A few further snips from said handbook mentioned below of 1972 vintage. I enjoy the singsong frank tones of these instructions…helped by the sprinkling of cheerful adjectives…
“There are handsome chairs which, if you lean too far back, topple over and you can be a WCB accident statistic.”
From the three good rules section: rule number 2.
“Learn from experienced men around you. They’re experienced because they’ve been around a long time. They obey the safety rules.”
From Alcohol and Drugs section
Drugs? Not hard drugs like heroin or soft drugs like marijuana — they’re illegal and lead to real trouble — but the drugs you get from a doctor, the prescription drugs. What about them?
…. and, of course, mixing alcohol and drugs is deadly. There is probably no quicker way to go.”
Digging holes in 1972
From Have a safe day: A handbook for safe living (1972. Published by 3 organisations inc Workmen’s Compensation Board of BC !)
P9 Excavations. (part 1)
When a man works in an unsafe excavation he may be digging his own grave.
Every ditch more than four feet deep must be shored or flared. Excavation and shoring must be done at the same pace.
Be careful when digging in wet soil, sandy soil or clay. Vibrations, even from passing traffic, can bring the walls tumbling down. Exit ladders should be in every trench and they must extend three feet above the ground level.
Proper crosswalks should be built over trenches. men should never jump across.
Excavations must be barricaded and well marked to prevent persons from falling in.
I’m not the only one struck by #18 miner – Estaban Rojas emergence. He’s on the front page of tomorrow’s Irish Times in this photo (AP/Hugo Infanto)….
OK am confusing miners. It may have been #18 since #20 is going to start a vegetable growing business and there was no vegetable growing hint of #18. #18 Estaban, according to the records was not hugged by his mama but by his partner of 25 years, who must have been the woman hugging the Virgin Mary teatowel instead of the flag.
Exit of miner #20 (44 anos) was the most moving I witnessed, though his was also the only exit today that I caught. His mother (?) was stood clutching a teatowel of the Virgin Mary, as opposed to the Chilean flag. He exited the human thermos and sank to his knees and engaged in a lengthy, devout looking prayer before he did owt else or muttered a victory cry. The mama, if in fact she be his mama, might a been his Mrs, gave the Virgin Mary a shake and a further clutch, until he was finished, whereupon she hugged him, with the instinct and impetus of a rugby tackle.
I had my eyes on a set of 5.99 curtains and asked the small male his opinion on the colour. He took a very dim view on them, the dimmer his view, the more my attachment to the potential of these curtains increased. I couldn’t understand his strong resistance to a very average yellow / orange shimmery curtain.
His final words on the matter gave something toward an explanation …
“They’ll make us look religious,” he said.
Next Post
I have had several waking dreams. It’s where I cannot decide whether I was awake or asleep or somewhere inbetween when I had the particular thought. Or perhaps I had the thought in a dream and it chased me into the kitchen — awake.
In anycase one was that my hoover was no longer working or had disappeared. It was such a sudden shock, because I am peculiarly fond of hoovering. (The repetition? the immediate result? the upper arm power? the constant living with shite carpets?) . I turned it on last week and nothing! Horror! Except the feeling I had already experienced this in a dream. Then I realized I was putting my foot on the wrong button. But the shock dreamed and lived was replicated.
Roy Arden bequeathed me my first Canadian hoover. It is no longer with me. I am three hoovers on. My second hoover came from a popular and successful Vancouver sushi restaurant from back in the eighties. It was an industrial log looking item. The current one was an alley rescue and has a cracked pipe dilemma.
The other was a sculpture vs hotel room (or dowdy rooming house) dream where a bunch of sculptures installed into the walls of each room of a hotel sent the public into a frenzy where they would occupy the rooms for months on end — competitively — to be near these sculptures having no need or reason to stay in the rooming house. The sculptures were from the Made in Japan series I’ve featured photos of recently, but there was one in particular that preoccupied the masses. It is called Ben or Ben Gem or some such. People became fixated on Ben and began removing parts of the sculpture. In actual fact though Ben is not part of that series it’s from an earlier series by the same artist Jeremy Isao Speier.
Eventually the hotel or dowdy rooming house sought to capitalize on this interest so they asked the artist to create a single entire room of sculpture embedded into the walls behind perspex or glass (like the fish and so on at The Aquarium). As soon as they unveiled this singular intended piece, the interest completely ceased and all the people pouring in, turned away and the place was then quiet thereafter. It was a bit like a flash mob dream.
I will write a short story out of it, I think.
Myself and the small male have been attentively watching the emergence of the miners. The realm of what’s happening and how we are able to partake — distantly — is curious and extraordinary. The unknown and unknowing factor of watching the paramedic head inside the human thermos and guinea pig his way down the hole without flinching .. . and the return journey bringing the first of the 33, well we had become deeply acquainted with that metal hole shaft and never thought anything would emerge from it. There’s also a strangeness to the public witnessing of it all, in that the families grief and anguish is by virtue of the situation, is so raw and public. I wonder whether the collective witnessing helps or intrudes and how that will effect recovery or adjustment.
I began to think about the people who sent them down there in the first place and whether sending people in this technological age into the centre of the earth is really a sensible or necessary idea. Who was witnessing them being sent into an unsafe mine? Tomorrow many workers will enter other unsafe mines, again, unwitnessed.
The euro streaker?
And sometimes the audience hop up spontaneously inspired. By the Godly Eurovision experience….and consistent 30 year Eurovision hairstyles (2010)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uWCTeIv-Tc&fs=1&hl=en_US]