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Written by: Rod Boyle

Category: Blog

Published: 01 September 2024

Hits: 167

This morning, the first of September, noticing the leaves have begun to turn and are falling from the trees.

Time to go and try and start my car.

Last night, work, slow, after work head down to the liquor store. 

A bad habit, I know.

And from the alley behind the Hume there's a group of maybe 8 high school students, - slight, of slender build and height, coming out of ???

One of them recognizes me, says "hi", they've just been spelunking in the tunnels under Nelson. And I try and get details - what did they see, find, the only answer is "puddles", it sounds like no discoveries worth mentioning, merely the thrill of discovery.

This morning, coffee, this evening, work, between now and then I have to learn how to paint with watercolors. And that outlines the day...

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Written by: Rod Boyle

Category: Blog

Published: 29 August 2024

Hits: 186

And this week, the kids, visiting. The Son on Sunday (Sonday), with his girlfriend, until Monday Morning, then in the afternoon the Daughter. 

She wants to play Chess & Scrabble, having skipped the family reunion to be with her mother she found her poor competition, or perhaps she thought she was that good...

5 games later she was properly schooled. And not happy, but - there was a time when she was younger, and I'd let her win, and she complained that her mother had told her I was a formidable opponent but clearly that wasn't the case, and having listened to this crowing for a few minutes I took off the gloves, and now, now, it's her that needs to up her game.

This is how I know my kids will visit me when I'm old and senile and in the home, the daughter will be showing up with a Chess and Scrabble board to claim the victories she missed out on in her youth...

She took the losses relatively well, with the parting shot: "You've mastered the board games Pa, but what about your life???"

Tuesday, work double, Wednesday off, and the boy texts me, he'll be through town again in the afternoon.

My plans for the day off involved taking his car to check up on my ruby prospect, maybe do some exploring, that's ruled out, his trip to Vancouver cut short by a break in in his car, a "secure" parkade nonetheless, but - in these the darkening of days no place is secure.

I instead make some food, the daughter was sorely disappointed I hadn't cooked or planned to for her arrival, I'll remedy that, I make a tasty guacamole, cucumber-mint salsa, and Kim-Chi, all vegan, and they're glad for the fresh food, it's tasty, if I don't say so myself, but the bill - a grocery bill with no meat, vegetables only, well, it's preposterous....

And then they're off, to "Wicked Woods", a better venue than being broken into in Vancouver, and this ends the fall visit, next one probably Halloween, and time now - he having taken back what remained of his car, time now for me to go and boost mine, get myself back on the road, there's still a few weeks of summer left and many a prospect that needs my attention... 

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Written by: Rod Boyle

Category: Blog

Published: 22 August 2024

Hits: 187

Finally, to the experts with this seasons share of hopeful rocks.

1 - the lamproite/diamond - Geologist #1 a bit stumped, #2, the old timer, declares it to be slow-cooled basalt (possibly still lamproite) and what I took to be a diamond is in fact a ruby. This I would not have guessed, the crystal is dark against a dark background, but he seems certain, has several just like it, a jar full. Doing some research later at home later I find that the Montana Sapphires were hosted in lamproites, so it's not an impossibility. Definitely worth returning and breaking some more rocks. And there are enough lamproites around the Kootenays that I should at some point find a sapphire/ruby deposit...

2 - the blue kyanite (I thought). Pale blue, bladed texture, in pegmatic granite, some thin sections resembling aquamarine. I could get no consensus - Geo #1 thought it was beryl, #2 Slick & Slide (not). 

3 - Serpentine - an attractive dark water worn rock picked up on Balfour beach. Dark green with black spots. Confirmed as serpentine.

4 - red/pink tourmaline crystals in host feldspar, again picked up on beach, lake tumbled. Identified as red/pink tourmaline crystals in host feldspar. Now, the hard part, figuring out where it came from, surely closer that Mt. Begby... 

5  - dark black crystal, rusty setting, from pegmatite in Revelstoke. Remains unidentified.

6 - black slag looking piece, with vesicles and small crystals. Google lens identifies it as meteorite, but it's not (meteorites don't have vesicles), geologists agreed it wasn't slag...

And so here I am at the point where I have to figure things out for myself, because bloody hell I'm not getting a whole lot of help. That said, these old timers, if they're the competition it explains a lot...

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Written by: Rod Boyle

Category: Blog

Published: 19 August 2024

Hits: 179

Charles Fort, the original anti-science skeptical-of-everything and at the same time too-credulous collector of strange facts and events, I've a long time kept an eye peeled for his works, none forthcoming, and so finally read his "Book of the Damned" online at Project Gutenberg. Link provided at the end.

Now this, a list - long, with notes as to sources, with everything that (in his view) flies in the face of science. He refutes any attempts to explain away unusual events by science, instead preferring to come up with even stranger and more imaginative explanations of his own - for example, Star Jelly - of which he gives numerous examples (a strange jelly like protoplasm sometimes found falling or upon the ground after meteoric events), and any odd sky-falls - large hail, rains of fish, frogs, what nots, on an adjacent place near to the earth but invisible, the "Super-Sargasso Sea" or Genesistrine, and while a good many of his sources do demand extraordinary explanations, a great many do not. 

While he himself is positively feverish with imagination he doesn't allow that other people may have been as well. 

There's the impossible rains and sky falls, atmospheric phenomena, thunderstones and thunder-axes, sky arrows, sky axes, thunder-teeth, Nostoc, all the craziness reported throughout human history, impossible rains, atmospheric phenomenon, thunderstones, thunder-axes, sky arrows, sky-axes, thunder-teeth, Nostoc, the IYNKICIDU of Philadelphia, Cyclorea, his confusing of staurolites, a mineral, as evidence of a tiny race of fairies, Monstrator, Elvera, the Vitrification of Ancient Forts, extra-telluric, marvelling over extreme weather events (now becoming commonplace), hailstones nucleated on frogs, Algol, Planet “Neith”, Melanicus, celestio-metathesis, his “other worlds” hypothesis, quake lights, Super-Tamerlanes, bird-falls from the sky (poisoned food, now largely attributed to glass skyscrapers), blood rain, Stone of Tarbes, the wheels of light and spokes seen upon the sea by captains and sailors, sea monsters, recalling: “those who go down to the sea in ships”; otherwise extraordinary events now made explicable, but we have our own inexplicable dark matter, quantum action at a distance, light discerning the slit, etc.

"Still the Dominants are suave very often, or are not absolute gods, and the way attention was led away from this subject is an interesting study in quasi-divine bamboozlement.”

His prose style, well, somewhere between incredulous, manic, rattling a fist against an establishment (science), world (god) that he can make no sense of, no an easy read, but filled with interesting ideas, and some worth more considering...

Oh, and if you ever have heard the term - "Fortean", it derives from him, applying to situations, events, objects, that in themselves appear inexplicable.

A short bio: https://skepdic.com/fortean.html

read online here: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/22472/22472-h/22472-h.htm