billcoe

Funny test on Climbing.com on how to pre-screen your potential climbing partners (or take the test yourself). http://www.climbing.com link "Scores of 76-100: You are the best of the best of the best. You probably climb with your husband Tommy, or your wife Beth." I scored a 48.

Great pic Pho! Man, that looks like a cheese grater waiting to happen if you muff the clip! ___________________________________________________________________ I'll bet it's something on glacier point I think that averages 50 degrees. Some of that stuff is pretty polished and smooth. Like on Misty Beethoven (5.10d) your shoes squeek from the contact. Hall of Mirrors continues up and it's mucho harder per the book although some it it looks steeper. I've not been on HOM personally. There lots of less steep stuff as well.

That's some real good stuff there SaraGrace! Thanks for sharing, I wish I had more creativity so I could add to your list !

It's not all about you. One word, one word for the graduate....PLASTICS takeitserious. . . . peace out

LOL!

Glad to see you being nicer these days Pat. It is a common mistake many make in believing that others think and act like they do. Often, most often, that is not the case at all. So, say if a certain poster thinks that it's just friendly banter to get insulted then continually (with that as a mindset) keeps insulting and belittling others thinking it's all just in good fun... say others who do not enjoy it AT ALL and have never done that to the OP, and even after the recipient express's that view - that they are becoming angry and the bullshit coming their way is out of line, they STILL continue to get the same bullshit obnoxious belittling treatment over and over and over by the obnoxious poster, despite often not directing ANY posts to the assholes direction, but continually receiving bullshit coming to them.... well - I said this earlier, but it bears repeating and to be read closely and slowly more than once cause it's not a game: most of us do not know how close to the edge of the cliff we all walk. Some more than others.... Certainly in Hughes case, if you threaten to kill another person like Hugh did to Bug and then follow it up with a couple more very angry posts: or continually harass them with personal and belittling attacks when they keep telling you to back off like you have done to many: do not be shocked if they either: A) Call the FBI like Bug says he will do next time. B) Get your ass tossed off the site. C) Preemptively come at you when you are not looking and do not expect it. D) Never come back here. All bad things to happen and totally unnecessary in my view, but expected. MMMMK? We should all of us treat each other with respect. All of us. If we can't or won't do it, then the mods should delete those obnoxious posts immediately. Hughs multiple attack post

Well spoken Bug, but I hope you do make it back at some point. ________________________________________________________________ Not true Matt, I came very close to going after a poster who continually berated me and would usually end his posts by saying Asshole some other personal flame type comment. The personal attacks made me angry and I explained exactly that in my reply and suggested that bumping into each other was going to get personal. Had I bumped into said person in person before I got myself calmed down (weeks later), it would have been full-on like Donkey Kong. I mean like nasty like you don't know. Sure, I don't like it when I get like that - the last time I lost control like that I whipped out a knife and it was a bloody bad scene that ended fast and furiously for us all. I barely escaped a long prison term by a Red C* hair. Not a hell of a lot I can do about it though. Once you flip over mentally I mean. I've noticed that said poster has rec'd another similar notification, perhaps even more direct, so it's not just me. Glad I didn't bump into dude before I got it together, and the alleged dude is being nicer as well. So speaking only for me: A) The difference between what is normal and mental illness is very very small. For all of us, but some of us know that for a fact. B) Violence and death isn't as as far away from us as we believe. C) I give respect and I expect it in return. Disaster may be all too close if this is not the case. You listening to this mods? Don't be ignoring this shit, cause today's guy calling people assholes all the time may not be posting on this site or any other if it goes bad, and you'll get some of the blame for letting that shit escalate should a person preemptively really attack another in a self-defensive mode. I try and will continue to try, to keep myself in check. But that's me. I'm old and much calmer than when I was young. Your results may vary.

Lightning is typically a level one spell, and much like "flare", it is pretty useless. Level one million is a gross exaggeration and a level 2 druid would not even be worth killing. I recommend you brush up on your current spell base porter before claiming such silliness.

