We live ~40 miles from the Pacific Ocean in Oregon and we go beachcombing all the time – indeed we’ll be going this coming weekend. We rarely find anything overly interesting, perhaps an intact sand dollar shell now and then. The holy grail is, of course, Japanese glass fishing floats. I’ve never found one but I know someone who has.
And I’ve only seen coal once in my life, in a college geology lab. I wouldn’t recognize it in the wild.
Concurred – it’s sort of like a lightweight aggregate of rock and glass. When I worked with my friend, the blacksmith, at the renaissance faire, I cleaned a lot of clinkers out of the bottom of our forge.
My mother bought a canoe with the green stamps and we took it for boat rides on vacation. Lot’s of fun, including remembering how to boat into the waves when a storm hit in a Canadian lake.
Huh. My first reaction was that seems weird to me. But then I spent my summers in Western Pennsylvania coal country as a young child. And thinking about it the coal refuse that was everywhere on the ground in the early 1970’s was largely overgrown and non-visible by the 1980’s. It was very specific to a time and place, so I really shouldn’t be surprised.
Yeah. I grew up probably 1000 miles from the nearest piece of coal, above ground or still underground. OTOH, where I was sea anemones were more common than robins. Not so in PA I’ll bet.
I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen coal. Whenever I try to picture it, even right now, just after having read the Wikipedia article, I can only picture pitch or coke. I can’t imagine the more rocky-looking coal ever actually burning so my mind has to adjust it to something more tarry or charcoaly.
My friend wanted to do blacksmithing. He had an anvil and was going to build a forge and everything. For the forge, he had gotten, from where I do not know, a large garbage bag full of coal. There must have been fifty or sixty kilos of the stuff.
It was black and in broken chunks, yes, but it was also quite a bit heavier than charcoal would have been. It had hard edges and an almost-metallic lustre. In appearance, it was definitely an odd rock, not anything showing a plant origin.
There is also the stuff called “Brown Coal”, which, in it’s natural state, frequently shows signs of plant origin. It’s what we’ve got in my state (Victoria.Australia)
The Germans invented a process of making briquettes out of the stuff, and the method was stolen (industrial espionage), and brought here. After it’s pressed into briquettes, it looks more like black coal (it’s still got a lot of ash).
When my mother was young, she decided she wanted to be a Doctor when she grew up. So when people asked her what she wanted to do, she’d say “…be a doctor…”, and they’d laugh, and say “that’s cute, she hasn’t decided yet”
Later on, when she was training to be doctor, there were sessions held in the men’s change rooms, which she, as a women, was not able to attend. 50 years later, that still burned.
Another form of discrimination, student athletes got more and better food in the cafeteria. I think some divisions still haven’t changed…
(Apart from the basic cheapness, as a kind of foreigner, she found a lot of the cafeteria food inedible)
Once, when I was a kid in the '50s, my mom told me that in the Soviet Union women can be doctors, lawyers, architects, engineers, etc. She didn’t say it approvingly or disapprovingly, but merely as a statement of fact. I thought it was really weird.
That would have been anthracite, or hard coal. It’s the hardest and most energy-dense variety. Melbourne has mentioned brown coal, or lignite, the softest variety. In between are sub-bituminous and bituminous coal. The density of coal depends on how much pressure and heat it’s been subjected to after burial.
My favorite introduction to lignite.
Melbourne, it also kind of went the other way around. When a male cousin of mine decided he wanted to be a nurse, some folks thought “he just wasn’t up to being a doctor.”
When my mom went to nursing school guys weren’t allowed in their classes. And if a doctor(almost all male) came into the room, the students had to stand up. Mom was almost the first student allowed to stay in school after she married.
Oh no, now I’m going to have to read Digger all over again. I seem to have entirely forgotten this bit.
I asked some nurses what it was like for a guy to go into nursing in the 1970’s (in Melbourne, Australia), and they were universally negative. That would have been a bad idea they said. I know it would have been possible (I knew a guy who went into nursing in 1977), but they refused to be specific: just that it would have been a very bad idea.
And here I thought the question was, ‘has it been long enough since I last read Digger to read Digger all over again.’
Well, yeah. The “oh no” portion of that wasn’t serious; except possibly from the point of view of getting anything else done.
And I’ve just started it (looking for something to spend my time with since Schlock Mercenary ended).
For the first time? You’re in for a treat!
And of course, when my mom went into nursing, in the early 1950’s there were racial and ethnic problems as well. My mom’s class had the first black student, and when the girls went to the movies they all sat in the balcony of the theater, because their fellow student had to sit there. And they would get lunches to go, instead of sitting down to eat, because their fellow student wasn’t allowed in. And this was not in the South, but in Topeka, Kansas, when just three years later the desegregation order, Brown vs The Board of Education of Topeka, went down.
An Hispanic student a couple years behind my mom was told by her high school counselor she shouldn’t try for nursing, “because you people can’t handle it.” When she graduated from the nursing school she took her diploma and went back to the high school to wave it in his face, saying “See, see?”