Freesteel

Deferred posting. Halfway down the first canyon — Rosiga — I began to feel I was getting too much of a good thing. The jumps and toboggans forced water up my nose so hard my eyes were squeezed. My eardrums were swollen. I could tell it was a good canyon, but I wasn’t quite ready for it. My nose started actually bleeding at the halfway point. My arms ached two days later from all the swimming.

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Deferred Posting. The podcast player was found in Becka’s computer case. Now I’ll have some noises to listen to on the long drive across Europe. Clive lent me his phone for the rest of the holiday to enable me to find out where I was going. We sat around for one last beer in the newly cleaned potato hut with its natural wooden tables and no longer linoleum covered floor.

The night was disturbed by the small brown mouse that had made its nest in our food box earlier in the week. This time it was in the tent, though the fact took some time to establish because it froze and stopped rustling every time we woke up. We cornered it under our old clothes, unzipped the inner and watched it catapulte out like a flying furball. Then it spent the rest of the night trying to get back in. I could see the it running up and down on top of the inner tent.

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Deferred posting No time for a proper timeline. I was badgered into going caving again. Then I walked over to and up the Greisskogel the following day across the Plateau. Then got down to basecamp and remained there out of the way. There was one walk up, pack up the bivi (stashing all the gear into a nearby cave), heavy carry down in the dark. My podcast player went missing overnight. In the morning I saw my clean trousers hanging out on the line with my phone still in the pocket. Bummer. Could be worse. I could have lost my wallet and passport. Still, this is making it very difficult to find out where I am supposed to go to in Italy for some proper canyonning. I knew my real holiday was going to get thwarted. I’ll just have to park in some layby outside the major supermarket in Domodossola for two weeks and hope my friends find me when they go shopping there.

Enforced internet absence during a somewhat full-on canyoning holiday. A mere 500 email backlog as well as so many things I’ve kicked forward to September. Pictures and reports to follow at some point.

Mon. 9 August More Tunnel programming and general lack of hassle. Walked up road with Martin to buy a canister of cooking gas when all the drivers were too idle to help fetch it themselves before the shop closed. It’s sunny at last again.

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Becka got a lift up to Yorkshire on Friday night with another caving buddy. Unfortunately he had to go to the Matienzo caving 50th anniversary party in the evening, which meant she was going to be short changed.

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This Max Wind-Cowie dude at the wank-tank Demos has come out with a publication: Civic streets, the big society in action which includes questionable stats decorating some amazing corporate PR marketing speak, like:

End ‘brand deserts’

Mainstream, high-street corporations should be encouraged to pursue corporate social responsibility through ‘doing’ – by expanding their presence to deprived areas in order to deliver jobs and confidence, and reduce the stigma of ‘brand deserts’…

Much has been written about the negative effects that brands can have on deprived people and communities. The sense of dissatisfaction that can spring from being presented with strong, aspirational brands to which one does not have any hope of access is very real and can be incredibly damaging to individuals’ wellbeing…

Of course, it is important to strive to ensure balance, but we should not actively prevent large, mainstream corporations from extending the benefits that they provide to poorer communities – we should embrace their potential to deliver economic and social change and to bring high-quality, affordable produce into the hearts of deprived areas.

The newspapers gleefully reprinted this rubbish.

Wind-Cowie’s twitter feed is: Myscular Liberal. A very recent post states:

Great article from Melanie Phillips on why Cameron needs 2 be more robust in defending #Israel http://bit.ly/aW0oSf

The words “great article” and “Melanie Phillips” are so incompatible, I had to check it out:

David Chamberlain and the reprise of historical infamy

For those who still don’t get it, let me spell out just why the response by Cameron, Clegg and Hague to the Turkish terrorist flotilla incident is so despicable and so terrifying. At a time when much of the western world has turned itself into a kind of global Nuremberg rally – this time with not Jews as people but as a collective people being singled out for attack while those who are gathering to destroy them are appeased, rewarded and strengthened — the British government has refused to defend the Israeli target of this appalling reprise of historical infamy and has instead placed itself squarely on the side of this truly diabolical inversion of reality and justice.

The convoluted pieties of Cameron Clegg and Hague, professing to support Israel’s need for security while denouncing it for defending its troops from kidnap and butchery, constitute in fact the most stomach-turning hypocrisy. For these men are not merely condemning Israel for its flotilla interception which, although undoubtedly botched, nevertheless saw Israel under attack from Islamists – you know, the kind which Britain and America are killing in their thousands in Afghanistan and elsewhere, along with countless civilians about whom no-one ever says a word because no-one cares a tuppenny damn if Israel isn’t in the frame — but are also calling for an end to the blockade of Gaza.

And so on, including the regulation Hitler reference that appears in every one of her articles.

