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Alberta Amber
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Images
- Hits: 2163
Check around the visible coal seams in Drumheller, Starland County, anywhere in Alberta really, and you'll probably find some Alberta Amber. Generally small pieces, the size of a pea or smaller, it's brittle and readily crumbles (so you have to be careful), but it does show some beautiful colors...
It could be heated, pressed, sealed in resin to make some interesting jewelry and rings (they do this to the lower grade Baltic amber), but Alberta classes it as a fossil and so collecting is forbidden. Shame. If it were coal, or oil and gas, or simply in coal, you could collect all you wanted and burn it, no problem, but the collecting of it to appreciate is prohibited by law.
Flood Trees
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Miscellany
- Hits: 2140
I wondered at the trees, the branches that started beneath the ground, the obviously planted forest, odd, and then I remembered the flood a couple of years ago, the trees captured the silt, raised the level of the ground, and those branches nearest died off.
The Beano Anthology #3
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Miscellany
- Hits: 2022
It's here, almost. The Beano Anthology #3.
Zen Watches
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Ideas & Questions
- Hits: 2164
In my early 20's I had the idea for "Zen Wristwatches", which were essentially faceless watch dials mounted upon straps. Of course they wouldn't be plain faceless, we'd do a whole variety, out of different materials, jade, onyx, clear crystal, stainless steel, hundreds of possible materials, big, small, whatever.
The genius wasn't so much in the watch, it was in the marketing of it: "Zen Watches - for the Here and Now" or "No Time Like the Present: Find Your Zen" and there would be a whole bunch of irrelevant quotes about the meaninglessness of measuring time and the importance of Now and Living in the Present and Bullshit and all. Pretty much like every other product on the market...
I think that I got the idea because I was getting into collecting wristwatches, and I couldn't get why people would pay enormous sums for brand names...
Anyways the marketing was good, only I didn't have the product or the budget to bring it to fruition. It's still there, I think, in a notebook someplace in the locker. There wasn't any Kickstarter in those days. There is now, though, and I was a little surprised that someone else had a similar idea...
Link: "Jesper: Minimalist Wristwatch"
It's not actually all that minimalist, with all the pointless crowns and crystals and all...
For an excellent article on Minimalism read this: James Altucher - How Minimalism brought me Joy and Freedom. I don't think he's wearing a watch. Certainly not a Jesper...He does seem to have a surprising number of bright ideas, though, if you browse through the rest of his blog...
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