Word: mineral
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...feelings about this decline in the prestige of the Crown are ambivalent. When I was a little kid my father explained that the surname Jenkins--unusual in a Hispanic country like Costa Rica--was the legacy of an old English miner who had migrated to Central America in the late nineteenth century. Right then and there I became a fierce Anglophile...
Rimmed by steep ridges and mountain shanties, the hamlet of Keystone, W. Va. (pop. 627), looks like a movie set left over from Coal Miner's Daughter. Main Street, all four blocks of it, has not a single traffic light. Yet the local bank in recent years has boasted one of the highest profit margins in the U.S., and reached $1 billion in assets in 1998. You might wonder how such a bank could thrive in one of the poorest counties in the U.S. And you'd be in good company, because bank examiners and the FBI wondered...
Coober Pedy is a small town but full of M-E-N. They'll argue all night, but God help you if you cross them. The cops aren't much use out here, and the men take justice into their own hands. Last month, a passing wannabe miner got into another man's mine and rifled a lode of opals that the owner had opened up but left unextracted. (He had taken off to the pub for a beer, committing the fatal error of letting on that he'd struck, and this was overheard by the thief.) His friends identified...
...fossilized backbones of archaic freshwater squid. The paradox of the stuff is that although it is so brilliantly colored, it has no color of its own. It's a solid diffraction grating, and the color you see is the light dispersed and reflecting through it. John Smart, the miner in whose mine we filmed, waxes reflective about this. "The opal's just a bloody illusion. It's as though you're spending your life down here digging for something that doesn't actually exist...
...ever feel jealous, I ask, when another miner makes the big strike? "Ah, no, Bob, it'd be pointless. You'd spend your whole life being jealous. I feel glad, actually. It keeps you believing that it could happen to you tomorrow. And if you go for six months without a strike, you've got to believe that. Otherwise you'd go crazy...