Here's my take on it.

Imagine a radio antenna like you would pull out of a portable radio - the telescoping kind that get thinner and thinner at the top.

Flip that antenna over. That's your well. At each joint as the "telescope" extends into the ground, you need to seal things tightly...more on why later.

Take your antenna, drill it it in the ground, until you hit a pocket of fluid highly compressed by some kind of gas, so the fluid begins to shoot up the concentric telescope from smallest (deep down in the hole) to largest (near the surface). Imagine a bottle of soda with a cork in it and a straw through the cork. Shake the bottle.

OK, now you have soda spraying all over the place. So you want to cap the pipe right? But you see, what we didn't tell you at the start is that it's super-cold and ice is forming on the part of the antenna sticking out of the ground, and as you put the cap on, ice forms, you can't get a good seal. Worse still, remember those joints at each telescoping section? Well if you just cap off the top of the pipe, the pressure could blast out of those joints, and that would mean all kinds of fluids blasting out under the surface into which your drill goes and THAT could collapse everything under the well - that would be bad.

Now in terms of the situation in the gulf, there's more complicating factors, including:

- It's 5,000 miles below the surface, so everything is done by remotely operated vehicles.
- The physics of very high pressure environments (tons per square inch) affect things dramatically - including how gasses like methane behave and form "hydrates" (basically Ice) that gum up the works.
- The force of the oil coming out is just tremendous - picture trying to stop the flow of a fire hose using only a pair of vice grips and some sheet metal and you have a sense of what they are up against.
- The well has some construction flaws that could make any capping activity a problem - as in the oil would come out from the joins in the well casing that is under the seabed and that could erode and collapse the entire seafloor and release some or all of the the oil in there. Not. Good.

As far as "outsider ideas" let's put this into perspective. It's not like a house has caught fire like 2 zillion other houses have caught fire and the ways to get the fire to stop range from Water to Foam to innovative dry chemicals. But it's a house, you know how they burn and you have a pretty good idea of how to stop the fire.

It's more like Apollo 13 - a situation that, in retrospect, was a result of an intrinsic flaw in the engineering, but nobody was better informed and prepared to solve the problem than the same engineers who basically were to blame for the problem.

No "outsider" to Apollo 13 could have given better solutions to the situation any more than someone without the engineering knowledge related to oil drilling and in particular deep-water oil rigs (of which there aren't many comparatively speaking).

Do I think BP is doing everything possible to stop this oil? Yes, I do, and I'm a vigorous opponent to off-shore oil drilling - yet I don't deny that they are obviously trying every possible solution that the best minds in their business can come up with. There's no economic rationale to NOT stopping the oil, there's no motivation to NOT cleaning it up where and how they can (including dispersants)and while they are fumbling the PR, realistically, how can any company in this situation manage the PR?

Well I've gone on a while, hope that helps.