lurch

Well it was only steaming a little, like small cloud o'vapor coming up off one small point on the wall at the inside edge of the crater. Most of the crater is filled with oddly bright green water and quite calm. Pinatubo. As for the crowd, there was just my Dad and a local girl and a couple flying students nearby in this cantina near the runway. Thats all the cheering crowd I need. Very quiet place, Omni aviation school, Clark airbase. Hell of an adventure, cheering crowds or no. And no, didn't get chased by any boulders, but I kept a lookout for em anyway... You never know, you could turn a corner and there it is, giant rolling boulder jumps out at you like a 20-ton mineral ninja.... Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Update: I came. I checked out their volcano on the way up. Nice volcano. Only steaming a little. I flew. First birdman flight in Philippine history. They thought it was pretty cool. I owe beer. Story soon. Must organize the pics video and my notes. Its been quite the Indiana Jones experience... I even got the hat. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

*sound of crickets chirping....* Hello? (looks around empty field, hears crickets) Anybody home? (crickets) No birdmen at all? (more crickets) Damn. (addresses the oblivious crickets) Well if nobodys ever flown Birdman in the philippines the I suppose I'll go do it myself. Somebody ought to handle it. (Checks watch, addresses crickets) I'll get back to you guys in about 4 weeks let you know how it all worked out. Keep chirping, huh? (Crickets...) Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Are there any wingsuit pilots in the philippines? Has anyone ever flown one there before? Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

and will put a hole in your enemy that your cat can jump through. BWAHAHA!!!! Thats it, perfect score, 100%, coffee-spray factor of a SOLID 10.0!!! And SOOO true... just went shooting with a friend at a local range. Brought this old remington 870 express 12-gauge. The range only allows slugs through shotguns. Fine by me. After sending a couple pounds of lead through the other guy's beretta I brought out the big dog. Imagine a busy shooting range with constant gunfire as background noise. I brought up the big gauge and let off a single slug. BOOOOM. The entire range went dead silent and a voice echoed from one of the other slots "What the hell was THAT?" Very gratifying result. Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Wow those guys got skills.... Anyone know whos the band in the soundtrack? Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

I had a musician try to pull that shit on me. Oh, god, the restraint it took to not abjectly humiliate him. He was a friend of a friend for whom I was fixing this amp the faker had blown the input stage on. When the guy found out I was a jumper he tried telling me he was, too... Then basically he gave me a verbal text rendition of the scene from point break, totally unaware that that clip is perpetually joked about among real jumpers due to its inaccuracy. "Where did you jump?" "this friend has a plane and took me up." "Well theres only 3 dropzones within 100 miles of here....which one was it?" "I don't remember." "really? What altitude did you get?" "I don't know... I was too scared, I just jumped and pulled my ripcord when the needle on my gauge got in the red area." "Uh huh. How many jumps do you have?" "10." "Tandems? Or did you start AFF? Get licensed?" "No, my buddy just gave me a rig and we jumped..." "Funny, that simply doesn't happen. There are training structures in place... Can you tell me what rig you jumped? What canopy? What aircraft? So far, your jumps sound just like out of that movie we all laugh at....." I needled him enough to make damn sure I knew he knew that -I- knew he was full of it, but declined to do a full-on "you're full of it and here's why".... I figured being THAT much of a loser, I should show the poor bastard some mercy. God knows the planet wouldn't. But I let the friend who introduced me to him know that his buddy was full of it and I had no use for him whatsoever. I never saw him again....I think he knew better than try to go for round 2. Does EVERY poser out there think Point Break was real? Its like the gold standard for liars and idiots. Personally I'm glad such posers exist. They remind me that I'm the real deal with a Sabre2 and a wingsuit parked in my living room that I actually know how to use without dying, and that that is extraordinary. Sad sacks like musicboy can only ever experience the faint shadow of the real thing through their imaginations and attempts to steal thunder from the real. Poor guy doesn't understand you can't steal REAL thunder, it belongs to whoever created it by creating such experiences for themselves. I DO think its kind of cool to have thunder thats worth trying to steal, though. I've started not hiding exactly, but omitting mention of skydiving to people who don't already know I do, just because after awhile the oohing and aahing and wowing and questioning gets old...its like having people discover you're a celebrity and having to explain why, every time. Over and over again. After awhile I just want to put my thunder back in its case and hide it so people don't all gawk at me for having it. I'm ordinary! Really, I am! Honest! I think its giving me a Batman/Superman complex...walking the streets I'm Clark Kent with a secret identity, because when it gets out that I'm really Superman, the demands for autographs and shit just get to be too much. Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Yuri, thank you. Hard to believe isn't it? No sooner do we as a species actually get to fly, then we forget why we came and turn to bickering. The various suits are mere decoration. WE are the flying things, debating whose suit is "better" is like debating which color makes a race car faster. We already know the entire bandwidth wingsuits occupy, the land between freefall and canopy flight. If I go too far in one direction I'm in normal freefall, too far in the other and I'm just flying like a wearable canopy. I've spent god knows how long trying to go the tiniest bit further or fall a bit slower in a GTI. The fact that an S3 would shift all those numbers up or out a few mph doesn't invalidate all that GTI time nor make it worth less to me. I've discovered perfect speed hides in all kinds of places... going over the top of the hill after a high speed exit right when you've used up all your thrust... feels like a momentary standstill hanging in space. Momentary immortality, perfect speed, right there. The seagulls would understand. The way people talk a lot here you'd think the only way to get perfect speed is to upgrade your suit more often than you upgrade your underwear. My first flight, I experienced perfect speed in a demo Classic. I'm sure I wasn't any magic superbird and by my current standards I wouldn't think I was flying "well", but that moment, hitting the air with my own wings I knew why eagles scream. I landed and totally, absolutely lost it, screaming "I want more" to every camera and grinning face in sight. Just thinking about it got me grinning again. I want more. Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

