Status Updates From Oil on the Brain Oil on the...

Governments of some cities, such as Guangzhou, have forbidden small cars from their streets on the grounds that they are beneath the dignity of a metropolis.

But at the time of the shooting, I was at a nearby Internet cafe, watching out of the corner of my eye as the two young men next to me crafted a classic Nigerian scam letter, complete with misspellings. In it they offered to sell the recipient a lost tanker of oil at a great discount if only the recipient sent them his bank account number and a wire transfer of $23,000.

Shell employees - who largely come from ethnic groups outside the [Niger] delta - believe that they pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and hard work in school. Like Venezuela's oil workers, they are horrified and disgusted by the culture of dependency outside the company's gates.

By the end of 2005, the oil project had given Chad $306 million in revenues, far more than anyone anticipated. In the meantime, though, Chad had moved from being the tenth poorest country in the world to the fourth. It also earned the distinction of being rated the most corrupt country in the world in 2005, tied with Bangladesh.

He wore two pairs of shorts, one covering the holes in the other to make the equivalent of one whole pair.

The lure of money [from the new Exxon project in Chad] drained the university in N'Djamena and even closed fourteen schools in the oil region, simply because teachers quit to find work with oil.

A former law student now working as a caterer [in Chad] tells me that men get "sex loans" from prostitutes, who record their visits in notebooks and present bills on payday. He also says that the condoms Exxon gives to workers for free are taken by entrepreneurs and resold at above-market rates, when they're available.

Drivers and boaters spill more oil every year than the Exxon Valdez.

To prevent people from buying [untaxed] off-road fuel and using it to drive on the highway, the state dyes off-road diesel pink, so police can see what's in the tank.