One a day, plus iron

I was stuck in the McCain campaign office last evening with time on my hands, because we had a calling moratorium for 9/11 observance. Nothing to do but keep the office open for people looking for signs and material, and read old, old newspapers laying around the office.

There was this article in the New York Times about prospectors and landowners clashing up in Ontario. Apparently Canadian land grants *never* assigned underground & mineral rights to land purchasers in the first place, which means that prospectors can buy licenses from the provincial government to prospect on your land, make claims, and there's shitall you can do about it except get there ahead of the bastards with your own prospector's license and make claims on your own land. What this means in practice is that landowners can't keep clowns from climbing all over their property and digging about, up to and including dynamiting, apparently.

Thank the sky demon for American-style land grants, where you *start out* with a full-spectrum claim on your land, assuming some clown somewhere down the line of custody didn't alienate rights-of-way or mineral rights back in the mists of time before you ever purchased the property.