The people screaming to censor are asking us to take huge steps backwards. Thats the problem. They are not asking. They are demanding, with the oldest rationale in existence... Do it or I'll kill you your family your kids and anything else that isn't islamic. Its ultima ratio regis ... the last argument of kings. They insist that we are subject to their laws and cave-man religious taboos, and they back it up with bombs and AKs. And our insistence on refusing to acknowledge the supremacy of islamic law over all else drives them utterly insane. So we get muslims even slaughtering each other, just because they're so mad about a bunch of danish cartoons. Wheres the sense in THAT? Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Filipina girls RULE. This is me, my last trip to Manila for some scuba. And these are the girls I hung out with. And for all you guys drooling.... I'm on my way back there in 2 weeks. Theres just something about Malay DNA, man... an amazing percentage of Filipina women are simply drop-dead gorgeous, and if you're a gentle, polite type, well, they love you. Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

WOW. Just WOW. That is an incredibly beautiful animal. Miniature jaguar/leopard/cheetah. Wow.

That was one of the most bizarre websites I have ever seen right up there with Rasmack's proof that billvon is in fact a duck. The whole time I was browsing it I was constantly trying to figure out exactly what the hell was happening and what was going to happen next. Really, really, cool. Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Hey, assholes like this 0x80 DO serve a purpose. Everything I ever learned about what goes on behind the GUI I learned while figuring out how to take my hardware back from scum like this shithead. They prey on people's technical ignorance and are a disgrace to jedi hacker types everywhere. The single biggest thing anyone can do to beat this shit is, don't use I.E! I run a stripped build of XP with all the unnecessary messaging and support crap turned off or disabled, I absolutely refuse to use outlook or any MS email programs, which seem designed to let people in, and Opera for a browser. That, a simple firewall and plain old paranoia keep my box uninvaded, WITHOUT doing it microshaft's way with a billion patches each creating new vulnerabilities. I get called to help overwhelmed friends and family with computers hijacked by these assholes about every other week. Every single one of them shows a dozen or more hidden processes running in the background. 180 solutions is one of the worst but there are dozens. I wasn't happy till I figured out how to kill everything and have a box with a mere handful of basic processes....in my case 18 processes counting the stuff I use to run my Radeon card. The last computer I rescued was so infected it took 8 minutes to boot and had 38 processes running at once....2/3 of it spyware. I DESPISE guys like these and would happily pay a fine or face an assault charge for the chance to punch one so hard he'd be picking his teeth up from halfway across the state. Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Thank you. When I decide to be stupid I try to think it through thoroughly, increasing the quality of the end product. I had an equipment cheat on my side...leather workboots so stiff they took 3/4 of the load off my feet and hung it in the leather behind the steel toe. I KNOW you must have a better one. Come on, spill it, just change the names. So far your stories have a coffee-spray factor of about 9.5. Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