Hugh, what people are thinking is that you need to stop being such a prick by calling everyone else assholes (like this post) and post more trip reports. Bug had a real concern. He's being nice and reaching out here, so don't call him an asshole OK, it's fucking offensive. (spoken in a Miss Manners voice) Maybe we should be taking this over to cafe sensitivo?

I heard that Sat. evening there was a beat up, trashed out, with masking tape on it, old orange cooler with empty beer bottles inside which had been left by the only trash can out there which is inside the restroom...... Let see, bomb call Sunday during the day.....hmmm, did the bomb squad just hut hut HUT out there and blow up an old f*ed up trashy beer cooler full of empties? OMG!

Metolius makes 7.8 doubles now that probably are stronger (UIAA fall rating) than what you used back in the day. With 2 - you are less likely to be screwed via chopping them both (I bet it's happened sometime someplace), so since chopping them both (or even one)is so rare, might as well go light! I find that the weight reduction as I get older (54 now), is a blessing. Think of carrying a rack of old heavy (non-wiregate) Eiger Ovals up some alpine route compared to a Nano or some other sickly light biner! As far as getting them stuck and tangled, you will, sadly, and that's the trade off. Like Drew says, careful rope management helps.

You really molesting the Marmots up there? Cause I heard PhoQ has PETA on speed dial. BTW, you do dish it out Keith, but Hugh, Off White nailed it for me. I figured you were partners...hearing you've never climbed together...creepy dude. MOVE AWAY FROM THE MARMOTS SIR!

I doubt that dog was hurt at all FhaQ. My old buddies dog, Samanta, a small black lab, jumped out of the back of his pickup truck that was going full speed on the freeway. He saw her in the mirror and couldn't believe it. After he'd wiped up the shit off the seat and gotten over the shock and got back to her, she was fine.

hmmm, looks like I should be hanging with you tonight Paul! All I have is some left over rot gut wine from a real estate open house.:-)

No shit. 7 years. ' I know some of these asswipes have shown up later and fought and killed Americans. However, it's damn un-American to just lock up people who are non-combatants without a trial. Often for heresay evidence. It's just Fucking wrong. So, I have to go with Prole. We need to shit or get off the pot. If it means some of them are transferred back to their home countries, like Qatar, or Dubai, so be it. We've had plenty of time to work em over, there no more info inside of them. Have them swear on the Koran to Allah they will NOT fight us and let em go. Sorry Mike, but that's the way we should be rolling. These pricks have been in prison for up to 7 years, time to "let my people free" as they say. I they were caught in an illegal act then prosecute them.

I got one that jumps the fence and disappears and the other sits and barks in the backyard till that one returns. It's a 5' fence too. The other one is sitting in the corner right now stinking up the room with puppy farts. Damn. I'd trade both of them for 2 of those Gitmo prisoners ya'll are discussing right now, and then we could finally close that retched place and this room wouldn't smell like shit..... hopefully. F**CK

F*ing asshole racist punk MF. Check this out, unbelievable. What a prick. Bush got a lot of this crap to, but it at least it wasn't racist. Link "Online Threat to Kill Obama Leads to Arrest By Kevin Poulsen January 09, 2009 | 4:18:51 A Southern California man was charged Thursday with threatening a presidential candidate, for posting a racist note to a Yahoo message board in October expressing displeasure over Barack Obama's candidacy, and predicting "he will have a 50 cal in the head soon." Walter Edward Bagdasarian, 47, was found with an arsenal of six weapons when Secret Service agents raided his La Mesa home in November, according to court records (.pdf). He had three handguns and three rifles, including a 30.06 with a telescopic sight and a Remington .50 caliber muzzle-loading rifle. Bagdasarian is not accused of actually plotting against Obama, and he was released last month on a $100,000 real estate bond. Bagdasarian's attorney did not return a phone call Friday. The post in question showed up on a Yahoo Finance board on Oct. 22, about two weeks before the election, under the handle "californiaradial." The message was titled "Shoot the nig." "County fkd for another 4+ years, what nig has done ANYTHING right???? Long term???? Never in history, except sambos." "Fk the niggar, he will have a 50 cal in the head soon," the message concludes. The message thread has been deleted by Yahoo, but traces in Google's cache show that several other users announced that they were reporting californiaradial's comments. In subsequent posts, the author calls one critic a "crybaby," but does offer an explanation for the apparent threat. "I was drunk." U.S. Secret Service agents in Los Angeles traced the post to Bagdasarian through the IP address. When they interviewed him, Bagdasarian reportedly admitted authoring the message." His claim of "I was drunk" is so hollow, shit I'm heading to drunk right now and Sobo probably is as well, you don't see us calling people names and talking stupid dumb-assed shit. What a prick.

