Crows are smart. How smart? Pretty bloody clever if you ask me. Their ingenuity never fails to impress.
Crows on my fridge.
Last weekend I hosted a boozy dads’ weekend at our cabin up near Pemberton. I don’t mean a weekend for alcoholic dads. I mean it was a boozy weekend for dads, and we played lots of cribbage, charred meat on a BBQ, and talked rubbish into the night.
Just down the lake from our place is the local Mr Fixit, Mark. He lives there all year round, and looks after three cabins for their owners; gardening, fixing stuff that falls down or drops off, and generally taking good care of his little piece of lake side.
Over the weekend, I was perusing archived computer files from my days with Anglo American PLC in London, 20 years ago. It was a bit of a lost cause- I was looking for digital photos from a trip I took to western Pakistan (see “My Project Went Boom“) to illustrate an upcoming print article on my misadventures there, but couldn’t find them.
The other AA, not that one.
The files are stored on a collection of dusty CDs, saved in a variety of file formats, some long since extinct. Tucked away in a folder, I spotted a Word file named “How to promote a mining stock”. It turned out to be a series of humorous rules for promoting a mining company, which are spot on even decades later. The piece is at least 20-years old and I’ve no idea who wrote it. It may well have been me but I don’t remember and can’t claim ownership for it, although it is along the same lines as my earlier blog piece “Mining stocks are crap”
To be honest, I suspect it’s not mine; there’s too much junior markets cynicism in the piece. Back then, I was still latched firmly on to the warm bosom of Anglo American, well paid and with little or no exposure to the dark side of the Canadian junior markets. There’s also a reference to a “portly chairman” that suggest to me a UK provenance for the piece. Anyway, I’ve taken the liberty of updating it a bit, adding a couple of rules of my own, and have removed some of the less “PC” bits. If you wrote it, or you know who did, drop me a line through the Comments section.
Hands up if you’ve ever hitch hiked anywhere? You know, the old-fashioned thumb up, side-of-the-road-have-back-pack-will-travel way? We’ve all thumbed a last-minute ride into town to go drinking, but that’s not what I mean. No, I mean long distance stuff, going hundreds of miles, at the mercy of truck drivers, motorway service stations, and dodgy slip roads.
My class circa 1983? Bloody freezing.
In the early eighties, I was hard up geology student in Portsmouth and I hitch hiked regularly. It was a rite of passage for a lot of fellow students who were strapped for cash. Train ticket, or beer and food?
Last week, a regular Urbancrows reader emailed me to suggest I write about what minerals geologists actually do. Not a bad idea thinks I, from up high on my perch in the Urbancrows e-rookery. So I’ve decided to take him up on the idea with an informal series of blog posts, starting soon, loosely themed “The Things Geologists Do”. It’ll be based largely on my own experiences since I graduated in 1984, but I’d welcome suggestions or questions from non-geologists who might find themselves puzzled by the activities of their rock-hound cousins.
My friend Brent posted a link on Twitter today to an article about the inexorable growth in wind power capacity in the US. It reminded me that I’d been sitting on this piece about wind power for a month or two because I couldn’t figure out how to finish it properly. But ending be damned… the stats speak for themselves. They’re an interesting counterpoint to the Trump government’s continued idiotic obsession with bringing back carbon-heavy fossil fuel power generation. His antiquated energy policies look dafter and dafter as every month passes.
Sandbanks and Seaweed.
Growing up in southeast Kent, we spent our summers on the beach, assuming we could get past the great piles of stinking, rotting seaweed washed up on the tideline. When the tide is low, a large sandbank –the Goodwin Sands- emerges a few miles off shore; a 10 mile long yellowish-orange strip of sand rising up gently out of the sea.
There’s
nothing like a cheesy marketing cliché in a news release to make you immediately
buy a bucket-load of a company’s stock, right? Spend five minutes talking to
any IR professional at an investor conference and see how many clichés you can
spot. This is the kind of stuff I mean.
“We’re undervalued relative
to our peers and poised for success.”
“Our management is
best-in-class with a proven track record”
“That’s the steak, now here’s the sizzle.” (wtf?)
I’ll buy 20,000 at 2c above market, because…sssssssssssizzle.
Anyone who follows the junior mining sector will -just maybe- have spotted the odd cliché tucked away in marketing materials, or in one of the many stale corporate PowerPoints that end up unread on a dull home page. The judicious use of meaningless phrases is an art form that our industry has perfected, and sadly we all use them, UrbanCrows included. I admit it -guilty as charged- before you start pointing fingers. It’s hard to come up with marketing copy that sounds fresh without delving into the bloated lexicon of hackneyed phrases at some point. So as a public service to my readers, I’ve polled some mining friends (thanks, you know who you are) to compile a short list of the ones that we see regularly, and that we love to hate.
What follows is an edited version of my monthly junior mining update to the members of the steak-eating-red-wine-drinking stock picking club informally known as the “Get Rich Short Our Picks Club”. All names of members have been removed and some of my more abusive comments have been diplomatically edited out too. Which is a shame really. I’d love to leave them in so you can all see how bad this motley collection of mining experts is at choosing winners. Anyhoo, here’s the table, dateline end of April.
I’m a wannabe classical guitar player. The trouble is, I’m too bloody old to practice enough to get to the standard I’d like to reach. So, I lied. I’m not really a guitar player. But I do listen to a lot of classical guitar and have, over time, convinced myself that I’m a talented-albeit-vicarious musician. Woulda, coulda, shoulda, I know.
This is an update to an article I posted a few months ago on urbancrows.
It’s an old cliché but very apropos at the moment. To put it in simple terms, the prevailing climate in the resource world I inhabit is beyond crap and has been for a few years. There’s been a slow, persistent drizzle of shitness scaring speculative money away. Investors have all but abandoned the mining and exploration sector. The TSX Venture Composite Index has drifted up a little recently, but the reality is, it’s simply inching its way slowly up from a 10-year low. The amount of investment capital available to the sector has shrunk, and as a direct result the pace of new mine discoveries has slowed to an historic low.
Last Sunday was the first Sunday in April, known as Geologists’ Day, and rightly celebrated around the world by millions of people. It was originally designated a holiday by the Soviet Union under the leadership of Leonid Brezhnev, a notoriously jolly chap with unbelievably big eye brows. I hope, wherever you live, you tracked down your closest geologist, and gave them a big hug and a giant sloppy kiss. We deserve it because we add so much to your lives, if only you knew.