I did prove it. I lived, and I learned not to do that again. But I figured if I survived that level of stupidity, then backed off a few notches I'd probably be alright. So I learned how to skydive. Now I can fall all I want. Problem solved. Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Walked across the ceiling of a factory, hanging by my toes and ankles from the girders. I was up with my supervisor on one of those JLG scissor lift platforms taking inventory. Most of the space was filled with boxes stacked about 30 feet high, so the custom was to cruise the plant using the scissor lift to get a birds eye view from the top, to count the rows. I was climbing out of the lift to walk the tops of the rows, being light enough in weight to stand on top of the stuff without crushing the boxes. We had reached a gap in the rows, which, from my perspective looked like a cardboard box canyon with a concrete floor. Now I am known as someone who pulls what I call "half assed ninja moves", and can be found at my home DZ occasionally hanging by my toes from the awnings in front of the hangar. I enjoy jumping and sticking to walls like a gecko whenever feasible and inventing creative ways to get from point A to point B. I regard walls and ceilings as just floors with really poor traction. I had just climbed back into the lift platform and my supervisor had turned to take the controls, lower the lift, drive across the gap and raise it back up so I could get on top of the boxes on the other side of the gap. Then that little voice said, hell, why not? It matters this time, so just don't fall. I reached up and grabbed a girder, swung my feet up and hooked them over the I-beams, let go, and started "walking" upside down hanging from the ceiling across that awful drop, unhook one foot, advance, rehook foot, repeat. My boss turned to speak to me, and the look on his face was priceless. I've never seen a double-doubletake before. The first doubletake was him turning and seeing the lift was suddenly empty, and the shock and horror as he realized I must have fallen. He was looking in the wrong direction. By the time he turned I'd crossed a good twenty feet of ceiling and was occupying what to him must have been a physically impossible place to be... it took a couple seconds of scanning the floor below before it occurred to him to look elsewhere. Then he looked up and turned left and saw me happily walking upside down across the ceiling 36 feet above the concrete, and, well, it was just one of those things, you know? He asked a question about what I was doing so loaded with startled obscenities I don't think its legal to repeat it, but the reaction was gratifying to say the least. I stopped, turned, folded my arms as casually as one can when hanging by one's toes, looked at him baffled, and said, "What?" He just spluttered for a bit, then came chasing after me at low speed without lowering the lift to "rescue" me from my position. I merely turned and kept walking, trying to look casual but not feeling it, because by stopping I'd interrupted the overall move and now the muscle-fatigue counter was against me. It became an invisible race against time and lactic acid as to whether I would reach the other side first, run out of gas and fall, or be picked up in the middle of the ceiling by the lift. I made it to the other side just as I was reaching the shaking and trembling with effort stage and the lift pulled up next to me seconds later, giving me a nice menu of unhooking options, boxes or lift. I chose to "crouch", bringing the girders within hands reach, grabbed, released my toes, inverted myself back to normal gravity and dropped into the lift as if nothing unusual had happened. He was so astonished he didn't even freak out any more, just shook his head and asked me not to do that again. I won't. Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Yell at me I want to Be your light that shines But my ground is shaking and I might fall I wish that I could say I wish that I could be your evil evil in a closet Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Seen recently closing fast in a rearview mirror... TI 3VOM Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Obviously I can't speak for the entire planet's bottlers, BUT... I know what I see where I've worked...not too many places, true, but enough that the articles bear about the same resemblance to fact that the average newspaper article on skydiving does to what actually went on. Oh and did I mention we also UV the water on its way out the tanks? This and the ozone is why I do trust the water. Zap it to ozone, ozone kills everything, ozone turns back into O2 and ceases to exist. Theres nothing -else- in it. Its actually clean. No powders bleaches fluorides or chemicals dumped in it to "improve" it somehow. We just make damn sure its sterile when its sealed. I'd love to meet the bacterium that could survive this...several kilowatts of raw UV and a liquid environment so loaded with ozone it'd take the chrome off a truck. The nrdc article reads like one of those freak-the-consumer expose's intended to convince you that something is a major problem. Kind of like the sudden burst awhile back of articles claiming all kinds of medical and scientific credentials all about how cellphones are such a bigger threat than anyone really knows, blah blah. The part about the water from one place coming from a parking lot in an industrial park next to a toxic waste dump... Please... Thats just trying WAY too hard. National enquirer-sounding. And a lot of it is intended to sound threatening and negative, when it isn't. Leave the cap off bottled water and it might grow bacteria... well, um, yeah, bacteria DO that. The article deliberately misses the point on THAT one trying to sound all doomsday about bottled water... If bacteria won't grow in my tap water after several days, that shit has waaay too much toxic crap in it! I want water, not clorox disinfectant. At a glance I noticed a bunch more either inaccurate, questionable stretched or spun points, the most obvious being contained levels of synthetic compounds such as arsenic that exceeded... Arsenic is not synthetic. Nor a compound. They could have bothered to say "compounds containing arsenic" but their wording is syntax-specific. If they can't even get THAT right... Can you find a few studies with more fact and less hype? Some thing serious... facts, figures, exactly how many samples taken, from where, from who? an actual paper on the issue with real data, not something edited for magazine-browsing attention spans? Its hard to take an article seriously that tries to convince me that cleaner water is more dangerous than water with chlorine in it. I like my water without halogens. Not trying to talk trash of your efforts, really....but those artciles feel very much like articles about skydiving written by whuffos. Final point: Experiment for you. Go buy 2 6-packs of whatever bottled water, variety pack, random sampling. Put 6 on a shelf, unopened. Open and drink the other 6. Refill with tap water. Place on shelf, marked, with the unopened 6. Test for bacteria in a couple weeks. Or just look. Most tap water I've seen gets some kind of scum on it, sealed or not. Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Batman: 100% Neo, The One: 98% Go figure. Something to do with my twin obsessions with flying and computers and gadgetry. Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

