ivan

i don't sweat it - hating organs of self-government is thoroughly american - i think my local's got a better approval rating than congress at least

my senator's one of the sponsors so i guess i can skip writing him he suuuuure don't like my union though....

what are the relevant bill numbers, tvash? i got a few minutes tonight and was gonna be writing them anyhow again about me dogdamned cola

whataday know, damn thing's got it's own wiki-page! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statue_of_Lenin,_Seattle well, after a brief read, i now have an obvious solution - the family that own's it wants to sell it - perhaps you can put together a group of like-minded folks to purchase it n' melt it down n' recast it into a more dramatic work depicting lucifer giving it to stalin something rough? at any rate, if bill's "never forget" mantra is in fact true, doesn't keeping a piece of tangible history about to remind you of that which you don't want to forget like...uh...a good idea? and what better than a giant statue w/ whatever artistic modification your local community feels like throwing at it?

pretty much sums up the whole dynamic of the middle-east! that philosophy sure do keep the world spinning around your analogies aren't so great - a statue of lenin (and again, one bought cheap off an empire that'd just gone tits up by a community of fruitie hippies) in fremont is more equivalent to a statue of george armstrong custer in malaysia than one of nathan bedford forrest in georgia

by "coolest attempt" i meant "coolest attempt that wasn't succesful in actually killing the president" jackson was the object of the first attempt on a president's life - the crazy dude who tried shooting him in the capitol entrance improperly loaded his two pistols, and when both misfired, the last at point-blank range, jackson beat the holy hell out of him with his cane and had to be pulled off the guy asked by the cops why he tried to kill jackson, he merely mumbled that his death would "make money more plenty." jackson, feeling that he'd had his fun and made his point, pressed no charges

love'em or hate'em, you gotta admit, the coolest assassination attempt in history was jackson's

great idea actually - stack enough up n' you don't even have to climb shit, plus you can have the mother of all bonfires way up there in the sky

you can clip the first bolt of p1 by either a) being 6'7 or b) stacking several convenient rocks on top of each other for a step i've never used a hook anywhere on route, though i do usually use a mini-cheater stick to get to the high bolt past the third anchor p2 and 3 combine neatly w/a 60 meter rope and is the recommended way - you don't need to leave draws but on every 3 bolts or so to keep it reasonably easy for the second to clean - i do recommend either a rope protector at the lip into the cave or to just fix the rope for the 2nd at the bolt below the lip (with the line then back up to the anchor in the cave of course) - i sawed through half my rope there once

"irony, it's what's for breakfast"

the difference, dear druk, would be that 'mericans didn't make the lenin statue, they nipped it from the very bastards they were all nervous about all those years. ut bif the talibano's have themselves a groovy statue of OBL, then yeah, why not wrench it out of the ground and put it some park in nyc? ya know, let people pour bags of shit on top of it for 5$ a head n' put the moola towards a survivors' fund?

meh, trying to fuck w/ the nsa is probably dangerous - i think ggk could more readily improve his (and maybe many like-minded others?) mood if he instead just welded a large cock n' balls into lenin's cake-hole

my first climb in the northwest, what got me hooked on the area and the sport, was the humble old s side of mt hood, and on the 4th of july no less

ack, i still remember that father-son team that died after fallign down the colchuck glacier a few years ago - and that thing seems so tame in summer...

we shoulda lugged the roman coliseum back here, brick by brick, after teaching them eye-talian bitches a lesson in double-you-double-you-eye-eye!

i once thought, passing through fremont in a thoroughly phreaked state-of-mind, that it would make a mighty-neat sci-fi story - lenin in nineteen twenty-whenever approached by some mysterious time-traveler - lenin shown a picture of seattle a century later - he erupts in gales of laughter at his triumph, then soon thereafter he gets another gallery of pix of the walmart just a few miles down the road to set him straighter

funny, i always took it tongue n' cheek - ya know, capitalists buying at cut-rate a shitty old statue nobody behind the iron-curtain wanted anymore n' putting it up in the Land of the Free just to rub the bastard's face in his defeat? like the crusaders tossing the crescent moon of the jerusalem mosque into the qibla cum pisser? i can, however, see how one w/ roots back to that part of the world wouldn't savor the joke quite the same...

bitch'n'camero, n' holy shit, lake serene most definitely a pleasant site at the end of it, if only to remind you how truly puny the warm-up you just did was

fisher chimneys is a great idea as a starter- if he doesn't like that, he's a lost cause forbidden is a no-brainer intro climb too

