Wallace Street Journal
From computer death to silver
David Bond
Editor, Silver Valley
Mining Journal
April 4, 2005
Wallace, Idaho -April Fool's
Day arrived in a rather cruel way. Our computer displayed for
us the Blue Screen of Death, then upon further prowling by our
keyboard inputs, reverted to the Black Screen of DOS Death. You
say Windows doesn't operate under DOS? Then why, when all else
fails, does Windows try to run CHKDSK on your hard drive? Our
data are gone. We are starting from scratch. And being a Professional,
we never backed anything up.
Windows is like that, to be sure. We are watching for the latest
permutations of functionality from the Linux people, and when
they appear, we will rid ourselves of the Fresh Hell that Bill
Gates has wrought. DOS was a good thing, straight-forward, basic.
Several people, back then, wrote disc operating systems. If you
were into computers in the early days, you will recall that Microsoft
was just one of many DOS-writers. Tandy Radio Shack (remember
TRS?) and Apple had vastly superior programming languages,
but they got greedy and proprietary, and Gates snookered IBM
with his pirated trash. The rest is history.
Nevertheless, MS-DOS was vastly superior. It was simple. It worked
in the mud. If it had a problem it was because you created it,
not because some sloppy code-writer miss-typed a key line because
his boss had flogged him to give you some new feature you never
wanted. It's quite revealing that the evolution of the American
battle rifle tracks along the same lines. American armies won
the first world war with the Springfield .30-'06 bolt-action
rifle. In World War II we triumphed with the M-1 Garand, heralded
by no less than Gen. Patton as the single greatest invention
of the century. The Garand was an automated .30-'06, with a spring-loaded
six-round clip. It trumped the finest precision rifles the Germans
could create because it was simple to operate, simple to clean,
and worked in all situations.
We won World War I and World War II with Col. Whelan's fine 30-calibre
cartridge. Then along came the bean-counters. We fought Korea
to a draw with a smaller cartridge, the .308 Winchester round.
By the time Vietnam rolled around, we were reduced to a .22-calibre,
55-grain bullet and we got our clocks cleaned by Mikhail Timofeevitch
Kalashnikov's crude but effective .30-calibre AK-47. Now, Eugene
Stoner was no slouch of a gun-designer, and his original AR-15
design probably would have held its mud in the jungles. On paper,
at least. But Robert McNamara, one of Jack Kennedy's fair-haired
boys whose great gift to American culture was the Ford Edsel,
"improved" upon the AR-15/ M-16 rifle and ignored Stoner's
pleas to use clean-burning powder in this precision weapon. In
fact, our troops were dispatched to battle in Southeast Asia
with a "self-cleaning" rifle that neither cleaned itself
nor, in jungle conditions, acted like a rifle at all. Our snipers
in that conflict, on the other hand, bought or were issued Remington
Model 700 rifles that fired the venerable World War I Whelan
cartridge, the .30-'06, and they could count on their weapons.
Sitting in the top of a tree, camouflaged up the yin-yang, we
would prefer an Arfie over an AK for accuracy's sake. A Stoner
will stay inside a quarter-sized pattern at 300 yards all day
long, whereas a Kalashnikov will tend to wander as the cheap
barrel warms, and become a splatter-gun. But should we drop said
rifle from the top of the tree, and it lands in dirt, and we
climb down to fetch it, we will be grateful we're picking up
an AK, because the AK will still work.
So Windows XP is the M-16; DOS is the AK-47. On paper, one is
better. In frantic battle, the opposite applies. But there are
always more than two choices. The bolt-action Remington Model
700 still lurks out there, the best of its breed, and a smart
guy should have one, like he would have Linux for a backup to
his Gates OS - chambered of course for Hank Whelan's brilliant
cartridge, sitting right next to the TRS-80 computer on the typewriter
stand, near the Underwood.
Speaking of paper, it wasn't our intention to become a book-reviewer,
but in the larger context of silver mining this mission has become
important. Silver mining has suddenly become hip. It has style.
It has class. The source of this tipping point is not clear,
But we might suggest that Gregg Olsen's "The
Deep Dark" about the 1972 Sunshine Mine Disaster, which
is climbing its way to the New York Times bestseller list as
we speak, and Fritz Wolff's recollections of working underground
at the Bunker Hill in "A
Room for the Summer" are partly to blame. Die-hard mining
freaks will recall Steve Voynick's excellent "The
Making of A Hardrock Miner" from two decades ago.
