ivan

i'm covered!

"don't speak to me of traditions, sir, for the royal navy has but 3 traditions: rum, sodomy and the lash."

he might be able to convince the good people of louisiana to vote for him since he wants to get rid of FEMA? wants to get rid of the air traffic control system? oh, okay...

man, you sure you want yer boy to win iowa, kev? looks like the kiss of death to me past 9 caucuses there, the winner has either not won the nomination or lost in the general election 6 times if you throw out the incumbents running for re-election (reagan in '84 and bush in 2004), iowa only picks the eventual winner 1 time out of 9.

man, you sure you want yer boy to win iowa, kev? looks like the kiss of death to me past 9 caucuses there, the winner has either not won the nomination or lost in the general election 6 times

nothing less than what i've come to expect of you, devushka!

if i still lived in virginia i'd be ghey too

old guys are so quick to lose their powers of imagination

same dude from the swiss family robinson looks like

welcome back, sailor!

Trip: Orygone Asylums - Here and There Date: 12/18/2011 Trip Report: idle has the last month felt, immune from adventure as i've been immersed in grades, educational goobly-gook and godless children, but the long-yearned for yuletime has arrived, so i've space to relate a few weekends of wasted youth, the inept ramblings of the village idiot... last month was the baker's eleven bash, deep underground - spent the rare aould times out from the burdens of work n' family atop terra-firma since then - justin's buddy kirk wrote for beta on the stone soup, a strange request when the sun still shines legally on the south side - i talked him round to just coming up for a day and mucking about on something more classic, the ever-scintillating stephenwulf! a polite boy, that there kirk, and plenty willing to defend the Public Good on the teh inTerwebz - god bless all smokers everywhere, you provide the tobacco and i'll scare up the discovery pass to keep the shit legit. i recall it a rare morning for beacon sport - blustery, bitter cold, dampness on the unprotectable first 40 feet, then hands numbed by crack-climbing - the short spiciness of the traverse into the belay cave across shattered stone - kirk followed in fine style, and soon enough i'd bullshitted him enough to think his lead would be tea n' krumpets easy a pleasant perch below the roof, somewhat sheltered from the storm's blast - at least 3 generations of bolts n' pins to pick from, and probably at least one of them in reliable rock? kirk was quick above the lip and scooting along gotta love aiding in the winds that turn yer aiders into pilate's lash upon yer face frosty beacon visions we ended up on big ledge w/ time to keep banging away - i went up to the hanging belay via the conga line of archaic pins, then came on back down while kirk kleaned it - we rapped off for high times and hollering at the base, then wandered off, each to his evening delights interludes - introspections - back to the beat-off rock a weekend or so later, w/ just a day to play - a big party this time, me having invited a half-dozen folks out only to experience the rare-occasion of damn near everybody saying yes - jensen's ridge then the Big Plan - cush ledges for a big crew at each pitch - a unique topout only i'd expereinced before - everyone a Nice Guy/Goodfella if you're in the neighborhood, you're a fool not to take the advantage to wander up one of beacon's elite routes - you get extra pts if you free it all - i saw it happen...once we were all too craven to lead the hard-kkkore alternate start, and i was happy to be selfless and let everyone get a lead in, so we started on the easy 1st pitch, The Phuzzy taking the mossy end while his counselor belayed lawyer or axe-murderer? just below the notch and the first good ledge a 4-some, geoff belayed his bro up p1 as adam tensioned me into the start of the super-shorty p2 an odd site perhaps - geoff cleaning p2 while the phuz crawls up the tag line - good thing the aggregate age of the anchor bolts here is something greater than the age of the nation i'd wager the Lost Gems of beacon - several incredible quality cracks absolutely crawling with thick cables of poison oak - happily, jensen's goes right of all this - if anyone has a p38 and a couple rounds of napalm, we'd sure appreciate a flyby in the spring... geoff wanted the money pitch, and for his crimes i gave it to him - 11a finger crack at the start, just out of reach of the oak, but hella fun and easy aid-climbing, the first piece a blind one with 200 feet of exposure below adam crawled up a ledgelet to take pix back down - sunny sure, but holy shit it was breezy n' freezy get a nut bitch. who's gonna complain about a setting like this? p3 tops out on the tower ole'boy's heading for... 'twould be fair at this point to point out i'd sandbagged my poor lawya - no 2nd #3 a poor poor decision on the "mind bending offwidth" - long story short, geoff suffered mightily in the wind and wideness, and ultimately we were all complelled to call it a night, leaving all the gear in place and rapping off a fixed line - had to wake up bright n' early the next mornign to finish the thing off w/ just geoff, which i did in true style, getting the final 2 leads fast enough to met the family at the ballet for das nutcracka shit...then...i forget? oh yeah, the weather got grand and glorious and i got a half-morning off to wander out for my first december corner solo - got two laps in, had a few laughs w/ old jim while watching that jeff thomas feller finish up the new genesis pitches, then it was a fine datenight w/ the wife, complicated by an inexplicably pinched nerve in my shoulder a week of slideshows - one rather drab and sad, the other a fucking riotious goodtime - the mighty tvashie had bent space to portlandia to right his abstentee landlordism, and having drunk in the debauchery of geoff's party, we took 3 days to work on his climbing i had a rope fixed on wild turkeys for a couple months and figured now was as good a time as any to sack up and have fun up on beacon towers, one of the few corners of the monolith i'd yet to visit ready to launch on excalibur, the hardest free climb at beacon? a fun and easy aid-climb, albeit one having a shorty cheatstick on would not be ill-advised, as the first couple bolts weren't intended for god-damned fatarse chossmanauts white caps on the columbia reached grassy ledges as the Big Breeze built up and the shade set in - we raced up uprising as the silverman boys completed right gull and a 3-some appeared to epic on the last pitch of the corner - pat and i tried to stick aroudn to see if our rescue services would be called upon, but boredom and smith-plans and cigarette-shortages sucked us away in short order thick oregon fog made our crawl to smith a slow one, but the nice thing about having a badass for a driver is the navigator can drink the whole way conversation and coffee - starlight and meteors - multiple diners - madras near midnight - breakfast plans - frosty tenting in a desolate smith bivouac sunday morning dawned bright but w/ random light rain - bacon and coffee - an easy walk to the base of the picnic wall - the sun roared to life and we lounged, me drinking gluhwine by the gullet-full - pat's still new to the aid-game, so thought it just to inflict p1 of bubbas in bondage on him he did well by it, but still our big sleep in and his shortness of stature, merged w/ a nice big aid-fall, made that pitch our only one of the day - i cleaned up and declined to make him follow p2 in the dark - we fixed to return on monday monday, monday. feeling hangoverish after an early night of chain-smoking and chuckling - up at 4 a.m. bored, reading atheist manifestos - then a 3rd day in a row for bacon and on to the full-on funness of p2. it's a liiiiitle steep in places zig-zagging against a clear-blue sky pretty obvious we wouldn't be topping out unless we committed to freezing our balls off in the dark, but plenty of time to wander up another pitch or so? pat had fun while i indulged in self-photography afore the shipwrecked rock. pat quickly tried to kill me - fancy cam in a mudcrack while i wasn't looking resulted in a breadload-sized block flying out and crashing into me, hanging above the Great Gulf - another fine red bruise of courage? no worries, pat quickly realizes the superior virtues of nuts in shitrock? note the orange tcu and villian in this here story still dangling from the blown out etrier... tvashie w/ Bob Dole deployed he got up there eventually, and i took in the Golden Glow of the Magic Minute we bailed even better drive back into the bosum of my family - burgers and butts and burgundy - cosmology lessons - road rage redacted shit, w/ a whole week left in this here year, maybe i'll find the time to do some real climbing?

