User talk:Rlquall

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Contents 1 Auto Zone Page is Spam 2 AutoZone 3 U.S. Capitol shooting incident (1954) 4 Caving 5 Request for Help 6 RFC 7 Article in need of cleanup - please assist if you can

[edit] Auto Zone Page is Spam

[edit] AutoZone

Hello and welcome to Wikipedia. An article you recently created, AutoZone, has been tagged for speedy deletion because its content is clearly written to promote a company, product, or service. This article may have been deleted by the time you see this message. Please keep in mind that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not an advertising service. Thank you.

[edit] U.S. Capitol shooting incident (1954)

My only source for Sen. Clifford Davis being one of the wounded in the cpital shooting incident is the wiki page... U.S. Capitol shooting incident (1954). It says he was shot in the leg. I felt it significant enough to also put the data on Sen. Davis' biographical page.

[edit] Caving

Rlquall, could you tell me where and when you did your caving? It's been months but I just picked up on your comment about it on my Talk page. I have caved with many men and women in Mammoth, including "grand old timers" such as Roger Brucker (well, okay, once) and mere "old timers" such as Tommy Brucker, Jim Borden, Darlene Anthony, Dick Market, Karen Wilmes, and James Wells. I count myself among the countless young people to have been touched by the many good people who sometimes live underground. It's a pretty "golden rule" motivated environment to find oneself in. FWIW, in the last couple years I found the newest (and all natural!) entrance to the Mammoth system (with James Wells.) A rush that others deserved more but I did it. Good segue into my midlife crisis, anyway. Alan Canon 05:20, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

You wrote:

Most of my caving was in the 1970's (when I was young & single!). I was the first one into one passage at Cumberland Caverns on a mapping trip with John Smyre and the Sullivan brothers (one of whom, Mike is now a Knoxville policeman and National Guard officer fairly recently back from Iraq; what became of Pat I don't know, last I heard he was in Ireland). I used to go to NSS events back then & am a lifetime member but haven't done anything in years other than VERY occassionally read the magazine. I'm still interested; my wife will tell you that my "ideal" vacation still involves seeing a commerical cave at some point during the trip, but I've never really succeeded in getting her interested in taking it beyond that. When I was at TVA for a little while in the late 1970's I was involved in searching for "cavities" in the rims of Tellico and the Raccoon Mtn. Pumped Storage; it was like getting paid to go caving and cave hunting (respectively). If you want more specifics (i.e., pre-development England Cove) I can share more. Regards, Rlquall 19:15, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

Cumberland Caverns: do you know Bill Walter, of "The Longest Cave" and Blue Spring/Cumberland Caverns fame? I have been caving with him in Hidden River/Horse Cave and maybe once or twice in Roppel. Never, sadly, under Flint Ridge, since he was banned by the park in 1957 or so for getting busted with Louisvillian Charlie Fort coming out of Unknown (and I wasn't born 'til 1968.) Because of this he was never allowed into CRF: as a result, since Bill couldn't participate in what was at the time the focus of exploration in the longest cave in the world, he did the next best thing, surveying in the first and second longest caves in Tennessee. There were many others in Bill's category, all of those CRF old timers really, who regularly trespassed under Park lands and were never caught, but Bill and Charlie were. Bill is a good guy, and once told me a totally gross story about Charlie not fit for Wikipedia (but not really that bad.) Charlie, who must be fifty years younger than me, has been a fixture around Louisville for many different reasons: a local restaurant he frequented has a big poster detailing his adventures (it must have been a Courier-Journal article, reprinted and enlarged.) I have also seen Charlie Fort at the Bluegrass Brewing Company (a restaurant that serves beer made on the spot), gathered with maybe 5-6 other musicians, playing mandolin, I think, belting out some old standard. This was informally: he and a bunch of his friends had gone out on the town and toted their instruments along to deliver spontaneous "guerilla" music wherever they wound up. Being a punk/classical music player with affectations towards vaudeville, I was in a position to appreciate this. On another occasion, I attended a Louisville Grotto meeting, I think while Charlie was an officer (if he's still alive, I bet he still is.) The joke around Mammoth was that Louisville Grotto people were friendly people who talked about going caving (it is not true...they do hard core watery stuff in Breckenridge and Meade counties, now have their own cave reserve, and have been true ombudsmen for Louisville cavers for many decades.) But Charlie sort of validated this unfair characterization during the Grotto meeting during the "current scheduled cave trips" part of the meeting: he stood up and bellowed "I know ten leads in (some cave...) that we could do. I'LL TAKE YOU THERE RIGHT NOW!" To be like him at 75, or 37 for that matter. Alan Canon 07:23, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

Pumped Storage? As in natural gas? I have a new programming job in that field. We are gauging the flow through pipelines scientifically by listening to the pipe with microphones.

