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The Midnight Prospector
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Other
- Hits: 619
Winter passes and all my prospecting is done on YouTube.
A couple months yet before I have my jeep, before the weather is good enough to get out and about.
So I've found a new channel, I'll call it "The Midnight Prospector", because he's out looking for pegmatites in various counties in Colorado, and while he's finding stuff (usually feldspar and smoky quartz crystals) it's never "Great" and never in quantity enough to pay for the expedition. But he's got a "method" to his madness, which he charts out, shows how he's prospecting the veins, how he's looking for the miarolitic cavities, how he's determining whether he's getting closer (to fuck-all, generally) or farther away...
Anyways, I watch them. They're OK, and at least he's finding - "discovering" - stuff, not great stuff, but stuff.
It's a new take on how I should be working the field.
The "Midnight" comes in because for some dumb-ass reason he overstays his time on the mountain and half of his prospecting is done in the dark, by headlamp, before he heads back to camp. Not in just one video, but several. Which is such an inane thing, but, there you have it, such is the age we live in...
3 months. I check for jeeps daily on YouTube, work out my magical financing, 3 months and I'm up the mountain, finding my own shit, and there's shit to be found, mark my words...
The Abortion: A Historical Romance 1966 - Richard Brautigan
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Books
- Hits: 545
I needed this, lyric, light, poetic, humorous, romantic. A break from William S. Burroughs, who's brilliance is undiminished but whose taste in romance is very much at odds with my own.
The cover, orange, with a black and white photo of the author (droopy handlebar moustache, long greasy blonde hair) beside a beautiful woman in a trench coat, both leaning up against a stone pillar in front of what could be the library described in his book. And the woman, in her trench coat, buttons placed so as to represent the nipples of her breasts if it were removed, perfectly slouched. I'm intrigued enough to suspect that it's some juvenilia doodled by a previous owner, but attempting to erase it does nothing. Merely a good photo that gives some indication of both the era (1966), the author, and the love interest Vida.
The library, staffed by the narrator, is a repository for first editions, unpublished manuscripts dropped off by unpublished authors, at all hours. All manner of authors bring their cherished manuscripts there to place them upon the shelf, including Richard Brautigan himself (a clever trick, also done frequently by Cendrars, to introduce himself in the third person into the novel...).
And the book meanders from there.
Read more on Brautigan here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Brautigan
And read about the library it inspired here: https://cchmuseum.org/brautigan-library/
The Oscars
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Blog
- Hits: 411
Called in to work, we've a big booking, the Civic is doing a Oscars Screening, we have the large screen TV they require...
Complete and utter bollocks, but I knew that. No surprises there, and a day off thwarted to work this, well...
Playing to an audience almost exclusively of women within my age range, who for reasons of taste will be completely, entirely off limits, just their presence at this event is a red flag, hell, it's a full-on stars-and-stripes, and the vacuity of the ceremonies can't distract me from the very real fact that the rest of the world is gone to shit, and maybe that's why they're all here, in need of some diversion from the real world at the moment, but somehow it all just seems a little extra trite...
Magic and Mystery - Houdini/Dunninger
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Books
- Hits: 554
Written by Houdini & Dunninger as a rebuttal to late Victorian/Early 20th Century Spiritualism & Seances, it outlines the tricks used by Mediums & Spiritualists and explains (for the most part) how their "communications" were effected.
Houdini, of course, the world famous magician and escape artist, and Dunninger - at the time as well a famous stage magician.
Now, describing all the various effects they accomplished - glowing instruments hanging in the air and being played by invisible spirits, the casts of limbs in paraffin, the writing on slates, levitating tables, glowing ectoplasm & cheesecloths coughed up by mediums, spirit photographs, the bar back in the day was a heck of a lot higher. I say this because once I was invited to a "similar" event hosted by a popular radio psychic in Airdrie, and not a single one of these tricks were employed, nothing, in fact, that would convince the even the most gullible of idiots there was "another side" that was being drawn upon. But, oddly enough, she was pretty popular in Alberta. Look at the politics and go figure.
Now, in the explanations (and the descriptions of the seances, which Houdini and Dunninger frequently attended with no other intent than to debunk) they frequently call upon a confederate (or 2, or 3), as well as the occasional dwarf (to fit inside hidden compartments in the Spirit Cabinet, or under the floorboards or wherever they might be needed. Discount dwarves are no longer a dime a dozen, which might somewhat explain how the standards have slipped...
Humorous, albeit not terribly enlightening, although it amused me to think of how they spent their spare time, tracking down and enjoying other "Magicians" who frequently were making even greater sums than they were for performing (poorly) but a small repertoire of tricks. Their exposing of them fits in with a long line of Magicians exposing frauds, including Johnny Carson (vs Uri Geller), The Amazing Randi and Derren Brown. Yet for all the exposes and abundance of evidence to counter these miracles people still choose to believe...
I'm in the wrong business...
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