JayB

Sounds like you are the one trying to discredit the vast body of research into obesity, which consists of far more than a single paper in a middling journal, because it doesn't conform to your disposition to believe that society is always to blame for the problems of individuals.

I don't know that it's always necessary to immerse oneself in the minutia of a particular claim to doubt it's validity. The first problem with the fat-virus claim lies with thermodynamics. The only way in which it is physically possible to gain weight is to consume more calories than one expends. End of story. The second is that it seems rather unlikely that such a virus would lie dormant for all of recorded history, and suddenly make it's only known appearance amongst populations who have access to a massive food surplus and lead incredibly sedentary lives. One would have to assume that this virus wasn't around when my parents were growing up (just after WWII), when food scarcity simply wasn't a problem. One would also have to explain the peculiar distribution of the virus amongst people who live in the same area, have access to the same food, and have roughly the same genetic heritage. All the normal biological variables are the same, but the fat virus somehow manages to preferentially infect the poor and the sedentary. It must also pay a hitherto unnoticed regard to arbitrary geographic borders, and affect the English and the Germans far more than the French, despite the massive commingling of the populations on a daily basis. The Pima indians on the Rez in Arizona are the most obese people in the world, yet a biologically idenitical population just across the border are rail thin? Virus or diet and lifestyle? Then there's the fact that humans are rather unlike most other animals in that we have the capacity to regulate our behavior. Presumably, if two people are infected by the virus, they are equally likely to overeat. Yet we know that the propensity to overeat is correlated with a host of other factors that have much more to do with character and personality than biology. There's also the matter of people who manage to lose weight and keep it off with diet and excercise. Is this the result of their immune system kicking in and clearing the virus at precisely the moment that they decided to make these changes in their lives? Does stomach stapling also trigger an immune response that gets rid of the virus? Then there's also the possibility that in humans that the virus has the tendency to replicate and localize in adipose tissue, or thrives in people who are borderline diabetic, or who are borderline diabetic and have tons of adipose tissue, etc, etc, etc. This will be conclusively debunked as a causal factor for obesity in five years or less.

Anyone know if the late 80's/early 90's had especially cold winters relative to the average?

Might be the best all-around ski on the market these days. http://www.ski-review.com/content/view/22/30/

Gotcha. I think if you advertise widely enough you'll probably get a good price for your set-up. If this part of a plan to ratchet the amount of risk in your life down a bit, that new boat must be a Sea Kayak? If not, I suppose one risky hobby is better than two, but WW kayaking certainly has its share of risks associated with it as well.

He clearly needs to choose his words more carefully if he's going to get all of the world's socialist daytraders behind him.

Forgot to post that I already have a pair of Big Stix with Freerides and an old-pair of Karhu's with 404's, but would definitely recommend the setup to anyone looking to get into a pair of BC skis.

The answer is on p.264 of "Dianetics," by L. Ron Hubbard. Make sure you get the edition that has the erupting volcano on the front.

I know it's a sweet setup, but seen as they've been on sale for a month and a half, and paddling season will start kicking-in in about 1.5 months, I'd either drop the price by $25 a week until someone bites or just hang onto them and enjoy an epic season with a great pair of skis.

Unfortunately you're gonna have to drop the price if you want the dough in time for the paddling season, amigo.

Someone get a shot of Jim and PP shaking hands over a pitcher....

29 months... you got a long haul ahead of you... True. But it's less than the three-year sentence that I was looking at this summer....

My wife rode a lift with a woman who's four-year old son was knocked into a coma after a collision like this. I'm continuously amazed by the number of dumbasses that haul ass down groomers packed with scores of people, and quite a few kids. Must be because if you can ski fast down groomers you are X-Treme. The dude's rage was way out of line, but I get kind of irked when I see people flying down packed groomers, narrowly missing the four and five year olds doing the "pizza-fries-pizza-fries" drill. It doesn't help that their skill-to-speed ratio is not terribly impressive either.

The sad thing is that is only a partial listing of the things that I hate about Boston. The funniest thing about living here is that while people who have never lived anywhere else seem to get passionate to the point of violence when defending the place, most people who have moved here from somewhere else are eager to tell you how much they hate the place when they find out that you are also from elsewhere. Get the degree and get the hell out seems to be the going mantra - and the negative population growth stats tell the rest of the story.

Jesus Christ I'm going to puke. When I moved to Colorado in 1998 I had to suffer the indignity of watching Baker set the world snowfall record while CO was sporting bases in the sub 20" range - in February. Now this. Not to mention the fact that I'm going to miss out on the best paddling season in years in the spring, not to mention all of the incredible spring skiing. Not to mention that by the time the crappy weather ends back here it's Africa-hot, as humid as the Mississippi Delta, and buggy as all hell. When I leave Boston that'll definitely be one of the happiest days of my life. T-29 months and counting. Now that I'm below 30 months I need to get one of those advent calendars and substitute months for days...

So does anyone know the cumulative snowfall stats for January (in the Cascades)? I think that most resorts on the Least Coast are reporting a whopping 10" or so for the month.

Sad News. Isn't he the guy who survived a horrible incident elsewhere in the Himlayas where his partner fell to his death while rapelling off of a pounded-in tent pole, taking the ropes with him? If I remember correctly, the survivor (J.C. LaFaille, I think) was hit by a falling rock or piece of ice which broke his arm while he was making the horrendously difficult descent, and when it was all said and done he promised himself that he'd never return to the mountains? After surviving something like that I'm not sure if I'd feel invincible or swear-off anything dangerous for the rest of my life. Anyway - sorry to learn about the demise of a gifted climber.

MacClean's Column on the Oprah Memoir Hoax. Pretty funny.

