lurch

Cats RULE. Just ask one. Seriously though, one reason I hold cats in the highest respect is because they often display insanely gallant courage ten times their own size with a kind of hilarious and cavalier total disregard for their own safety and well-being, charging headfirst without hesitation into situations that should kill them and coming out unscathed due to sheer balls. My aunt has this cat named Katrina after the hurricane, and the little fuzzball lives up to the fierce name. I watched this cat tree a mother raccoon (huge engorged nipples visible from the ground) that must have outweighed her ten to one, and she KEPT the thing treed until we brought her inside for her own protection, furiously protesting that she had that raccoon right where she wanted it and was gonna get her if it took all night. If that monster raccoon had realized how small the aggressor was she could have eaten the cat alive, but the cat kept the coon intimidated by raw ferocity. Half the reason we brought the cat in was to give the raccoon a chance to escape and return to her kids with some food... Raccoons are cool too and being a mother she deserved a break. Amazing animals, cats.... Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Second that question. YMMV of course, but past the pursuit of simple time I found that the less effort I put into any given muscle group and the less strain I put into flying, the longer the flights became. As I was told by senior pilots, when I stopped going for time, tilted over forwards a bit more and went for distance, the times came back of their own accord, granting me ever-larger helpings of both distance AND time with less and less effort... It takes me far more effort to fly SHORT range and slow, semistalled than it does to fly long and slow and let the suit have all the forward speed it wants. Personally my thought is, the future of WS design will be ever-finer tuning of lift, profile and balance so that greater and greater performance is more easily obtained with less and less work on the part of the pilot, well-balanced pressurization and WS structure taking up the workload originally handled by brute force on the part of the pilot. That said, I'm looking forward to having my ass handed to me by my new S-6 when it is done... If I'm not totally in error here, I think I'll find the "3 minutes dude!!!" is most easily accomplished in the S-6 by pursuit of the relaxed "lying down on an air mattress" flight mode that delivered the best performance with my lowly little GTI... You know what part takes the most strain for me when I fly that way? My neck! Its the only part not gently supported by the wings or extracting any lift out of the deal, and man do I feel it after a day of flying... I used to be pencil-necked, I'm rapidly becoming bullnecked instead. This is all very subjective, though, and I may find when I learn a bigger suit things change dramatically, but thats what I fly for, to learn how to fly, better. I can't wait to discover if these techniques cross suit architectures and work as well with bigger wings or are simply artifacts of the way a GTI performs. My .02$... -Lurch Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Post deleted for fear of winding up on some watch list. Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

There's only one road that leads to God and that is through Christ. There aren't many roads. Jesus made that clear. You may not buy that but that's what's in the message. 1: There ARE many roads. An infinite possible number of them. Amazing that you walk through your life every day seeing people walking those other roads but you claim the roads they're walking on don't exist. How limited. 2: You assume everyone wants to go to this god of yours. Maybe some of us want to go elsewhere, anywhere, somewhere far beyond, just so long as it doesn't dead-end in this god thing with no more new questions. "why live by any rules or moral conduct at all." Easy answer. Theres far more to life than following a rigid caveman rule structure you think was imposed on you by something else. Many of us, by our own free will, choose to make life for ourselves and loved ones better, just because we can. Just because you cannot conceive of a moral system not imposed on you by the supernatural and divorced from the value systems it supposedly enforces does not mean that such a system does not exist, nor that there are not people living by it. I am one of them, walking a road you declare nonexistent. Most of the best people I've known had value systems at least loosely based on the idea of not hurting people because we don't like being hurt ourselves and don't like seeing it happen to others. Amazing, huh? Authentic self-worth derived from a sense of value of yourself to yourself and others, based on respect for those others, and yourself. We're only here a short time, lets make it as good as we can for each other. With a value system like this one, what do I need your jesus for? Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

