Totally Blowin Shit Up Tuesday: Ahoy, Limey

Where I grew up was basically a lot of dark, rich topsoil spread over an ancient, enormous coral reef. You call it Indiana.

The thing about ancient coral reefs is that they make damned fine limestone. In fact, large stretches of southern Indiana--especially around Bloomington--are famous for the high quality of the limestone that is quarried there. There, the limestone that is quarried is used for more decorative pieces because it gives a lovely smooth surface when it is finished. The reason for this is the millions of tiny shells that comprise the stone. In fact, as a part of my geology minor, I spent several hours with a ground up vial of limestone, a fine paint brush, and a microscope trying to pull out the various tiny remains of creatures and then identify them. Was it tedious? You betcha. But I also enjoyed the hell out of it because I'm just that effing weird.

The limestone from where I grew up was more coarse and was used primarily for construction work, driveways, and for support on the sides of levees and dams. The fossils that popped up in those were a lot easier to spy, and I had a rather fine fossil collection from my driveway and the surrounding area when I was a kid.

There were several abandoned quarries in my town. One of them, someone bought, trucked in a bunch of sand, strung a volleyball net across, and put a water slide on. This was the "world famous" Markle Pool. At one point, this was operated by a family who went to my church, and their daughter, Melanie--whom I had a bit of a crush on--had an impressive set of deep water buoys, if you know what I'm saying. There was another quarry pit not far from the Markle Pool, but it was owned by the Boy Scouts. We used to hike around it during our camping trips. To the south of town there was an even bigger operation, but it had closed up by the time I was a kid. Still, you weren't allowed to go there looking for fossils, which kind of sucked since there was still a ton of material laying around.

I bring all this up because I happened upon this footage of a limestone quarry being blown up for mining purposes. You'll see the wall of rock detonating and blowing up from a few different angles. The big pay off is in the end. Oh, and there's a special guest voice cameo.

That was a pretty fortuitous result there, chief. I like how he claimed to have been inspired by Dirty Jobs to get the camera angle. I guess they're just a lot more lucky on Dirty Jobs in that they haven't destroyed a camera in all their trick shot photography--at least not that we've seen.

So, there you have it. Nothing too sciency today. And, not a lot of stories of me fighting the plumbing in my house, rife with references to my asscrack sticking out.