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Everyone's a critic
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Restaurants & Cafes
- Hits: 1318
Against all my better judgement I went online and looked at a few restaurant reviews. The internet, it's great, it democratizes everything...
Tripadvisor.ca, a few of the local restaurants, the one I'm working at, it comes in pretty low, I understand, I work there. But you read the reviews, one by one, and you can understand where everyone is coming from, but not one of them is even close. Taken all together the aggregate of the reviews ideally will give you a sum of the experience, taken singly, few people can spell, even fewer have dined out...
I check our reviews against the other restaurants in the area, one is described as "Fancy" and "Fine Dining" - not by a long shot, and it only goes to prove the ignorance of the reviewers - out here, paper napkins and a set table make a restaurant fancy. And in the reviews there's a lot of that petty small-town in-fighting, trivial politics, feuds, dirty laundry and grievances are aired. The reviews are skewed in both directions - both on the high end and on the low end, and everyone has an opinion and wants to share it...
Which is a problem, and here I'll explain. Not everyone should be allowed to have an opinion, most people shouldn't, and certainly shouldn't be allowed to give voice to it. A proper restaurant reviewer will visit a restaurant a minimum of 2 or 3 times to sample various of the items on the menu, rate the staff, the ambiance, etc. A proper reviewer has dined in a lot of different restaurants at both ends of the spectrum - from the ethnic hole-in-the walls to the higher end places with brand-name chefs. No respectable critic would even think of dining out on a Mothers Day or Valentines Day, let alone writing a review of the experience. Here, people review restaurants either to boost their friends or diss them for what they feel was an extraordinarily bad experience. For a lot of the locals, even getting a bill at the end of their dinner is enough to ruin their week.
Every restaurant out here relies on the scenery for the ambiance. It's rare to find a place that even comes close to a well designed Chinese takeaway, let alone a fine or character filled restaurant. There's one restaurant, been meaning to try it forever, I don't want to give away the name so I'll make up something equally pretentious, "The Kootenai Epicurian" or "Kootenai Conniseurs", you get the idea, and the place, it's an old garage, old tables, dusty plants and ledges and a big assortment of junk pretending to be antiques, ask for a menu and you're told to pick something from the fridge; not a glass countertop like you might find at a bakery or deli, no, a big fridge beside the kitchen, grab your frozen meal, pay for it. tip, and you can microwave it yourself and enjoy...
...burritos, lasagna, it's kinda unbelievable, the name of the 'restaurant', because even here I'm being pretty liberal, and the menu and accompanying preparation...not what you'd expect from such a grandiosely titled establishment, but for here, well...it's got 5 stars...
Seiko Watch
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Lost
- Hits: 1350
Batshit had asked, "You collect watches...you don't have an old one..." and I couldn't very well deny, I did, and so I gave him an old Seiko I had, 70's, big and clunky self winder with day and date. It needed some work on the bracelet, which Batshit did, and then when I saw him next he was miming all the hand gestures he was doing to keep it wound, and explaining to me how the Japanese after it was invented used to march around like soldiers with their arms waving 'cause they had to keep it wound...
He's nothing if not amusing.
And then he described to me a curious thing: That while trying to set the date the alarm on the watch had went off...
I dismissed it, alarm watches are pretty rare, I've always wanted one, a Jaeger LeCoultre Master Reveille, maybe, but they're not easy to come by. Not on my budget anyways...
And, while setting the day, the date, what should happen but...
The alarm goes off. It's a vintage Seiko Alarm watch, self-winding (not battery), and I'm thinking what a cool thing and now Batshit will be wandering around town waving his arms proudly wearing the watch I never knew I had, or trading it away for a half a pack of cigarettes and a stale loaf of bread...
So it goes, "Don't it always seem to go, that you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone...".
Crystals, crystals, more crystals
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Found
- Hits: 1228
And stumbling through the forest, close to old haunts and scouting for new ones I find a narrow seam of quartz, silver ore, too small to be of any interest to the miners, but of some interest to me. Mainly for the abundance of quartz crystals, pretty, I'm pretty sure I can sell these in a gift shop someplace....
Early finds:
little beds of calcite crystals embedded in the reefs...
Great promise showing, needs to be cleaned and separated, this piece, maybe fifty pounds, 18 inches long by 10 inches wide...filled with ore, quartz, calcite, and some other minerals I have to identify...
a cross-section of quartz plates....
quartz
Some of them aren't so pretty before they're cleaned up. The black stuff is degraded Galena, or silver ore...
a tiny cluster of calcite flowers or plates...
Dirty Calcite Rhombus on quartz.
A few notes, a few perfect Calcite Rhombuses, small, but like the Icelandic Spar or Sunstones, cool, but too small to be salable. And cleaning these things up with acid gets the quartz clean but dissolves the calcite and fluorite and other crystals - have to be careful how I clean them, and there's more work in the cleaning then there is in the finding. I have a theory, that the best rocks in the shops all come from third world countries not because they have the best rocks, it's because they can afford the abundant cheap labour and time required to make these specimens spectacular.
And that's been the week, I worked that vein out, got about 300 lbs of material to clean up, now to write up a few notes on the specimens and shop them around. And get back into the woods and start searching for the next big find....
A Circa 16th Century Unicorn Horn
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Found
- Hits: 1217
Courtesy of Batshit, over at his place he saw me ogling it, knew I had to have it...how to mount it?
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