And congrats again on the absolutely spectacular performance, Ben. That sound of eerily quiet freefall gets addicting real quick, to some. You may find some of the more experienced birds have already grown somewhat cynical about it, somewhat scornfully referring to it as "number chasing." Ignore it. If you are "number chasing" it is due to a fierce desire to fly better, faster, further, longer, more. Indulge that desire to the limit, and you'll find that that limit breaks, over and over again, and what looked impossible becomes your new Normal. I STILL can't believe you pulled that off this early in your wingsuit development curve. I am so....freakin....jealous. You love the wind THAT much, it starts loving you back. Just awesome, Ben. Congratulations, now go fly more! The wind wants you back. WOOHOO! Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Bear in mind.... SNORT. Somehow. I just knew that was coming. I don't know how but I knew. Interesting suit there. I'd been thinking about doing something with the hands on my old GTI exactly like what Tony has done with his suit, the idea being to be able to tense the wings cleanly all the way to the fingetips. I'm not surprised to see it implemented, its the next logical step to increase available wing area. The next step AFTER will be to sweep the material back and integrate the handwrap with wing extensions like a V1. THEN we'll see some fallrate. Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Fortunately for all of us here, we have far more than enough guns to make sure THAT will never happen without depopulating the nation. Attitudes like that are precisely what raise an American's hackles and the specific reason why we keep em. Kinda like Switzerland but a lot pushier... Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Actually, it does make sense, because as stated it does explain what backs your faith and leaves open the nature of "evidence." Thats where the gray area appears because everyone has their own standards of what they would consider to be evidence supporting their faith. I consider objective reality to be sufficient evidence of the nonexistence of a god the same way you would consider it sufficient evidence for nonexistence of Santa. You look about you and nowhere in Reality is there room for exceptions to the rules of physics that would allow for the existence of a fat man in a flying snow vehicle powered by domesticated northern ruminants stuffing himself down every smokestack in the world in a single evening delivering gifts to children. You don't need faith to know theres no Santa because the idea flies in the face of every fact about Reality you've ever learned. I see god in the same light, exactly. Most Faithful don't because they somehow were taught that you don't apply that logical filter to the God idea, anything else ok, but not our God. I do not respect that limitation. The idea of God is just as subject to scrutiny and rational peer review as any other, and, put to the same test as any accepted facts like physics, fails dismally. Take Paj's statements about god and punishment. Not to pick on Paj or anything, but nowhere in his statements do I find even one single connection to objective reality. All of it is based on assumptions of the properties and desires of things that do not exist and statements of the things this "god" will do to you when it judges you. First you have to HAVE a real diety, then you have to establish that it has authority over you and that it can and will take direct action upon you for disobeying its will. I see nothing backing the original assertion that there IS a diety with the stated properties desires and mentality, and I see nothing indicating from where or in what form of expression its will was made known. Usually the claim is made that its desires are made clear in the Bible, the truth of which is not subject to debate because the writings were Inspired By God or because God personally spoke to the writer. When people hear voices in their heads we call it schizophrenia and treat it, we don't write down what they thought they heard and claim it as commands from the Almighty and actually expect people to obey. The ONLY thing I see supporting the idea of a god is Other People's Say-so. And the starting point of that say-so is an edited-beyond-recognition book of oral traditions passed on by a bunch of Neolithic fishermen over 2000 years ago. That isn't evidence, it is hearsay, and much-distorted hearsay at that. And nobody answered my question: You find yourself in 2286, wearing the same shoes as the ancient Greeks would today, practitioner of an extinct religion. Christianity has followed the path every other self-propagating viral memetic belief has taken in time, that is, it has failed to propagate due to education inoculating people against the belief, and it has died out. From that perspective, one where the will of Zeus or God or whoever is no longer considered binding, what do you do? Keep the faith? Or move on? Consider that in the most educated parts of the world, exactly that phenomenon is occurring. Nobody expects America's legal system to enforce their religion's laws anymore, and right now rational society will no longer permit people to enforce their god's will on others. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

