billcoe

Well, we can ask Salomon Rushdie his thoughts on that later. Meantime, it wasn't all that long ago that Catholics were murdering and torturing innocents who would not accept that Jesus was the one and only true son of God, and they finally got over it not long before my Grandfather was born - not that long ago really. 1492 wasn't just remembered as "in fourteen hundred and ninty two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue".....but as the time wherein the Spanish Inquisition Jesuit Catholics murdered Jews (and Muslims to a lesser extent) by the thousands in horrible, terrible, violently bloody ways..... They changed.

Do you remember him when he was 6 hiking wartley's? talk about a midget! Yeah sure do, but it doesn't seem like it was 4 years ago.... Life is a river, just rolling on. One of the joys of having children is that it fixes time differently for us old folks....

I like how happy he looks in the pic! Thats the money part of it.

How old is your son now Rudy?

So perhaps all political cartoon authors should just be killed? I doubt anyone would take one making fun of President Obama with the big ears and shake it in his face, but yet they proliferate and are viewable constantly in various world media: the US government still isn't yet tracking them down and killing them for attempts at humor, some of which fall very very flat.

"Robert Hintze, founder of the feel-superior site, added, "Letting fatties roam the site is a direct threat to our business model and the very concept for which BeautifulPeople.com was founded.""

BLAH BLAH BLAH that stuff is everywhere. more: YOU WON'T BELIEVE THE AUTHOR LINK

We could go with that. Perhaps, for discussion of this case in question, the cartoonist works for or is an agent of the CIA then? He drew the pic of Mohammed to inflame the world and get Joe average to fear the Islamic world so that we would have carte blanch to proceed as we wanted over there. I suppose we also proceed to blame all similar things on CIA if we tried and worked at it hard enough. I'm not saying it's impossible, this stuff happens. Certainly in this case, the Nigerian very strangely did get a pass in showing his passport at the control office in the Netherlands, and there appeared to be some other shenanigans which the passengers noticed and publicized.

PLEASE! You're not really thinking he's faking this to just keep his Oxycontin addiction subscription going do ya?

Great story on you grandpa Dave! You must have had some heart palpation's yourself when the Ad popped up on TV for the first time! The music in the remix is tough to listen too, I'll bet they find out someday that rap music can cause heart attacks:-)

I was in Paris with my wife in 1997 an it was pouring buckets. So as we had Le Carte L'orange (the orange card) which was unlimited transportation in the city, hopped on a city bus to do an impromptu tour of the city while we waited for it to finish raining. At some point Jasmine jumps up all excited (for me as it turned out) and says breathlessly, look, a "Climbing Shop". Like a sex addict in a whorehouse I immediately popped the call button to stop and we ran back in the rain so I could gear whore. I wound up buying 2 pairs of shoes then. A pair of LaSportiva Focus for $65 Euros, and a pair of Red Chili Spirits for @ $80. The Red Chili line was still relatively new than, and I'd been lusting on a pair, but didn't want to pay the $120 they were in the states. Needless to say, I was ecstatic over the find. Years go by, both shoes have multiple resoles, perhaps 4 or 5 each, and I like the Red Chili's and use them for most of my long routes as they are loose, and I have bad toes and don't want the pain. Last year, my son took up climbing. He was talking to his sister on what he wanted for Christmas and it turned out he wanted a pair of Red Chili's. As she lives in Hawaii and is broke, I volunteered to find and buy them so she could give them to her brother. I luck out and find them at REI on sale for $65! This is what they look like on his feet Christmas day. The ones in the middle are the identical model and color which I got in Paris 12 years ago. I offered to trade......

uhhh, Ivans wife has a different checklist I think.

From his web site, it appears he is use to doing guided climbs: previously on Denali (RMI) and in the Pickets, a day toproping an icefall in Michigan as part of a class....I guess I understand a bit better now. Wow, ambitious guy, wants to crank off the 7 summits.... ...maybe "do you have a web site" will be a question we need to start asking new partners:-) My friend Dave has one, he doesn't get out much anymore as he's been bike racing. http://www.englishengineering.com/dave/adventures/adventures.html It would be a good way to evaluate a parner, you see they did a trip to the Cirque of the Unclimbables with a few buddies, should give you an idea.....

He was "Rushed" to the hospital then? ...think he has insurance?

You don't recognize it but that's my fat ass.... I'm vowing to lose some weight for the New Years!

Must be vacationing with the Obamas...

Only if you like cold food at altitude, dude explains above that fool couldn't fire a stove up. It's not the ability not NOT fire the stove, it's the lack of humility of just asking "hey dudes, can you show my how to work a Whisperlite, I can't even spell MSR" or some such. Of course, doing an accurate and honest trip report on summitpost, (linking the story for us of course) and using his summitpost name in the tale might be enough as well. If anyone likes him and has knowledge, they will recognize that they need to share it with him and mentor the guy. Just be honest. By the way, what is you name over on Summitpost, I didn't see Whoiswillhockett over there.

Speaking only for some poor relatives here. (It's the only deer/elk story I have.) They were barely making it as farmers of the various high plateau country area in Colorado. They'd pray for divine support all the time, but the bottom line was that a slight bit of bad weather or a large deer herd could literally cause starvation to them and their children. As unimaginable as that might seem, it was the truth as they saw it. At the time, in these remote areas, they hadn't heard of food stamps but probably wouldn't have taken it anyway. No joke. Anyway, the few cows they had for milk and meat barely scrubbing by on marginal pasture in a long cold winter didn't need any extra competition. On occasion, when the deer herds were huge due to good summer conditions and crowding their pastures, they'd take one. Illegally. Kids were fed. Yet this was a criminal act. But having the government take away money from YOU, to give it to someone like them claiming need - that is OK.

I once had a disaster of a Mountain climb with a guy (lets call him Bernie cause that was his first name and I forgot his last name) who thought that Reinhold Messner could learn some things from him. I found the arrogance and unbridled lack up hubris he carried very very disturbing...the whole mentality. I never saw any of this on the ground. I did discuss it at length with him afterwards and also warned anyone and everyone who could be a potential partner of this time bomb: and yet he refused to take my verbal check under consideration at all. So I dug in deeper and started really drilling the dude, thinking he really really needed a reality check. I don't know the details of what later occurred other than what I read in the paper, but I suspect that still believing himself to be a truly great climber, he soon thereafter went up and got his brother killed on the North Face. Bernie barely survived the fall, but he did live if you can believe the newspaper (which you usually can't). I never did get a "you were right Bill" card, nor ever hear anything ever again from the jackass. However, to his credit, as I never bumped into him and I was out a lot back then, I believe that he did stop climbing, thus sparing the next victim. Sad to say that he did lose his brother though. It shouldn't have happened, but I carry no guilt after surviving my climb with him (it could have gone either way). _______________________________________________________________ that's all I know.

These were clearly leopards And not cougars Leopards have spots

LOL!

Whew, rough crowd here today....

I didn't like him as a republican, I still don't like him as a democrat. I'm bi-partisan that way.

Yes! I would think that if the last group who were doing the adult supervision thing for blanco had mentioned it online, as painful as that may have been, you would have been spared. Furthermore, dudes like that can easily get you killed in addition to themselves. This guy needs to hear the honest appraisal of his abilities as well as warning his future victims partners. THEN you should relax, drink some more wine, and find more senoritas once your work is over.... THEN you should post a Trip report over here and use folks real names so we are all clued in! Anyway, that's the sequence as I see it, whatever you chose to do, make yourself happy. Hope you had a good trip otherwise.