This apologist for Tesco’s also retweets from a fellow neocon Tim Montgomerie:

RT @TimMontgomerie: The ugly truth about the “aid agency” that attempted to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza http://is.gd/cwWYQ

That’s a link to the pure propaganda site Terrorism-Info.IL (Israel).

Montgomerie also mentions among his other favoured articles this one:

Krauthammer: Israel’s blockade is doing to Gaza what JFK did to Cuba; stopping a deadly enemy acquire lethal weapons http://is.gd/cDPbK

Charles’ Krauthammer’s statements on Gaza were featured on The Daily Show last week, which is why his name caught my eye. Here is the amazing clip from Murdoch’s Fox News:

Krauthammer: The fundamental deception here is the use of the word “Humanitarian”. As we say, humanitarians don’t weild iron clubs and would have killed the Israeli’s had the Israeli’s not drawn their pistols in self-defence.

But there’s a larger issue here.

What exactly is the humanitarian crisis that the flotilla was addressing? There is none. There’s no one starving in Gaza. The Gazans have been supplied with food, social services, education by the UN for 60 years, in part with American tax money.

This is high-grade, unadulterated, unashamed lies and propaganda. Not spin, not opinion, but lies.

It fits with my MP’s categorical statement that “there is no blockade of Gaza”. It’s just a little local difficulty that’s happening in the waters off the coast.

Meanwhile in the real world, the dead bodies were returned:

Israel was tonight under pressure to allow an independent inquiry into its assault on the Gaza aid flotilla after autopsy results on the bodies of those killed, obtained by the Guardian, revealed they were peppered with 9mm bullets, many fired at close range.

Nine Turkish men on board the Mavi Marmara were shot a total of 30 times and five were killed by gunshot wounds to the head, according to the vice-chairman of the Turkish council of forensic medicine, which carried out the autopsies for the Turkish ministry of justice today.

The results revealed that a 60-year-old man, Ibrahim Bilgen, was shot four times in the temple, chest, hip and back. A 19-year-old, named as Fulkan Dogan, who also has US citizenship, was shot five times from less that 45cm, in the face, in the back of the head, twice in the leg and once in the back. Two other men were shot four times, and five of the victims were shot either in the back of the head or in the back, said Yalcin Buyuk, vice-chairman of the council of forensic medicine.

The findings emerged as more survivors gave their accounts of the raids. Ismail Patel, the chairman of Leicester-based pro-Palestinian group Friends of al-Aqsa, who returned to Britain today, told how he witnessed some of the fatal shootings and claimed that Israel had operated a “shoot to kill policy”.

He calculated that during the bloodiest part of the assault, Israeli commandos shot one person every minute. One man was fatally shot in the back of the head just two feet in front him and another was shot once between the eyes. He added that as well as the fatally wounded, 48 others were suffering from gunshot wounds and six activists remained missing, suggesting the death toll may increase.

What does this say about some wingnut’s lunatic concern for the poor and their “brand deserts”? Not a lot.

Except it sheds light on his general level of intellectual dishonesty in relation to his ideological fetishes. Inconvenient reality clearly doesn’t get in the way for him.

There’s no need to waste any time on his useless output.

Camera clips have finally been edited and uploaded. Quite relaxing. The rest here is for my own records.

Friday 2 April 2010 – Drive down Liverpool to Land’s End, arrive at caravans at 11pm. Weather looks horrid.

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Becka’s cave trips last weekend (I surveyed part of the entrance streamway) was to survey up to the connection and then, on the next day, help dig the connection between Rift Pot and Ireby Fell Cavern. No time to talk about it, so here is the survey:

Oh look, I’ve left off any scale bars. How useless. No time to waste. Back to work.

The data is here. Access to the project is here.

Once again, too much work happening, and all my blogging time is taken up with active activities. Last weekend I was hauled off caving to the Forest of Dean whether I liked it or not.

We picked up two cavers in Manchester and headed down, using their crap-nav stuck to the windscreen. The novelty wore off after much time hurtling down unnecessary single track lanes nowhere near our destination, only to turn back out onto a trunk road. All the campsites had huge barriers and gates, except one which we found at 1am on Miss Grace’s Lane, which was excellent. There was even another caving club staying there.

Saturday was a trip down Slaughter Stream Cave. I have added the photo to that Wikipedia page, and then got incensed to discover that those Yank cavers had deleted the coordinate field from the Infobox Cave template.

On Sunday I had an unusually pleasant morning in Chepstow foraging for breakfast owing to the fact that we were booked into Otter Hole which has a tidal sump part way through. This wasn’t scheduled to drain till 1:40pm, so I couldn’t be rushed to get going, get going, get underground.

The cave was all squalor and sharp rocks. I found it exceptionally hard going. We participated in a session of spray cleaning some of the stalagmites in the Hall of Thirty. And then spray-cleaned ourselves with a secret hosepipe in the woods where someone had dammed a stream to create a head of water. Good thinking.

Here’s a 5 minute video to of the squalor.