That. Is one. Sweet. Image. Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Semantics, yes. But you say it dismissively. On this topic, semantics are everything. Belief as defined involves thinking you have knowledge without anything objective to back it. I am an atheist in exactly the same way you are an asantaist. People have told you Santa is real, but you know he is not. You don't disbelieve Santa, you know that in the real world he is just something someone told you about, and you know he isn't real. You don't consider it to be a belief because you -know- Santa isn't real. You don't need specific proof of his nonexistence to back your knowledge of it, since you have an entire objective reality in which theres no evidence FOR a santa from which you derived that knowledge in the first place. And the discussion DID go somewhere, I have no idea where, though. Withdraw if you like, I thought it a productive perspective to raise, myself, although if I felt like getting all Japanese about it I could get mildly bent out of shape over the fact that you thought I was such an asshole I'd demand you ask my leave to be allowed to withdraw a comment. Now where were we going with this? Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

AMEN! The clouds have been particularly surfable lately. Instead of time I've been going for that dizzying headlong plunge-down-the-slopes action and breathtaking visuals resulted, the kind you sit gasping and laughing at when you view the video later, unable to believe you just did that. And, I got spooked off Rodeos years ago after trying a few at very low WS jump numbers, got flipped over on exit, decided I wasn't ready and shelved rodeos for later. Lately, I tried again, figuring by now I'm so comfy in a wingsuit I ought to handle it no problem. I was right. Exit and flight went off without a hitch, although with greatly increased armstrain. Rodeos are GREAT arm training for prepping to fly a bigger suit. Oh my god I had a blast. Did 3 rodeos in 2 days and want to take everyone I can, my passengers thought it was awesome! Now I have a new way to intro people to wingsuits and a whole new field of wingsuiting to play with, involving non-wingsuiters and all kinds of new ideas for Stuff Based On Rodeos, wingsuit rodeo/RW hybrid dives, all kinds of things. I am currently the coolest boogie board in existence, or at least until someone else does a rodeo. Best Time! -BC Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Nope. Sorry. Logically assembled rationality doesn't work that way. I think theres a logical fallacy term for the method you just used, something like a reversed "argument from ignorance" where inability to DISprove something is held as positive proof of its existence. Belief isn't a numerical thing subject to mathematics but I can use a simile. Having a belief is like having a number. You believe, so you see a +1. You think I see a -1, which is still a number, negative number but still a number. Does not work like that. I see a 0. In reality when you subtract 2 from 1 you don't get -1, you get nothing, a failed transaction because you were able to subtract 1, but when you tried to subtract the second "1" there was nothing to subtract, reality doesn't allow you to have -1 oranges. I didn't say I "believe in no god". The idea starts from the assumption there is a god to deny. I've gotten that misconception from many christians because they can't conceive of a blank reality without the concept of "god" in it, therefore I'm not a atheist I'm a christian in denial of god. You can't have a specific "belief in NO whatever" if you never assumed the existence of the whatever. I don't "Believe" in NO god, I've never seen any evidence that would lead me to think there WAS one. My starting point is ZERO, not minus-one. That doesn't make me a believer any more than your knowledge of the nonexistence of unicorns or Santa makes you "believe" that they DON'T exist. Its not a proactive thing, you just know they aren't real. The starting assumption, lacking information supporting the specific positive existence of something, is a void, a nothing, until such time as someone puts forth the idea of their existence. The same way you'd feel being told about the spirits and the ancestors by the local Feng Shui man. You don't DISbelieve the Feng Shui man, but in your world there aren't any spirits or ancestors to worry about, the things he says, (you MUST have the dining table facing east or bad fortune will come to you and the ancestors will not bless your home) simply aren't true, and do not apply to you. Thats me. I unasked myself, rewound my mind and asked myself what would I think and "believe" if I never heard of any of it until I was an adult? Saw it from the outside, like we would see Islam or Feng Shui or whatever. The answer was I don't believe in any of them, and have seen nothing to make me view the christian viewpoint as any more valid than Zeus or Zoroastrianism. The default state is assumption of nonexistence, or else you could legitimately propose the universe is actually full of unicorns because I can't prove to you there aren't vast herds of them somewhere where I can't see em, and claim my inability to prove those herds don't exist is proof that they do. Your rebuttal? -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Do I, now? (bares fangs for battle)

