Just in case you started thinking Facebook privacy was your biggest worry, real life has come pounding on the door with a reminder that it can make some serious trouble. The monstrous oil blob spewing from BP's damaged Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico is oozing toward America's southern shores, and the blogosphere is oozing with explanations and opinions are and ominous maps. DoobyBrain has incredible photos of the blazing, crumbling rig, and a link to video explaining what probably went wrong. HuffPo has 7 Secrets BP Doesn't Want you to Know, asserting "This may be BP's largest disaster, with many claiming it will be larger than Exxon Valdez's spill, but it is certainly not the first." Business Insider says "The oil spill is screwing up key industries in one of America's fastest growth regions" and takes tally of the $2.2 trillion gulf economy now threatened, with a fact-filled slideshow.

Econbrowser does some financial math on the aftermath and calculates BP has suffered "a net loss of $6.91 per share. BP has 3.13 billion shares outstanding amounting to a net loss of $21.62 billion." That's a loss in value spread across all shareholders, though, not an actual loss for the company. BP's image takes a huge hit too. Says The Source: "When the White House boasts that it will 'keep a boot to the throat' of your company, and Daily Show host Jon Stewart is cracking jokes about you in which the punch line is 'Goldman Sachs,' you know you've got an image problem." Everything is about perspective, of course. If, like RedState, you view the world through Blame Obama glasses, then the spill is "Obama's Katrina and Halliburton all rolled into one... There was the delayed response. There was the worrying about the image. There was the lack of resources... But it gets better..." Even better than mass devastation? Some people can just find good news everywhere.

More info is emerging about Faisal Shahzad, the apparent sleeper-cell terrorist in the city that never sleeps, who left an almost-bomb in a SUV in Times Square. News photos of Shahzad have been from the social networking sites Orkut and Facebook, where he apparently kept only certain things about himself private. (Alert: DO NOT FRIEND HIM.) Erica Swallow wonders: "How could an individual with a plan to unleash bombs in Times Square leave his online social presence completely unprotected from the media? Were the privacy settings too difficult to understand?" But hey, if you want to blend in. Boing Boing has the guy's resume, too, and says it's "terrifyingly mundane" citing experience with "Cognos, Hyperion, BRIO financial, Truecomp, Funnel, Artemis, Business Objects, JBA AS400 accounting and operations systems, Excel, PowerPoint, Word, FoxPro, Front Page, SwishMax, Showcase database query tools, email tools and Internet experience." (Alert: DO NOT HIRE.)

Since there were no casualties, the late-night comedians couldn't resist. "It's so nice today in New York City that people were leaving bombs in convertibles," David Letterman quipped (Daily Slog rounds up the monologues here.) Jay Leno's crew did up a fake Facebook page for Faisal that had him listed as a member of "Al Qaeda, the Pakistan Frequent Flyers Club, and Team Coco."

When times get tough, at least there's always news about Facebook's privacy snafus to entertain and annoy us. "This morning we were alerted to a bug that enabled users to view their [Facebook] friends' active chat sessions as well as any of their incoming friend requests," reported All Facebook on Wednesday. Yikes. Bloggers weren't even done complaining yet about Facebook's previous privacy crime, its "Connections" of members' private info to other sites, which Boing Boing this week called "the most reprehensible bit of corporate awfulness I've seen in months." (A chilling BB graph of FB privacy "events" is here.) "Facebook feels like privacy hell," says ghacks.net, which explains that, in the latest glitch, you could see a friend's chat by selecting "preview how your profile appears to a specific person." Mashable reports that chat was taken down, and presumably the problem was fixed. "After some reflection, I've decided to delete my account on Facebook," says Gizmodo, which offers Ten Reasons to Quit Facebook. Lines Writing Lines counters with 10 reasons NOT to delete your Facebook account. The top two are "Facebook gets better all the time" and "It's a pain in the ass to quit."

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