Identification

The next presentation that I'm pondering for Science Club extends some of the work that I've been doing for the Beagle, namely working on tentative identifications for the various pieces of a horde of mixed minerals, rocks, fossils, and shells that is lurking in the second basement (the one where the telescopes hide and plot their long-distance evil). It came to me suddenly the other morning that all of this messing about with chemicals, magnification, microscopy, streaks and hardness, this would be great dinner theatre. Or, barring that, a great demonstration for kids in primary school. Especially if we can rig up the apparatus to do the flame tests {grins maniacally and bulges eyes outwards}...

Looking through my library, I really do have a large number of books about rocks and minerals, even after all of these years. Despite not having followed the path that led to geology as a career, I did more than my share of study in that field. Nevertheless, it doesn't surprise me that I've forgotten a lot. A hell of a lot. And, of course, when I was younger I wasn't really set up to do the testing, when I was a child, although I read about it. For some reason, the idea of putting things in flame to see what colour they burn excites me more now than it did then, and re-learning about some of these things has been more interesting than I would have expected.

I've been told that there's a real thirst for this sort of information among the school-aged children in the area, and that there are a lot of kids who would enjoy learning about how to identify rocks and minerals. If that's true, and if I can put together a presentation that is clever and amusing enough, with sufficient fire and acid (at a safe remove, of course), then we might really have a success - namely, more kids interested in science and scientific thinking.

One of the things that I've found, though, is that in writing some of the basics down for doing an identification presentation, I realised that it could be a very funny and personal sort of one-man show, if I were so inclined. A lot of the awkwardness in my life has always been bound up in my childhood - why not make it funny and exploit it for my own amusement and possibly for filthy lucre financial gain? Not only would it be about the process of actually determining what a given piece of the earth is, but it would also cover questions of my own whimsical identity, and how it's relentlessly and irretrievably bound up in family history. Trying to escape the inevitable, and how it never works. All of this really sounds funnier in my head, bear with me.

I don't know about you, but I think that taking a child and turning them loose in a road cut with a hammer and a chisel is intrinsically funny. Imagine how narked the Highway Department must get whenever they find aspiring geologists swarming all over the place, hammering out half-ton boulders and dropping them dangerously close to the road, all in search of a trilobite or a nice pocket of calcite crystals. In Missouri, of course, you could argue that it serves the Department of Transportation right for doing such a rubbish job with the roads in the first place...

Frankly, the thought of it makes me want to go and find a road cut right now.