly in the river after a few kilometers and only fish at the location where the mud entered the river would be severely affected.
Second, it contains heavy metals but not in a concentration that would have an immediate toxic effect -- problem with that is that it will accumulate in organisms.
The bigg
Sounds like a red tide (Score:5, Interesting)
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Red tides have a number of causes, some of which are quite natural. The algal bloom is often toxic, which makes me worry for the fisherman in TFA.
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While not strictly "red tide," here in Oregon we have problems every summer with (potentially lethal) freshwater algae blooms that come in a variety of bright colors. The one that has plagued Hills Creek Reservoir for many years is a fairly bright, ominous red.
Last month I saw one that was a pale milky green.
A natural area a few minutes from my house has signs warning pet owners of brightly colored waters and the danger of pet death.
People's Republic Rejoice! (Score:5, Funny)
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No longer appropriate for a country that is only nominally Communist, and happens to be the biggest Capitalistic entity on the planet.
Perfectly reasonable (Score:4, Funny)
Listen (Score:5, Funny)
Just let the Jews go. It only gets worse from here.
- Pharaoh
Re:Listen (Score:5, Funny)
If it gets to where all the first born children die, there won't be many people left to stop them from leaving in this one-child-only country.
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They may try, but God will just harden the Central Committee's hearts. He does that whenever He wants to make a point.
Dumping (Score:5, Informative)
Some of the religious nuts will probably claim this is bibilical, but more likely, somebody dumped some industrial waste.
Something like that happened in San Jose, CA about twenty years ago. Someone dumped several big industrial plating baths into the sewers all at once. This killed most of the bacteria that digest waste in the sewerage treatment plant. So for about three days, raw sewerage was dumped into the San Francisco Bay. Big mess, especially since there isn't much water flow in the south end of San Francisco Bay to dilute that stuff. It could be both seen and smelled. EPA fined San Jose millions for that. San Jose found and fined the plating company.
Call me when it catches on fire (Score:2)
Call me when it catches on fire [wikipedia.org]. That's how you know an industrial revolution is complete.
You know when you're in a flat with three girls? (Score:4, Funny)
And then they get "sync'd"?
Now imagine that with 14 million women and poor sanitation.
Re:You know when you're in a flat with three girls (Score:5, Funny)
Just do you know... (Score:2)
...that river was called golden for a reason -- it always carries suspended particles of clay, so the color of the river depends on the composition of clay around it.
Red clay is nothing unusual, so most likely the river eroded some part of a bank with a different clay composition. If this is the case, any sane geologist should be able to find the place along the river where color changes, take water samples, and determine the source.
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China is notorious for its poor environmental practices and there are so many ways to get red, from organic pollutants to heavy metal salts to industrial dyes and coloring agents. The "Golden Watercourse" has run golden for many thousands of years, the chance of a sudden color shift not the result of human intervention (read dumping) though possible is vanishingly remote.
A similar event along the Yangtze happened in February of 2008 when the river ran red and authorities found large amounts of Ammonium Nitr [msn.com]
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1. It was not Yangtze river itself.
2. None of the chemicals mentioned are bright red.
3. The amount of red subtance that requires such color change over the whole river likely exceeds the capacity of any chemical production in the whole China. Yellow color was caused by clay, so there is no reason to suspect anything other than clay unless demonstrated otherwise.
4. Water pollutants are water-soluble, red substance that is seen in the river now is clearly suspension.
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In reply...
1. The Han River is a tributary fork of the Yangtze, what you see on the Han, you see on the Yangtze shortly there after.
2. I beg your pardon, Permanganates can range anywhere from deep purple to red depending on the metal, and this didn't have to be an identical dumping, Iron oxides, certain lead compounds (already responsible for colorful pollution on smaller rivers), even cinnabar (mercury sulphate) could color water red. I mention in the first paragraph we could be looking at any one of a n
cyanobacteria ? (Score:2)
a bloom caused by excess nutrients, i.e. pollution, in the water ?
maybe a kind of algae ?
that would be my guess.
Image is poorly Photoshopped - restored version (Score:5, Informative)
Based on a quick study of the poorly Photoshopped image (you can clearly see the mask lines, and the bits they forgot to alter) it looks like someone simply doubled the saturation on the water.
I've made an attempt to restore the image to something approaching reality [imageshack.us].
Hype much? (Score:2)
You've got to like the last sentence of the dailymail piece:
According to chapter 16, verse 4 of the Bible's book of Revelations, one of the signs that Armageddon is near will be an angel pouring a bowl into the rivers, turning them into blood.
Yangtze River Dolphins (Score:2)
I see why the Baiji dolphins of that river went extinct. At least they didn't have to suffer through this red mess.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baiji [wikipedia.org]
LET MY PEOPLE GO! (Score:2)
You've seen the movie. Don't make me go through all the stuff again.
Just ask the Pharaoh...Oops! My bad!
Free enterprise will pick the right color... (Score:2)
Garlic (Score:2)
Obviously someone blew up the local true blood factory.. time to get the garlic out.
Nothing new, ask my wife... (Score:2)
Re:Uh-huh.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Trying to figure out the scientific explanation behind this isn't nerdy enough?
Re:Uh-huh.. (Score:4, Funny)
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No.
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The 'shop certainly makes it look more insane, but in the spots where you can see the original colors it's still discolored. It's more of a ruddy brown, but it's still reddish.
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It wouldn't be the first time dye turned a chinese river red [huffingtonpost.com]
They said it's not the normal red-tide algae because that algae grows in salt water, but this is a freshwater river.
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I seem to recall that the cuyahaga(sp?) river caught on fire 10+ times before they did much about it, around the early 70s. Pretty sick, really.
So many tons of toxic shit dumped into the rivers and great lakes...
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The last one was a pair of illegal dye factories. They got shut down and their equipment dismantled. Now all depends on whether this is an illegal operation or in the Party's good books.