JayB

Damn. What a tragedy. I can't even imagine the grief of losing a spouse, but losing a spouse and a child all at once has got to be unbearable. My thoughts are with, and my sincere condolences extended to the rest of the family.

I try to bring enough gear to survive a night out. Sometimes that means lots of equipment, sometimes it means a lighter in a ziploc bag.

Congrats on your marriage, and my condolences if this means that you'll be stuck living in the East for the rest of your life. Staying in the East for the sake of your marriage might be an acceptable working definition of true love...

I just listened to a great audio-history piece on the early history (through WWII) of the 10th Mountain Division on NPR's all things considered. Here's the link: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=14594652 Sounds like the audio should be available as of 4:00 PST.

Is this the same Otto that posts on cc.com? Whichever Otto it is, they'll be in my thoughts. Hoping for the best for all concerned.

I kinda expect to see this one debunked on Snopes, but it's funny either way.

Cyber cheats married... to each other Monday, September 17, 2007 Computer Caught out: The chatroom lovers A married couple are divorcing after they chatted each other up on the Internet using fake names. Sana Klaric and husband Adnan poured their hearts out to each other over their marriage troubles. Using the names 'Sweetie' and 'Prince of Joy' in a online chatroom, the pair thought they had found a soulmate with whom to spend the rest of their lives. It should have turned out like a real-life version of the 1979 Rupert Holmes song, Escape, where a couple meet through advert by someone 'who likes pina coladas and getting caught in the rain'. But, unlike in the song, there was no happy ending after they turned up for a date and realised their mistake. Now the pair, from Zenica, Central Bosnia, are divorcing after accusing each other of being unfaithful. Sana, 27, said: 'I was suddenly in love. It was amazing, we seemed to be stuck in the same kind of miserable marriages. How right that turned out to be.' But when it dawned on her what had happened, she said: 'I felt so betrayed.' Adnan, 32, said: 'I still find it hard to believe that Sweetie, who wrote such wonderful things, is actually the same woman I married and who has not said a nice word to me for years.'

I think so. Think of George Michael and Don Johnson's circa 1980's stubble.

What's funny about this is that you are comfortable using the gender you don't belong in as a put down for a guy who gets shit for using clowns (do they work for a union? I wonder...) as a put down. Now that's funny. Somewhere, a middle-aged Womyn's Studies professor has just read this post and has been overcome by the simultaneous urges to swoon/fan-herself with her hands/shout "you go girl"/raise a clenched fist full of scrupulously unpainted nails...

I believe the honors go to the phrase: "Jizz-Gurgling Cock-Monkey."

One more... http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1767317

Another... http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1771556

Hahahaha. Awesome.

Not quite the thread I was looking for, but captures the essence of the discussion... " Mad Dog View profile More options Aug 21 2001, 5:05 am Newsgroups: rec.climbing From: Mad Dog Date: 21 Aug 2001 04:36:42 -0700 Local: Tues, Aug 21 2001 4:36 am Subject: Re: Sliding X - Good or Bad Reply to author | Forward | Print | Individual message | Show original | Report this message | Find messages by this author Zaumoron works the Drone Therapy: >Mad Dog wrote: >>Bill, Melissa didn't specify that the sling had to be cut, she said "fail". >With people mostly using sewn runners, the most likely sling failure would >be due to the sling being cut. You just don't get it. One could easily extend your argument and more closely approximate the truth by saying: "With many people buying high-tech sewn runners (such as Spectra) which are very cut-resistant, the most likely sling failure is due to a failed water knot on a tied sling." Again, it would be hard for you to argue with this, since you personally have been involved in sling failure when a knot came untied, eh? >[about shock loading] >>John Long disagrees. >I'll disagree with respect to short falls of about a foot. If you >go 3 or 4 feet, it's a different situation, which is probably what >John was refering to. Then you would again be blatantly wrong. From page 59 of "Climbing Anchors": "No extension means that if one of the anchors in the system should fail, the system will not suddenly become slack and drop the climber a short distance, shock-loading the remaining anchors." Bill, don't try to tell me you know more about anchors than John Long. You have said in this thread that short extensions do not cause shock loads but I have shown clearly that a leading expert and respected technique author clearly is in disagreement. How did you manage to fit that foot in your mouth when it is so far up your ass?"

