LIST OF MR. CUFFNEYS' GREAT PROFESSIONAL ACHIEVEMENTS, DISCOVERIES, PUBLICATIONS, CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE SCIENCE OF GEOLOGY, ACCOLADES, AND PRESTIGIOUS AWARDS

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Yes, there they are: zip, nada, squat - no great honors, awards, or rewards. I take solace in one of Mark Twain's famous and wholly applicable quotes, "It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not deserve them."

With that out of the way, I can get down to what this literary masterpiece is all about - entertainment. This is a somewhat disjointed collection of short (and not so short) sometimes rambling stories based on the crazy, funny, stupid, sometimes harrowing, and all too often embarrassing happenings of my geological career and the rocky road on the way to it.

These stories span some 60 years, from collecting rocks and fossils as a boy growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, through the crazy juvenile antics and tomfoolery of my high school and college years, on to the crazy juvenile antics and tomfoolery of a career as a geologist exploring for mineral and energy resources on four continents and a bunch of remote islands.