Concur but it took me 2 Maxims to "get" that. Powderhound showed up to climb with me once, and with in a day or 2 of him making that very comment about longevity of Maxim ropes, my 2nd Maxim rope had core shotted from rubbing on a smooth rock while jugging. I'd take the Maxim before the Petzl still. All the major mfg make pretty good stuff. BTW, to the op, bigger is better for longevity. heavier though. 9 seasons eh? Remind me that when we climb together, we'll use my rope !

I agree and like to hear both sides as well (but don't bother to listen to Rush and a few other assclowns, including some liberal types). The link I posted above claims to be an "Activist" link which I'm sure JB would totally agree with had he bothered to read it instead of immediately arguing the next point that popped into his head. As he rarely posts no links to document what he says, and appears to not even read others links, having a discussion with him looks to be pointless, although he has some valuable insights, they often seem to come out as just "off topic and not germain to the point or discussion at hand spew".

I may be the "Mother Teresa" of gear whores. I got the heads up from RyanB, all praise to him!

They are STILL available for now too. This may be the best rope deal I've seen in the 36 years I've been climbing. Thanks Ryan !! Petzls would be my VERY next to last choice, next to last as in right before I used my momma clothsline. They have quality issues and don't appear to give a crap that their brand new ropes literally just fell apart on several folks in a couple of weeks occasional use. Screw em.

Why bother with your often off-topic non-substantiated claims that seem to have importance to you? I don't and won't. Why would I? Maybe someone else cares, but speaking for myself, my interest in your all too common opinionated rants and minutia can be measured in micro-give-a-shits. Sorry dude. I bet you are a nice guy in person too, I'm just sayin' is all.

Go ahead and click on and read that rightweb link, ya might learn something.