In general, most US tap water is better than bottled in pathogen content. I don't know where your source got their info, but THAT is a bunch of hooey. I work in the industry. We ozonate the living shit out of our water....literally. Every tanker gets checked. The sources, (which really ARE springs, various locations around New Hampshire, are required to ozonate the water when they ship it to us.) Not ozonated? Not bottled, then. We have sent tankers back before, because someone screwed up at the spring, missed the fact that their ozonator was off when it was filled, blew it off and figured nobody would notice this one wasn't ozonated. We did. We also have an in-house ozonator that lives in the tank room, sits there looking very scary and high-voltage, and makes a very threatening humming noise. Everything that leaves the tank gets reozonated before it even hits the building's internal piping. All piping is stainless, everything we bottle gets sampled and tested 4X an hour. There is actually an ozone alarm in the bottling room. Ozone in the water drops below a certain level for any reason, entire process gets the E-stop till we find out why....usually its a sensor mal. We have an in-house lab specifically to -try- to find any pathogens... samples are kept like back paperwork in the labs and tested periodically to make sure nothing got in it, nothing is growing in it. You do NOT want to drink freshly bottled water. The ozone makes it taste like eating a fistful of pennies, weird sharp metallic taste. The ozone all goes away in a couple of days, and presto- perfectly clean water with some oxygen in it. Better than anything for cleaning injuries, too. Chance of infection virtually zero... you use tap water for cleaning a cut, its a total gamble, you're betting the town keeps their pipes clean. I've seen some industries with questionable practices and questionable sanitation... Mine is not one of them. Got nothing to say about the bottle litter problem, though. Not our problem. You drank it, you deal with it. I make the bottles myself with this thing called a Sidel blowmolding machine, about 83,000 of them per shift. Quality? Yeah, we got quality. Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Aggressive. Drive like you stole it and people will get the hell out of your way, thus eliminating the chances of being forced to make a sudden stop, endangering your eggs. Seriously, though, be careful not to exceed 300 words in your posts, man. Seems to be some kind of major faux pas around here. I didn't bother to count yours, but people did mine and I'm waiting to see what the penalty is. Please do hurry and get your safety vest. How you and the rest of the species survived walking down the road this long without one is beyond me. Doesn't everyone wear one? Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

