texascavers Digest 17 May 2011 18:29:48 -0000 Issue 1311
Topics (messages 17778 through 17788):
Re: Facebook related
17778 by: Fritz Holt
hello, GPS underground
17779 by: Espeleo Coahuila
New LED flashlight
17780 by: dlocklear01.gmail.com
17781 by: Mark Minton
UT GROTTO Meeting - Wed May 18
17782 by: Gary Franklin
5 Mouth Cave dig
17783 by: J. LaRue Thomas
"Cave of Forgotten Dreams" Coming This Friday to the Violet Crown Cinema in
Austin - Group Discount!
17784 by: Mark.Alman.L-3com.com
Re: Cave of Forgotten Dreams
17785 by: BBURNETT1.austin.rr.com
17787 by: Mark.Alman.L-3com.com
Re: [SWR] Cave street art
17786 by: Diana Tomchick
Petzl Scorpio Recall
17788 by: Mark Minton
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--- Begin Message ---
David,
As previously mentioned, I don't do facebook but can't most cavers be reached
via cavetex and OT? I hope to join you there Saturday.
Fritz
-----Original Message-----
From: David [mailto:dlocklea...@gmail.com]
Sent: Sunday, May 15, 2011 2:49 PM
To: Cavers Texas
Subject: [Texascavers] Facebook related
I am right now sending out personal invitations via e-mail to the 500
NSS members in Texas to
invite them to NaturFest.
This would be 100 times easier if all of these people were on Facebook
and on a common caving group
page such as, "AllTexas Caver," or the TSA group.
Most of the e-mails so far have bounced back, and many don't have
e-mails. Some are obvious typos.
Many have weird e-mail addresses that you have to carefully proofread,
which is no fun.
I would like to personally thank Mark Zuckerberg and the guys he stole
the idea from for making this
much easier. Facebook is the best way at the moment to plan events,
but I can see something else
coming along someday to do it even better, and I am willing to bet it
will be a product from the winner
of the Android/iOS war.
Someone should try to track the folks down in the NSS manual and send
them a Facebook invite to their
favorite group.
I am leaving for Brenham in just 4 days to start setting things up, so
this is the last chance I will get to
send out invites. If you never get an invite, it was not
intentional. Some of you didn't want one and
got it several times from different sources. Sorry about that.
Weather outlook so far for NaturFest is looking warm and muggy during
the day, but not so bad at night.
I have invited a whole lot more people this year, so if some of them
come, the event should break even.
David Locklear
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--- Begin Message ---
http://www.karstworlds.com/2011/01/underground-gps-finally-possible.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+KarstWorlds+%28Karst+Worlds%29
--
LCC Monica Grissel Ponce Gonzalez
San Antonio, Texas
espeleocoahu...@gmail.com
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--- Begin Message ---
Lowe's Hardware just got a new flashlight in.
Kobalt #0079129
I will not be able to test it for a while, but it looks like the best
flashlight I have seen in my life.
$ 70
500 lumens on high. Has a low setting which is what you would normally use.
Has fancy lens arrangement with 3 LED's.
Light-weight enough to take on a caving trip to a big cave.
Hopefully there will be one at next caver's auction.
David Locklear
Sent on the Sprint® Now Network from my BlackBerry®
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--- Begin Message ---
There's a whole thread on this light on the
CandlePowerForum, including a
photograph:
<http://www.candlepowerforums.com/vb/showthread.php?310983-500-lumen-Kobalt-at-Lowes-cr123x4>.
It uses relatively expensive CR123 batteries.
Mark Minton
At 12:44 PM 5/16/2011, dlocklea...@gmail.com wrote:
Lowe's Hardware just got a new flashlight in.
Kobalt #0079129
I will not be able to test it for a while, but it looks like the
best flashlight I have seen in my life.
$ 70
500 lumens on high. Has a low setting which is what you would normally use.
Has fancy lens arrangement with 3 LED's.
Light-weight enough to take on a caving trip to a big cave.
Hopefully there will be one at next caver's auction.
David Locklear
Please reply to mmin...@caver.net
Permanent email address is mmin...@illinoisalumni.org
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--- Begin Message ---
Howdy Caver,
You are cordially invited to attend the Underground Texas Grotto meeting on
Wednesday May 4, 2011 from 7:45 P.M. - 9:00 P.M.
