Growing up on a farm, I had some experience handling barrels of crude oil, which I never found to be particularly flammable, and certainly not explosive. So I had been puzzled by those derailed oil trains that were going off like nuclear bombs, complete with the mushroom cloud.
Turns out I wasn't the only one puzzled. A reporter from the Wall Street Journal started to look into it and, and at some point, so did Rachel Maddow.
Now I love Rachel, but I always get irritated when she seems to repeat the facts she is reporting over and over, and rerun the graphics accompanying her commentary over and over. And the commercials, my God, the commercials (the Simpsons have even parodied the commercials). Thank God for TiVO.
But I am almost always astonished that at some point in her show she comes to the reveal: information that I not only did not know, I never saw coming.
Go below the fold for a case in point: last night’s show.