So, you think you have no beliefs, huh? The subtext in your question is clear. I answer this way: I don't THINK I have none. It was a statement of fact with no iffy qualifiers like "I think". I have none. Beliefs, that is. I draw a line between verifiable fact, opinion and feelings or beliefs. I've had believers jump on this before, trying to prove that I Do in fact believe whatever and my rationalist certainty on certain topics equates to their Belief. It does not. Usually the argument goes "But you believe in electricity, or gravity, or evolution..." I do not believe in these things. I do not need to. They are self-evidently present whether I acknowledge them or not. Whether someone else tells me about them or not. They are not subject to things like "belief." They are facts. God is not a fact. The supernatural of any description is not a fact. Resurrections virgin births and saviors are not facts unless you work in the medical field and have seen virgins get artinsem, and cardiac patients resuscitated, and thats cheating because it is real and has nothing to do with faith or divinity. Unless someone else tells you about these religious things and tries to convince you they are true, they do not exist for you. There are many who have never heard of this "god" critter or his agents Jesus and Mary. To those raised in ignorance of other people's belief structures, there is no such thing. To those raised in ignorance of education, Gravity Electricity and Evolution are still real influential undeniable parts of their lives even if they have no names for them. Disbelieve in electricity all you want, drag your feet on a carpet on a dry day you get zapped anyway. Disbelieve in gravity all you want, jump off a cliff you splat unless you brought a canopy with you. Disbelieve in Evolution all you want, it will not stop bacteria from evolving antibiotic resistance, will not stop the roaches under your sink from evolving defenses against the Raid you've been using. So, no. I don't have any beliefs unless you count quasi-opinions and positions like "I believe in being nice to animals." I very specifically reject the notion of "belief" in favor of living in the reality I know. Chanman wanted discourse. Ok, I riddle you this, then, not a rhetorical question, quite serious, here: Hypothetical situation: You're a believer, and somehow, by cryo or time warp you wind up in the Future! And you find yourself in the same situation any adherent to the old Greek and Roman gods would face, transported to here, now: Your religion has gone extinct. You are in the year 2286 and there are no more christians. Rationalism triumphed 2 centuries ago. Theres nobody left who believes in a God let alone whatever particular flavor you favored, Catholic, Baptist, whatever. You are The Last Believer. You try to tell people all about how God wants this and that and commands this and that and they laugh at you as if you were actually proposing that they are subject to the will of Zeus. You realize, that, since, according to the book "there is no way to heaven except through me", and nobody believes in "Him" anymore, according to the rules you know, EVERYONE- without exception, has gone to hell unredeemed since the day the last believer died in 2106. Pop quiz: In such circumstances, which- HAVE happened, (ask any Zeus worshipper) What do you do? Keep your faith? Voluntarily accept the mantle of "total whacko" that would be assigned to you by an entire civilization that long ago matured beyond notions like "god"? Or choose to become a functional member of that society and let your faith and beliefs fade away? What would you do? Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Agreed...the other thing I'd disagree with is the slightly head-high tip. For "float" flying I'm lying down flat on my air with my head tucked down below my shoulders like a vulture. For "fast" flying I'm ever so slightly head down, verging on atmonauti flying attitudes. Aside from momentarily during openings or high speed exits, theres never a time while WSing that a head-high attitude does me any good. It is just like a tracking dive in that respect, Kris....the surest way to take yourself out of a tracking dive is arching and craning your neck to look up at the formation you're trying to get back up to. The more you go head-high the faster you drop away below. I could show you video of a guy in an SF3 trying and failing to stay with a couple guys in GTIs because he kept his frontend reared up, looking up at us as he dropped away