Had a nice talk yesterday with an acquaintance where I learned three facts:
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He was, in his words, a cemeterian—a graveyard caretaker—for almost eight years.
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The cemetery in which he worked, spanning some 400 acres and with its earliest tombstone dating to the late 1700s, provides housing to its caretakers—quite the employment benefit in an urban cemetery—in the old trolley-station that once served as the point you would hop off the city’s rail-line and board one of the cemetery’s horse-drawn trams.
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While excavating an area of the cemetery to prepare it for new burials, my acquaintance spotted something black in the newly-exposed soil. Fearing that they had hit a coal seam—and the possible associated pockets of gas—he called for the excavator to stop and clambered down into the trench to inspect what they had unearthed. He found a dense and heavily-pocked black rock, round and about the size of a baseball surrounded by a layer of soil more brittle and ashen than the surrounding dirt. A geologist later confirmed his immediate suspicion—interred there at 100 km/hr, a meteorite.
