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Collecting...
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Miscellany
- Hits: 2278
I've taken this collecting thing a bit far. I mean, to see my place, it's packed to the rafters, overflowing with stuff.
Stuff, as in, not especially valuable stuff, probably most of it worthless, but my stuff. Boxes and boxes and boxes of it. It's been over a year and I sitll haven't unpacked.
Most of it is worthless, junk, but sentimental. With everything there is associated a memory, the 1930's vintage Rolex Oyster Observatory, junk, but the memory, the surprise of finding it in a Value Village in the southeast of Calgary. The 50's 16mm film camera, the realizing of it's potential, the quick reframe of thought at a garage sale, from "What is it" to "I have to have it....". And so on and so forth. The dinosaur bones, small fragments, memories of Drumheller, walking in the badlands. The native artifacts, walking the local rivers at sunset. An antique ivory chess knight, memory of an antique shop in Greenich, that, the keys, the bones, coins, crystals, all serve to jog the imagination, archived, preserved inspiration, a moment of time, recent or long ago, held captive and displayed in a series of old wooden typeface drawers, themselves a souvenier.
On the shelf above my desk...2 Coins, Roman, (Maximus & Trajan), coin, chinese (15th century), pendant (chinese), cheap rock crystal skull 1" across, a lead soldier, 3 18th century keys (the rest on a shelf elsewhere), 2 native beads, many stones with holes through them picked and thought too neat to be discarded, 2 fossilized bison teeth (1 from Crowsnest Lake, the other picked along the Bow), a pine cone, many sea shells, a nautilus, postage stamp, lock, piece of amber with insects....
The objects, they're only the landmarks on the journey. The physical signposts.
Other people fill their houses with warm memories of Ikea and smooth talking salesmen. Well dusted kitchens, scrubbed floors and orderly bookshelved. Mine is packed with junk and memories.
Joanna Newsom
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Music
- Hits: 2123
"...
And the little white dove
Made with love, made with love:
Made with glue, and a glove, and some pliers
..."- YS - Sawdust and Diamonds
Absolutely amazing. Listening to her voice, frail, up and down, pursuing haunting melodies, her voice, childish, distant, as if from another time. 5 out of 5 stars. Her other albums are also well worth listening to.
Visit her website here: http://www.joanna-newsom.com/
It's an instinct...
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Miscellany
- Hits: 3234
It's an instinct, this treasure hunting.
And the garage sale season having passed, a short season this year, hampered by finances and transportation, the instinct seeks its outlet.
I take the children to a riverside park in the neighborhood to look for stones for their rock tumbler.
And sorting through the gravels, the abundant pebbles, we're surprised to find an old indian bead.
Small, perhaps an inch and a half, with a perfectly bored hole straight through it.
And it triggers the instinct.
There are no buried treasures in Alberta, well, very few anyways. There's the Lost Lemon Mine, if you credit the legend, and undoubtedly more than a few mason jars filled with farmers life savings buried under fence posts, but there's none of the classic treasure hunting raw materials, gems, gold, sunken ships.
But there is history, in it's way a sort of treasure.
Before I go too much further I should note that it's illegal to look for archeological artifacts in Alberta. If you see or spot an archeological artifact you are supposed to call the provincial museum and leave the site undisturbed. All artifacts are property of the state.
Now, on paper this is ideal. It speaks to our highest and noblest selves, our shared history is our shared property to be preserved for future generations.
But like many laws that at first glance look good on examination we can discover that it lacks both teeth and foresight. We think nothing of building entire neighborhoods (In Calgary, think Bowness, Crescent Heights, Mount Royal, Hawkwood, and many, many more) over Native sites. We build highways over them, farmers rearrange the stones on their field, taking apart medicine wheels, teepee rings, burial grounds are buried beneath parks, golf courses and basements. The vast majority - over 99% of the paleo and archeological history of Calgary - lies buried under suburbs, or has been churned by bulldozers and ploughs destroying any contextual value the sites may have provided.
We turn a blind eye, or excuse it with "You can't stop progress".
Which is true, but laws that allow and encourage laypeople to collect, document and report finds and artifacts would would save much of this.
No government could ever afford to staff a province or even a country the size of Alberta with the number of archeologists we would need just to keep abreast of progress. Of the expanding highways, cities, suburbs, oil sands.
It is, upon examination, an idiotic law that is in its way far worse than having no laws at all. The kind of law that is intended to reassure the people that "we're protecting our history" when in fact we are systematically destroying it. Destroying it through ignorance, through "Let the experts handle it", through progress and neglect. Presumably countries that don't have similar laws have no valued history, you only need to look at countries like the US or Great Britain to see how their lack of competent legislation has destroyed their history....
I digress, but I will return to this theme again and again.
So we discover the bead, and search through the gravels but find nothing more, some fossils, other stones that might look good polished, but that is all.
But the seed is sown.
I've been admitted to the club...
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Conversations
- Hits: 1662
He has a friend he wants me to meet.
Finally a chance to wear my new helicopter pilots helmet! And so strapping it on I hope on my bike and cycle down to the cafe.
He's pleasant enough, older, maybe early seventies.
At first we talk about the weather, small talk, they're feeling me out.
Then it starts.
He's an expert in history. He knows the Declaration of Independance, the Magna Carta, every Papal Bull and edict ever issued off by heart, the succession of kings, everything.
His learning is formidable.
But somehow there's something lacking, or something added, to the interpretation.
They've faked Barak Obama's birth certificate. He was really born in Kenya.
I've heard this theory before, and seen it well and thoroughly debunked here.
"It doesn't matter, he's a walk-in anyways...."
My friend, his friend, our mutual friend, doesn't quite understand and so I explain.
"A walk in is when an alien entity takes over your body..."
He continues.
"Barak died when he was 15. That's when the Walk-In took over his body. We don't know what side he's on, he might in fact be helping to fight the gathering forces of evil..."
That's all the explanation it needs. We pass over the walk-in of Barak Obama as a fact, evidence accepted ad-priori, no need to question that as we're all reasonable people here.
I wish I was taping this. "The gathering forces of evil..."
The conversation continues. He explains to us how the process of getting birth certificates is a process of trading us like commodities. How we're born into slavery, and he explains it back to the Church of Rome. How the Pope is in fact the Antichrist, and the last three popes have been assasinated for attempting to reveal this.
How his attempt to secure the freedom of the people of the United States from their Illuminati overlords using a little known clause in the constitution that allows states to elect non-partisan members to review government policy was thwarted by spurious criminal charges.
He pauses for a minute to smile, somewhat proud at his deft and dazzling interpretation of the facts.
It continues, there's a break for a minute while they begin talking about creationism. Again, it's taken for granted that the world was created (how else did it get here?), and in a brilliant rapport both quote and laugh at a particular BC comic - that mostly unhumerous comic that places man living with dinosaurs, and I'm struck - it's as if they're believing that BC is some sort of absolute archeological proof, some ancient petroglyph discovered by Johnny Hart and presented to the naieve public as fun but really historical fact...a conspiracy of scientists to discredit it....
I'm glad I brought the helmet.
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