Geek_the_Greek

Only having with girls I love.

Good call on the Metallica. Moby Austin Powers movies (any damn thing with Mike Meyers, for fokk's sake) Ocean Pacific t-shirts (had 9 different ones in grade 8)

Bouldering Leather tele boots Friendster the Interweb

I have heard of many trips relying on the $2 Krazy Karpet - essentially, a thin plastic square mat with two cut-out handles that weighs little and rolls up like a thermarest. However, a web search only turned up Canadian sites, so maybe it's not a product available down here? Maybe the price is too low to satisfy American tastes... On an unrelated note, a search for Krazy Karpets turned up a couple of amusing tobogganing ("or sledding for all the Americans out there") tales: from the McGill (Montreal, Canada) Tribune

[quote I eat only the supposed "free range" eggs and they are white without exception. They don't taste any better than eggs from tortured, miserable chickens & they cost a lot more but somehow it all works better for me to do that. I commend you on your economically-irrational-yet- ethically-correct-despite-little-supporting-evidence perseverance. Really, though, every marketed-as-organic egg I've ever seen has been brown. In Greek, cock-a-doodle-doo translates to 'kokkoriko'. Yep, spelled with k's.

As usual, the truth is boring. What I've always wondered is what the deal is with brown eggs. My grandma always said brown eggs were healthier, but then a friend who kept chickens said no no, it's just different chicken varieties: some lay white, some lay brown eggs. Ok, then, how come all the ORGANIC (and free range too, I think) eggs happen to be brown, hmmm? Is it just that companies hawking organic eggs have thought of my grandmother, and are only stocking brown-egg-laying chickens because they (wisely, it seems) know we healthy types will prefer them??

Dude, you forgot to post your pic.

[Tree geek hat on] It's true that the article went a bit far in drawing sweeping conclusions from a limited dataset. You can't write a one-pager titled "Post-wildfire logging hinders regeneration and increases fire risk" and not expect a lot of scrutiny into what you did. What all parties need to remember is that ecology is a science of place - what applies to one area may or may not apply elsewhere... [tree geek hat off]

Having depended on this type of thing to get my telemark stoke on, I thought I'd give a review of the 4 flicks UP Productions puts out, as well as their instructional vid "Free Time". Overall, I like ski vids. Being a tele skier, I like tele ski vids more. I watch these every fall and jump around the living room, giddy with the stoke of the upcoming schralping. So I'm biased, and like watching all of them, even the lousy one. All these vids have the typical "music video" format (except for Free Time), which is predictable, but fun. The music is pretty consistent throughout - I think it's pretty good - a lot of G Love, and other bands you probably won't know (or at least I didn't), but work well. Unparalleled I: A journey to the roots of telemark skiing This was the original "modern tele vid" that came out in 1998 or 99, I think. The camera work is a bit simple, with too many cuts. Fast-paced is one thing, but when you never see more than a couple of turns before the next shot, it seems too ADHD-ish. Still, the vintage footage of the roots of skiing is way cool, and the skiing is good. 3 stars (out of 5) Unparalleled II: Free World The second vid has more good skiing, and better camera work. In fact, this is the best vid of the series in some ways - good skiing, good camera work, not too much cheese, no over-reliance on slow-mo stuff (which is often an excuse for having a dearth of real footage). The annoying distractions are the long-boarding stuff (the analogy that tele skiing is the long-boarding of winter sports is tenuous at best, and leads to way too much irrelevant 70's footage of long-board surfing - yah, I'm talking about in the water). The B&W WWII intro "Telemark saves the free world" is cute, but too long, and feels like filler. 3.5 stars Unparalleled III: Soul Slide This is the introspective movie in the series. Starts out reflectively talking about a friend who was killed up in Alaska, and goes from there into all sorts of philosophical musings. Great skiing shots - very nice camera work, good light, sweet moves. Maybe a bit too much slow-mo, but it is arty, and works. The cheesy bits (background irrelevant pop-philosophy crap about life), girl meditating by the stream, afro-wig skiers doing dumb shit on shorty skis, irrelevant shot of dude playing guitar in the desert) are unfortunate, but the good skiing parts make up for it. 4 stars. Unparalleled IV: The Lost Season Apparently this is the vid that Bones (filmmaker Josh Murphy) had trouble releasing after a lot of corporate backers withdrew their support. I don't know the full story, but the lack of funds shows. Badly. Instead of good skiing shots, we get all sorts of little stories about the skiers. Some of them are kind of cute (watching Ty Dayberry build his first pair of skis), and some of them are totally irritating (watching one of those dudes at his off-season asphalt paving job?! WTF?! Another dude driving a logging feller-buncher?!). This is the weakest flick of the bunch, and barely qualifies as a ski vid. If you like a lot of rail tricks ( ) maybe you'll be into it. 2 stars. Edit: after writing all this, I went home and watched this one again. I suppose it's not actually that bad - there is still good skiing (mostly park stuff, tho, but not all), but something about it - maybe the music, the lack of different venues, the lack of helicopter budget, or whatever - makes it all kind of sleepy and boring. Well, not boring, but definitely slow-paced, sad and wistful, like the skiers all knew this was the Unparalleled swan song, their last chance to make such a vid. Anyway, the result is that it's still not really a good stoke, even though you feel for Ty and Max and Cody and the rest. I'll up it to 3 stars and leave it at that. Free Time: Techniques for Modern Free-heel Skiing This is the instructional vid. I'm not sure if anyone can really learn how to tele ski from a video, but it's entertaining to go through the paces. Plus, you get to learn some of the lingo - what some of those sick air moves are called. I suppose I may have learned a thing or two by watching it. 3.5 stars. I guess there are lots of these movies out there, although way fewer for tele skiing than alpine or snowboarding. I recently saw Sessions: Total Telemark 5 (from Tough Guy Productions). It featured many of the same folks as the UPP vids, and was at least as good as Soul Slide (better in some ways). Good times. Unparalleled Productions Tough Guy Productions (Sessions)

