Just Not How You Were Expecting Them
If you have been following the blog over the past few days AND YOU SHOULD HAVE BEEN then you'll be aware we published a long Intro about 'Ball's Pyramid', a fantastically difficult, treacherous and dangerous sea stack in the waters off eastern Australia. Your Humble Scribe came across it quite by chance, on a random Youtube channel calling itself 'Fatally Curious', which I then followed up. It features an extensive list of mountaineering disasters, where things go horribly wrong and lots of people die. Grisly stuff. Art!
NO IT DIDN'T!
The assertion is utter bunkum, but I shall still steal a few illos from them, because they deserve it for being clickbaiters.
BE PATIENT! we shall get to both water and pyramids in due course.
This chapter of our Intro begins in 1938, when a farmer in the Mount Gambier region of Australia was walking his horses, or running them, or whatever farmers do with herds of horses. BOOJUM! is not agricultural in the slightest.
ANYWAY one of the dobbins fell over, which Farmer Selig discovered was due to sticking it's leg in a hole in the ground. When he investigated further with a rope, he found a yawning chasm 120 feet deep beneath his field, of which 110 was water. Art!
This was a giant sinkhole, worn away by millennia of flowing water, which eroded away the limestone substrate.
The first thing that occurred to Farmer Geils was that he'd better fence the hole off, or any small livestock that fell into it would become a capital expenditure.
Well, perhaps. He might have also thought of making money by allowing cave divers to take the challenge, except I think that would have been a few decades ahead of cave diving.
Here an aside. Cave diving is a very, very different business from open-water diving. Art!
Looking at this illo and knowing what is to come, Conrad is reminded of that immemorial quote from "A Bridge Too Far". Art!
The entrance hole, you see, is only a yard across, and that's after extensive widening. The divers have to go in absent all their gear, down the ladder you see one pic above, then put it on whilst in the water. They can manage this because - Art!
- of the underwater pyramid called the "Rock Pile", the main feature in the upper chamber called "The Shaft" both for the narrow entranceway and the sunlight that illuminates it.
Water in The Shaft is perfectly clear, meaning you could swim around until you ran out of air with no problems, thanks to it being a very large open space. Moreover, there is a guideline that runs from the entranceway to the Rock Pile, meaning one can find one's way back to the surface and air. Art!
Here is where things begin to get dangerous, or, if you are Conrad The Giant Quivering Pudding, even more dangerous. Cave divers, hmmm? You see, the cave floor falls away sharply in caverns to west and east, becoming restricted to the west and very restricted to the east. Once past the Rock Pile, there is no sunlight nor any guide lines, so divers are dependent on their own torches. Nor is that all. The caverns are lined with thousands of years-worth of silt, which will instantly turn the water into an opaque milky liquid if disturbed.
The western tunnel ends at 260 feet deep, the eastern tunnel at 400 feet, which is so deep divers need to breathe an air mix or risk nitrogen narcosis - for the layman, basically tripping your head off. Underwater. In the dark. In a confined space. With limited air. Note also what might be called a 'choke-point' in the eastern tunnel, Art!
Still up for cave diving?
All this preamble is to work up to the quadruple deaths at The Shaft in 1973, when an eight-person team descended into the waters. They had all been warned NOT to venture into the tunnels beyond the bottom of the Rock Pile, which five of them ignored, zooming off into the east tunnel. Only one of them made it back, and it took 11 months for police divers to recover the four bodies. They had no guide lines, no proper air mix, poor torches, no cave diving experience and no dive plan.
These deaths shook the authorities, who came up with the Cave Divers Association of Australia, which requires aspiring cave divers to undergo rigorous training and certification before they can get anywhere near a puddle, never mind a flooded cave. Art!
As you can see, only 4 deaths, not 16. We may come back to this morbid subject, it does have a trainwreck quality to it. Art!
Looking up The Shaft from above the Rock Pile. Let's hear it for Liz, who is more of a man than I'll ever be.
Whilst On The Subject Of Water -
Conrad was reminded of a certain shot from "The Home Planet", vaguely remembering that it had to do with deep water and shades of blue. Art!
Hmmm, you just don't get the depth of colour from my cheap digital camera, and I'm charging up my phone so can't use that, either.
What the picture shows is the 'Tongue of the Ocean' and the Great Bahama Bank, where the lighter colour is water to a depth of 10 down to 200 feet, the medium colour is down to 400 feet and the abrupt transition to dark shows an underwater cliff plummeting down a mile. Art!
Watch out for Bathies and sea tanks.
In The Red
Your Humble Scribe has been re-watching episodes of The Original Series 'Starry Trekkers', which Netflix have on offer, with the special effects given a 21st century upgrade. This kind of detracts from the naive charm of the original spaceship models and planets, but whatever. They did this with 'Doc
ANYWAY the episode I last watched was 'Miri', where - Art!
You see the two security redshirts? No! That one with a skirt is a featured actress, she's not one of The Expendables. These two redshirts are there for the first ten minutes, then they vanish, until one of them reappears minutes before the episode ends. Where were they and what were they doing?
Apart from that, the derelict lot scenes were eerily effective. Also, it was nice to see the away team scouring through stacks and stacks of paper files and folders, from a civilisation that had not evolved electronic storage media. Art!
One part that had scared me rigid as a smaller version of Conrad proved to be an extremely damp squib. Remember when the hideously disfigured attacker is restrained after attacking Kirk? Art!
A bit of appliqué latex and makeup and there you go. It's also amusing to see Mister Spock and a couple of security men being run ragged by a bunch of children.
Vic Reeves, Prophet Of The Future
Conrad is unsure if the youth of today are familiar with one of Britain's premier light entertainers, who went on to become a quiz show host and hot comedy-drama property when they remade 'Randall And Hopkirk (Deceased)'.
ANYWAY AGAIN one of Vic's most popular sayings was 'You wouldn't let it lie!' which would crop up regularly.
Here's another comedian at work. Art!
He wouldn't let it lie, would he?
Vic Reeves as Elong Tusk
Finishing With A Little Gentle Ribbing
Gentle for me. Were I to do this in Mordorvia, there'd be an appointment with a 10th storey window, a pot of polonium tea or a novichok cocktail. Art!
Thanks to 'Suchomimus' on Youtube for breaking this news. His deadpan Nottingham delivery of slang and insults about Putinpot guarantees him an appointment with a 10th storey window, a pot of polonium tea and a novichok cocktail all at once. Art!
They are now down to 2 prototypes. At least they didn't have to shoot this one down when it tried to defect to Ukraine, as happened last year. Tee hee!
S-70 is now 200
Weep me some salty vatnik tears, Vova.
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