If you’re wondering why gas prices recently spiked – in my neighborhood they’re up some 20 cents over last week – the answer is not an OPEC/ExxonMobil/BP conspiracy. It’s the forces of freaking nature:

The entire field’s operations were shut down just ahead of the storm, reducing daily production by 2.7 million barrels of oil and 2.6 billion cubic feet of natural gas.

From time to time, nature decides to display its dominance, making humankind its collective bitch. Droughts make for poor harvests, early frosts destroy the orange crops (and your mothers perennials,) and hurricanes in oil-producing regions tend to disrupt the supply of oil.

I suspect it will be a day or so, tops, before I get another one of those chain e-mails urging me to “boycott” ExxonMobil gas stations.