We really are all getting wired together. I let this one out into the wild a week ago, just to a couple of friends, and copies keep coming back to me by e-mail from increasingly unlikely sources. It’s a little scary. I guess it’s too late to decide my mining background should be a deep, dark secret (as mining-day secrets should be).
The photo was taken quite some time ago, if I may be coy about it (as hardrock miners typically are), with an 8mm “spy camera.” A friend in Montreal with darkroom equipment and an old apartment with high ceilings stood a bed on end, placed the developer atop this piece of makeshift equipment and put the paper on the floor. The print spent the last umpteen years rolled up in a tube before I recently scanned it. 
Sara says I look the same today. Unfortunately. Same sense of sartorial splendor. The lot.
Are we supposed to guess which one’s you? What are you looking at – and drinking anyway?
The “drink” is my hat-lamp. I’m gazing off in the direction of Montreal, where I really wanted to be. I’m in the middle, of course. Here’s my response to a similar query on Facebook: “I’m the one in the plaid shirt. I don’t know who the other two are. š … Far right is still a friend, retired schools inspector living in the Yukon; the one on my left is a Yugoslavian I’ve lost touch with; first underground experience compliments of a military prison. Great stories associated with both. None with the guy in the middle, who is already gazing Montreal-ward, looking for an escape. Actually that was just the first of four mining jobs for the man in the middle.”
Are you in Hong Kong?
No still in NK. I was thinking about your friend in Phuket…
How many days was each mining job?
How long could you stay underground if you had wine in garbage bags & black pepper oatmeal cookies & stuff?
What happened to HK? What friend in Phuket? About 850, 120, 120 and 100 days (the last stint was actually 99 12hr days with one off for a hangover)… Indefinitely, depending on what the “stuff” was.