Afraid to post the link where you got that JB? Here: link to wikipedia Here's a more interesting one. rightweb link They say " Founded in 1919 by Herbert Hoover, the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace, based on the campus of Stanford University, is one of the oldest research institutes in the United States. Funded largely by right-wing foundations and corporate donors, Hoover has been a mainstay of the Republican Party for decades, serving as a virtual revolving door for conservative figures involved in Republican administrations, including the George W. Bush administration, which employed several Hoover scholars. Case in point was the September 2007 announcement that the institution would hire Donald Rumsfeld as a visiting scholar; the former secretary of defense was widely excoriated for his oversight of the Iraq War and left the administration shortly into Bush's second term (Associated Press, September 8, 2007). Another major figure of the Iraq War, former U.S. Central Command chief John Abizaid, has also found a home at Hoover. Past Hoover fellows, including notably Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who were tagged to serve in the Bush administration, include Stephen Krasner at the State Department and John B. Taylor at the Treasury Department. The think tank's ties with the Reagan administration were similarly strong. Reagan advisers associated with Hoover included Secretary of State George Shultz, Attorney General Edwin Meese, and National Security Adviser Richard Allen. Margaret Thatcher and Newt Gingrich have also been Hoover fellows. Hoover became an ideas factory for George W. Bush before he was elected president. In the summer of 1999, Bush, then the governor of Texas and in the early stages of his presidential campaign, paid his first visit to California as a candidate. At the time, Bush's campaign was at pains to portray him as a moderate, "compassionate" conservative who would soften the hard edges of Republican economic and social policy. But a few analysts looked beyond the rhetoric to take a closer look at the advisers who provided the intellectual foundation of his campaign, and in the process saw signs that Bush was not the post-ideological moderate he appeared to be. The Christian Science Monitor noted that one of the biggest tipoffs was Bush's close association with the Hoover Institution, which had already "emerged as the early core of Mr. Bush's brain trust." The Monitor reported that there were "many interesting aspects of this relationship, not least of which is the juxtaposition of the think tank's staunchly conservative heritage and the candidate's moderate political persona. But whatever the attraction, the relationship has blossomed fully, with no end in sight" (Christian Science Monitor, July 2, 1999). Hoover is particularly influential in its advocacy of free-market economics and a hawkish foreign policy. On economic issues, the think tank has served as a home to some of the most important right-wing economists of recent years, including the late Milton Friedman, Nobel Prize-winner Gary Becker, Nixon and Reagan adviser Martin Anderson, and author Thomas Sowell. W. Glenn Campbell, Hoover's influential former director, was a free-market economist, as is its current director, John Raisian. Hoover fellows have also been influential for their right-wing stances on environmental issues. Fellow Thomas Gale Moore is a leading climate change skeptic, having authored the 1998 book Climate of Fear: Why We Shouldn't Worry About Global Warming. Fellow Bruce Berkowitz is the author of the 2001 Hoover Digest article "The Pseudoscience of Global Warming." And Gale Norton, who as George W. Bush's first secretary of the interior took a notably laissez-faire attitude toward environmental issues, is also a Hoover alum. Norton, a lawyer and lobbyist with ties to the energy industry, was a fellow from 1984-1985 (University of Denver press release, December 29, 2000). On foreign policy issues, Hoover includes a mix of traditional realists and neoconservatives, but its fellows tend to be united around the goal of an aggressive U.S. foreign policy and have been a driving force behind military action in Latin America and the Middle East. At the beginning of the Iraq War in 2003, eight Hoover fellows (including Becker, Gingrich, Allen, Pete Wilson, and Martin Anderson) sat on the Defense Policy Board, the Defense Department think tank that was once chaired by Richard Perle (The Nation, March 28, 2003). In addition to policymakers like Shultz, Rice, and Rumsfeld, Hoover fellows also include such hawkish intellectuals as historian Niall Ferguson, classicist Victor Davis Hanson, and historian and staunch Cold Warrior Robert Conquest. There is no sign that the think tank's foreign policy influence is waning, as any future Republican administration would likely be well-stocked with Hoover alumni; Rudy Giuliani's chief foreign policy adviser, for instance, is the Hoover fellow and Iraq hawk Charles Hill (Harper's, August 27, 2007). Although Hoover is best known for its right-wing stances on economics and foreign policy, it also hosts a number of well-known social conservatives. One of the most prominent is Dinesh D'Souza, who was been harshly criticized by liberals and conservatives alike for his 2007 book The Enemy At Home: The Cultural Left and its Responsibility for 9/11, which blames U.S. social liberals for causing Muslim radical anger. Another prominent socially conservative fellow is Mary Eberstadt, author of anti-feminist tracts like Home-Alone America (2004), which blames the rise of working motherhood for all manner of social ills (National Review, November 30, 2004). In addition to subsidizing the research of its many fellows, Hoover also serves as an idea factory through the publication of two journals: Hoover Digest, a quarterly journal edited by former Reagan speechwriter Peter Robinson, and Policy Review, a well-known right-wing journal of ideas edited by Hoover fellow Tod Lindberg that was long associated with the Heritage Foundation but was acquired by Hoover in 2001 (Policy Review website). The Hoover Institution's wide-ranging political influence over the last few decades is in contrast to its relatively humble origins. When it was founded in 1919 by future president Herbert Hoover, it served mainly as a collection of scholarly documents related to World War I. By the 1940s, the institution had begun recruiting scholars to use the documents, but it still had not become a think tank in its present sense (see the Hoover Institution website). The think tank began to assume its present form in the late 1950s. In 1959, Herbert Hoover gave the institution a mission statement, which it keeps to this day: "This Institution supports the Constitution of the United States, its Bill of Rights, and its method of representative government. Both our social and economic systems are based on private enterprise from which springs initiative and ingenuity. ... Ours is a system where the Federal Government should undertake no governmental, social, or economic action, except where local government, or the people, cannot undertake it for themselves. ... The overall mission of this Institution is, from its records, to recall the voice of experience against the making of war, and by the study of these records and their publication, to recall man's endeavors to make and preserve peace, and to sustain for America the safeguards of the American way of life. This Institution is not, and must not be, a mere library. But with these purposes as its goal, the Institution itself must constantly and dynamically point the road to peace, to personal freedom, and to the safeguards of the American system" (Hoover Institution website, emphasis in original). In 1960, Herbert Hoover picked a young right-wing economist named W. Glenn Campbell to serve as director, a position he kept until 1989. Campbell built the institution into a major player, increasing its endowment from $2 million to $125 million and luring high-profile scholars like Friedman after they had retired from other institutions. The Hoover Institution also gained influence because of Campbell's close relationship with California governor and future president Ronald Reagan. "When [Reagan] became president, we had a bonanza," said fellow Melvyn Krauss, and the Reagan administration was quickly stocked with Hoover fellows (Stanford Report, November 28, 2001). Although Hoover is hosted and partially funded by Stanford University, its right-wing politics have led to a fair amount of strife with the broader university community. The Nation reported that "during the Reagan presidency, close links between the administration and Hoover prompted Stanford faculty to draft a petition demanding investigation into the relationship between the university and the think tank. ... Faculty also battled the planned construction of the Hoover-backed Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and the Reagan Center for Public Policy on campus. In 1985 Stanford's trustees, led by chairman Warren Christopher, agreed that the library and a small museum could be built in the foothills overlooking campus but that the Hoover-run policy center would have to go elsewhere" (Nation, March 28, 2003). Hoover's ties to the George W. Bush administration have led to renewed strife with the university. In 2003, a group of students drafted a petition alleging that the Hoover Institution's mission statement was improperly politically motivated and calling on the institution to reform the mission statement or lose its university funding (Nation, March 28, 2003). And in April 2006, a group of more than 1,000 protestors forced a meeting between Bush and Hoover fellows to be moved to the home of fellow and former secretary of defense George Shultz (Stanford Daily, April 21, 2006). Although Stanford donates about $1 million to Hoover's library and archive annually, the bulk of the institution's funding comes from returns on its endowment and from individual, corporate, and foundational donations (Nation, March 28, 2003). Conservative philanthropic foundations have contributed vast amounts of money to Hoover in recent decades—nearly $24 million from 1985 to 2005, according to MediaTransparency.org. Donors that have given more than $1 million to Hoover include such right-wing stalwarts as the Sarah Scaife Foundation, the Lynne and Harry Bradley Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Shelby Cullom Davis Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation (MediaTransparency.org). Richard Mellon Scaife of the Scaife Foundations and Shelby M.C. Davis of the Davis Foundation also sit on Hoover's Board of Overseers. Corporations have also been quite generous in their donations to Hoover. ExxonMobil has been a notable contributor, giving $295,000 to the institution between 1998 and 2005 (ExxonSecrets.org). Hoover-based climate changed skeptics like Moore and Berkowitz have been helpful to ExxonMobil and the rest of the energy industry. And the major conservative foundations, many of which were founded by captains of industry aiming to promote free enterprise and keep their fortunes out of government hands, have funded Hoover fellows such as Friedman who were responsible for increasing the influence of free-market economics. One source calls Hoover "one of four leading policy institutions that pulled the nation's economic policy to the right in the early 1980s" (MediaTransparency.org)." Exxon contributed $295,000? over that 7 years? I'm shocked I tell you. Thats $42,142.85 a year! Shocking. Do you have any idea what Exxon makes in a quarter?