lurch

First off, nice axle upgrade...Moser, if I'm not mistaken, although Strange built a kit looked about the same... Glad to see theres still a few Eagles left and people who care enough to keep em alive, from a decade driving mine, I know it ain't easy. The valve covers, the tranny, the door handles that break when its cold, the starter that blows every 18 months... Mine was unbelievably borked out... I still have it, but it hasn't moved in years, rusting in peace in the parking lot. Maybe someday I bring it back from the dead, again.... Gearheads will appreciate this... Specs: Holley 350. Jacobs ignition. 96 amp alternator. Stamped steel valve cover off a late 70's rambler. No, the gasket pattern didn't quite match, especially the ripples down the side on the right where the newer 258 in eagles had a straight line, but enough RTV can solve almost anything. Custom tranny rebuilt with kevlar linings and custom valvebody. If you wanted that weak-ass 904 to live long you had to spend some serious cash on it. Stock 2.35 axle gears giving an apparently unlimited top end... I never did find out just how fast it would go, the old 258 had enough torque to eventually push it up to 124mph out in the salt flats, clocked by tach and GPS. I backed off before it stopped accelerating, scared about the tires. Thing was sluggish as hell off the line but hauled ass once up to speed. 6 inch lift in rear, two separate stacked spring packs for progressive rate...compress it halfway and the spring rate doubles. Rancho shocks. Amazing articulation...I could have one back tire up on a 4-foot boulder and it'd still have all 4 wheels in contact with the ground. It could climb over shit as high as the windowsills. 29-inch BFG Mud-terrains. 4 inch lift in front, homemade, angled balljoint spacers and springs out of a late 70's Concord V-8. Transfer case out of a '78 Jeep Grand Wagoneer, NP229 giving it 2.71/1 locking low. Custom gearshift for the above case consisting of a hunk of chopped off throttle valve linkage punched through the floor with a pair of visegrips clamped on as a handle. 1,460 watts of total lighting, depending on how much of it was smashed off at any given time... triple 150 watt aviation landing lights on the roofrack, 6X 55watt driving/bumperlights, assorted baja lights on the fenders and a REALLY custom headlight hack consisting of quad low/high beams installed in all 4 sockets and wiring and relays set up to run all 8 filaments at once. Battery splitter/isolator/shutoff. Dual batteries...Optima Marine under the hood, 1500CCA Caterpillar bulldozer battery in the rear. Rear brake drums off a late 80's Cherokee... huge heatsink fins, nearly overheat-proof. Cop-style bullbars front and rear with the rear one mounted on hinges allowing it to flip down to get at the gas cap behind the license plate. Good for when you slide backward off a hill into a pile of boulders. Plexiglass rear window...(this didn't work out well and had a tendency to explode into shards at the most unexpected times. After the second one blew I went back to glass.) I had more glorious adventures in that car than I can recall, a second childhood. Its a Jeep thing, they just wouldn't understand. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Trying to stop laughing... Oh god you nailed it... You don't know the whole story yet. Remember I said six years earlier it blew the pinion? Guess what year I'd replaced the axle with. Guess what happened to my ride, 3 weeks after I arrived in Cali. I stepped on the gas, it started to accelerate, suddenly went into "neutral", free-revving. Instantly I knew it'd blown something in the drivetrain. I hung a hard right onto a side street. And the left rear tire came off, taking the brake drum with it, passed me on the left, and as the axle started grinding a trench into the pavement, the tire hung a hairpin right turn and hit me in the front bumper at the same instant my now 3-wheeled ride ground to stop. Thank god Cali has lots of junkyards, I had it fixed in less than a day... when I checked the cross section of the axle, it was rusted 3/4 of the way through already, inside the crack. The freshly broken metal was only about 3/8 inch thick. I'd driven it across the continent with the axle cracked almost all the way through. That car was fucking awesome...built like a tank and I drove it like one. If I couldn't drive over it, I drove through it. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Ok this may be one of the funniest fucking threads I've seen... changes direction faster than the squirrels in my head. Short travel story... I did 3200 miles in 4 days, solo, Nashua, New Hampshire to Sacramento California. In an '83 AMC SX4 borked out into a rock buggy with mud tires. Then did it again one year later. Imagine the return ride: Almost broke, barely got enough cash for the trip, just trying to get home and get another job before the cash runs out. Noticed a faint squeak at driveshaft rotation speed from somewhere under the car on my way out of Sacramento. All through Cali, Nevada and half of Wyoming that sound was bugging me. Faint. Could only hear it over the wind engine and tire noise when decelerating. I knew what that sound was, I'd heard that sound before... what the hell was it? Couldn't quite