tvashtarkatena

Rule 1: You can't answer if you know the answer. You can only GUESS. Most of you will fuck this up, I know. Rule 2: No 'looking it up'. You have to GUESS. The rest of you will fuck this up. In any case, here's the trivia question: What was Michael Savage's (conservitard shock jock, author of 'Savage Nation') former occupation?

Fuck off and play my trivia game, bitch.

You've got a crush on Obama. Admit it.

Wow. THere's so much bullshit flowing from both sides here you'd think the CC server had been dropped into a feedlot. The whole Bush hate death threat thing. FW, just STFU. You know the only death threats made in any seriousness on this board are towards each other. And SS, the 'conservitard in exile' shock jocks are certainly having a stream-of-incontinence field day right now in their standard free ass-holeciative manner, but they're not spokespeople for anyone. They're entertainers. The voltage is up in the cage and the rats are making mountains out of their own droppings instead of heading to the mountains, which, fuck you all very much, I'm doing tomorrow. So take a breath, folks. Or, more preferably, stop breathing entirely, but in either case I'm calling bullshit on this bullshit.

Just a couple of points and there are probably more: I don't think FW is either a Christian or particularly riled by the idea of gay marriage, at least according to his postings. Not sure about his abortion views, and that's my third point: it doesn't seem to be one of his themes. He's more of a property rights focused, hawkish libertarian it seems to me. Plenty to disagree about without making shit up.

A sitting hip will do the job, but it isn't as omni directional or foolproof as a belay device. It's also kind of rough to have your kidneys crushed when someone takes a screamer. I still use it for quickie situations: crevasse hopping, etc. If JH is teaching sitting hip with a directional non-locking biner, cool. If munter with non-locking...definitely NOT cool. I assume the latter is not the case. Munters twist the shit out of rope. In sport climbing, particularly with larger parties, if the rope gets fouled on a rap, who cares? In alpine climbing, not so much. Both should be required knowledge for any kind of climbing, because belay devices do tend to want to head back down without you on occasion. I've taken to using an auto locking biner with my belay device. Fatigue induced stupidity is rarely a problem sport climbing, but it can produce unwanted results after a long day in the mountains. I take my cue from a Canadian mountain guide, a mutual friend, I hung with for a few days. "When I ice climb, I sew it up now. I didn't used to, but it's a numbers game. I do it so much, why stack the deck the other way?" Along a similar vein, if human error, regardless of source, can be eliminated by a wee bit of hardware, I'm all for it. As for Swiss harnesses, they're light and just fine until you have to hang around in them...unless you're already a member of the Vienna Boys Choir. Gear loops are awful nice, too.

Soylent Green is People. FW is not.

I fully support death panels if Sara Palin is first in line.

The Anti-Climbing Gym Movement. Sounds like that one's gonna take off pretty shortly. If this board is any indication, there is no real evidence that climbing gyms have anything to do with bolting ethics. Most of the bolters on this board were drilling long before climbing gyms were invented, which was, after all, pretty recent. Gyms are a completely separate environment...there is not bolting involved at all. They simply simulate the crag for the purpose of training. Nothing wrong with training in my book. Then there's the 'big business' conspiracy thing. Um...would you rather that climbing equipment companies lose money and go out of business? Personally, I'd rather Petzl, BD and other faves stay in business and keep offering good gear at very reasonable prices (buy a ski boat and then come back and tell us our sport is expensive). These companies aren't sounding some ultra-high frequency whistle which turns hordes of Prana clad yuppies into consumption zombies...most people buy the gear because, are you sitting down for this? they like the sport. And the irony of Don's latest round of idiocy? Gym climbing requires the least amount of gear of any aspect of our sport. Finally, outdoor companies make the lion's share of their profit on clothing, much of it sported by non-climbers, not gear. Somewhere, right now, in downtown Seattle, an latte sucking, non-climbing tax attorney is sporting a $400 Arcteryx jacket. The injustice! Go get 'em, Don! Gyms have hugely raised the bar for rock climbing: producing a new generation (with some older fuckers in the mix) of very talented climbers. Not hard to figure out why: climbing 4 times a week probably gets you in better shape than climbing 1. In addition, gyms are green. Drive to the crag, or drive down the street? Even a savant like Don can figure that one out. Gyms are also great resource for kids who often can't travel to crags like older folks. Keeps those kids off drugs...um, sort of. And finally, Fred climbs in a gym. So would Gaston, sweaters and all, I'd wager, had they been available during his time.

Whatever that means. Sounded pert gud, anyhoo.

Love Goldsworthy, but no, they're not - they are only 'owned' by those who end up interested and willing enough to attempt to climb them. Well, that's what I meant...just as Goldsworthy's ephemeral work is given over to a particular stream, beach, or change of season. With his work, as with yours, place and form is everything. Yours may be more durable, but it still leaves your control once it's finished to possibly become something else.

