catbirdseat

Are you kidding? Astronauts would fight each other to the death to go on that mission, even if you told them there was a 90% chance they'd die. First man on Mars? Immortality.

This just in: PCBs and Dioxins Higher in Farmed Salmon than in Wild Salmon.

So I read in the newspaper today that Bush wants to send people to Mars. It is expected to cost $1 trillion. Considering our ANNUAL deficit will be that big in a few years, how are we going to afford it?

Kurt, do you know how many degrees are spanned by that panorama shot? Looks like it might be as much as 180.

Well, Mr. E, trask told me that when he works on his truck he doesn't even need a floor jack. He just slides under the truck with a couple of jack stands and a copy of Playboy magazine.

Was it good?

Otto was my neighbor. He told me a couple of stories. One was about a rescue he was involved with on Mt. Stuart when a climber named Dave Grant and his partner were struck by lightning. Dave survived, but the partner was killed. Dave had a burn where the lightnight bolt travelled down the wet rope and struck him. Otto also had a story about climbing with a young inexperienced fellow as his partner on a ridge in near Innsbruck, Austria in 1939. He was already an accomplished veteran at that time. They encountered a lightning storm and were forced to rappel down an unknown rock face through clouds and murk to safety. How when he joined his young partner on the ground, the guy pointed his finger to the sky and yelled something like, "ah ha! You didn't get us this time, you storm gods!" He used to love to tell how he showed The Mountaineers how to use German front pointing technique. Prior to his arrival in 1939, they were all still using 10-point crampons and French technique, exclusively.

I'd bet they would have a costume or two you could squeeze into after they let out the seams.

You two guys remind me of Mutt and Jeff

Being a native born Californian, I've always known the Banning is a place you don't want to be. They call it Stagecoach Town USA. I almost ended up there once when I took a wrong turn at 2 am on the way to Bishop.

I've got the 2004 Stihl callendar...if you only knew what I was talking about you wouldn't be so smug about stone nudes. Kurt, I have an inkling of what you are talking about.

I've seen lots of people puking their gut out on Adams, although I've never had problems with the altitude myself. They are the ones who leave Seattle on Friday night, camp at Cold Springs that evening and head for the summit the next day.

That's me.

When you stop to consider that most Americans can probably only name about half a dozen public figures, you realize how meaningless it is to say that 29% of them admire Bush.

Many have the times been that I was prepared to make a sarcastic remark about Muffy's spelling and then stopped myself. She does the best she can and my ridiculing her would only serve to piss her off. I can understand her most of the time, anyway.

Bronco, what is your point? Those guys are sort of like the poets of the math world. It takes all kinds.

We need to split this into two threads: the "Pogrom" thread, and the "Moon Landing Hoax" thread.

Who moi? My objection was not that the thread was trimmed, but that the cut material wasn't preserved elsewhere. I've already forgiven Alex after he explained how difficult it is to move posts when they branch off the original thread in so many places. I told him there ought to be a tool to convert those branches to a linear thread based on chronological order of post. There isn't any such tool that I am aware of. The reason I got pissed was I'd just written a rather long post to the Red Rocks thread and when I went to submit it, I got the message, "You cannot post to this forum", or some such. I thought I was banned at first. Well, it turns out that the thread was moved to the super secret moderators forum to which I obviously have no rights.

It's possible that a pair of skiers might also have become disoriented, but less likely. I subscribe to the adage that two heads are better than one. In this particular case, it was said that Mr. Witkowski had poor eyesight and this may have contributed to his disorientation. A partner with better eyesight might well have prevented that fateful wrong turn.

The thing about boats is that whatever boat you have, there's always a bigger, better one you wish you had.

What trask is saying is that he would be a much better person to whom to give $12 million dollars. He would be more likely to spend it wisely.

That's even worse than what the Taliban did to the giant Buddha statues.

Do you mean this face on Mars?

"On the moon, there is only one light source, the sun. This is a shot of Buzz Aldrin and Neal Armstrong planting the US flag on the moon. If the sun is the only light source used by NASA on the moon, Aldrins shadow A shadows should not be so much longer than Armstrong's " If Aldrin is standing on a hummock above Armstrong, and his shadow is cast upon a down slope, it will longer than Armstrong's, especially if the latter's shadow is cast upon an up slope. "If you will look at area B you will notice a shadow cast across Buzz Aldrin's space suit. Once again, if the Sun is the only light source used on the moon, this shadow would have been MUCH darker." It's called "flash photography". They had a remote flash positioned behind and to the right. So what? "In this picture, taken from the LEM, you can see at least two abnormalities. In section E you see an abnormal shadow on the moon's surface. NASA claims that this shadow is the shadow cast by the Lunar Module, but on earth, even when aircraft is flying low to the ground, it does not produce such a clearly defined shadow." The picture was not taken on Earth. It was taken on the Moon where there is no atmoshphere. Hello! "OK, here's the kicker... if you will look at section 3 you will notice there are no stars in the sky. In fact, you will never see any stars in any NASA Moon photographs, or hear an astronaut mention anything about the glorious stars that are visible when out of the earths atmosphere". Go take a flash picture outside at night and tell me if you see stars in the photograph. The light in the foreground is so much brighter, it swamps out the starts. I won't go on. His arguments are all half-baked.