JayB

The Big Dig is a tremendous engineering feat in a lot of ways, but should also serve as a cautionary tale for Seattleites trying to figure out the best way to fix the viaduct/seawall problems. I'm not sure what the standard is for installing bolts that will secure heavy, suspended loads is, but some MIT civil engineering profs that they interviewed on TV seemed to think that it was kind of startling that the bolts didn't screw into metal plates embedded in the concrete. If it all works out I'll leapfrog from the greatest traffic cluster in history (here) to what promises to be a close second (there) in '08.

http://www.bigpharaoh.com/

Old Dog-Induced-Tension story below: "This reminds me of a day I spent at Turkey Rocks a couple of years ago. A group of climbers hitched their dog to a tree near the path that everyone had to follow on their way out, and - without fail - the dog reared back, growled, and lunged at each and every person unfortunate enough to pass by. Sometimes it actually lept off of the ground and got whipped around by the kneck when the leash came tight. Yet, the owners continued to insist that the dog was "friendly" and would "never just bite someone ." Perhaps they meant that it would never merely bite someone, preferring instead to latch onto their flesh and whip its head back and forth like a Moray eel on crank. This continued until one fellow decided it was time to go home. He was a very pleasant and affable guy, despite being built like a cross between Howie Long and George 'The Animal' Steel. He had been climbing elsewhere and had yet to see the dog in action, and obliviously strolled towards the lunge zone on his way back to the car. What followed was only noteworthy for the sheer spectacle of watching scores of millenia worth of evolution reverse directions in a millisecond. The guy didn't seem to take much notice of the low rumble emmanating from behind the bush, but when the dog hurled itself towards its next target, this guy turned the predator-prey dynamic squarely on its head and lunged towards the dog with one choking-hand extended towards its throat and one spam-block sized fist cocked atop an arm purpose built for skull-crushing, all the while bellowing out a roar that sounded like a silverback gorilla's kill signal amplfied by a speaker tower at a Motorhead concert for the deaf. In the same instant, the dog that was playing the part of the untamed Ur-canine just a few minutes before recoiled in mid-leap, let out a yelp that would shame a show-poodle in a grooming salon, and attained the head-down-with-fully-tucked-tail cower position before even hitting the ground. Upon arriving on the soil, the dog scuttled behind a tree and continued cowering and yelping incessantly while intermittently pissing itself as the primate looming several feet away continued to alternate between -literally - pounding its chest and roaring out some inspired, theat-laden profanity "I - (POUND) - WILL - (POUND) - RIP - (POUND) - YOUR - (POUND) -MOTHER- (POUND) -F&^%ing - (POUND) - HEAD -(POUND)- OFF (POUND) -AND - (POUND) *&^%ING (POUND) EAT (POUND) - IT - (POUND) RAW (POUND)...[etc]" This carried on for at least 20 seconds. It must be true what they say about dogs and their owners sharing a common psychological profile, as the blase indifference, casual dismissals and occaisional snicker (seriously) that had characterized while their previous responses evaporated, and they looked on in mute shock when the tables were turned, and it was they who were worried about their companion being injured by a violent animal. After they had finished cowering, pissing themselves, and yelping to one another they finally moved their dog away from the main pedestrian throughfare, and the other climbers were able to hike out without any further incident. "

The main source of tension I've seen has actually been people's dogs.

Do you have the "Hijack This" program. If you download the program and post the results of the scan on one of their forums, there are folks who should be able to walk you through the steps you'll need to take to remove it. You can also plug the last bit of the address into Google, and often that will take you to a page with removal instructions.

I don't think it's all that odd when you consider that Syria has served as a safe haven for Iran's proxy forever. Syria gets Iranian backing and whatever protection that they can offer in exchange for enabling Iran's proxy to operate their and attacking their mutual enemies. It doesn't seem like too much of a stretch to view the warning to Hezbollah as a veiled warning to Iran that they aren't going to give them a free hand in the Gulf.

No kidding. Thank God Hezbollah and Iran have always been at odds with one another. Who knows what would happend if Iran supplied them with money, weapons, and training. Then they might occaisionally serve as Iran's proxy.

Interesting. "RIYADH (Reuters) - Saudi Arabia on Thursday blamed "elements" inside Lebanon for the violence with Israel, in unusually frank language directed at guerrilla group Hizbollah and its Iranian backers. "A distinction must be made between legitimate resistance and uncalculated adventures undertaken by elements inside (Lebanon) and those behind them without recourse to the legal authorities and consulting and coordinating with Arab nations," Link

What, are you nuts? Nothing is worse than lying about a blowjob. Ever. If presidents are allowed to lie about blowjobs, then the terrorists have won. Speaking of winning, we're counting on you to help the forces of good prevail in the War on Tweakers. Food for thought at the next Squamish C.O.C. Meeting.