Medved: Caller: Medved: Right. So you can just switch plans if you don't like it! That is, unless you are: -old -sick -have a family history of illness -have ever been sick before etc. Better to have some insurance industry goon bending me over than a government bogeyman The second point he makes is even more obvious. I definitely feel better knowing that if my insurance sucks, I have the option of just paying for, say, heart bypass surgery out of my own pocket! Thank god I have the option of shelling out that extra 150,000 I had laying around for a rainy day, I mean that's why you save money, right? Just in case? Yep, the best product they can afford, beautiful system- to each according to his wallet. Just like, you don't get to buy that BMW until you make enough money, in this case, you don't get the good treatment until you work for it. If you make less than $40K a year, at least you have the freedom to buy a plan that will help delay your bankruptcy for a year or two in the event you get sick or have multiple injuries. That is, if they decide to cover it. And just bask in the freedom to switch to an equally expensive plan of a competitor that will offer equally incomplete coverage for you, AND your family! Best of all, you don't HAVE to support these insurance companies if you don't WANT to! If that doesn't sound good, then maybe you just need to work harder! Is it really true that all insurance plans offer equal value for money? That there's no way to expand the number of options that people have nor the ease of changing from one plan to the next other than via the government creating a health insurance company that they own and operate? Or that this is the only conceivable mechanism for providing coverage to folks that can't currently get it? Sufficient - perhaps. Necessary? I'm not so sure. That it represents the optimal mechanism for doing so is even less clear. I lived right next door to a hospital in NZ from October through March, and conversations about who got treated for what and how were a staple of daily conversation. This doesn't make me an authority, but it's not like I'm speaking from a position of complete ignorance when it comes to the merits of one system versus the next. Different people will take away different lessons from hearing the details of a gazillion different cases in a single-payer environment vs the environment we have here, but my observation was that if you have an accident or illness that mostly requires labor-inputs to fix, and the diagnosis/treatment are obvious - the system over there will be pretty good at taking care of you. If you have extreme trauma - all things being equal, you'd be more likely to survive the experience in the US. If you have a chronic condition that requires expensive diagnostic tests or treatments, especially imaging or expensive drugs, and/or your disease has some subtle manifestations and/or requires seeing a specialist - I think you're quite a bit more likely to suffer more and die sooner than you would here. If you have a premature/sick fetus/baby - my sense that it's less likely to survive in NZ than it is here, particularly if you're located a long way from Auckland. It didn't look like prevention was a particular strength of their medical system either, given the regularity with which advanced pathologies that showed up in the ER. Also not a terribly good place to be if you're over a certain age and have a condition that'd be particularly costly to treat - although New Zealanders did seem to be considerably more stoic and philosophical about calling it quits than we are. Also on the plus side - everyone was covered. I don't mean to understate the significance of that. Just to suggest that, at least from my perspective, it wasn't free from some fairly substantial tradeoffs that came along with the particular mode of providing that coverage via single-payer/provider model. Part of that stems from the fact that if forced to chose I'd rather be broke than dead, but I realize that not everyone shares that opinion. You are understating, grossly so, the significance of universal coverage verse the sorry state in the U.S. And the 'trade offs'? Nothing more than unsubstantiated conjecture on your part.

Perhaps an Andy Goldsworthy perspective sheds some light here. Your climbs may be you while you're putting them up...but they become everyone else's afterwards.

Like I said, what if all the alpine classics had fixed lines? Fixed lines in the mountains would just mean more free ropes for booty hounds like me. The nice thing about the mountains is that most of them require a stiff approach. It's an effective filter. Extra ropes and rotohammers usually don't make it into the pack. I can understand the feelings about overbolting in cragging areas...from a distance. I just don't share them. If I see a bolt next to a trad route, I either clip it or not, depending on how I feel that day. My humanity doesn't depend on such things. Plus, I suck so I need all the pro I can get.

OK, Weather Gods, thanks for watering the tomatoes and killing the bugs. Now fuck off. Let's get some summer going on again.

I just thought I'd get in on a little o' that.

Prole, you fucking commie POS!

I'm pretty much an alpine climber, so the whole bolt thing just isn't my battle. Every once in a while an old piton falls out of some moss filled crack somewhere up there, or a glacier melts, or a mountain suddenly gets a thousand feet shorter, but that's about the extent of the change to the physical environment in that world. When I go cragging, I kind of expect a manufactured environment, including trad routes, which tend to be wire brushed, etc.

Do you see? Do you see what we've become?

I can understand longing for Spray's halcyon days when polite company exchanged pleasantries; just good comrades enjoying each other's company with a bit of good natured ribbing thrown in...along with the occasional death threat.

Crisis elsewhere probably. It couldn't just be us. We're all so nice here.

He broke up with me He broke up with all of us.

When I don't want to see other climbers, I pick a route that is likely to not have anyone there. Or I go midweek. Yeah, solitude is pretty easy to find, even nowadays. For anyone who can't seem to find it...learn to bushwhack. If you grouse about areas like Vantage and Smith or any crag close to a city being too crowded, though, you might as well add a soapbox to your rack.

Don't Ebay your down bag and downgrade to a POS synthetic one. Get a proper bivvy sack or a silnylon tarp when rain is possible.

You've slept together, haven't you?