ScottP

If Microsoft made cars... 1. Every time they repainted the lines on the road, you'd have to buy a new car. 2. Occasionally your car would just die for no reason, and you'd have to restart it. For some strange reason, you'd just accept this, restart and drive on. 3. Occasionally, executing a maneuver would cause your car to stop and fail to restart and you'd have to re-install the engine. For some strange reason, you'd just accept this too. 4. You could only have one person in the car at a time, unless you bought a "Car 95" or a "Car NT". But then you'd have to buy more seats. 5. Amiga would make a car that was powered by the sun, was twice as reliable, five times as fast, twice as easy to drive - but it would only run on five percent of the roads. 6. Macintosh car owners would get expensive Microsoft upgrades to their cars which would make their cars go much slower. 7. The oil, engine, gas and alternator warning lights would be replaced with a single "General Car Fault" warning light. 8. People would get excited about the "new" features in Microsoft cars, forgetting completely that they had been available in other cars for many years. 9. We'd all have to switch to Microsoft gas and all auto fluids but the packaging would be superb. 10. New seats would force everyone to have the same size butt. 11. The airbag system would say "Are you sure?" before going off. 12. If you were involved in a crash, you would have no idea what happened. 13. They wouldn't build their own engines, but form a cartel with their engine suppliers. The latest engine would have 16 cylinders, multi-point fuel injection and 4 turbos, but it would be a side-valve design so you could use Model-T Ford parts on it. 14. There would be an "Engium Pro" with bigger turbos, but it would be slower on most existing roads. 15. Microsoft cars would have a special radio/cassette player which would only be able to listen to Microsoft FM, and play Microsoft Cassettes. Unless of course, you buy the upgrade to use existing stuff. 16. Microsoft would do so well, because even though they don't own any roads, all of the road manufacturers would give away Microsoft cars free, including IBM! 17. If you still ran old versions of car (ie. CarDOS 6.22/CarWIN 3.11), then you would be called old fashioned, but you would be able to drive much faster, and on more roads! 18. If you couldn't afford to buy a new car, then you could just borrow your friends, and then copy it. 19. Whenever you bought a car, you would have to reorganise the ignition for a few days before it worked. 20. You would need to buy an upgrade to run cars on a road next to each other. 21. You would have to hit a Start button to turn off the car.

Type "national park fee increases" into Google... You get a who's who list of proposed national park fee increases.

I climbed some hardened mud they call rock climbing in Iowa with my brother in law a few years back at a place called Palisades-Kepler State Park. The climbing itself was mildly depressing, but the Cedar River that cut the banks we were climbing makes the Crooked look like pure alpine goodness. Even the carp couldn't live in this river judging by the multiple cacasses I saw. I am color blind, but even I couldn't miss the orange hue of the water. The smell was that of water coming from a primary water treatment facility. It was pure disgusting. The only saving grace was the awesome marine fossils to be found in the gravel beds lining the river.

Like a dog peeing on a hydrant, Dru will soon be around to mark his territory with a link to his original thread...

Looks like he burned a hole throught the toes of his shoes.

Dru has an I'm-better-than-you-and-I'll-point-it-out-at-every-opportunity complex...

What is "middle age"?

I think one can read the information less for its predictive qualities and more for its contextualization of the "Iraq situation"; as such, it's much better than any prediction it might be making (what was the prediction, by the way?). The political allegience of those who point out the truth has nothing to do with the quality of the truth itself. To say so is to fall in line with the worst of the McCarthy efforts. I'm wondering if PP even read the article I linked...it seemed to me more of a historical perspective than some kind of "apocalyptic" prediction. The Prediction (as I see it): "The hour of the invasion draws near. As we write this, on December 28, 2002, the Iraqi government has told a solidarity conference in Baghdad that “he who attacks our country will lose. We will fight from village to village, from city to city and from street to street in every city....Iraq’s oil, nationalized by the president...from the hands of the British and the Americans in 1972...will remain in the hands of this people and this leadership.” The Iraqi armed forces may not be able to put up extended resistance to the onslaught. But the Iraqi people have not buckled to American dictates for the past more than eleven years of torment. They will not meekly surrender to the imminent American-led military occupation of their country. And that fact itself carries grave consequences for American imperialism’s broader designs."

WTB: Kids rock shoes... Sole lengths: 8 and 9 inches EUR : 29 and 33

Sixteen years ago, I girth hitched and clipped into a twig as a joke while leading a pitch on Little Mac spire in the southern Pickets. My partner Kevin, to this day, doesn't trust my anchors.

The goal should be that by the end of the day they want to go do it again, no matter the outcome.

I heard my friend Kevin yodel "Packyouroldlady'spoo!" while hiking the Colchuck glacier. That one bounced around a bit...

"Iraq’s oil resources are vast, surpassed only by Saudi Arabia, and as cheap to extract as Saudi oil. The country’s 115 billion barrels of proven oil reserves are matched by perhaps an equal quantity yet to be explored. “Since no geological survey has been conducted in Iraq since the 1970s, experts believe that the proven reserves underestimate the country’s actual oil wealth, which could be as large as 250 billion barrels. Three decades of political instability and war have kept Iraq from developing 55 of its 70 proven oil fields. Eight of these fields could harbor more than a billion barrels each of “easy oil” which is close to the surface and inexpensive to extract. “There is nothing like it anywhere else in the world,” says Gerald Butt, Gulf editor of the Middle East Economic Survey. “It’s the big prize.” Iraq’s prewar production was three million barrels a day and present production capacity is put at 2.8 million barrels a day. In fact, because of deteriorating equipment, it is hard put to reach that figure, and it currently exports less than a million barrels a day. It is estimated that, with adequate investment, Iraq’s production can reach seven to eight million barrels a day within five years. That compares with Saudi Arabia’s current production of 7.1 million barrels a day, close to 10 percent of world consumption. In June 2001, France and Russia proposed in the Security Council to remove restrictions on foreign investment in the Iraqi oil industry. However, the United States and U.K. predictably killed the proposal. American companies are barred by U.S. law from investing in Iraq, and so all the contracts for development of Iraqi fields have been cornered by companies from other countries. Lukoil’s (Russian) contract to drill the West Qurna field is valued at $20 billion, and Zarubezneft’s (Russian) concession to develop the bin Umar field is put at up to $90 billion. The total value of Iraq’s foreign contract awards could reach $1.1 trillion, according to the International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook." Food for thought...

"4 new bolts placed on the 1st two pitches in the last month...thus do the little men cut the mighty arrow down to their size." -Royal Robbins

What is the name of that crag in the 4th picture? It looks like a good spot to take my kids this summer.

Back to Bush: "In this job you've got a lot on your plate on a regular basis; you don't have much time to sit around and wander, lonely, in the Oval Office, kind of asking different portraits, 'How do you think my standing will be?' " 15 March 05

"Smoke 'em if you've got 'em."

I don't believe most of what I read, hear, or see from politicians or the media. On the other hand, can you prove what the article says isn't true?

Wow. I must have missed this in mainstream media...

Um... Yeah...

That was it. Lambone was like: "Whaduhfuhdidido!"

I believe the caveman did it back in the day during one of his psychotic rages against the moderators for deleting his posts or something...

Looks like the upper pitches of The Golden Arch, but what do I know? I am an idiot.

Having first hand experience cutting through two umbilical cords, I can say with certainty Tom will be doing quite a bit of chewing the day Katie gives birth. ...and in other news...