Sunday, March 18, 2007

Dark with Excessive Bright


I took myself off to a 'Rock, Gem and Mineral' Fair today, my jackdaw eye a-glint (when did I become so acquisitive?), rather hoping to buy a Devonian fish or a eurypterid, but ended up instead with various eye-catching minerals. From the dealer R D Mazda, I bought a cluster of apophyllite, and, more decoratively, a small oval bowl shaped from moss agate.

I expressed my incredulity that none of the many women at the fair had scooped up this necklace in faceted rock crystal - something that Mr Mazda had bought on his last trip back to India in February as (he put it) an 'aberration' from his normal serious mineralogy - and affirmed that, had I a particular lady friend I wanted to give a gift to, I would have bought it on sight. A little later, I went back and bought it nevertheless, some might say, for my one true love...

Trying to do justice to it, I photographed it out in the sun, on a suitable page of Milton: I liked the letters multiplied in the facets. Maybe this is a sign that I am about to turn devout, or sense that I need to start saying my prayers.

http://webmineral.com/data/Apophyllite.shtml

One of my friends has started a blog, under a whimsical pseudonym
http://tupperkneetoss.blogspot.com/
Here he is indulging an undeniably pointed philippic about Global Warming. I didn't bother watching the documentary, but must ask 'Tupper' about his assertion that "One of the talking heads (a founder member of Greenpeace, no less) made the excellent if overdramatic point that to deny climate change was a bit like being a Holocaust denier". Was this really said? Surely not with any seriousness?

I must have another go at making 'Blogger' put URL's in my 'Links' section, though most previous attempts have failed (this makes me embarrassed about fellow bloggers).

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