Our own book, "The Silver Pennies" will be out next
week. It's a brief dissertation on the surviving mining issues
of the old Spokane Stock Exchange list of 133 companies. Remarkably,
3 dozen of them survived the horrible purges of Utah, Seattle,
Denver and Spokane, and the dot.com bust, and many are poised
for meteoric growth should silver strike $7 as its new basement
- which it's in the process of doing as we speak. So you can
get SBUM for twenty cents, or SRLM for four lousy bucks. This
is chump change. New Jersey's mining gobs of gold, for god's
sake! NJMC at 50 cents? Independence, which has the royalty on
the Lucky Friday Mine, for just over a buck? Jeeze.
We were accused this year, in Vancouver and Toronto, of playing
favourites in our stock picks. Firstly, and for the 400th time,
we don't own any silver mining stocks. Nor do our relatives,
nor does out pet parrot Buzzard, our pet Chow-Chow dog Smoak,
or our vicious black cat Velcro. We have a signed relationship
with our publisher that expressly forbids writing about stocks
we own. Personally, we would prefer to dabble in the markets
and take our chances (and your money), but there's something
about a steady monthly cheque from McGraw-Hill Publishing that
gets you through the checkout line a bit faster. Plus, it makes
it easier to call a stock a dog; you don't have to get your subscribers
out of it first, or explain to them why you sold them all that
legend stock in the first place just as you were dumping.
Here is the disclaimer, taken from a famous newsletter writer's
website, that you will never have to read here: "(We provide)
research, analysis, and investor relation services for certain
of the companies featured in the articles appearing in its publications
(each a "Featured Company"). Featured Companies may
pay fees to (us) Inc. that may include securities-based compensation
that would appreciate if the company's stock price rises. Accordingly,
there is an inherent conflict of interest involved that may influence
our perspective and provide an incentive for publishing favorable
information with regard to a Featured Company."
This disclaimer is somewhat akin to that sticker on that paying
Coeur d'Alene, Idaho poker machine at the Timeout Tavern across
the street from the Kootenai County sheriff's office that proclaims
"For Amusement Purposes Only." Even as the quarters
pour out.
If there is a flaw in our attitude, it is in our belief that
the Silver Valley of northern Idaho, the Coeur d'Alene Mining
District, is host to the finest silver reef on the planet and
that this deposit has yet to be plumbed. It is a 20- or maybe
200-mile vein open at strike and depth. It is on American soil.
Its plays, those 30-something we mention in the book, have permitted,
patented properties. They are, like a trusty Garand, locked and
loaded and damn the sand.
Bear with us whilst we digress: Garand is not in Bill Gates'
Microsoft Word Office 2003 Professional spellchecker. Nor is
hardrock. Nor is stope. This is how far we have slid. Of course,
neither is the word Edsel, but McNamara is. Dayamn! How quickly
we remember.
We quote now from Wolff, who after his run at Bunker and retiring
as an aerospace engineer now dabbles as a minefinder (another
word not in the Gates spell-checker) for the Washington State
Geologic Survey: "A tantalizing question to consider is
whether 'Has every deposit in the Silver Valley been discovered.'
My answer is, 'Not by a long shot.' One of the reasons it's possible
to venture that opinion is because so much ore has been discovered
by accident and serendipity, by driving development work with
no thought of hitting a well-reasoned 'geologic target,' as was
the case when the shifter reported to the (Bunker Hill) mine
superintendent, 'Oh, by the way, we cut a six-foot vein of wire
silver on that last drift shot.'"
There, in a nut, is the story of the Coeur d'Alenes, and why
this is the finest district play on the planet.
We've covered a lot of ground from computer death to silver in
this rant. But in a perverse way, they tie together. Some nefarious
spirit from the netherworld reminds one to get back to basics.
We're not quite ready to go back to the Royal, but any old silver
stock will do.
April 3, 2005
David Bond
email:deepee@usamedia.tv
Archives
Editor: Silver Valley
Mining Journal
David Bond covers
gold and silver mining equities for a number of national and international
publishers, including Platts Metals Week, a division of McGraw-Hill.
He lives in Wallace, Idaho, heart of the planet's richest silver
fields, the Coeur d'Alene Mining District. He is former editor
of the Wallace Miner, and holds regional and national firsts in
investigative journalism from the Atlantic City Press Club (National
Headliner) and from the Society of Professional Journalists (SDX/SPJ)
and has edited or written for newspapers on both coasts, Canada
and Alaska.
321gold Inc
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