This thread is crying out for Bill Zaumen of rec.climbing fame. I remember reading a mega-thread there about core vs. sheath loading dynamics that would put this sucker to shame.

What position is that, exactly? The US and its citizens have deprived themselves of chance to work for long hours in settings requiring little or no skill or capital, for low wages, while some 300 million Chinese have lifted themselves out of a grinding poverty far more severe than anything that the worst off amongst us has to contend with by saving us money by selling us goods that they can produce more cost effectively than we can? Edited to add...that "when [the benefits of] cheap labor become outweighed by the risks" is when the alternatives are *literally* starving, prostituting oneself or one's children, scavenging amongst trash-heaps for food, etc. Depriving desperately poor people of the one competitive advantage that they can use to improve their lot in life so that their overfed counterparts in the first world can make a marginally higher wage hardly seems like the more moral course of action to me.

Far be it, indeed.

Actually - both their average hourly pay and their benefit payments are higher than the retail average in pretty much every sector that they compete in, with the exception of unionized grocery store employees. I personally don't want to pay higher prices for my groceries so that someone with a GED can forcibly extract a higher wage than their skillset warrants via coercion, but the existence of Walmart isn't preventing anyone who wants to pay more for their food from doing so. The small stores that you bemoan not only were likely to pay their employees less and offer fewer benefits, they were also likely to charge higher prices for the same goods - the benefit of which was confined to their personal balance sheets, and certainly didn't benefit the customers who had no other options available to them. Or the effect that paying less for essentials had on their ability so save, spend a new car, remodel their homes - etc.

Supply follows demand. Speaking of which, if American consumers were to demand toys manufactured in the US and were willing to pay the requisite differential - the toy manufacture business never would have gone offshore in the first-place. Ditto for any other manufactured good of your choosing. Instead, most manufacturing that still goes on in the US does so in industries where the US still enjoys a comparative advantage. Typically this occurs where requirements for capital and expertise are higher and/or there's a substantial barrier to entry. We're much better off allocating our capital into industries other than those for which the primary determinant of competitive advantage is cheap labor, but I don't expect you to understand this, much less why this is so.

"Yeah but moveon.org doesn't poison any children's toys with lead paint." Yes. They were manufactured by Walmart and wound up exclusively on their shelves. Their logistics capabilities, shipping/distribution infrastructure, and generosity didn't put substantial quantities of relief supplies into the epicenter of Katrina days before the government got its act together, either. Glad it makes you feel better, though.

What is it that makes you a fiscal conservative while a social "liberal," in the modern American parlance? How does such a being approach questions like welfare reform and the like? Edited to include: In you conversations with your compatriots in the ideological majority, have you found a broad sympathy for your views on the various entities - Builderburgs, The Illuminati, etc - that you have claimed both exist and exert a significant degree of influence over the course of history?

Kind of like when I shop tax-free at the Walmarts in NH.

I almost got desperate enough to pick up tele-gear while exiled here in the East, but decided I'd rather ski switch, ride my snowboard switch, or hit the park whenever the boredom became intense enough to consider tele gear. My advice to anyone who gets bored on alpine gear is to ski steeper lines at higher speeds.

Buckaroo - if you're going to read mattp's mind and channel his unfiltered thoughts via the keyboard, at least make the proper attributions.

The same old, tired, cliched response. You guys are laughable. Fox news (which I don't actually watch you dickweed) is biased. Why? Because you say so. It's a tautology. The NYT is, of course, NOT biased. How dare anyone make such a ridiculous claim. After all, everything in the NYT is true! Obviously! Because the bias in the NYT conforms to your world view. But wait, that's essentially what you just accused all the "fox news" watchers of doing. And that's what you accuse them of doing repeatedly, over and over, as your favorite knee-jerk response to any skepticism of any story in the news that threatens your fragile world view. Just ask Jayson Blair. He'll personally vouch for the NYT.