Birthdays; Producer article on Wood Mountain; The Jaw

Happy Birthday on Feb. 17 to Michael Jordan, Richard Karn [Al from Home Improvement], Luc Robatille of the Kings, Denise Richards, and Renne Russo. And Clair and Evan too, since they know who they are.
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"But Lisa, that's the beautiful part of the plan... When Winter comes the apes freeze to death." You've just been subjected to an obscure Simpsons quote with Principal Skinner outlining the town's plan to control one pest with another predator animal. It seems Australia forgot to make its toad-killing Winter backup plan.
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The Feb. 9 2006 Western Producer has an article about my hometown:
Clay mine possible in southern Sask.
Subscriber Content
A proposed $15 million kaolin mine near Wood Mountain, Sask., could be the first step toward revitalizing the community of 20 people.
Unfortunately it's a subscriber magazine though, so the body of the article is hidden to us. The part that I do know is that the mining operation is based in Georgia USA where kaolin comes from in spades. They'd like to use a railline to transport the white chalky clay, but CP Rail plundered Wood Mountain's branch line years ago, and the only steel still in the bed is the occasional lost spike, and 1km of stranded track running through the village of Wood Mountain where the municipal government took a legal stand against the CP pirates. If the mine does get rolling, no thanks can go out to the RM of Old Post, and the Sask. NDP who let our ecologically friendly infrastructure be ripped away without a fight. It was torn out less than two decades after the federal government used Canadian tax dollars to upgrade the quality of steel in the rails. Guess who got to profit when the high quality rails were taken away, and your hint is it wasn't the Canadian taxpayer?
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I was in Moose Jaw today and saw the two Tunnel tours. The Chicago tour was more interesting to me than the Chinese tunnels, mostly because one was glamourous with funny acting from the male tour guide, and the other was about racism against Chinese immigrants. At one point I saw a wood stove in the Chinese tunnels that was nearly identical to the wood stove in my parent's kitchen [which they don't use as anything but decoration]. In the Little Chicago Tunnel, a '20s barmaid took the tour group to a secret door and told a little boy the secret knock of "four knocks". Well we didn't get in right away because the kid knocked about 10 times. Then we almost all were shot when the barmaid slipped up and asked the guard to "take care of us", then corrected her mistake before he went to get his Tommy gun.
The most interesting thing I learned on the tour was that the Tommy gun was invented for the Great War [WWI] as a trench spraying gun, but was never used for that, then was hardly sold because of its poor accuracy. Capone bought some for about $2000, and history was made.
When the guide once asked what we were all there for, and I excitedly spoke up, "Booze!" that prompted giggles from some ladies near me. I also got asked to look into the secret hideaway fireplace to "check that no one was coming".

While I was in "The Jaw" I had a tour of Palliser Regional Library headquarters, including their dog trick course downstairs from the library. Lunch at Mr. Sub, a -30 drive past the abandoned hospital and CCSchool, and watching "My name is Earl" TV show, and "Kinsey" [7/10] rounded out the weekend vacation in "The Jaw" with my friend. I then drove home to Wood Mountain and had rabbit stew for supper, and ruhbarb-strawberry pie for dessert.