University of Texas Campus in 2.48 Painter Hall
http://www.utexas.edu/maps/main/buildings/pai.html
Geoff Hoese will be presenting Biospeleology in Southern Belize
His recent trip is a review of the First Annual Biospeleology Expedition of
the Subterranean Ecology Institute. Geoff’s talk will include footage from
two weeks of inventorying cave biota in the Toledo district of Belize in
April 2011. Belize has become quite the caver destination with a wealth of
caves to visit and explore. Come out to visit with friends from the
extended Austin Texas caver community.
For information on Underground Texas Grotto activities, please see
www.utgrotto.org All of our information including officer contact info,
trips reports, new caver training, event calendar, and posting links to
beginner trips or vertical rope training are available.
Before the meetings, we sometimes meet at Sao Paulo www.saopaulos.net for
a happy hour special. This area is the best place to park and meet folks
walking over to the meeting. Then after the official meeting, we continue
with the decades long tradition to reconvene for burgers, beer, and tall
tales of caving at Posse East. www.posse-east.com
The UT Grotto needs you, the caver with photos and a story to share about
your adventures, scientific research, or something else really cool. Contact
Gary
Sincerely,
Gary Franklin
UT Grotto Vice Chair & Program Organizer
v...@utgrotto.org
Geoffrey Hoese <g...@io.com>
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--- Begin Message ---
All,
We have landowner approval for digging in Five Mouth Cave the weekend of
June 4th. We for sure will dig all day Saturday and depending on people's
schedules we can dig Sunday morning.
There is dry camping. I will provide directions and gate combo to folks who
sign up. We can accommodate 15-16 people.
Contact me off list to sign up or with questions.
Jacqui Thomas, PBSS
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--- Begin Message ---
Hey, all of you C.O.C.U. (Center of the Caving Universe) cavers!
This superb movie, directed by Werner Herzog, is opening in your area Friday,
May 20th, and y'all are invited and encouraged to attend.
I'm working on finding out what the discount will be, but, the more cavers the
better, I would imagine.
If you're interested in attending, please send me your name so I can give David
a fairly accurate head count.
Bill Steele, Diana Tomchick, and a bunch of DFW cavers and myself have already
seen this movie and give it an enthusiastic muddy "thumbs up"!
Look for reviews of this movie in the next TEXAS CAVER, which I am feverishly
working on as we speak.
Send me your thoughts and reviews for inclusion, ASAP, as well.
Thanks!
Mark
----- Forwarded Message ----
Sent: Mon, May 16, 2011 1:02:22 PM
Subject: Cave of Forgotten Dreams/Violet Crown Cinema
Hi Mark,
My name is David Gil and I am the marketing manager at the Violet Crown Cinema
which recently opened in the 2nd street district of downtown Austin. Violet
Crown Cinema is a locally owned and operated cinema with four screens devoted
to art, independent, documentary and international films. Violet Crown offers
modern amenities including state-of-the-art digital sound and projection,
comfortable seating, stadium auditoriums with unobstructed sight lines, and a
full bar and café with daily specials and craft cocktails that can be taken
into the theater.
We have a film called Cave of Forgotten Dreams opening this coming Friday, May
20th that may interest the Texas Speleological Association. The documentary
from acclaimed German director Werner Herzog gives the viewer exclusive access
to the Chauvet caves of Southern France, capturing the oldest known pictorial
creations of humankind in their astonishing natural setting.
I am wondering of you might be able to inform your peers about the film's
screenings? Also, I would like to offer TSA a group discount if there is
interest in viewing the film which will be presented in Digital 3D.
I look forward to your reply and speaking with you further.
Best,
David Gil
Marketing Manager
Violet Crown Cinema
512.495.9600
--- End Message ---
--- Begin Message ---
From: bburne...@austin.rr.com
Sent: Tuesday, May 17, 2011 11:13 AM
To: Bob Burnett
Subject: Cave of Forgotten Dreams
Here’s a review. And count me in. BB
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Do They Dream? Spelunking With Werner Herzog
Stuart Klawans | April 27, 2011
Hyperbole fails. “A movie 30,000 years in the making! Goes where no film has
gone before—or will ever go again! Mysteries and wonders leap off the screen!
