ITEMS WITH THE MOST PAGE VIEWS AND MY FAVORITES - IV

An eclectic blog (November, 2009, through December, 2014) with sections on Biography, Commentary (General, Economics and Investing), Fiction, Health Care, Oil and Gas, Politics, Photographs, and Poetry (Children's Poems, General, Health, and Space Poems) and (new) Poems By Others: http://stopcontinentaldrift.blogspot.com/2011/07/reunite-gondwanaland-2009-june-2011.html  As of the end of 2014, the blog contains 419 items.

In the new Poems By Others Section, Ogden Nash's poem Fossils garnered by far the most page views overall:  423 with 72 of these added in the past year [http://stopcontinentaldrift.blogspot.com/2013/01/fossils-by-ogden-nash-poem.html] as the blog bears down on 25,000 page views.  No posts in 2014 obtained as many as 200 pages views.  The year 2013 saw two pieces that moved into 200 page views category: My Maternal Grandmother (Biographical) with 220 page views [http://stopcontinentaldrift.blogspot.com/2013/10/my-maternal-grandmother-biographical.html] and Working Underground: My Rational Self and My Emotional Self with 210 page views [http://stopcontinentaldrift.blogspot.com/2013/01/working-underground-my-rational-self.html]. Previous items with more than 200 hits are: You Are So Lucky (Biographical) with 266 page views [http://stopcontinentaldrift.blogspot.com/2009/11/you-are-so-lucky.html] and Muammar Qaddafi And Me (Biographical) with 223 page views [http://stopcontinentaldrift.blogspot.com/2010/12/muammar-qaddafi-and-me-biographical.html]. The former was no doubt popular because of the Great Japanese Earthquake of 2011 and deals with my first three days in Japan in 1965. The latter was popular because of the overthrow of the Libyan dictator Qaddafi.

There are 13 others with 100 to 199 page views, one of which is biographical, a new one, The Tea Cup Seismograph on August 12, 2014 (145 page views) [http://stopcontinentaldrift.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-tea-cup-seismograph-biographical.html], and The Break Even Price Of Fracking Oil on October 8, 2014 (193 page views) [http://stopcontinentaldrift.blogspot.com/2014/10/break-even-price-of-fracking-oil.html].

Each piece I have written is like a child and I love them all, but it is common that some children are loved more than others. My personal favorite continues to be the Effectiveness Of Taxes from May 7, 2010 with 116 page views (up from 62) [http://stopcontinentaldrift.blogspot.com/2010/05/effectiveness-of-taxes.html] followed by Basics of Bureaucracy from July 26, 2011 with 129 page views (up from 127) [http://stopcontinentaldrift.blogspot.com/2011/07/basics-of-bureaucracy.html].  Important new additions to this small list of personal favorites is Is The Atmosphere An Infinite Sewer? from February 11, 2014 with 47 page views [http://stopcontinentaldrift.blogspot.com/2014/02/is-atmosphere-infinite-sewer.html] and The Plight Of American Workers from May 22, 2014 with 22 page views [http://stopcontinentaldrift.blogspot.com/2014/05/plight-of-american-workers.html]. In the first one, I point out why decreasing taxes on individuals is an inefficient way to stimulate the economy. I liked this so much that I refer to it in three other pieces. In the second one, that was written many years ago, I give some real rules of dealing with bureaucrats in a humorous fashion.  In the first new one on the atmosphere I also conclude that global warming is indeed occurring and that the atmosphere is not the infinite sewer that many believe.  In the second new one on American Workers, it is explained why the Golden Age of the American worker may be over.  It deserved 10 times the attention it got.

Let me give two Honorable Mentions. I wouldn't say this is a favorite of mine, but it can be important to some, i.e. Preferred Stock Investing from November 27, 2011 with 194 page views (picked up 7 more hits in 2014) [http://stopcontinentaldrift.blogspot.com/2011/11/preferred-stock-investing.html]. I have invested for about 60 years, but never got involved in preferred stocks until the last decade. I would also like to mention one poem Upon the Second Anniversary Of Apollo 11 from January 9, 2010 with only 12 page views, the first landing on the Moon [http://stopcontinentaldrift.blogspot.com/2010/01/upon-second-anniversary-of-apollo-11.html]. Normally a couplet or more just pops into my mind and I construct a poem around it (An example is So How About An Asteroid from July 20, 2011 with 76 page views) that contains my favorite couplet: Who could possibly be annoyed/About the study of an asteroid. The Second Anniversary of Apollo Eleven, however, was little noticed which I thought was too bad as this was the first time I sat down to compose a poem from scratch.