place it but knew it was important. Kinda like a bad U-joint but different. Pretty sure its a drivetrain problem. Made me nervous as hell. Kept thinking about it. Halfway across Wyoming, in the middle of nowhere full of 700 miles of semis and sagebrush, it hit me like a nail between the eyes. Last time I heard that sound was six years earlier a few seconds before the rear differential blew a bearing and locked the rear tires at 40 mph on a back road. I pulled off the road, having a quiet heart attack. Grabbed some hex keys, popped the cap on the rear differential. Bone dry. Must have sprung a leak about 800 miles ago. This car was a rolling toolshed used violently offroad and fully stocked wih spare parts and all fluids. I dumped in my entire stock of gear oil. Then drove the remaining 2500 miles almost nonstop in a sleepless daze like a neverending low level panic attack, expecting the rear axle to blow at any second, endlessly trying to figure out if I could actually pull off a rear axlehousing swap on the side of the road by hitchhiking from whatever junkyard is closest to whereever I am when it goes. Because last time I blew a pinion bearing it took the entire axlehousing with it. All I could do was hope I got to it in time. Its the not-knowing that just kills you. That was a harsh ride. Best part: I used that car for another 3 years. The axle never blew. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Check out the "thermate, WTC collapses" thread. Billvon was dishing out what I thought was a rather elegant asswhuppin and in the process mentioned having maybe had some "thermate" slipped into his wheaties. Thus I observed that Billvon is now a combustible duck. This brought on worries from others about web page maintenance, and philosophical musings from myself about what exactly defines a duck, anyway and is it still a duck if its combustible? Shortly thereafter the thread died, either because the idiots and not-idiots got sick of beating on each other, ran out of rocks or simply lost interest in the fight. I was disappointed. And last time I looked, Rasmack hadn't updated the page yet, either. I sense a conspiracy here. "The system" doesn't want it known that ducks can be combustible. These things could be going off in backyards all over the world and nobodys even figured out how to force people to pay a tax or need a license for that shit yet! Won't somebody think of the children? You can't allow old people with alzheimers to be in posession of potentially combustible bird life, its bad for the environment. Anybody in favor of allowing this to continue is a racist trying to poison black neighborhoods with metal oxide combustion byproducts, overcooked avian science professor parts as well as blood and potentially infectious bodily fluids. Then you got to worry about mass distributing biohazard cleanup and decon kits to the public, and whos gonna pay for all this, and are you an irresponsible parent if you let your kid ride a bike or walk to school on a one-way street without one of those kits handy, or at least one of those masks the Asians became fond of wearing in public right about the time the bird flu hit. Coincidence? I think not. Hell, the release of steam alone qualifies him as a WMD. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

"If it walks and quacks and looks like a duck. It is a duck. Asking me or anybody else to prove it is a duck is just a silly waste of time." What does Billvon have to do with any of this? He may be combustible, but I doubt he's much of a racist.... -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

That may be one of the coolest camera mount ideas I've seen. Do you really need the box-on-a-post part though? How aimable do you need it to be? If I were building it, I think I'd ditch the "industry standard" mounting style and build box-on-a-plate. Flush-mounted, so theres little to no lever-arm physics going on when wind and inertia start shoving that camera around on its post. No post. Basically integrate it into the wingtip. Camera lies on the back of your wrist like a particularly hard piece of wing topskin. Pretty close to the triangular dowel/plate arrangement youve got but bigger. If the angle isn't right, include a wedge angle into the flat of the plate itself so the camera is flat and level when your arm is in "standard flight posture", whatever that angle turns out to be. If rigidity is a problem you could back it up with a stiffener in the back of your sleeve. Then you could ditch the entire wrist tether altogether... you'd just have one unusually bulky, flat, rigid gripper on that side. Post-deployment, the camera hangs at your side as part of the wing. I'd probably make it out of carved and bent lexan once I' got the exact shape, geometry and proportions... Now that you got me thinking about it, I'm tempted to try to build one for myself. I'm starting to think I might be able to pull it off with a single piece of lexan, maybe two or three if getting the bends right is too tricky. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Congratulations Brother Spot! Hey, I had a few words with the Apple people and got em to agree to leave out the more hazardous programming in the next version of the ipod, so if your next one wakes up and attacks you, its a factory defect, not a feature, and will be covered under warranty. Your old ones can still be used for self defense and thrown at people who annoy you, similar to my Dire Ninja Attack Jacket, although much like the jacket, friend-or-foe targeting can still be problematic and it is suggested that you don't run new and old pods on the same laptop due to the possibility of firmware transcription errors rendering your next-gen pod attack-prone like the previous ones. Although as a practical workaround, I'd guess the waterproof jacket is probably pretty effective at rendering your current pod harmless. Bipedalism: Its for your future! *ducks flying ipod and flees the forum*