PM sent. Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

that close to a steering wheel is just not smart. No it is not. It isn't even out of line calling it downright stupid. What I'm arguing against is the massively artificially inflated perception of the risk, and the ridiculous level of overreaction involved. The people making noise about this are making out like she was in an action-movie-esque situation with death-defying risk and the kid somehow only survived because they got lucky enough to get away without a catastrophic wreck setting off the airbag. As if the kids death by airbag wasn't a theoretical possibility at the end of a chain of events less likely than a double mal, but a certainty. How many kids have died, grand total, by THAT one cause, out of all drives ever taken in a car? Her child's chances of dying by lightning strike were greater, statistically. THAT is the ridiculously remote risk people are shrieking about. I have to wonder, how many undocumented mothers worldwide drive off with child at breast in countries where they don't regulate like this? How many millions upon millions of automotive departures under that precise configuration-wheel, baby, mom, happen every day in every town and city planetwide that does not consider it a crime? Somehow, they mostly manage to evade the horrible slaughter. By the same risk/frequency evaluation we should all be in jail for skydiving... one of us jumpers dies every MONTH that way! (roughly). I could go on, there are a great many newly-invented "intolerable" and now legally actionable, prosecutable risks whose probability is equally or even more absurdly remote, and they're all bullshit. Freedoms I enjoyed as a child, now outlawed. Climbing trees. Riding in trucks. Riding with or without seatbelt depending on REAL risk, not a blanket declaration. a 1/4 mile drive down a dirt road to a general store? I'll decide. Maybe I don't feel like making a big belts and buckles safety production out of a 30-second 1500-foot drive on an empty road. But the decision is no longer mine to make according to the law. A trip 100 miles on the interstate at 75 mph? Seat belt pretty good idea....the exposure to the risk is long and the speeds high, the traffic thick fast and unpredictable, and the odds are, ANY accident under those conditions will be dramatic due to the energies, numbers, masses and speeds involved. Unfortunately there is no way to defend an antiregulation position without being attacked as somehow pro child-death, and so it continues, utterly unopposed. Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Yes but that is beside the point. The point is, certain forms of behavior have become trendy to attack or label a risk. Has little to do with the REAL risk, just that lately its become trendy to perceive it as one, whatever it may be. Fifty years ago we would not be having this discussion. The idea of legally assaulting someone, prosecuting them, for not using a freaking baby seat would be laughed at. Same goes for a great many forms of behavior...the only reason you perceive it as a risk is because someone decided to crusade about it, make laws enforcing their will, and TOLD you it is, and insisted loudly. Fifty years ago if someone told you "You can't ride in the back of a truck with no seat belt! You'll get hurt! Its an intolerable risk, if you carry your kids in the back of your truck you'll be arrested, you're a criminal!" You'd have laughed in their face. It was NORMAL. Not risky, not intolerable child endangerment, NORMAL. A fundamental part of the childhood of every rural kid who ever lived, and half the suburban ones. Where was the outcry THEN? And if someone attacked you for doing so back then, accusing you of being a criminally negligent parent deserving prosecution, you'd have every right to explode in their face. Nothing has changed except our insurance company-dominated society is out forever finding new things to disallow, control or charge you more insurance for doing... forever jacking up the perception of risk because that is what pays their bills. Insurance companies drive the phenomenon, but its people themselves who repeat the trendy public safety lines until they believe them, because they were TOLD to believe and accused of courting Murphy's law if they did not. If you aren't for mandatory child belt laws, then you MUST be all for child fatalities! You beast, you! What I'm against is the ever-thinner excuses for legislating my behavior all in the name of eliminating ever-smaller fractions of hazard. Its a classic slippery slope in progress. Fifty years from now it will be against the law, a punishable offense, to drive a car without a helmet. You could hit a pole, and that wheel is right there! The risk levels are the same. Defending your right to carry your kid in the car without a helmet let alone drive without one yourself, will result in you being attacked as a criminally negligent parent who doesn't want to be bothered to protect her kids from the certain hazard of a slim possibility of the creation of a slight risk of head injury, just like Britney. Meanwhile your kids go to school in seatbeltless school buses, but thats an acceptable risk because the state is the one choosing to expose your kids to it. Its a punishable crime if YOU do it, but ok for it to be standard policy everywhere due to the impracticality and expense of retrofitting and enforcing the use of, seatbelts in school buses. Its the incredible gap between the only acceptable politically correct line and reality that bugs the shit out of me. Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.