Magic to clean up Great Pacific Garbage Dump?

An individual using the alias "Rumplestiltskin" claims to be removing tons of plastic garbage floating in the North Pacific Gyre.

According to an e-mail sent directly to this blog, Rumplestiltskin possesses a magical object, a chantment, that extracts pollution from seawater without damaging marine plant or animal life. According to Rumplestiltskin, the object, a baby's teething ring, was a 'gift' and came with written instructions on how to use it safely.

"Nothing on the materials provided says whether this object came to me from Sahara Knax and the Alchemites, but I am not a believer in the Alchemite cult," writes Rumplestiltskin, who added that some of the plastic is being burned in a home-built generator to provide power for their effort to clean the ocean.

The North Pacific Gyre is located in the Northern Pacific Ocean and is reputed to be heavily polluted with small particles of plastic garbage, over an area twice as big as the State of Texas.

Rumplestiltskin is not the first chantment user to claim to have successfully turned ordinary electricity into power for magical objects, a claim that has yet to be verified. The proposition that people use some form of recitation, sometimes referred to as "cantation," to channel power into their mystical objects is becoming widely accepted. Cantations have been said to allow mystics to draw power from their surroundings: including the life energy of nearby animals and people. This last procedure, known as vamping, has been used to deadly effect by Alchemites in their clashes with law enforcement.

The fact that magic requires energy has been well-documented, and in one well-publicized experiment, physicist Ravi Sharp has shown that a candle and a light-generating chantment use the same amounts of energy to produce comparable amounts of light. Sharp argues that this implies that magic cannot be used to simply reverse climate change and other devastating effects of human habitation on earth. This runs strongly contrary to claims made by Sahara Knax and her followers.

"If the power requirements are comparable, we will still need fossil fuels to accomplish large-scale effects, just as we would through the use of technology. This implies that using magic to combat pollution might simply beget more pollution."

In a related story, Sharp went missing from his home in Brooklyn, New York, two weeks ago.

Rumplestiltskin's e-mail message includes a call for a volunteer video-blogger and a marine biologist to witness and document the use of the magical teething ring. The e-mail message promises future communications, including a schematic of the power generator and information about the cantation used to turn electricity into magical energy.

The Canadian and U.S. Coast Guard have statements to the effect that individuals caught using magic in coastal waters will be arrested and prosecuted under the increasingly strict anti-mystical laws.