Well, I dunno. I wouldn't presume to advise you on any changes to what may be the most awesome web page I've ever seen, but you know, with all that "thermate" in his wheaties it may have had subtle effects on his essential duckness. I mean, it brings up all kinds of philosophical questions... just what IS a duck, anyway? How do you define, "duck"? Are ducks customarily combustible? And if not, and if one -becomes- combustible, is it still a duck? Does it simply expand the definition of duck, or has it become something else entirely? Is there any such thing as a pyrotechnic duck? Now, I have a lighter shaped like a penguin, which may be related or at least shed some light on the subject without having to actually ignite Billvon in order to gain insight into this matter, but the trouble is, my penguin runs on butane and not powdered metal oxides and thus has limited scope for comparison. Its an aquatic avian with an unusually high potential for exothermic chemical reactions, production of expanding gases and various optical phenomena, but thats where the similarities end, unless I've missed something. I suppose the thing to do would be to put Billvon with a bunch of other ducks and see if they still accept him among them, combustible or no. I say, the other ducks are the authorities, and if a combustible Billvon is good enough for them, he should be good enough for us all. This is just my considered opinion, and I could be wrong, but I'll stick to it until proven wrong by a recognized authority or anyone on enough drugs with the most advanced tinfoil hat available. High tech shiny things always impress me. Lurch out. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Billvon. Is now a -combustible- duck. That is all. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Andreea, I'm surprised you didn't expect this. Earlier this season when Reed and I did our midair rodeo assembly, didn't take long before a few started trash-talking it. Some people just have no sense of fun and adventure. I was flying chase video on this one and almost fell out of the sky laughing when Jsho bit the burble. I call it a success... Crystal WAS hanging onto Sho, after all. The fact that it was upside down and chaotic just made it awesomely funny as well. Tellya what folks, next time we're all back home we're going to get even MORE radical with it. Anybody wanna bet on whether we can pull off a midair assembled triple-wingsuit docked surfing transfer? I'll land on Reed again and see if I can step off his back and onto Jsho. Or dock on Reed and see if Sho can land on us both. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Tony, this isn't pandering to trolls, remember, most people don't really know what our capabilities are, exactly, nor the difference between what we can do easily and routinely versus what we can do at our theoretical limits. Now, Stoney, I'll try to address your points... A couple years ago Jeff started showing up claiming sub-30's, low 20's and people started calling bullshit. It wasn't bullshit. You've seen the hack I fly these days to take on the x-bird boys. That is the -smallest- set of armwing hacks I've done, cut down to be user friendly and easy to fly. I don't know if you ever saw the toecable suspension version I had a couple years back but it looked like a tent and produced fallrates so low my Neptune simply did not record the skydive at all, or logged a hop-and-pop. That thing could have easily pulled a 4+ minute skydive from 13 but there was no way in hell my arms could take it. Past 3:40 or so, my arms are so wasted I can't fly for shit and my fallrate goes up. I can barely pull at the end of a flight like that, let alone flare the suit to a maximum planeout, with perfect accuracy, at the exact split second I need to. Even if I conserved energy, flew limp at high fallrate all the way down, and tried a hard planeout at the bottom, I wouldn't bet my life on my ability to hit zero as I arrived. There is no margin for error. NONE. Face-first, if you're off by 1 seconds worth of change in speed, thats the difference between kissing the surface and arriving at 22 mph with an incredible whack. 