lurch

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

ok, what movie: "Murder! Lemme tell you about murder. It's fun, it's EASY....you gonna learn all about it." Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Ok pop quiz regarding the freefly mods commonly used on a vector II: I have addon bridle pocket, new (under a year old) ubertight boc, tight riser cover velcro, main tuck tab retainer elastic across the back of the flap and the old somewhat cracked pin cover stiffener has been reinforced. Been freeflying this for some time now, seems to work great, zero problems. The question: anybody out there freeflying a v2 with mods have any problems with it attributable to its origins as non-freefly friendly? If so, what happened? edit: I just saw the in response to thread appear and read it. The v2's described sounded like factory stock. I mean any case where the mods failed to do their job... Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

I like the somewhat zen answer to that question. Desire causes unhappiness. Using that, I try to want nothing instead. YUCK. If you want nothing, refuse all desire, go for the zen ideal and succeed, you'll wind up a contented nobody, doing nothing, achieving nothing, going nowhere, with nothing. I could accomplish all that in a box 6 feet under ground. Desire is the emotional voltage differential that can be used as the power source to create change and growth. The stronger your desire the more power you have. Let desire guide you, and when it takes off, grab ahold and hang on for the ride and see where it takes you....if the desire was a real one and a good one, the place it takes you will probably be better than where you are now. There's a reason zen philosophy never really took off...none of them wanted to do anything or go anywhere with it. Strikes me as a good mental state to avoid, personally. I want more life. I mean to have it. Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

how would you go about in finding what you really want in life? Easy. Lot of people chase lies, things other people told them they want. Reminds me of end of high school, everyone else taking SAT, experiencing angst about getting accepted to a college like beggars hoping for alms. Pick me! pick me! I'd already given up by then, ditched the program, started writing my own. Everyone else at that school struck me as sort of domesticated...following programs written for them by someone else...parents, guidance counsellors etc. Being good little seniors. I dropped out end of junior year, left the school, took plane ticket home started working, living, bottom of economic ladder, poverty. Stupidity. Was a very unhappy man. Learned a lot about hard work, pride, tech stuff. Biggest lesson from then: I learn what I want by watching what I do. I wanted interesting, I got it. Became an adventurer of sorts, widened the scope, then took a tandem. I'd always wanted to try that someday. Looked like the way out of a dreary endlessly repetitive existence, at least for a moment.... It was a taste of things beyond and things to come...if I wanted them bad enough to focus everything toward getting them. Took me another 6 or so years to make it real. It's been about a year now since AFF. I've been a happy man ever since. It taught me how to really USE things like absolute iron determination, strength of will. How bad do you -really- want it? Bad enough to face and hurl yourself headfirst into the fear every AFF student knows? Happiness in life is having just had a huge buffet of adventure learning and living, and when thats done, having an even bigger plate full of life awaiting you, and discovering the first one just whetted your appetite for more. I'm at 118 jumps and just put in for a C license. The trip isn't over, it's just begun. The mindblowing adventures of the past year have been only a prelude, the introduction. My bigger plate still to come includes night jumps, a D license, a riggers ticket, lots of freeflying, (finally getting a good sit/stand!!! I can't WAIT till I'm ready to go head-down, so much more to come...) And becoming a tandem master so I can travel around dz to dz and be paid to do what I love beyond all else....fly. Life these days is dangerous, bright and incredibly fast. The big one on the list is Birdman. I've dreamed it ten thousand times, I know EXACTLY what it will feel like except my imagination is much lower resolution than the experience WILL be. I think I'll be so happy my head will explode, you just can't contain that kind of happy. You all should have seen me a week or two ago getting my first rock solid sit with invaluable help from a friend. After landing I was bouncing off the walls, howling raving ecstatic doing the victory dance while looking up at where that just happened. Once upon a time I thought skydiving would make me happy. You know, I was right. Which means I'm even righter about the birdsuit, righter about spending my life doing this, righter about human flight. I know what I want, I HAVE it. And more of it is coming, and I already know its worth it, worth any price. Used to be scared I'd miss the boat, you know? become like so many friends, settle down into mindless endless deadend job and weekends spent at a bar somewhere, eternal mediocrity, wake up one day and realize I just wasted 30 years never got my shit together and now its far too late..... But I didn't miss the boat, and the pleasures to be found on the ride on that boat are worth dying for. If its worth dying for, its worth LIVING for, and I do. My plate is full. I'm still ravenous. Bring on the next course please, ah, there it is....DOOR! Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

