You are currently browsing the daily archive for March 23rd, 2007.
A while ago I wrote about the BC Minister of Mines who resigned over a “nasty” e-mail. At the time I could not find the e-mail. Now I have from another blooger more resourceful than me. Here it is, and all I can say is WOW!:
It is hard to imagine there is any link between mining and dancing. I grew up in the 1950s on a mine in South Africa. A favorite passtime was to go to the mine dances. On hot Sunday afternoons we would gather in the arena of the mine compound and watch in fascination as the black miners did their traditional dances. My favorite was the gumboot dance: a stomp in four-time. Then there were the wild gyrations of the Zulus in vivid headgear. Or the shimmer of the Shona as they slide to and fro to a wild drum beat.
I wonder if these traditions continue? Are they now outmoded and improper? I make no excuses for a time when I was innocent of pubity and all that follows, when I was innocent of politics and racialism, and ethnicism, and all those terrible things that drove us from our homeland. The memories are good and the pleasure of dance remains. Here in Vancouver I still go out to dance twice a week, and this is a brief description of just one evening.
Dorothy Kosich writes in Mineweb that the Colorado appeals court has ruled that Colorado counties may ban the use of cyanide in mining within the county. Five Colorado counties have such regulations. The Colorado Mining Association sued Summit County asserting that state law, which permits the use of cyanide in mining, pre-empts county regulations. Not so, said the appeals court, ruling that the Colorado Mined Reclamation Act “specifically requires that mining operators comply with zoning and land use regulations adopted by political subdivisions.”