TVA is part of my immediate family story. I have stood inside the powerhouse of Kentucky Dam many times. My mother grew up living on the last wooden hulled steam towboat on the Green River of Kentucky, then migrated to Grand Rivers just before Lake Barkley was flooded. Her dad was a towboat pilot and liked having his family on water so that he could move their whole home easily to a new work opportunity. When his wife made him buy land, he had the misfortune to have half of it flooded by the Corps to make Lake Barkley, then the other half condemned to make LBL. The lake part he could deal with: the river was our family's lifeblood and he could appreciate the public necessity of improving the inland waterways (if he was not too happy about the price they gave him.) But the making of Land Between the Lakes and the wholesale destruction of that regions vibrant tradition, he never could countenance or forgive. My parents live in Murray now and are volunteers three different ways, as volunteers in the US Coast Guard Auxilliary, as docents at the Elk and Bison Prairie near the Tennessee state line, and as part of a grass roots group called Between the Rivers Preservation Association. They have a historical research component, but the thing that they do that I like the best (and they do too) is to find forgotten burial sites in LBL, clean and preserve them, and then make careful archaeological/genealogical records of everything they find, with GPS coordinates, color photographs, interviews with descendants, like that.

I have the distinction of being the most recent person to find a natural entrance to Mammoth Cave, but I will tell you that when we connected our cave to Mammoth (after 18 months of looking), we discovered the connection under private land (the cave has been known to extend outside the Park since 1979), and the specific part of Roppel (Mammoth) that we connected to was the Hobbit Trail area, which was pioneered solo by none other than Bill Walter. He already, in doing so 30 some odd years ago, earned credit for pioneering a connection route from a natural entrance (Old Roppel/Coalition Chasm) into the Mammoth Cave system. So, I have the minor historical distinction of having compounded Bill's achievement, by showing that his route is accessable from not one, but two natural entrances. And Bill is still caving as he has for 60 year!

If you're ever in the Central Kentucky Karst with some hours to spare, I'll bring the hard hat. You simply must go caving with these new super bright LEDs...a carbide lamp is still used to mark survey stations and warm the hands. Alan Canon 07:23, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

I'll try to take you up on this some time – your offer in:re the Central Kentucky karst. Hoping to take the wife to Lost River right outside of Bowling Green sometime. It is owned by Western Kentucky U. now and is very near the Potter Children's Home. I think that Dr. Nick Crawford, who was instrumental in getting the geohydrology program going at WKU, had a lot to do with getting the University involved in saving this site. He was active in the Nashville Grotto in the early 1970s while he was simultaneously working on his doctorate at Vandy (under Dr. Richard Stearns, among others, I believe) and teaching undergraduate courses at WKU. I have heard lots of the names of the Kentucky oldtimers at one time or another, but don't know as I have really met a lot of them. I did go to the old SERA Cave Carnival in Monterey, Tennessee in 1975 (the old KOA where we met has long since been replaced by a luxury bed & breakfast!) and a lot of Indianapolis guys were there. They talked about having to come to Kentucky to explore really major caves, which was all right in their eyes, they said jokingly, as no one from Louisville was much doing it anyway, which is right in line with your comments above. You touch on the sensitive topic of underground "tresspassing". I really always wondered just how good a surveyor you had to be to avoid it at times, since it is very easy to wander off of the land of the owners who have presumably given you permission to be there and to go inside and onto (under) someone else, although I doubt that the parties in question above had anybody's permission other than their own. Horse Cave is another cave I want to go into now that it has been cleaned up. I love the little town, although I understand that the little used book store with the good Hot Brown just about across the street from the cave entrance is now out of business. Pity. I used to work at a food service place that got a shipment of Dart foam cups (sometimes two) from the Dart cup factory in Horse Cave every weekday, and would always ask the drivers, if they had the time, about what was going on in the area, since I would say that it has been nine or ten years since I was last up there.