below, even though he had his wings fully open. If you're trying for long fallrate with your head higher than your feet, you're flying a dynamic tailstall, going nowhere fairly rapidly, and sacrificing -easily- 25-35% of the suit's capacity. My.02$ Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Yup, that was me, guilty as charged.... My Neptune missed the first few seconds, video told the truth. End result: 22,300 ft. FF time by video: 03:55. Suggestions: Gloves are a must....I didn't think it through, expected it to be at least tolerable, 80F on the ground, turned out to be about -20f at altitude. I had to ball up my fists to keep them from flash-freezing. Suck your O2 till the very last second and DASH for the door. And I'll tell you the same thing other birds told me... save your strength for the second half of the flight, you'll need it. Try to max out your min fallrate right out the door at that altitude and you'll exhaust all the oxygen stored in your bloodstream long before you reach breathable air. Just get out, gasp like a fish, get wide and relax for a while. If you're flying any of the bigwing suits the same holds true but much much more so. A GTI is relatively easy on the arms. I find flying anything bigger than a GTI is a hell of a lot more work, trying to stay maxed out in a V-1 or an SF3-6 for that long would be total hell. And have fun! High altitude WSing gets you into the very, very, very small ranks of those who have freefalls of well over 3 minutes... for everyone else without wings, the only way they're getting a flight anywhere near that long is exiting from over 40,000 feet. Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Trouble with outgrowing things like religion is, as soon as you understand that you are not a believer it creates an instant us-and-them, with the "them" being most of the world. "they" in turn, thinking their religion-based morality to be the only one, think you have rejected all morality. To the eyes of most religious, the nonreligious are by definition evil. Being an atheist I think its hilarious that to some people the act of thinking clearly unclouded by belief defines their concept of wrong. To me, HAVING beliefs defines my concept of wrong. I just leave out the "evil" label and try not to judge people by theirs, since almost everyone has them. I'd imagine Hairy here has had to deal with a great deal of condemnation. Hairy, I'd suggest a little more eloquence and a little less beating your point in with a lead pipe. Burying them in links to a website that isn't exactly a paragon of rationality and science itself isn't helping your cause. That site's stuff comes across as so new-agey/flaky that most rationalists would dismiss it as new age crap at a glance. I did. I then went back and read some of it, and it is crap. It backs up my atheist position, but I wouldn't want these people on my team. They're as full of crap as most self proclaimed witches satanists and pagans I've known, full of talk about universal cosmic conciousness and vaporous proclamations of connections to the infinite. Explaining why you hold the position you do, though, in clear language without resorting to insults or sarcasm? THAT might get your audience's attention. Truthbeknown.com? Gimme a break. There is only one way to speak the truth on such matters and know you are speaking the truth: say "I do not know the truth." I don't. And if I ever claim to, I'll be wrong. Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

This is going absolutely nowhere. I feel like a guy trying to organize a baseball game-in an empty field. Ok, then. Looks like it'll be itty bitty miniflocks or whatever we can scrounge. Check back in 5 years, hopefully we'll have more birds by then. Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

It just keeps getting weirder. Guy was getting started not 60 minutes ago, inspiring this rant. I went and kicked in my weaponry and shut him up again. Came back in here and wrote about it. While the system was unattended I heard a loud WHACK! from the other room. Smelled a smell that gives electrical engineers nightmares and bolted into the living room to see my old Gateway2000 semiretired crappy-rez monitor had just gone up in flames, literally. Smoke billowing out the top filling my apt real quick. I have everything on various killswitches and used one, which killed the fire but for the moment my subsonic weapon is down until I move another spare monitor out there. Dammit! NEVER trust old electronics. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

