Robert Lee, also in the oil patch, has been hauling in water by tanker.
On a weekday morning, a large water tanker lumbers through the quiet streets, past its football field and basketball court, and over to a carefully manicured private park where a couple are sprawled on the bright green grass.
A further comic element is supplied by the antics of a Russian oil tanker, which is quite by coincidence shuffling back and forth uneasily just outside Swedish territorial waters in a position from which it might rescue, or have launched, a miniature submarine.
Simon Jenkins once observed that the idea that a newspaper is like an oil tanker and can be turned round only very slowly is false.
There is also a refinery and offshore oil tanker terminal nearby, but the coast guard did not find a sheen from a spill after the tar started to accumulate on Wednesday.
A fireball ripped through the tanker, penetrating the double hull and causing oil to spill into the Arabian Sea.
But try telling that to the clean-up team after an accident at sea involving a tanker or an oil rig.
Ride along, little tanker In love with regulation In Brennan's wake Unto him that hath . . .
Although American and British patrol boats intercept some of the smugglers, such as the Russian tanker seized last week, many more slip by.Some of the fruits of this trade are on display in Baghdad.
It is the smell of oil and it is everywhere, flaring at wellheads, sloshing from the tanker trucks that grind up potholed roads to backyard refineries in the Kurdish hills and fuming from their chimneys.