In a lifetime of moviegoing, you will never see another film like this!” Such
ravings become mere statements of fact with Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten
Dreams, a documentary that demotes cries of “Awesome!” to the status of mere
reportage. The proposition, quite literally, is this: you can pay your money,
strap on your 3-D glasses (yes, 3-D) and witness what Herzog alone has been
entrusted to show you, or else forgo seeing the most primal and profound
evidence yet encountered of what makes us human.
That evidence lies buried in the cliffs overlooking the Ardèche River in
southern France, where in 1994 a trio of spelunkers pushed their way through a
crevice in the rock face and found the oldest known cave paintings in the
world. The walls of the site, now named Chauvet Cave in honor of one of its
discoverers, are covered with hundreds of images of animals, which most
archaeologists believe to be approximately 30,000 years old. There is some
debate; but no one doubts that the paintings are almost pristine, the mouth of
the cave having been sealed by a rockfall ages ago. To make sure that the
condition of the paintings remains stable, the entrance has been resealed, this
time by a steel bank-vault door. Small research teams and their highly select
guests enter the cave for only six weeks during the year, breaking up their
time to avoid letting too much body heat and moisture build up. No other people
are permitted beyond the steel door—except for Herzog and a skeleton crew, who
received permission from the French Ministry of Culture to film in Chauvet Cave
in the spring of 2010.
Some details of Herzog’s experience during the shoot are unavoidably worked
into Cave of Forgotten Dreams, since passages through Chauvet Cave are cramped,
and everyone must remain on a narrow steel walkway that the researchers have
laid down. The crew members, with their battery belts and flat lights, could
not help getting into the shots. This was only fitting; people who come to
Chauvet Cave to explore someone else’s form of image-making do well to
acknowledge their own. But Herzog also incorporates voluntary self-revelations.
He chooses to narrate the film in voiceover and to make his presence felt
during interviews. And the presence, as should be obvious from decades of his
cinema, is far from bland. Speaking with an archaeologist about the difficulty
of understanding the cave painters from the marks they left behind, Herzog
likens the attempt to someone’s trying in the future to imagine the lives of
New Yorkers based solely on a discovered list of their names. “Do they dream?
Do they cry at night? We would never know from the phone directory.”
Never mind that the paintings are far from being piled up in a matter-of-fact
list. They were made to glide and veer, warp and scurry by firelight across the
surfaces of their chambers, where thousands of years of calcite deposits
glisten like pearl. Herzog knows perfectly well that the spectacle is stunning,
and he’s prepared to keep his implicit bargain by giving you plenty of it.
(That’s why he complicated an already challenging shoot by filming in 3-D, so
you could see the paintings in their plasticity, as they curve with the walls.
Given the chance, I suspect, Herzog would have added Smell-o-Vision.) But he is
not content merely to record these traces, however beautiful, of a vastly
distant, all but unimaginable communal life. He is also determined to confront
that unfathomable collective experience with what we know in the present—the
idiosyncratic, the concrete, the individual—as if trying to look through both
ends of a telescope at the same time.
You sense Herzog’s delight when one of the younger scientists he
interviews—bearded, ponytailed and draped in a stylish scarf—turns out to have
come to archaeology from a career in the circus, where he rode unicycles and
juggled. A kindred spirit! The scientist recalls having needed to get away for
a while after his first days of working in the cave, so overpowering were the
paintings, but then feeling reassured and happy when the images of the Chauvet
lions invaded his dreams. Then there’s the experimental archaeologist who plays
“The Star-Spangled Banner” on his reconstruction of a Paleolithic flute; the
researcher who gamely trots back and forth in a field for Herzog, demonstrating
the spear-throwing technique of prehistoric hunters (who must have been much,
much better at it, he admits); the master perfumer who is sniffing his way
through the Ardèche region, collaborating on a project to reproduce the scent
of the caves. The personalities of the principal scientists are so important to
Herzog that at one point he stops the film to record a gallery of them in
close-up, deep underground, while everyone silently listens for “the heartbeat
of the cave.”