I bought a havok about 6 months ago, my first helmet, mostly for winter jumps and face-armor value. I LOVE the evil space fighter pilot looks, I get star wars jokes on a regular basis and as gear goes its one hell of a conversation piece. LOTS of people ask me about it...comfort, durability, peripheral vision, weight, etc. The highest praise I can give it is after I lock it down I forget I'm wearing it. LOADS of features...Durable as hell, impossible to open accidentally or pop open by itself. It doesn't have one single lock stop. it has 600 of them. Mine was a perfect fit right out of the box, did not need to bake it, and once locked on the fit is so perfect I could leave the chinstrap undone and it would stay on my head in a standfly. I've seen several people come down without their very expensive helmet/audible assemblies. Its impossible to remove the havok once it's locked down, period. I tried to take mine off with the visor down and it can't be done. Peripheral vision is so wide I never notice the edges, glasses fit with room to spare. Padding is ample and it makes winter jumping painless and eliminates the cold-air-blast nasal-snot-fountain effect commonly generated by extreme cold wind in face. With warm weather here I removed the lexan and went with tinted overglasses kroop goggles which fit under and through the faceframe like it was made for it, so I get the best of all options, great armor value, I can feel the breeze without choking on it and without the lexan in place I don't have to flip it up under canopy. The lexan DOES get chewed up awful fast even if you're anal about protecting it so the visibility goes to hell after awhile, you can't buy tinted ones for it and when I removed the lexan it revealed the edges which had been hidden under the rim of the opening, showing poor workmanship: the lexan had very obviously been cut out of a sheet, by hand, crudely, with a pair of scissors...there were small overcut marks wherever the cut changed direction. One of the bolt holes in the lens was misaligned when they assembled it and they corrected it by melting the hole to an oval with a soldering iron. I've done that a million times myself working with plastic and know what a hole looks like when you melt it wider that way....Its not even close to a problem, it just looks crude and I did not expect to find that kind of hackmanship in a manufactured high-end consumer product. My rigger quoted me 20$ a pop for new lenses. For that kind of work, I'll make my own replacements, tinted ones too, just by tracing the original. All in all its a damn near perfect piece of gear, good for any kind of skydiving, I've been freeflying with it since I started to learn to sit and stand and have zero issues with it. I think bonehead sat down and decided to build a serious lightweight fullface that eliminates every single major issue anyone has ever had with a fullface, from popping open due to a kick, popping open due to button wear, helmet coming off, poor peripheral vision, no glasses fitting under, insufficient audible ports/security, difficult lens replacement, every problem I've heard of with a fullface the havok has it licked already. Perfect 10 out of 10 score so long as you don't mind looking like you just stepped out of the cockpit of your beat up old 2472 fusion drive Rebel Fighter Craft. Expensive toy but worth the money and unlike every other 300$ helmet I read about, trouble-free. A very unusual and different piece of gear done right. Strange properties include the fact that most new havok owners become gripped by an irresistible cultural compulsion to put it on look in a mirror and say "luke I am your father" in a deep metallic voice. Note to first-time winter havok jumpers: the antifog solution Bonehead includes with the helmet does NOT work in subzero temperatures-use skier goggle antifog wax on both the lens (and the glasses you're wearing under it! ) and you're good to go. Nuff said. Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Um, actually I'm pretty sure that was really her face, or as real as anything is in movies these days...I got the big 96 meg trailer and her face looks like that cause A) The agent was kicking her ass seconds before she took the high dive, (has scratches/cuts on her face) and B) she's in as desperate a situation as any you could think of and her face is all scrunched up like yours would be if you were putting forth a last effort. I thought the look on her face when she finally takes a bullet in the chest was very well done myself. The conga club scene -I- thought was the result of morpheus exhorting them all to shake the earth and make their presence felt, that whole "we're alive" assertion in the face of oncoming peril....better to be partying hard than panicking, eh? To me the scene was unnecessarily overdone, but fit nicely in with events. The movie DID have its glaring flaws, less-than-stellar dialogue in places and some scenes like the agent crushing the car that screamed "FAKE!!!"...that agent looked like something out of the next version of Unreal Tournament...way too cartoony. This one lacked the gritty (un)realism the first one had that made it so believable....they did a MUCH better job blending the CGI in the first flick, I'm surprised so much sloppy work made it through to release in this one. Overall score I'd give it about an 80% with extra credit given for so much unprecedented tight action. Excellent flick, a trifle disappointing in places but worth going to see again tonight maybe. My .02$ Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