I looked into State Farm a while ago (after my car break-in up in Squampton, for those who may recall...). Their policy sounded good (~$15 a month, I think, something like $20K max, low deductible), but they could only offer it to those with 0 or 1 housemate. Family members were ok, but I was told there had been too many issues of housemates being suspects in thefts. Since I live with friends in a house, it wasn't going to work for me. A friend has insurance through Geico, and said they don't have that stipulation, so that's somewhere else to look.

Also, the cliffs on the north side of I-90 at X38 (Far side - Eastern Block, Headlight Point, Gritscone, etc.) are known for some of the softest grades around (printed grades at least 2-3 grades higher than any other local areas). The older cliffs, on the south side of the highway (Nevermind, Mt Washington areas, etc.) have grades more in line with other local sport areas, like X32.

I think I figured out the inspiration for their colour scheme:

Can I buy just one leash for $12?

I've always found .10b to be the most meaningless grade anywhere. When I climb something rated .10b I expect it to feel anywhere from 5.8 to mid 11. Caboose (Squampton) is the hardest I've tried. (I guess it's shut down now, so kind of moot.) I thought BBQ and Orange sunshine were decent for the grade (ie not hard). Pack Animal direct? I thought it was kinda soft. Oh yeah - last pitch of Sunblessed (rattly fists/stem/chimney horrible thing) felt farqin hard for 10b.

Great use of Soviet-era brick and concrete. My knees always throb when watching that parkour stuff, tho.

I like my Reverso too, but I can see its disadvantages. Mainly, it kinda does suck for small diameters. Like if you're cragging, and have to hold someone up who's dogging a route, you have to use a good amount of heft just to hold them in place on anything less than a 10.2 mm (or so) rope. And for free-hanging raps on skinny lines (<10 mm) it offers very little friction (a backup is pretty much mandatory). It locks up like a champ when using the autoblock feature, though.

Agreed. Shit, man, this already happens on 5.10s and 11s.

Dude, that' f'ing great! I don't mind Christmas, and have fond memories from when I was a kid, family stuff, blah blah. But I do hate stores and malls around this time, and it's a like a double that this is the time of year that I'm most likely to go to a mall (trying to figure out what the fawk to get for my folks). Handmade/crafty gifts are certainly best, but they take time, which is increasingly scarce.

Apparently original copies of this (Rad, that is) on VHS are fetching good prices on ebay. There is a petition to get it released on DVD here

As an afterthought, I guess these routes (really bouldery starts, way harder than the rest of the climb) are also sometimes just 1-star routes (usually rated at the higher grade, I think) - totally inconsistent, not sustained, 1-move wonders.

I meant the route Pearly Gates, but I guess it's debatable. The chimneying bit above the bolt looks harder from the ground, but it's not, 'cause you get a sweet seated rest. The crack beginning doesn't look like much but ends up having the hardest moves of the route. It still ends up being easy for the grade, though, so maybe 'bouldery' isn't a good description. However, this all brings up an interesting point. I agree that a bouldery start is much easier than the same moves elsewhere in the climb. But this means that if you're climbing at your limit, you won't be able to do the route. So if an honestly graded 10d (whatever that is) is pretty much your limit, you won't be able to do a climb that starts with a V3+ boulder problem. Alternatively it could be graded at an (easy) 11+. I bet we could find examples of each. I guess it's just another example of why climbing grades are dumb and pretty meaningless.

Pearly Gates is another one.

OMFG, you are sad.

The crack is easy, but the start is tricky. The start to all of those are tricky. You're a fucking punk. I should smack you in the mouth. Ok Dickbreath...come smack me in my mouth. Why are you looking at my mouth in the first place?... those pitches are "hard starts" if you're a little whining bitch. Apparently, YOU don't know shit from shinola. Leave the climbing for the big kids. You stick to selling t-shirts Mikey. Hello loser! This would be the route described as "a bouldery start (.10b)leads to a technical crack above (5.9)" in the Bourdon guide. And the one the old McLane guide ('92) suggested "try a shoulder stand if you're short" for. Is it a hard climb? Not by any stretch of imagination. Is it a bouldery start. Si, senor. But I must say, you're really impressing us with your big dick so far.