Cocktail party chatter with new M.D.s indicates that for the average guy, every 20lbs of excess weight submerges 1/2" of unit beneath a layer of fat, so I suspect that transforming Rush into a spokesmodel for the restoration of functional potency would be a bit much even for the much-touted powers of Viagra. If someone out there invents a man-girdle that can exhume the tackle from beneath a heap of adipose tissue, Rush might be just the ticket for that spokesmodel gig. Hope everyone got a nice visual out of that one.

I'm waiting for Plame-Wilson© to finish their contract negotiations with Andrew LLoyd Weber so that "PlameGate -The Musical" can finally assume it's rightful place on Broadway. Toss in some witty Plamewear © "I am a Secret Agent" clothing and logo-items while the musical show runs its course, and finish with a nostalgia-driven "Plame!" dramatization on the main stage at the Sands in a decade or so and they'll be in good shape. Toss in some savvy, demographic specificunderwriting by Viagra, Lipitor, and "Hairitage - a Radical (wink) Solution to Hairloss* and you've got an act that'd make the Wayne Newton and Siegfried and Roy look like nightclub acts in Winemucca. And - as a kind alternative to euthenasia, once the Boomers have blown what's left of their meager retirement savings on one last bender in Vegas, the stagehands can just roll a giant mirror across the stage, at which time the rapt audience will applaud itself to death. *The ONLY hairpiece which combines the requisite grey-ponytail with top-coverage in a SINGLE unit.

Glad I could elevate the conversation.

Consider it charity bestowed on the unfortunate souls who own rock-climbing gear and live in the East.

Someone with access to the OED should check out the term, but to me it's always denoted a person who combined an aggressive desire to take a particular action with a conspicuous inability to do so.

Glad to see that that my re-introduction of the term "limpdick" to cc.com a few days ago has restored the term to its rightful place in the lexicon.

Crazy. It's amazing that the Squamish COC hasn't taken any effective action. Seems like you'd be safer leaving a car with a giant "Free Heroin Inside" sign pasted to the windshield on Capitol Hill than parking a truck with a canopy anywhere near the Chief. Murray must be the lone, dangerous outsider amidst a group that one can only conclude is seriously incompetent or has determined that climber visitation to the town and patronage of the shops is a dangerous trend that they want to discourage before it gets out of control. Seriously - how hard would it be to hand someone a radio and pay them $10/hr to hang out in a single parking lot during daylight hours during prime climbing season? Hell - make it a pay lot so that climbers foot part of the bill for the extra security. I'd certainly pay $10 to protect a few hundred bucks worth of gear, and to prevent a few hundred dollars worth of damage to my vehicle. The fact that you've got thieves literally waving to climbers while they jack their belongings shows that things are way out of control.

Seattle is actually a for-profit theme-park run by Halliburton, for the express purpose of confusing and/or deceiving Canadians and Euros with respect to the true nature of America and the character of its population. Cross an invisible threshold and it's all neon-lit, V10-powered corpulence, gluttony, carnage, and ecocide. Think its an accident that Spanaway doesn't show up on Canadian Maps of the US, and there's just a big Spanaway sized smiley staring back at you when you zoom in on Google Earth? Think again...

Wow. Impressive. Glad you're alive. How long has it been since the previous summit via Willis Wall?

Hey. Prole and SC in a single thread. What a treat. If you would have read the thread a tad more closely the first time through, you wouldn't have needed to ask your question. Take it one word at a time, and sound things out one syllable at a time if you get stuck.

Oakley Edit. Good Footy. Dope Ass Footage

If you ever re-cage your soul by sportclimbing at Exit 38, I bet the bridge on the old RR grade would work.

Tacoma Narrows with goggles and snorkel might be a good bet.

I think they'll leave you alone if you're wearing a helmet and have some home-made wings on your back.

They've got a copy of the guidebook to the sport-climbs around Whistler in the Whistler public library. The library's right next to the central villiage, not too far from the "Deer Lodge" or something like that. Maybe 2-3 minutes from the grocery store.

From the Wikipedia article... Below are examples listed by SaveTheInternet of past examples of abuses by ISP companies where they blocked rivals or unfavorable opinions about themselves. In 2004, North Carolina ISP Madison River blocked their DSL customers from using any rival Web-based phone service. In 2005, Canada's telephone giant Telus blocked customers from visiting a Web site sympathetic to the Telecommunications Workers Union during a contentious labor dispute. Shaw, a major Canadian cable, internet, and telephone service company, intentionally downgrades the "quality and reliability" of competing Internet-phone services that their customers might choose -- driving customers to their own phone services not through better services, but by making their opponents seem worse than they really are. In April, Time Warner's AOL blocked all emails that mentioned www.dearaol.com -- an advocacy campaign opposing the company's pay-to-send e-mail scheme.