“The 4 stages of addiction: Experimentation, Regular Use, Problem Use, Addiction / Dependency”
My name’s Ralph. I write the urbancrows blog and I’m an addict. I’m years in to my addiction and I now embrace it. It’s an integral part of me, so I’ve stopped looking for help. I’m way past that.
Now that I’m older and a little more affluent, I can pay dealers to satisfy my cravings. Sure, it costs me more than before to scratch the itch, but my suppliers are reliable and I can get the best quality stuff so I don’t have to hit as often as I used to.
Yes, I collect mineral samples.(PS: the mineral photos are at the end)
The Self-Isolation-Round-The-World-In-14-Days Tour
I flew in from Santiago a week ago with a plane load of worried Canadians heading home from their business trips, or cancelled cruises or their we-had-a-bit-too-much-adventure holidays.
The road in Chile goes on and on and on and on
The handy leaflet I was given at Toronto airport that passes for Canadian government COVID-19 screening tells me that I have to self isolate for 14 days, so now I’m effectively stuck in the house until March 30th.
Well, screw that. I’m an experienced world traveller with the constitution of an ox on steroids, and I’m simply not prepared to sit around, thumb up my bum, while the wonders of the world pass me by. So, the Urbancrows blog has embarked on an all expenses paid (funding source to be determined) virtual world tour to take in some of the sights I’ve always wanted to see. Madagascar, Mongolia, Chad – I’ve crossed them all off my bucket list already.
Regular readers will be pleased to hear (I hope) that I’ve been keeping an illustrated travel diary to while away the time spent on my virtual plane, sipping virtual bubbly in my virtual fully-reclinable First Class seat. I’ll be updating the diary everyday, so let’s dive in and see where I’ve been…
Day 9: The Lord Of The Rings
Today I visited the set of the Lord of The Rings in New Zealand -I read the book over and over as a kid & it’s one of my favourite films. I went dressed as Bilbo & they let me climb Sauron’s tower, which was only 12 ft high and wobbled alarmingly; something of a let down! A pathetic looking rubber “Smaug” flew over on the end of fishing line & grilled one of the extras but that’s why they call them extras I guess! Gandalf was smoking his wand (wtf?) & a bit out of it. His tobacco smelled funny.
The endless Chilean desert has claimed me this week. Five days tooling around the Atacama with 2 fellow geologists is a great way to avoid the zombie-market-COVID-19-toilet-paper apocalypse.
Indeed there is after last week’s meltdown.
The three of us have been self isolating in a Toyota 4×4, well stocked with pringles, sun screen, rancid boots and single-use water bottles. We’ve been looking at 2 silver mining projects between the Chilean towns of Taltal in the south, and Iquique in the north. The projects are roughly 400km apart as a hugely overworked crow flies, with nothing but desert and dust between them.
Isn’t Toronto lovely this time of year? Parks, the lake, pretty girls in outdoor cafes…the early spring sun breaking through. A sense of rebirth lurking just around the corner. Just lovely. And total horseshit, as anyone unlucky enough to be in downtown TO last Friday can testify. True, it was warmish yesterday and raining; a fairly typical Vancouver type day, a tad better than the weekend. But if you ask me, Toronto is still a frigid fucking concrete wasteland populated by thinsulate-clad half frozen people running for the PATH tunnels. And I bloody hate it. Give me Skegness. Give me Milton Keynes. Fuck give me Red Deer; anywhere but downtown TO in the cold.
If you’re reading the urbancrows blog, there’s an above average chance that you might be a trained geologist, you poor soul. Which means you spent 3 or 4 years slaving away as an undergraduate at University learning shit about rocks; sometimes a bit too much for your own good.
Have I ever told you about the useless shit I learned at college?
And wasn’t University fun? Field school. Beer. Labs. Beer. Lectures. Exams. Less beer. Failed courses. Coffee. Retakes. Below average degree. Career re-evaluation. Ah..the best days of our lives.
Out you popped, newly baked and pink cheeked from whatever cradle of higher learning you attended; a keen, young earth scientist, stuffed full of sciency knowledge. Head held high, you felt like you really understood the inner workings of our fragile blue rock. Those were the days.
Listen up, all you young whippersnapper geologists out there. Yes, you at the back, the spotty one staring down the microscope. Are you looking to forge a career in the junior sector? Do you yearn for financial success? Are you driven by the tingly thrill of discovery? Do you see yourself as a future captain of the extractive industry? Yes?
Well then, there’s a key skill you need to learn if you want to rise above humble core logging and soil sampling. It’s called prostitution marketing.
When it comes to piano concertos I’m a bit of a traditionalist. I prefer the early 19th and late 18th century pieces to their 20th century descendants. I suspect it’s because of the lyricism of the great European composers of that era, and – to be blunt- the whistle-along tunes they composed. If you ask me, a lot of 20th Century pieces involve too much noodling; great if you’re a musical theorist who understands what’s going on but not always so great to listen to for lay people like me. But hey, that’s just my opinion and what do I know?
Beethoven. Cheer up.You’re a genius.
There are 2 stand out concertos that I keep going back to. Both are popular and well known which is a slight departure in terms of the music I’ve been writing about on this blog.
Firstly, Beethoven’s wonderful Piano Concerto No 5, known as the Emperor concerto; a name given to it by the English publisher of the piece. And then there’s the boringly named Piano Concerto No. 1 by Chopin.
It’s time for the year-end results of the Hys and Lows resource stock picking club, where world’s greatest mining minds come together to show how little we actually know about our business. This is an edited version of my end-of-year note to the club members. Sadly, I have to redact names to protect the innocent and throw the paparazzi off our scent. The unedited version is WAY more abusive and fun.
As you may know, we meet in late January to drink wine, eat steak, talk about the industry, and when we’re good and drunk we each pick a mining stock. That’s about it really, other than taking a guess on the 12 month performance of the overall portfolio.
A couple of years back, I was walking with a friend through the Christmas market on the southern end of Hungerford Bridge in London. It’s an interesting, brutalist spot for a market, trapped between the muddy river, a massive bridge and the imposing late 1960s concrete arts bunker known as the Southbank Centre.
The Southbank centre.A kinder, artsier sort of brutal.
(I only found out recently that the Southbank centre was actually the vanguard of what was supposed to be a ground-breaking architectural redesign of London in the 1950s and 60s. The plan called for large parts of central London to be razed, including Soho and Whitehall, to be redeveloped with huge concrete office and residential blocks. Covent Garden was also slated to be flattened but the local residents organised and defeated the plan. Thank fuck it never happened.)
I’ve made no secret here at urbancrows about my love of classical music, particularly the canon of music that’s been composed for the guitar. In a previous piece I salivated about the glorious Turkish flavours baked into “Koyunbaba”, a suite in 3 movements written by Carlo Domeniconi, an Italian composer who lived in Istanbul for years. I’ve also blathered about Bach’s incredible violin piece, the Chaconne, and droned on ad nauseamabout Tallis‘s contribution to the development of English votive music.
Are those drums, Fernando?
Well, today it’s the turn of the brilliant guitarist Fernando Sor, a Spanish composer and string-plucker who was born in Barcelona on Valentines Day, 1778. He lived to the not-really-so-ripe age of 61, and died a nasty, slow, painful death from tongue and throat cancer. I can only imagine what that was like in 1839.