2 years ago I wrecked landing a reserve in a downwash off the cliff out in the back field here. I don't know if I can describe the sickening sensation of having flared the canopy down to my waist with no change to the descent rate. The ground just kept coming up with the same high speed till I hit it. My best guess would be maybe 25 mph vertical, tops. I hit feet first and the impact ran my knees into my chest so hard I spent the night in the ICU with cardiac trauma. It was a useful lesson in what things look like in the last 50 feet when you've given all you have to give for control inputs, you have nothing left, the ground is still coming up so fast it looks like you're still in freefall and you know, "this is gonna hurt". Just because its theoretically doable doesn't mean it necessarily ought to be done. I'm actually a believer, and more optimistic than most. I DO have experience, for example, as a human projectile across a water surface. There was an episode with some friends awhile back with a jetboat, 200 feet of rope and a rubber raft. If the boat pulls enough G's with a hard turn at 50 mph the rider is torn off the raft and flicked across the lake like a bug. You'll skip and tumble for quite a distance before you slow down enough to break the water, and when you do, depending on your body position in midtumble, you are subjected to various levels of random violence to random body parts. I got results ranging from "totally harmless" to "hit so hard it tore my watch off and almost broke my nose". I've also done a fair bit of quarry jumping, 40 to 60 foot drops. If you fuck it up even slightly, it really, really hurts. And even with that experience in water landings under various conditions, and owning a wingsuit already capable of getting within those conditions, I regard the odds of surviving such an attempt as fair at best. If I somehow got a double total mal with nothing out, I would make for water with a certain optimistic confidence of "I DO have one last chance and pretty good odds of pulling it off" because I'm pretty sure I could get my suit down to within cliff-jumping speed range in a maxed out all-or-nothing stall within 40 feet of the water's surface if it was life or death. But I would not attempt it unless the alternative was certain death. I just don't see this as a stunt worth trying to do. And as for the midget/lightweight person thing, it ain't gonna help. I was ill first part of the season this year and for awhile my weight was down to 122 lbs. My fallrate got worse because I was too weak to fly maxed out. Theres a certain weight below which being any lighter really doesn't help. Now, a really fit 75 lb midget could do it, but then his wing area would still be too small to go sub-teens. The negativity around the idea of landing a suit isn't about promoting or discouraging achievement. Its more about the fact that those most qualified to try are asking is it really an achievement or would it actually just be a stupid thing to do? Like Scott said, makes as much sense as landing a refrigerator. We have canopies for this. I've worked out a number of ideas for expanding-wingsuit hacks that blur the line between canopy and wingsuit, and what you wind up with is a clumsy wearable canopy that would be barely controllable and likely to biff about as hard as I did under my reserve. Thats not a stunt, its an accident. If its landable with a sanely survivable margin for error, it just isn't a wingsuit anymore. Doesn't fly like one, doesn't feel like one, doesn't look like one. So whats the point? -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Alright, if you won't take it from a bunch of the highest ranking wingsuit pilots around, maybe you will from a wingsuit designer and prototype artist. I've actually built and test-flown some suit hacks intended to see how close to landable I could get in something that was actually flyable. So far as I know I've flown the biggest wingsuit design ever made, lexan-and-fabric exoskeletal tail extensions, armwing mods going from wrist to ankle with a cable suspension allowing me to use my shoulders and elbows to keep the wing taut down by my ankles. The sum total assembly, when flown was nearly 7 feet from collarbone to tailtip with a 135 lb pilot. Notsane actually saw the hardware and coined a new measurement to describe it, the "balls-to-sense ratio." It doesn't work. The thing was all but unflyable. I was -almost- wrong about my ability to manage and survive flying such a thing and retired the design before I joined the ranks of all the other dead wingsuit design pioneers. The human muscle and skeletal system can't sustain a load like that. Anything you do to offset that load adds so much drag and complexity its not cost effective by the physics. Its an asymptotic curve... the slower you go, the more functional wing area you need to go even slower. Bigger and bigger suits get less and less performance increase. I got mid-30mph descent rates in a medium sized stock suit, low-30's with small wing mods, mid-low 20's with wings as big as they could possibly be made. With each increase in wing size, the gain it delivered was cut in half and it took bigger and bigger mods for ever-decreasing gains in performance. The end of that development curve results in... a canopy. To get out of the 20's and into the teens and tens, I'd need to double my wing area yet again, which is impossible without 5 foot long arms and muscles to match. And again, if you DO build something like that, you end up with what we already have... a canopy. We're not being negative here, Cloudtramp, we're being realistic. Landing a wingsuit under extremely controlled circumstances (such as Jeb's ramp stunt) as a physics demonstration