All those views and nobody saw fit to even comment about the horrible image that advice is meant to create in the victim....I must be losing my touch. Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

I bet he doesn't know anything about process program profiling, zone mapping and preblow cam timing to control expansion characteristics and material distribution in sidel blowmolding automation. But he could probably whip my ass in a good game of cribbage. Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Just figured I'd post this bit of eternal wisdom given to me by a friend of mine. Do with it what you wish. Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

somebody know what stiletto song he's talking about? Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

This sounds like some kind of me too encounter session, but... ME TOO! It took me damn near 10 years to make it go from idea fantasy to kinetic reality, but I'm finally "there" and "there" is a blast and will inevitably lead to Birdman suit for me. Lou, I've dl'ed those videos of yours and many many more, green with envy, happy knowing I'm on the path to be there myself and the path itself is more than enough... I'm living my greatest most unbelievable fantasy in real life and loving every minute of it. I always wanted to fly but it was just, you know, impossible. Not anymore. I used to think how cool it would be to just be one of the birds in a bird party where you have 50 birds all on a wire, you can see em laughing, talking, checking their gear/feathers, probably swapping stories about how mirv missed his flare to the wire and tumbled down almost broke his neck but got a good landing out of it and isn't margaret migrating up from down south tomorrow? Skydiver culture seems to resemble what human culture would be like if we were all birds and could all fly. we got the students and first timers, the second year fledglings like myself, just getting used to their wings and learning all they can, guided by the elders who know which way to migrate when the season changes and the leaves turning start calling the birds south again. Its the greatest privilege and honor to be a part of it and I will never stop until I can't take it anymore or I'm eaten by something bigger. Some sunset loads I just exit, get as wide as I can for maximum freetime, and fly into the sun. Then land and join the bird party in the hangar, lit up so bright from within I could make plants grow faster by smiling at them. What more could a bird possibly ask for? Birdman suit....soon....soon....I will have real wings to spread....soon.... keep a slot open for me in the flock guys, I'm on my way there.... Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Ok. Somebody has got to appreciate the humor of this... I jumped twice yesterday, one a coach jump sitfly 2-way that went so much better than expected I was all but bouncing off the walls...Thanks Reed! anyway after jumping, went over to the Wulf's place to hang out and see a flick. The Wulf is this old friend of mine, non-whuffo, has done a tandem and is hooked for life but was prevented by circumstance (newborn daughter) from pursuing further jumps. Nevertheless he most definitely "has a clue" and knows some about how it works up there. His fiancee however is.....not. A fairly intelligent but utterly clueless flaky female whose dominant interests in life seem to be wedding cakes jewelry and junk psychology. One of those I'm-utterly-helpless types, she once called the Wulf out to help her get her car unstuck from 2 inches of snow. The Wulf got in, backed it up 8 feet on to dry pavement in one simple movement without so much as spinning a tire, got out, and said "there you go." Get the idea of my victim? so.... Here I am with my 100th jump video in the bag, (Thanks Tom! Awesome!!!) before we sit down to watch TITUS I pop in this little baby and show em both whats been happening lately. 8-way celebration jump with pieing. Allie, the fiancee, starts asking me a few questions about human flight...the usual ones...cost, training, how do you do it...then she asks me how do you breathe in freefall...you can't, right? Oh god I can't help myself.... No, I explained to her as the video played behind me, you can't breathe in freefall...for one thing the air's too thin up there to survive for long and in any case, you don't NEED to. There aren't any closeups in this video but there were in others you've seen and you no doubt observed the jumpers cheeks flapping furiously. This is a tricky part of the training not everyone can do. Falling that fast you get loads of oxygen transfer straight through the skin by osmosis, they teach you to flap your cheeks like that during the fall to enhance oxygen transfer in the skin and ensure enough o2 permeates the tissues closest to the brain...this is why some first time tandem students pass out and are revived either under canopy or on the ground...they didn't do the flapping right and lost conciousness. She said it must be kind of hard to get used to...I said it is, its tricky...This is also why skydivers are forbidden to jump through clouds...its very dangerous. Moisture in the clouds condenses on