Devil Strip Silver

I love that term, and I guess unless you are from Akron, Ohio, or are a linguistics freak, you may not know what it means.  What it means is that strip of grass between the sidewalk and the road.  Turns out its a very regionalized term, and I have no idea what the Chester County term is, so I’ll just use it, cause its cool, and proves I’m well-read on these matters, I guess (I grew up, and now live, in an area without sidewalks, so I don’t have a term, in actuality, but no doubt I’ve used “curb strip” in the past).  (Also turns out someone did a study on these regionalized terms, and published a huge dictionary on the matter.  Very cool, (but still proves many people have too much time on their hands).  Google around for it.  My favorite term has to be “zep”, a term, as far as I know, that is only current in the Schuylkill valley area of Montgomery and Chester Counties (where I did grow up and still live), which means “hoagie”, “hero”, “sub”, and the like (cool to define a regional term with other regional terms; most folks use “hoagie” around here except the true old time locals).  I love it that you can still walk into pizza joints around here (at least the old, cool ones), and see the term on the menu, even in this day and age of homogenization.

Anyway, onto the silver, and you know if the preamble is long, and off-topic, the hunt was likely lame.  It wasn’t too bad, cause any hunt with silver is a good hunt.  Back to the recent honeyhole (not the “old honeyhole”, the one before that where I’ve spent most of my time this year), to work a few undetected sections, including the devil strip along the road that runs thru it, and the first target was a ’41 merc.  Not bad.  Unfortunately, the next three hours produced bupkis (not even a wheatie), except of a gold-filled wedding band.

Hunting devil strips is an acquired taste.  Its hard.  Its trashy, and passersby (I love that word as well; a rare English word that is infix inflected (anyone still working on gender inflected interjections? :))) are in your face from both sides.  And, not only is it trashy, its brutally trashy.  Did I mention that it is also trashy?  But often you can get silver there when the adjacent area is dead, because some people miss them, and some people hate trashy.  I remember one hunted out park that produced nothing but a rosie after hours and hours of hunting, and then in the short devil strip was a walker and a huge silver ring, so its always worth checking out if you can stomach the passersby and the trash.

As for the “gold filled” ring, it claims to be 1/20th of 10K, which I guess makes it .5K.  If that ring were gold, it would be worth about $200, so I suppose its worth about $10.  But, its someone’s wedding ring.  It has names inscribed in it.  Too bad they are common names, and there is no date.  Last time I found one with names inscribed, one of the names was uncommon, and there was an exact date, and I still could not find the owner, despite all the research tools at my fingertips and at the historical society.  The odds of me finding the owner are low, but we’ll see.

So, I think that will be the last silver from this place, as all other areas tested dead, but I will give it one final farewell farewell hunt.  After 65 silvers, I owe it that much.

But, there’s more.  Actually, there isn’t really.  I should really write about the awesome Bad Religion concert Sunday night.  It was the best concert I’ve ever been to (even better than when I saw them 6 or 7 years ago), but I don’t really have the skill, much less the time, to do so.  One thing that was kinda weird tho was that some dude comes up to me and asks how old I am (and I am kinda old to be in a mosh pit and deal with crowd surfing, but I am in good shape and have been dealing with such for 30 years), and I tell him, and he says is friend is 33 and didn’t come cause he thought he was too old to go.  Are you kidding me?  The band has been making music that long.  Get out and live.  Never let your fear decide your fate (ok, I stole that line, but I like it).  Awesome concert in any case.

Well, we got some linguistics instead of the dismal science for a change.  I guess I’m just an intellectual jack of all trades.  Maybe next time we’ll throw in some particle physics.  What is a Higgs boson anyway, and why to we care that its existence was recently (supposedly) confirmed?  Isn’t all that stuff sort of obvious?  Sort of like the collective yawn that occurred when the background microwave radiation was confirmed.  Duh.  (As an aside, I’m proud to have called that one when I was very young, we’ll before it was confirmed and while there were many theories out there that were inconsistent with its existence.  Not that it ever did anything for me — look how I ended up, a slob writing a pseudo intellectual metal detecting blog that gets really excited about finding 60 year old shiny disks.  But, there is always more to the story than meets the eye).

Oh my, that was a bizarre entry.  Should have spent more ink on the BR concert.  But what is done is done; we don’t do morning edits anymore.

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