Trip: Crowded Point - Crusty Jewel Date: 2/8/2014 Trip Report: the snowpacalypse arrived promptly to resolve a week of unbearable woe - beacon closed - bastards howling at all hours - worst of all, a complete failure to cave in and give up on a craving to go a month w/o wine - a week spent crawling the walls n' slurping down endless cups of scalding mint tea, chewing fingernails n' feeling deeply listless n' disinterested, leafing through the pages of yet another war-book adventure the order of the day - the blizzard of the century came howling in thursday morning, scattering the baser bitches in all directions just after lunch - to the gym then home, the red devil skittering all over the frozen highway - a long walk to the park w/ children grown crazy w/ snow fever, the dog-damned god sprinting n' leaping like a lunatic set free - the frost-gale growing in gusts, the halls of the ice-lords turned upside down school cancelled for the day after, my union-agitator-training discarded as peremptorily, so a session of madness seemed promising - fortuitously the powderhund was looking to skip work too n' play, so there's the rope gun all lit along, now all i have to do is survive the drive - glorious sun, clear skies to hood shrink-wrapped in storm-clouds, not that i could see much of any of it w/ the windshield cleaner fluid frozen solid in the lines, leaving me reliant on my jedi mind-skills to keep it all on the road - wrecks all around, the detritus of ice-zombies in various states of revivification, wresting themselves from their ruined rides - troutdale's winds not quite the hurricane force i'd feared, bryan happy to drive n' me happy to sit aside n' smoke cooly, gazing out on the wintry columbia, gorge walls clad in frost-fangs and the piers on the river shackled in rime high above the wave-lines set the car down at the rooster park - the wind howling, drifts all over the lot - we seperate as bryan decides at the last minute to buy a year pass and figures he's always walking my slow ass into the ground so i might as well get started - made sense, until in hindsight later on, i realized he might be tempted like any fool who's going to the crown jewel the first time to try to eschew the hike down the highway to the access road in favor of following other fools tracks down to the boundary lakes great gusts at my back as i hoofed along alone, a steady stream of frantic looking drivers glancing me over as they screamed on by the interstate, fingers white on the wheel - no sign of bryan behind - quick chat w/ a stranger out scouting the ice planning on come back tomorrow turning back east on the train-tracks, had to suss out the snow-goggles to keep my eye-balls from being flenzed off by the foul breeze lovely little cliff a bit crestfallen i'd reached the joint only to have the partner completly unaccounted for - i pictured him swimming in the slush in his plastics and settled for a cigarette n' some low-ball soloing while he got his shit sorted out eventually saw a figure or two hove into view from the wrong end of the tracks - thought at first it might be my boy but then it resolved into two - their tracks no doubt helped taunt bryan to the same grief they'd just endured, plunged partway into the lake then forced to circle-round it the long way all was well, the 'hund emerged even as the two portlanders began to punch their way up hardly great conditions for just sitting around n' bullshitng, bryan too got geared up quick and blitzed up the waterfall - fine ice conditions - some water bubbling behind but mostly solid and thick enough for screws - we climbed to the right as the other crew took the left, bryan arriving a few minutes before them to the bolt-anchor (rigged up w/ an american death-triangle for reasons passing understanding in this modern fucking era) i froze my fingers good following and paused for a mild case of the buzzing barfies - ole'boy said the upper pitch looked like bullshit and i make it a point never to argue w/ case i'm in complete agreement w/ - we settled for doing as many tr-laps as we could squeeze in before the next round of storm was due to come scuttling in setting up the tr soon enough it was time to go, the sky gone all gun-metal grey and the stinging wind, never absent, now laden w/ flecks of white - packed up quick n' bugged out, the big breeze building in leaps and lulls - the walk back on the interstate truly rewarding w/ the wind in our teeth fresh crash on the on-ramp, an suv in the trees, partly rolled and ruefully smashed - cops n' medics n' onlookers converging from all directions, we passed in silence - troutdale again - parting is such sweet something - bryan off to fetch his little-lovely from a plane bound from old mexico - me to home and snowball fights n' hibernal hijinx w/ la familia after an eye-opening commute, highlit by hitting ice n' oscillating back n' forth off course at 35 mph fine season in this here city this winter - can we get a third wave i wonder?

storm warrior! how high did you go? how many ice-zombies along the interstate on the way back?

can't believe The Scarab didn't get the nod for yet another space-warp of an adventure good odds on at least a day of far skankier ice to be had down here in the gorge this here weekend...

doesn't look like a big window - freezing rain sunday then 40s n' rain monday - might be good enough to at least tr the flow below 14 on cape horn

it's not a crag if your buzz can burn off between the parking lot and the base!

nope, no more ladders, this year's gonna be a full on via ferrata! where's raindawg's goddamn stock photo when you need it?