So. Its rainy and I'm bored. I have this asshole moved into the apt across the hall. He has this slewed sounding bass-heavy voice that had me absolutely convinced he was a 300-lb black man. An angry one. To be fair, the guy actually has an excellent voice, makes me think of James Earl Jones with a NY city accent. Met him by chance in the hall a month ago. Its a 200 lb stupid, drunken angry white guy who just never....shuts....the fuck....up.... This asshole gets worked up and yells. Full-throated top-volume would carry clean across the airfield, outdoors. At whatever. The phone. His visitors, whatever they are. All I hear is "eahhh!!! Bleeeeahh eaaaahhhh bleeaaahhhh!!!!..." I can hear children start crying upstairs when this asshole gets going. I can hear this asshole through five walls. My closet wall. The wall to my room. The wall to my apartment. The wall across the hall and whatever walls are inside his place. Tricksy problem, confronting someone who obviously gets worked up to rages with great enthusiasm very frequently. If he got froggish I could deliver some medieval smackdown, in a fight I'd eat him alive and spit out his teeth, but I do not want to fight him, I do not want violence. I want to be civilized. But how? War with your neighbors....never works out. What to do, what to do? Lets see.... I have an apartment full of junk technical stuff. Discarded jumping gear. Spare helmets. Auto parts. Half a suspension for me old AMC. 3 semiworking pentium 4 class computers. 4 nonworking pentium 1/k6-2 class computers mostly as parts. A few old car audio amps, flea-market quality, a couple with one blown channel I keep around just in case I ever need to improvise a crude inverter. A Jeep transfer case. A big pile of megamagnets. A 1600CCA Caterpillar bulldozer battery, about 400 lbs of battery acid. An old Boston Acoustics isobaric/bass reflex type 12" .5KW subwoofer from high school. Stacks of leftover software from early pentium stuff. Half a dozen spare keyboards. And a really devious mind. Idea: don't confront him, confound him. Psych war, thats the thing. A piece here, a piece there.... lets see now.... Heavy equipment battery: Check. Old 1-ghz athlon processor: Check. Sound card, signal level: Check. Battery charger: Check. Really heavy power cables: Check. Old 600 watt "majestyk" brand amplifier: Check. Boston Acoustics' best subwoofer from 9 years ago: Check. Signal generator software: Check. Devious mind: (evil little chuckle).... Check! Hook it all together, power up this ugly pile of gear and test it. Works ok. Low level signal test says all systems ok. Produces a nice 1-khz test tone on demand, and pipes it into the boost of my choosing. The fun part: Using it. I wait a bit until Asshole starts up again....beah yeah beeeah yeah bleah eah.... When he hits full rant, I power up. Set signal generator to 17 hz. Volume to minimum. Engage. A faint vibration ensues. Grab the slider and slowly start ramping it up. The vibration becomes a dull subsonic rumble. Leave it be for a sec. Seems ok. But not enough. More. Ramp it up. Past a certain threshold the rumble changes from just vibration to a faint almost-heard "tone", like a musical note you can't quite make out, or like the way you know when a diesel school bus drove by half a mile away because of that rumble it makes. Keep ramping it. 200 watts, 300, 450. The speaker cables begin to get hot and an overloaded-electronics smell fills the apartment. Everything in the apartment takes on a faintly wavy appearance and the entire 18-unit building shakes. Things start dancing off the shelves and I can hear loose nails and other junk jumping around inside the ceiling. I go to the keyboard and add another tone to the current one. This one at 18 hz. The two tones overlap with different periods, resulting in a third tone that sounds like a very slow sine wave, a dull thunderlike throb that comes and goes well below the threshold of hearing it as sound. At 500 watts, its enough to shatter nerves. I laid the Sub box down so the bass ports themselves are pointing directly at my door, across from which is HIS door. I apply about 10 minutes of attack subsonics, then gradually slide the volume down so nobody will notice precisely when the shaking faded in or out. Bass is omnidirectional, no way this guy figures out where the power is coming from. I listen. Blessed silence. An hour later, asshole starts up again. So do I. This time the effect is immediate. Within 20 seconds of slowly ramping up the subsonics again, Asshole suddenly breaks off his bullshit and I hear what sounds like nervous conversation from across the hall. As soon as HE stops, so do I, again ramping it down gradually over maybe 30 seconds so it stays below perception threshold and gives the impression the source is much further away than it is... He tries again. I thunder him down. And again. Same result. Now, days later, every time he starts, so do the subsonics. He becomes very nervous very quickly and shuts up again. Aaaah, the blessed sound of silence. Now THATS neighbor management. Guy never even knew he was a problem, let alone that he got his ass sorted out and handled without ever even needing to confront his drunken face. Anybody else got some creative neighbor management stories? Post em! -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