is doable. Landing wingsuits the way we currently casually land our canopies under daily-driver casual flying conditions is not. And I don't think we need any more dead pioneers to drive home that fact. I got as close as I cared to get, in my quest to answer that question for myself. The others speak the truth: Anyone claiming they're going to be the one to make landable wingsuits happen is talking nonsense in an attempt to get famous and does not understand the physics their claims would demand that they have mastered. If you won't take our word for it, try asking the commercial designers out there... Jeff Nebelkopf, Robert Peknic, Jari Kuosma... Technically speaking, it is NOT impossible under theoretical perfectly controlled conditions. practically speaking, it is. In the end I had to settle for performance development within the envelope of wing sizes that made sense, and there is plenty of room for growth and improvement within those limitations. If you want to do a piece on wingsuits, I'd suggest focussing on how far we've come and the fact that we've totally filled the gap between normal freefall and canopy flight because believe me, the "landable wingsuit" topic has been done to death. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Pigpen? Owch, you wound me, Spot. I'll have you know it takes a great deal of hard work and dedication to maintain that debris cloud. I use only the finest materials... feathers, leather, shredded videotape, spectra, cat shavings, lexan, zero-p fabric, carbon fiber, bits of copper wire, machined aluminum... Anybody can make a debris cloud. Mines a creative debris cloud. Catch you at Elsinore, man. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Hell of a party, wasn't it? And Spot, really glad you showed up, man. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Hang a left.

ooo, tough crowd. Heres the finished product. One of the more challenging geometry hacks I've done. Working out shapes and locations so its low-profile, puts no structural load on the battery and maintains good solid electrical connection under the beating this thing is intended to tolerate was tricky as hell. Inner and outer hull plates are tinted lexan. I cut down the ceramic so its only present in concealed places where I wanted hard rigidity to transfer sideloads to the helmets surfaces and sealed much of it under RTV silicone. The green stuff is velcro, used for both padding/rub surfaces and camera wrapping. If I get sick of the velcro camera wrap I might make it a hard shell out of the same lexan later, but for now I like it for elegance and simplicity, plus it keeps the camera shell from getting all beat up and scratched. Same as last camera, I integrated the camera strap into the design rather than cutting it off. Instead of being in the way, it covers the mount details and acts as secondary retainer in the unlikely event of failure of the mount. The remote battery mount was carved out of parts from an old camera so it kept the ability to swap out and upgrade...tiny button inside releases battery, buttons at such an angle that theres no way in hell the battery gets released accidentally. I'm going to replace the two bolts on the back carbon fiber piece with rounded button head capscrews because repeated riserslaps will start to chew up the riser with time. I gutted an old spare battery from my previous camera setup, hacked the case so it fits the new camera and made a braided self-stowing cable for the resulting adapter so theres no loose loops of wire or anything. No plugs to come loose, should be incredibly riserslap-resistant, and now I get the closest thing to unlimited battery life while still keeping the camera itself as small as possible. I wanted to recess the camera further into the side of the helmet and still might over this winter, but it'll be VERY involved and require as much or more radical redesigning of the geometry as the battery mount did. The weight and balance worked out VERY well. I jumped it yesterday and the fact that theres a camera present at all is almost unnoticeable. Its far more low-profile than the old crude lexan mount I had with an HC-42, which stuck out a good half inch from the side. You didn't think those first pics were the whole thing, did you Spot? Although I must admit, it still somehow came out looking like it was specifically designed to fit a certain industrial-brutality aesthetic. It ain't a broadcast-grade helmet, but it was intended for rough-and-tumble daily-driver combat wingsuiting, and I think it'll serve. Whaddya think...ugly enough, or needs some diamond plate? -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Current project: May not be done for this weekend, but definitely by next. Specs: Bonehead Havok CX100, remote-mounted 3.9 AH battery, (439 minutes battery life) cheap .5 lens. Mount: lexan-cored ceramic, carbon fiber, silicone RTV, maybe some aluminum. The battery mount is half done. Still got to make inner and outer hull plates to cover the battery and protect my ear if the battery blows. Dunno if I'm going to bother with a ringsight since it ain't for pro work. Been a fun project so far. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Yes I think its possible, but not as you've described. Totally wrong way to do it. Last thing we need is to be working via coercion, threats and rewards. If I were going to start evangelizing or otherwise trying to spread my own take on atheism, morality and philosophy, it'd be by positive means. Meaning emphasizing a constructive, productive, humanist perspective. Besides, I don't see it as "believing in doubt", I see it as simply a refusal to believe the self-evidently fantastical bullshit believed by everyone else. To me atheism is addition by subtraction...removing/abstaining from belief in mystical crap frees the mind to see the universe for what it is, as it is, without degrading oneself by either worshipping things or living under the fear of whatever believers think will be done to them by their gods after they're dead. I spent my first 15 years in a religion-saturated environment, complete with lots of guilt and fear. Leaving that environment and shedding what token remnants of religious belief I still had at that age added enormous freedom to my life. In my mid-teens I had a short period of curiosity and experimentation with the occult and new age/witchcraft style bullshit, and when I found it all to be just as much bullshit as the religious stuff it is related to, discarded all of it in favor of rational objectivism. So if you want to build a rational atheistic movement, you need a clean, honest foundation. It should emphasize a drive to better yourself, to improve the human species by upgrading and improving the one individual you have control over....you. Personally I'd make a point of highlighting ideas such as taking care of other people, totally random acts of kindness, empathy and understanding of others, and the deliberate choice to be a good person by the best standards you can find with the objective of contributing as much as possible to the positive life experiences of the people you come in contact with. Since I lack a bunch of icons to tag it with, no named belief structure, I tend to think of it as just serving the light. Ever read up about the census and "jedi" being a popular religious entry? That'd be me. If I had to claim SOME religion I'd call myself a jedi. I love how popular that has become... a self-admittedly made-up fictional religion with no real structure or creed beyond "try to be good". I work for the light side of the force, (the "force" being vaguely defined as that which contributes to positive human experience) and I make my choices based on that. The only guilt I feel is when I fail to live up to that ideal, and theres always room to improve it. Feeling irritable today? I try to smile at people who annoy me, anyway. Being snappish, petty or vengeful does not serve the light. It lessens the person being that way, and takes away from everyone who has to deal with it. Being an atheist has added enormously to my life experience. Knowing there is no punishment nor reward, leaves existence a truly open-ended thing, limited only by my own choices. Taking responsibility for your own outcome forces you to better yourself. I figure, you get only one shot, better make it count. You're here, you're gone someday. Could be any day. You're responsible for writing your own story. You are the starring role in it. How do you want it to be? Hero or villain? You gonna do damage, or leave the world a better place than you found it? Encourage positivity and enthusiasm, and live the ideal here and now, practice it by your actions. Its the little things that matter. When a child smiles at you, even if you are angry or upset about something at that moment, drop it at once. Have a sense of priority, and smile back. This goes for adults, too. I used to pass through this tollbooth all the time. There was this little old lady I kept seeing in various booths. Always had this horrible, grim look on her face. Must have been stuck in some real bad long term depression or painful life trip or something. One look at her face and you just knew for her, life sucked. I decided to break that. Call it a whimsical impulse to see if I could spread a little infectious joy in what looked like rather stony, hard ground. Next time I saw her, in the 3 seconds of human interaction time available to me handing her a dollar passing through the booth, I grinned at her and said, "Smile!" Got a stone face in return. Mischeivous positivity is SUCH a fun weapon. I kept hitting her with the word and the grin for months. Never a flicker of a crack in that harsh face. I mixed it up a bit over time, occasionally passing through saying "have a nice day" or "Come on, I know you've got one, Big Smile! (step on the gas and keep talking, so the last thing she hears as I drive away is this voice dopplering away going "Big smile!") In the end I won. Rolled up one day and grinned at her, and her face cracked. I put on a comically wide-eyed look and said "oh hell yeah" and she turned her face away and looked down at the register in the booth like she didn't want me to see the look on her face. But from the side, I could see her smiling. I handed her a dollar for the toll and said "Gotcha!!!! a smile at last! Woohoo! Alright! Yeah! Have a good one!" The fact that her smile clearly made my day set off a self-reinforcing positive feedback loop and she smiled wider at my reaction, which in turn made me lose it completely, and I rolled away laughing fit to split. Victory! Somebody is no longer unhappy! Its a tiny victory, but thats how you improve the world, little bit at a time. I could go on, but you get the idea. Calling for atheists to "rise up" smacks of the same underlying mindset that gave religion such a bad rep in the first place, sort of implies a certain intent to gang up on and coerce those who do not believe as we do. Don't "rise up," reach out. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