WORKING UNDERGROUND: MY RATIONAL SELF AND EMOTIONAL SELF (Biographical)

I suppose that most of us have been in a commercial cave at some point.  You know the ones with the stalactites (from the ceiling), and stalagmites (those rising from the ground).  You walk on limestone if dry or on a wooden boardwalk if wet.  Some of us have been in a real mine on a tourist visit.  I know of a good gold mine in Cripple Creek, Colorado, that I took my wife down 1,000 ft and walked around.  Here the gold mineral is silver looking because the gold is a gold telluride.

I doubt that many of us have been down in a working mine.  I had a brief career doing so.  The only reasons that I think a non-miner would want to do this is curiosity or that they are not permitted to do so.  My longest bout of working in a mine was in 1957 at the Balmat #2 mine* at Balmat, New York, which, at the time, was America's largest zinc mine with an ore of sphalerite (zinc sulfide) in marble, but, as underground mines go, was only a medium-sized mine. I was collecting samples for a Ph.D. thesis in geology so I had the run of both active and inactive parts of the mine.  I was working for the, now defunct, St. Joseph Lead Company whose main properties were in Missouri with an ore predominantly of galena (lead sulfide).

Since I was being paid, there was a thought that maybe they could get something good from me.  They settled on my trying to see what geological information I could recover from the stopes* *  (large rooms from which ore was removed) shot out in WW-II.  At that time they mined as fast as they could, following the ore, with no record kept of the geology.  When I would go underground I would sort of deaden my senses as the moldy stench issued from the inclined shaft.  I would get off the hoist at the appointed level, maybe 500 ft, and go to the floor of a stope, a void that was maybe 200 ft deep, 200 feet across, and 500 ft long.  I had to use a compass to navigate my way across a stope, to record the geology on the other side, because there was so much moisture in the air.  I would have to climb over or find a way around large blocks of marble, a cubic yard or more in dimensions.  Some of these blocks had dust three quarters of in inch deep, some a quarter inch and some were clean.

My rational self told me that, if a block came down while I was in a stope,  the probabilities were that it would not land where I was, but my emotional self didn't believe it.  Though the temperature in these stopes was around 55 degrees and at no point did I ever feet hot, I would come out at noon or so dripping with nervous sweat.

In more modern stopes, there were pillars to hold the back (roof) up and every once in a while there would be a loud BANG!  A "bullet" of marble would be shot off from a pillar from stored up stress in the rock during marble formation.  A limestone formation for some reason would be taken down thousands of feet into the Earth where it became hot and under high pressure.  It became plastic and shear stresses folded and refolded and maybe folded it again, but at some point it gradually rose to the surface through uplift and erosion.  All the folding and refolding made following the geology to be difficult.  I think that if you ever were hit by one of these "bullets," it could kill you, but I never heard of anyone hit.  Again the probabilities were with you.  My boss was in the Balmat #3 mine talking to a miner at the hoist entrance when a cubic yard of marble fell killing the man he was talking to only a yard or so away.  Mind you, the hoist area is supposed to be the safest place in an underground mine.  But overall, the Balmat mines were really safe with little timber work needed.  If you see timber is used in a mine, you may think that is a safe spot, but actually it is a dangerous spot because timber wouldn't be used if it was safe.

Once when I was in the active part of the mine, I heard the loud hissing sound of compressed air used in the drilling equipment, a sign that a charge was going to go off to break up the ore for mining.  Because of the echo, I couldn't tell where the hissing was coming from, and, as I ran around the passages,  my God, I realized I had come right upon a face of ore where I could see the wiring and holes for blasting.  Damn, I had gotten myself right in front of the blast so I quickly turned around and franticly ran away.  Luckily the charge didn't go off while I was at the face, but you can bet my heart was pounding fiercely.

At the Edwards mine some miles away from the Balmat #2 mine, there were Y-shaped stopes.  Several of us were in one of these one day, several thousand feet underground, when we heard of block of rock bouncing its way down one of the limbs of the Y.  There was an echo and we couldn't tell where the block was coming down so we ran out of the stope.  My boss fell and was sliding along the wet muck, his right arm  up in the air when by accident he caught a cable protecting a winze (an underground shaft) dropping 200 ft.  Fortunately this stopped his slide or he would have gone down and certainly been killed.

For a year after my underground experiences, I was very sensitive to any cracking sound, such in a building cooling at night in the winter.  I would flinch and quickly look around.  I suppose today you would say I was suffering from post traumatic stress disorder.

* http://instruct.uwo.ca/earth-sci/fieldlog/Grenville/balmat.htm
** http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoping_(mining)