So Double_E, uh, are you the author of that particular anecdote, or is someone else responsible for that little misunderstanding? I'd hate to borrow that guy's car. Use 1/2 tank of gas and he'd be hysterical. "WTF! You just used HALF THE WORKING LIFE of my vehicle!!!!!!! Sorry, but you owe me $10,000...."

Good profile/story on the guy here: http://www.skiingmag.com/skiing/adventure/article/0,12910,1140855,00.html

I think that you are probably talking about Paul Ruff. Skiing article: I met skier Jamie Pierre for the first time on a Thursday morning last March. Within 90 minutes, I saw him flip off a 40-foot cliff at Snowbird and land on a tree buried in the snow. It hurt him like hell, but he broke no bones nor punctured any internal organs. Two hours later, at Alta, he got into a screaming argument with his friend and photographer Lee Cohen before popping off a 50-footer. Eight minutes after that, he tried to board a midmountain chair without showing his season pass. When a lift supervisor demanded to see it, Pierre snarled, "Do you know who I am?" The supervisor, who naturally found Pierre's comment rude, answered, "No, asshole, do you know who I am?" A sneering Pierre tore open his coat and thrust the pass toward the liftie in a manner that could have led to blows, but didn't. Early the next morning, Pierre hiked from Brighton to a cliff above Wolverine Cirque. As Cohen and I aimed cameras from an aerie above the Alta side of the cirque, Pierre attempted an American cliff-jumping record of 160 feet. During his stunningly long free fall, he pulled a Lincoln loop-reaching toward his tips and cartwheeling forward from the takeoff while somehow managing to rotate his torso. He stuck the landing. It was by far the biggest, most impressive air I've ever seen. Fifteen minutes later, while hiking out, Pierre had a seizure, likely due to the minor concussion he suffered on the landing. "I've averaged at least one concussion per year since the early '90s," Pierre tells me. He seldom wears a helmet: "If it's a matter of my body going instantly from terminal velocity to zero, a helmet isn't gonna help much." Pierre goes bigger than anyone alive, but I wonder what good it does him. Is hurling your meat off massive cliffs any way to make a name in skiing? It's hard to say. Pierre's 160-vertical-foot Lincoln loop occurred almost 10 years to the day after Tahoe bartender Paul Ruff died in an attempt to set the world-record cliff jump. At the time, the recognized record of 140 feet was shared by two skiers: soft-spoken John Tremann, who later left extreme skiing to become a born-again Christian, and Chuck "Huck" Patterson, who has since become better known for his big-wave surfing. After inviting friends, photographers, and cinematographers to a 160-foot cliff near Kirkwood, California, Ruff, and his dream of selling the footage to tabloid TV, splattered on some volcanic rocks. Nonetheless, skiers have spent the last decade going bigger and bigger. Canadian Jeff Holden became an immediate cover boy with a gargantuan 150-footer in Alaska a few years back. But just going big isn't enough-huckers keep tweaking the inhuman art of leaping into a void by throwing spins, tricks, and crotch grabs. A recent Nissan ad sells Pathfinders with footage of hospital-air flips by Micah Black, Kent Kreitler, and Shane McConkey. The sport's obsession with catching air long ago brought us V-legged Finns yumping Nordic style in the Olympics and, more recently, rubbery teens flipping about in terrain parks. But executing practiced jumps off man-made ramps doesn't send a shiver up skiers' collective spine like feral cliffs do. Unlike jibbers and Olympic ski jumpers, cliff huckers never know if their leaps are makeable. It's skiing's ultimate mind game. Ruff's friends, for instance, had reservations about his plan. But they hesitated to tell him so, fearing they'd cloud the positive attitude he'd need for his attempt. Still, Ruff's brains interfered anyway. Right before popping off the lip, he appeared to heed a basic human instinct and made an inexplicable, certainly unplanned, check turn. It was a "Whoa! What the hell am I doing?" hesitation. And it crimped his trajectory. Without the check turn, he might have cleared the murderous rocks... and survived to see his jump surpassed by some other loon. These days, the world record belongs to Paul Ahern of New Zealand. In 1995, Ahern jumped an astounding 225 feet into wind-packed snow, cushioning the blow by filling his backpack with Styrofoam. The fact that jibbers such as Tanner Hall make six figures a year while virtually no one even knows who Paul Ahern is suggests that cliff hucking is in no way a ticket to stardom. It gets you short-term attention, sure, but it's a dangerously poor way to make a career.

Seems to be wholly absent from sub-Saharan Africa as well. Can't think of any other viruses that are a problem there, so maybe the climate keeps them at bay. At some point in the 90's - I think it was after the woman who drank a fifth of JD a day sued JD because her baby has FAS - I joked about obese people suing McDonalds and other fast-food joints for making them fat. It seemed so rediculous at the time that I never thought it would happen. A few years later I joked about the obese waging a successful campaing to have their condition classified as a disability, and went onto state that as a consequence millions of people who were in the extremely-overweight category would eat their way into mortal-obesity in order to hop on this literal-and-figurative gravy-train. This already happens with people who want bariatric surgery, but can't quite qualify because their BMI is just below the threshhold. A side prediction is that we'll see quite a bit more research of this sort bein cited fervently by the National Association for Fat Acceptance (really exists) aforementioned campaign to qualify obesity as a disability on-par with Parkinson's disease. This will only intensify as more insurers attempt to use BMI as a tool to increase premiums in the face of spiraling outlays for medical expenses associated with obesity.

I am going to make it a point to bust a double daffy in the terrain park next weekend in order to taunt les enfants with some unrepentant old-school steeze.

I also give myself high marks for misspelling the magazine that I was mocking no less than three times during the troll...