I really love LBL but am really troubled by its origin, as most of the people who were forced to abandon their homeplaces, many of which had been in their families for over 100 years, were very loathe to do so, and in retrospect received so little for their lands, even given the valuations of the era. It also seems to have been a project beyond the scope of anything that was actually envisioned under the TVA Act; I wonder what George Norris would have thought about it. I think that at least part of it was an effort by Federal law enforcement to depopulate an area known for moonshining and generally being remote and somewhat untameable. The large State of Tennessee Cheatham Wildlife Managment Area near me is of a similar origin; according to a nearby local police chief it was easier for the authorities to find a premise to depopulate this wild, rugged, and then-remote area, using "conservation" funds, than it was to make a serious attempt to govern or tame the inhabitants (including some of my maternal grandmother's family). What some of those old homeplaces could be worth today!

My late father tried, about 20 years before I was born when he was still living with his father and stepmother in Perry County, Tennessee, to get on as a laborer for the Kentucky Dam project (then generally referred to as "Gilbertsville") but somehow failed to be selected and later wound up moving to Nashville instead, where he stayed until the start of World War II. He took a rather convoluted path back to Nashville after the war. Discharged in Memphis, he went home to Perry County to be with his dying father, and then did a stint in Detroit with Detroit Diesel (just enough to be able to afford a 1941 Chevy with Vac-u-Drive, he later told me) before returning to Nashville and eventually being introduced to my mother by his grandad at the old Eastland C of C.

I am fascinated by old navigation locks, in part because I had a high school history teacher whose master's thesis was about the old James River Canal in Virigina (think that he was attending U Va when he wrote it) and in part because of a lifetime fascination that began when my father took me to Cheatham Dam on the Cumberland (Corpts of Engineers) and Kentucky Dam when I was a kid (Barkley still being under construction at the time). My old teacher, the last that I heard, was headmaster of the prestigious Westminster School in Atlanta now, so I guess that he's become a regular "Mr. Chipps". I have even visited the ruins of at least one of the old locks on the Green above the current head of navigation, which I suppose is now Paradise Steam Plant? If so, that is the first place that I ever officially visited while with TVA, as we were doing a feasibility study for how much of the siting survey for what is now the "coal washing" house could be done seismically and hence far more inexpensively than by traditional core drilling (as I recall, not much). Come to think of it, this would have been 30 years ago, give or take a month.

Finally, no, the Raccoon Mountain Pumped Storage facility near Chattanooga has nothing to do with gas, other than perhaps an attempt by TVA to reduce their dependance on it. It consists of a lake made by blasting away the top of Racoon Mountain, which overlooks the Tennesse River Gorge (sometimes referred to as the Grand Canyon of the South or the Grand Canyon of the Tennessee) and a massive pumping facility. This setup uses off-peak generation to pump the water up the hill; when it is released it generates power by running the turbines used to pump it the other direction. It is inherently inefficent as it uses 4 kwh for every 3 generated, but in the energy business, as you know, timing is everything. It is so impractical to start up and shut down coal-fired plants to conincide with the demand curve during the day, and of course with nuclear plants it is impossible given current technologies. Rather than just dissipating the excess power generated (as used to be done by using idle dam turbine like giant electric motors) it can be "stored" in this manner. The former Union Electric was allowed to blow the top off of Taum Salk Mountain, the highest point in the state of Missouri, to build a similar, older project (1960s – think that they could get approval for that one today?). Projects like this allow TVA to have a ready source of hydro which has little impact on navigation or recreation planning involving the traditional reservoirs, and hydro is the only source of electricity at TVA which can be readily switched on and off, aside, of course, from their natural gas turbines. And guess what? Stills were found during the construction of the Raccoon Mountain project, too, mostly abandonned but at least one that was obviously still active until TVA arrived on the scene. Once again, TVA hand-in-hand with the "revenuers", by design or otherwise. Regards, Rlquall 13:56, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Request for Help

I have been falsly reported and accused here by User:Jersyko, because of these edits at the SCV page. If you feel that Jersyko's accusations are erroneous, I would appreciate your comment here.--Fix Bayonets! 22:53, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] RFC

I had received the following RFC notice:

"I invite you to comment on User:Fix Bayonets! user conduct rfc, which I started today. Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Fix Bayonets!. Thanks for any input you have. · j e r s y k o talk · 05:06, 7 November 2006 (UTC)"

Do you have an opinion on this matter? I find it interesting that the complainants are themselves frequently culpable of anti-Confederate POV pushing.--Black Flag 17:01, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

I was about to invite you to comment on this matter if you like, but I see that Black Flag beat me to it. Consider this an invitation from me, as well. · j e r s y k o talk · 20:28, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Article in need of cleanup - please assist if you can