JayB

I would be into hitting Smith next weekend (13th-14th) for some Tuff Love - but only if the Nihilists are making another guest appearance. Have you knocked off Chain yet Distel?

That would suck if they ruined the Taco - though I am much more likely to spring for major repairs and drive the thing until it implodes than buy a new rig in the next several years. So what happened with the 4-Runner anyway? I have seen one that looked heavier, had less clearance, and generally looked a bit more pedestrian but I thought that they were still selling "sport" editions that were mostly stripped down and still looked like the old 4-Runners.

Cool. Thanks. Will have to check those out.

I've always racked bread-and-butter cams like that, and added slings as needed while climbing.

The hangers for the anchors behind the pillar at the top of Ya Snooze Ya Loose were gone as of 2/28. I think the bolts there are 3/8". I would replace them myself but I doubt I'll be back there for at least a month or so - so if someone else wants to spend $6 and five minutes replacing them that would be cool. You might also want to bring along a hammer to peen the ends of the bolts to make things a bit more challenging for the next POS that wants to steal them. In the meantime there's a chock-filled crack to the left of the column and a block or two that you can use to make a decent anchor out of.

Yeah - if there's actually money to be made in that kind of arbitrage none of the hedge funds will have taken positions and moved the futures markets by now. The parable of Joe Kennedy and the shoeshine boy comes to mind...

Gotta bump this.

I am a skier at heart and always will be a skier, but I picked up boarding four years ago and absolutely love it -so it is not like I have any senseless animus against boarders but...Dave has a point here. Anyone who side slides on a board and shears off the new snow should be subjected to a hostile barrage of insults and profanity whenever they engage in such a practice. You sideslide, you suck and that's the end of the story. On a related note, I will add that anyone who can't ride their board through the troughs on moguls also sucks in a big way. I've noticed a steady deterioration in the quality of moguls since boarders came on the scene, and I think that the same ethic should apply to riding them - if you can't turn on them, you need to stay away from them and preserve them for those that can. I spent 20 days beating myself to a pulp on my snowboard in mogulfields, but I managed to get the hang of it. I've seen boarders who are obviously way more talented than I am sideslide the hell out of mogul fields that I was able to turn through, so it seems that this is more a problem of standards - e.g. sidesliding through moguls is okay no matter how good you are - than ability. So feel free to hurl invective at the next boarder you see trashing a mogul field as well.

Hey - I think I saw that line across the valley while climbing Syncro. Nice Work Janez, Don, et al! I will have to add this to the long list of "Cool Looking Lines that I Will Never Even Think of Leading." that I've been compiling for a few years. BTW - thanks to everyone for the updates on the ice up there. I may try to head up there the weekend after next for one last trip to LW - then its off to find some easy north-facing stuff in Cody for a couple of weeks in March.

Yeah. If AK is talking about the editorial page only he'd be right on, but on the whole the Journal has an enviable record with respect to news reporting, and has yet to suffer any of the rather embarrassing episodes that have beset the NYT periodically, most recently the Jayson Blair episode, and most memorably the Pulitzer Prize winning fraud in which a NYT reporter assured the world that all was well in Russia while the government was deliberately starving tens of millions of Ukranians to death.

Great article Cracked. Thanks for posting that. I've said it before but it bears repeating, that I'm absolutely amazed that the folks who have accused anyone in power who supported invading Iraq of having only the basest motivations for doing so, but have remained stone-silent in the face of clear evidence that many of the leading figures who opposed removing Hussein by force were taking direct bribes from the regime, funded by profits that were taken directly out of the pockets of the Iraqi people. Amazing.

I am primarily in favor of spending our children's future on Colt45 TallBoys and Pull-Tabs, but sustaining the millitary industrial complex is a close second. Are you sure that you don't have a talking Paul Ehrlich plush doll somewhere in your house that dishes out lines from "The Population Bomb!" when you squeeze it?

The real question is - how much fan mail have you sent to Paul Ehrlich since 1968?

Just admit that it's your fault for being a hopeless NASCAR junkie and move on....

I was too busy using my newfound abundance of spare time elsewhere today to do much replying, but the claims that PP makes w/r/t Leftists in the West turning a blind eye to these atrocities - mass murder on scales that literally have no parallel anywhere in history outside of the Third Reich. This is a historical fact that has been so thoroughly documented in so many books that there is no longer any dispute in the matter. People on both sides of the spectrum have willfully overlooked their fare share of outrages but I there's really nothing out there that can compete with the state-sponsored carnage that occured within the Soviet Union or Communist China in terms of duration or scope, or the continuing dismissal/denial of both by the Western left. I think I did the math at one point and the Chinese Communists alone killed something like 30,000 times more people than Pinochet yet Mao recieved rather fullsome eulogies from nearly every Leftist of note on the planet when he passed away. Rather odd, that.

I was gonna be there for ya homie but the multiple bus accident on northbound I-5 this afternoon put the mighty kibosh on Alpinfox and I's attempt to escape from Seattle. We had to pull the plug at 145th at 6:15. Lameness. Anyhow - hope the show went well and I am still down for the last weekend of March/First weekend of April Smithfest.

I was there last Tuesday (driving by on the way to Paradise) and noticed that there were about three-or four lines forming up, with only one of them touching down. I don't have my Ice Guide to use as a reference for names, but if I remember correctly the fattest line looked to be to the left of the bridge, on the far side (if you are driving towards Paradise) about 250-500 meters from the bridge itself. It looked a bit wet and a wee bit thin, but looked like it would go at somewhere in the WI3-4 range in the condition it was in.

j_b is going to have to go cold Turkey and ditch his NASCAR habbit or we're all gonna die........... Speaking of Kyoto, it would be interesting to take a survey of all of the people that cite the Kyoto accord and note how many of them have actually read the thing. At the time it was published I think the prediction was that if fully implemented it would reduced total global emissions by around 1%, and all developing nations like China and India are completely excempt from the treaty. Given their rates of population and economic growth, any attempt to reduce global CO2 emissions that excludes these two nations alone will not have much of an effect on global climate change. The most sensible and effective way to reduce emissions in practice would be to give consumers and corporations an economic incentive to reduce their output of CO2 through targeted tax credits for fuel efficient motor vehicles, the creation of a market for emissions credits, etc, etc, etc. Incremental change by means of small, practical measures that result from people acting in a manner that is consistent with what they perceive to be their best interest is almost always far more effective at changing the way society operates than abrupt, jarring changes brought about by coercive measures. If it were up to me I would have the US sign the thing and then ignore it like the rest of the world and be done with it, as doing so would be an easy way of forcing the anti-globalist, anti-capitalist, anti-american parlor-marxist crew to be a bit more creative when searching for fodder for their diatribes. On a related note, raise your hand if you uncritically accepted all of Paul Ehrlich's (early 1970s) predictions about the catastrophic shortages of food, water, and natural resources that was supposed to wreak havoc on the world well before the end of the century.

Check Yo PM's Foo.

Awesome.

Nice.

I thought homophone referred to a same-sex chatline....

I've wanted to get triples in hand sizes for a long time - I might consider getting one of these in the place of another number two and number three. Or I could just use the hexes that I've already got for the odd climb where I'd actually want to triple-up - but I could see myself having a moment of weakness in a gear shop and shelling out for one of these if the initial feedback is good.

Just admit that you have been engaged in compulsive bidding for the autographed, life-sized velvet Dale Earnhardt Jr. poster on e-bay and you'll feel a whole lot better....

I had this hunch that my evil homonym was a closet NASCAR fan. Must be a guilty pleasure.