Seismic activity

Last night I had a fun game of 'Death is Not an Option' with the Michael Hill Jewller catalogue. For those of you not familiar with the game it usually works by proposing two people (say Roger Douglas and Ruth Richardson) and you have to say which of the two you'd have sex with - if death wasn't an option.

The Michael Hill Jeweller catalogue variation is that you have to say which item of jewellry you would wear, if death wasn't an option. You can play along at home because the catalogue is on their website. We had group consensus on the ugliness of gold and spent a long time bitching about general ugliness. Although we knew that gold wasn't just ugly jewellry, one of my friends had gold injections for her arthritis (they didn't help).

I've thought a lot about Todd Russell and Brant Webb in the last few weeks. I had those fleeting nightmarish thoughts about them never getting out. I almost cried when they were released . It wasn't till we were making fun of the jewelry that I realised I hadn't thought a lot about why they were down there. What their employers, and the market their employers sell on, thought was risking seismic activity for.

When Todd Russel asked for a newspaper to be sent down, so he could look for a new job, everyone thought that showed he wasn't losing his sense of humour.

But it's not really a joke.

The company that ran that mine killed Larry Knight, it could have killed more of the people who work there. But without that mine the town is dead. What kind of a choice is that? How can we accept an economic system that insists workers buy their town's survival with their own death?