the harry truman solution might help? nuclear winter counter-attack motherfucker!

¿buenos tardes?

not a radical idea for the original 13 state perhaps, but the others were created out of land that was federal property first, so it doesn't seem counter-intutive that the feds should still have say over how its used for the greater good.

best thing for him, his treatment was going nowhere

fahq'n'a geoff, awesome goddamn time! 2 spectacular slideshows, adventure drinking hovering in space, peanuts for the peanut gallery, jesus christ! and like pat said, a true holo-deck experience w/ so many legendary sprayers in one place

wind's what did in my last n face bid

as an atheist, about the only time i pray is when i'm in the mountains

'cuz texans are known the world over for their superior brand of justice? i teach a 4th branch of government: the media

i'm bringing a half-dozen or so - hopefully the whole thing will be a bit more debauched than the rather tame wings of steel slideshow on monday?

pretty easy to argue we've always been paying to use the land, just in a different form (sales taxes here in washington) - i'm not looking at the current situation optimistically, but just in the past 10 years i've seen volatility that coudl send the pendulum swinging back our way - there used to be a parking fee (no real difference from a day use fee), but that gave way to no fee for 4-5 years, and now we're on the discovery pass (which isn't too expensive yet, and in fact might be cheaper than the previous method i paid?).

no idea how it compares - on busy weekends at least 100 cars come and go, not exactly chump-change at 10$/pop.

what can you say? pretty much the only thing our society values less than a park ranger is an assistant crack whore? at any rate, if the only way the parks are going to get any cash is from the meters, then of course its common sense that the core job of park employees will be reduced to minding said meters. expected impacts on the beacon-wand?

i have a map, compass, flashlight, and several gay friends - what more could i need?

agreed. occam's razor. would be nice to see conservative apply that elsewhere too, say to explaining global warming?