111, Isn't that a little harsh? You sound almost as if you think there should be a penalty for landing out, or it should be held against the lander somehow. Landing out is going to happen as part of a learning curve, it takes awhile to learn how to read winds and your slope. Flying with others slows this learning curve down a bit since you're paying attention to your wingmate, not just drift and slope and its easy to suddenly realize the picture ain't quite right and you blew it. I wouldn't want to have an inhibition against giving up and landing out. Generally my first priority is to -not- die of gethomeitis like this guy I used to know. Didn't even have a wingsuit, but reluctance to consider his outs till too late still bagged him. Its been awhile since I landed out, myself but I'd cut me some slack for the future since sooner or later I'll probably misread the winds down low or whatever. That said, I've been guilty of stretching some spots so far they should charge me mileage and relying on rear riser ninja tricks to get me out of it. If I was smarter I wouldn't have to. Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Just wanted to post this where connected birds will find it. I'm calling for any and all birds within 500 miles of Pepperell to come to the New England boogie August 17-20 at Skydive Pepperell. We will be trying to build the biggest slotperfect wingsuit formation to date out of whatever we have. If you can fly fairly tight and relative to another wingsuit, we need you. Will likely be a registration fee, will post when it is certain. Anyone who wants in, post here, build a list, and spread the word because this is going to take some recruiting, there aren't many of us. There will be demo suits available, specifics are pending. Thank you. -Lurch Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Its gripe bait. Yes its a disguised...-thinly- form of public prayer. And even to an atheist its so politely administered as to be harmless. This is not ID creationism or indoctrination. Nobody is telling the kids to pray, nobody's saying you ought to use this moment to pray to X god or specifically OUR god. IF you DO pray to anything, now's your chance, can we all just leave them alone to pray for a minute if they want to? I'm an atheist and I don't think this is an issue. If you pray, feel free to do so. If not, feel free to just do nothing. Pray to Lord Rayden, Mictlantecutli, Cthulhu or The Architect, whoever you want. End of problem. I could see letting this stand as a nice concession to religious folks, a kind of meet-you-in-the-middle sort of thing. The atheist types who will overreact to this give themselves away. They're not about hands-off want to be free from other people's religion, they're about stopping other people from enjoying theirs. That kind of thinking gives atheism a bad name and makes people think if you're not FOR my god you must be actively AGAINST it so you must be evil. I got a friend prays on the plane now and again. I respect that. Despite my doubts about the reality of who and what he prays to, I still might ask from time to time to be included in his requests for a little divine backup. You never know, I could be wrong, and when jumping out a plane, you need all the backup you can get. AMEN! Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Solution suggestion: Once upon a time in America there was this informal way of training kids for the adult world: give them jobs. Serious ones, not lawn-sale-scale-make-5$, but real jobs. Apprentice in a pharmacy. Cleaning rollers in a print shop. Whatever. I understand the evolution of conditions through the industrial revolution, kids working 80-hour weeks in factories getting mutilated and the myriad abuses that led up to today's level of control of kids in jobs. I understand the history. But its so far overboard in the overprotection direction as to make it all but impossible for anyone ages 11-17 to get a job or make any money at all, at least in the suburban and city environments I experienced. Farm life may be different, I always got the impression kids in rural areas got handed adult responsibilities sooner. Let the kids have jobs again, take the leash off the 15-year old entrepreneurs, let the 13-18 year old set man the drive throughs flip the burgers pick the lettuce and the demand for illegals will vanish, (or at least decline) the kids will learn how to earn and have something better to do than Columbine each other pretend they are gangsters and worry about Brittney freakin' Spears. The jobs will be getting done, the money stays in America and winds up in your kids' checking and savings accounts, the ones all you parents are teaching em how to use responsibly, right? I spent ages 0-15 living in poverty conditions. If anyone would have hired me at 13, 14, I'd have worked. I tried. The only people who will ALLOW you to work are little old ladies want you to mow the lawn, and their idea of pay scale tended to date from WWII. Being paid 3$ for 6 hours work because you're a kid and encouraged to save it for the college you know costs $50,000 is degrading. Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Excellent, thank you, that was exactly the kind of image I was seeking. Decision made. Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.