"No, we are condemned to spiritual death for not choosing to follow God's plan for spiritual life. " Wow. What a diseased mindset. You know, I've got a brother who used to claim "energy" powers based vaguely on tai-chi and chinese mysticism. He'd claim he could move your energy around or drain you. In an argument, he'd resort to telling me "I'm draining you" expecting me to weaken or give in, as if I could be affected by such cheap psych tricks. And I'd sit there, unaffected, because it was all in his mind...no draining was taking place of any energy of any kind. Reality stubbornly failed to deliver. I offer you the same outcome. As an atheist, I concede neither the existence of your god, nor his plans for what you call my spiritual life, nor any condemnation or spiritual death resulting from failure to obey. To use your terms, I have a thriving, colorful and fulfilling spiritual life. I experience joy and elation, looking at trees, birds, clouds, sky, weather... Feel the wind in my face. I spend as much time as I can with friends and loved ones and I have plenty of both and I value them highly and give back and help out whereever I can. No condemning is taking place, (unless I fuck it up) or will, from any supernatural origin or deities. I am no more obligated to find out about and seek to obey your god's plans than I am the plans of zeus, zoroaster or any other gods from history. The one you're telling people they must obey is no different than the dozens that came before and the ones that will come after. The only difference between theirs, and yours, is that yours is the one thats popular -now-. Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

I dunno, LLoyd, although your guy is more enthusiastic than spinal tap, he seems very angry about it. Whereas I think Drake is a bit more pleased with his suit than the angry rapper would tend to communicate. But thats just me. I could be wrong. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Xat ooas fukken auesum. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

I used to live there, occasionally go back for vacation...went to school in Makati, lived in Ayala Alabang just off the south superhighway. Check out P.Burgos street. Named after a priest, it has more titty bars per square mile than anywhere else I've been. The bars change names about weekly, but the routine is the same for most... Buy a few drinks, check out the girls, and if you feel like company or hit it off with a girl you wouldn't mind spending a weekend with, have a talk with the Mamasan. Filipina women often go clean off the scale for sheer beauty...a knockout walks by every 10 seconds. Watch your wallet. Watch your back. Beware the instant wife. You get a girl pregnant, you'll be expected to support her entire extended family. You're a foreigner, ergo, you're rich. If you're into diving, check out Anilao. Theres a very good dive resort there called the Anilao Beach Club. Within a 20 minute Banca boat ride you'll have access to one of the most incredibly diverse marine ecosystems to be found anywhere on the planet. I've done reefs there that'd blow your mind...every square inch of everything for as far as you can see covered in more types of life than have ever been counted all doing their thing interacting with each other...fish, coral, every sea creature in the book is there. Sharks. Groupers. Insanely colorful tropical fish. Giant clams. Lobsters, if you do night dives. I'd also suggest a stop at Johan's at Subic Bay a few hours out of town. A great place for wreck diving, and world class food. If you've got your gear you may be able to skydive at Omni Aviation out at what used to be Clark Airbase next to Angeles City. No amenities whatsoever, not what we would recognize as a dropzone but there is a sporadic jumper presence there. Ask for Martin Imatong for details, tell him the Birdman sent you. So far as I know I'm still the only wingsuit ever to jump there... control tower managing the commercial training/freight activity there repeatedly mistook me for a fatality till the pilot explained why I didn't need a canopy for several minutes after the locals and visiting Koreans had deployed. Be cool, low profile, respectful and friendly to the locals and you'll make out fine. Manila is the most fun, dangerous exciting and exotic place I've been, and in my experience, Filipinos are a pretty friendly, fun loving sort of people. Just don't go wandering down any dark alleys, either. Like any real jungle, Manila has its predators. Have fun out there... -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Well, just found out I got to miss the first 2 days of it, sudden opportunity for robot school. I'll just have to jump harder when I do show up. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.