Two friends of mine decided that they would go to the bottom of the wall at the dive site in Chindrieux. This dive site is on the Northern end of the Lac du Bourget in France one hour’s drive from Geneva. The classic dive, which I have done a number of times is a 40 meter dive along the wall. You see the rock overhanging and a blackness below. On previous dives we have been two groups. One deep group and one shallower group. The deep group were at 50+ meters while the shallow group were no deeper than 40m.
Several weeks or even months after they first hatched the plan they finally invested in the appropriate gas mixtures and dived down. Here are the preparations for this dive.
We were planning on interviews but by the end of the dive we were cold. Those who dived were in 6°c water for 70 minutes. We were also planning on taking a gopro down there but did not use it. I stayed on the surface with the camera gear.
You can expect more videos of this type in the near future.
Rather than reading newspapers, books and other intellectual adventures you see the world through what others are twittering about. It’ a bit like a chatroom but you take this one with you wherever you go, from your bedroom to the living room, across town on the bus and even to your computer.
As you get a greater diversity of people so your twitterfull existence progresses exponentially.
Canyoning, a sport you associate with warmer weather and low altitude canyons. In this case they go to Nepal, climb to 4200 meters before spending many hours going down a canyon. That’s quite an adventure. It looks as if most of the canyoning part was filmed with gopro.
Quarterlife is a show about what life is like for those at the quarter life mark, in their mid twenties. Last week their first episode came out and already they’ve signed a deal with NBC for it to be broadcast on NBC. That’s an interesting development. Â When you read the article you understand why the show has been successfully pitched and purchased.
Squadron Scramble is an interesting book to read in post-BREXIT England because it highlights aspects of the Second World War that BREXITers forget about. It looks at how the main character had to flee France via Dunkirk as well as the situation that Polish airmen had found themselves in. First they lost their homes, then they had to flee France when it was invaded and finally they went to England via North Africa.
You can read more about Polish Air Forces in France and Great Britain following this link for factual rather than fictional information and context. The book provides us with an easy to read, easy to understand scenario. If you had lost your country and you were flying for a third country would you want to shoot pilots as they parachute to safety or would you allow them to live.
If you were in England during the Second World War at what point would you have felt secure and confident that Germany would be overwhelmed and beaten. When would the battle shift from a fight for survival to a fight for supremacy?
This book focuses on the air war during daylight hours when Hurricanes and Spitfires were in their element and only glimpses at dog fighting at night. The book touches superficially on a number of topics without providing as much depth and context as it could.
This is an interesting documentary about the Polish contribution to the Battle of Britain. It shows how effectively they helped to fight the German Luftwaffe and how they were betrayed by the British people once the war was over. They had fought to defend England and defeat the Germans in order to ensure that their country would be freed from the Germans only to be betrayed when their country was handed over to the communists. Some of them went back to Poland but had to flee to other countries. They were not honoured in the victory parade either. The documentary is interesting as it provides its viewers with a good account of the Polish contribution to the British and Allied war effort.
When I was in Spain I started to read “The Bomber War” because it’s a topic I do not know much about the topic. It’s interesting to read about the technology that they used for guidance, for detection and for the bombing. It’s also to read about how one thousand bomber sorties were sometimes orchestrated. I’m only 40 per cent of the way through the book at the time of writing.
While reading the Bomber War I also watched a French documentary available on curioisitystream called Bombing War: From Guernica to Hiroshima“. It is a two-part documentary looking at bombing, from the experimental bombing of Guernica and the request for bombing not to target civilians to the bombing of London, Berlin and many cities in between. It takes a look at what motivated the change in bombing tactic.
By the end of the documentary, I thought that they should have addressed the cultural cost of bombing Europe. Plenty of beautiful old cities were destroyed in such a manner that we now travel to specific towns to see what Europe looked like before the Second World War and its bombing campaigns.
One sentence from the second documentary that may stick with you is that it was more dangerous to be in the bombers on their sorties than in the cities that were being bombed. This is due to the air defences, whether Flak, enemy fighters or mid-air collisions.
In the book, we read about the challenges of finding the way to the correct bombing site. They needed to navigate by the stars but also using dead reckoning. Eventually, both sides used beams to guide bombers to and from targets. If you’re interested in technology then the book is worth reading.
Although slightly off-topic the documentaries have some nice images from the war to give you a glimpse of how things looked at the time. It appears that some of the footage was colourised which is both a shame because it becomes a creative representation rather than accurate, and great because it brings certain images to life, making footage easier to interpret.
A topic that I had not come across until watching the second documentary is the dropping of Napalm on Japenese cities with more than 300,000 people, and then on cities of more than 100,000 people. You have images with a percentage of the cities that were destroyed by bombing.
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