Herzog’s personality is necessarily a part of this confrontation across the
ages, and a part of the texture of the film. Only minutes into the movie, he
and cinematographer Peter Zeitlinger are already asserting themselves, flying
the camera up the wall of a cliff for a dizzying, seemingly impossible view of
the landscape. From there, the signature gestures multiply. At one point the
camera flips upside down to accompany a description of a rockslide. At another,
the crew walks out the far end of a long, broad chamber, taking their lights
with them, so that the cameraman is left alone in the dark, and you are left
imagining the intense isolation of the cave. So it goes until the coda, when
Herzog puts you eye-to-eye with an albino crocodile in an artificial jungle,
for reasons that could be explained in a review but probably shouldn’t be.
Let’s just say it has to do with the challenge of understanding the cave
painters, and is something only Herzog would have thought up.
Is this arrogance on his part? No—humility, the point being that none of us,
Herzog included, could have thought up Chauvet Cave or really know what to make
of it. And so for long periods in Cave of Forgotten Dreams the narration drops
out and the cinematic personality approaches zero while Herzog leaves you alone
with the paintings, accompanied only by the wordless chanting of Ernst
Reijseger’s musical score. You see the lines that delicately mark out the
nodding, lifting profiles of horses, four of them superimposed in a herd, with
their jaws lightly parted as if panting. You see row after upraised row of
rhinoceros horns, curving like multiple crescent moons; the snuffling, speckled
muzzles of lions; a bison scrambling along on eight scrawny, busy legs. There
are also scratch marks on the walls, looking like the work of bear claws; heaps
of glistening, pearly animal skeletons scattered everywhere on the chamber
floors (though no human remains); and on several walls the outlines of hands,
including one that can be singled out, over and over, because of a missing
digit. Traces of an individual presence, at a distance of 30,000 years.
Awe without sanctimony, uncanniness without mystification, a respect for the
profound difference of other people, and other orders of beings, without any
pretense of abandoning one’s self: these have always been characteristics of
Herzog’s best work. These traits reach their height in Cave of Forgotten Dreams
as he comes as close as we’re likely to get to the unapproachable—our own
beginnings. Because Chauvet Cave must be protected, he had just one chance to
bring out of it a filmed experience, not only for himself but perhaps for all
filmmakers. The greatest praise you can give him is to say he didn’t blow it.
* * *
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Nice article, Rune, and I have you down!
Thanks,
Mark
From: bburne...@austin.rr.com [mailto:bburne...@austin.rr.com]
Sent: Tuesday, May 17, 2011 11:19 AM
To: Alman, Mark @ SSG - WSG - EOS; texascavers@texascavers.com
Subject: [Texascavers] Fw: Cave of Forgotten Dreams
From: bburne...@austin.rr.com
Sent: Tuesday, May 17, 2011 11:13 AM
To: Bob Burnett <mailto:bburne...@austin.rr.com>
Subject: Cave of Forgotten Dreams
Here’s a review. And count me in. BB
--- End Message ---
--- Begin Message ---
Begin forwarded message:
From: Jon Broholm <jonbroh...@yahoo.com<mailto:jonbroh...@yahoo.com>>
List-Post: texascavers@texascavers.com
Date: May 17, 2011 11:07:32 AM CDT
To: SWR Caver <s...@caver.net<mailto:s...@caver.net>>,
<colorado-cave-sur...@googlegroups.com<mailto:colorado-cave-sur...@googlegroups.com>>
Subject: [SWR] Cave street art
Cool "street art"...the last 3 photos in this set are new "caves."
http://news.yahoo.com/nphotos/3D-Street-Art-Edgar-Mueller/ss/events/wl/0513113dstreetart#photoViewer=/ydownload/20110513/photos_net_web_wl/1305300361
_______________________________________________
SWR mailing list
s...@caver.net<mailto:s...@caver.net>
http://caver.net/mailman/listinfo/swr_caver.net
________________________________
UT Southwestern Medical Center
The future of medicine, today.
--- End Message ---
--- Begin Message ---
I just learned from John Kerr that Petzl is recalling their
L60 Scorpio via ferrata lanyard due to a potentially deadly
manufacturing
defect:
<http://www.petzl.com/en/outdoor/news/products-news-0/2011/05/13/product-safety-alert-request-inspection-scorpio-via-ferrata>.
Mark Minton
Please reply to mmin...@caver.net
Permanent email address is mmin...@illinoisalumni.org
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