the skin and the jumper suffocates. Now the Wulf has a bad neck right now and was curled up on the sofa maybe 5 feet to my right...I had been spinning this tale with an utterly straight face until when I got to the part about the suffocation in clouds at which point I was interrupted somewhat by this horrible rhythmic squeaking sound coming from the sofa as the Wulf finally failed to contain his stifled laughter entirely...I looked in his direction, can't see his face, he's still curled up but now shaking in rhythm with the continuing squeaky sound. At which point I started to break up myself, and the fiancee wanted to know why we were laughing. The Wulf being unable to speak I locked my face down and told her its cause of Wulf's first tandem...he had a bit of trouble himself mastering the flapping during his training and it was funny as shit if you were there and saw it. She said well he -did- get it, right? I said oh yeah he did get the art down and did awesome on his tandem, stayed concious, got hooked on it, maybe again someday....the squeaking noise continued....conversation moved on to other things...... I will be haunted by that somehow terrible squeaking sound coming from the sofa for the rest of my life. It should be criminal to do what I just did...but I figured some jumper might appreciate it.... Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Yeah. '91 vector 2....the freefly mods were LOADS cheaper than going out and buying a new mirage g3 or whatever...All I could afford at the time was bottom-o-the-barrel rig, but anything freefly worthy I could find was way out of range. I got the works...new riser cover velcro, new BOC moved closer to edge of container, new bridle pocket added to right flap, elastic tuck tab keeper on main, has worked great so far but was wondering about it in a stand....I'm starting to hit some speeds I've never pushed the rig up to before and am wondering about hidden vulnerabilities... Anyone with the freefly mods on a v2 ever had a problem with it? Premature deploy? escaping bridle? Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Greatest american hero rocked! I only saw a handful of episodes because back then the parental units were big on either making the kids go to bed by 7:30 pm or lugging us all to "prayer meetings" where lifeless people sat around singing tunelessly about loving some savior staring at these lame little songbooks. somehow these people suffered from the delusion that they were alive.... I can't believe that chick is an adult. Displayed mentality looks like about age 10, maybe 12. Gimme a break. priorities in life include stars and glitter! GLITTER! She's proof some people are not adults by 18. Do you want to be in the air with someone so ditzy she might get distracted by admiring the nice sparkly 3-rings? oooh, stainless....Everyone else is visualizing the exit, going through the dive plan, plotting out a canopy flightpath based on observed winds, checking gear, practicing emergency moves, and she's sitting there thinking this plane would look so much nicer inside with a little elmers glue some glitter and a few paste-up stars. How about canopy piloting? I can see the thought train now: "ooh, look at all the pretty canopies! neon! pretty! hey, they're going away! shouldn't I try to land with them? How? hey theres water below me! help! shouldn't I pull these strings? when? oh look theres a nice truck wants to play with me...it must like me, it has stars on it...(THUD)" Take her for a tandem, give her a nice t-shirt bumper sticker and certificate, and let her fly once. she'll walk the earth the rest of her simple happy days (daze?) telling her friends all about how shes a skydiver for the rest of her oblivious life....never knowing she only has 25% of the mental processors required to get to... let alone survive the places times and situations depicted in the pretty pictures she loves. Welcome to the filter in the drain at the bottom of the gene pool. I think this chick is the result of the ubersheltered life I ranted about in the smoking and child abuse forum in talkback. ugh. what a waste. Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

...Huh? Yeah, after I got out I kinda found out some about that, although I'm always looking for a willing mate to kinda teach me more about it.... Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

I hate smokers with a passion . ... OK. No more mr. nice guy. I'm pissed. One too many safety nazis/smoking nazis weighed in here to just lurk it. (lurch takes deep breath and summons the ringing echoing thundergod voice) ENOUGH! I grew up in cloud of smoke. It sucked. If I ever have kids I will consider it my duty as a parent not to poison their air. As an adult I smoke...and I know enough not to subject others to it. Meaning outside when needed, downwind when needed, or just wait till later...if you smoking nazis would shut the fuck up for a minute you'd hear me asking if this bothers you! I am also equally sick of the smoking nazis loudly shrieking about how smoking within 25 yards of a child while downwind of that child in a hurricane is still somehow secondhand smoke poisoning them far more than I'm poisoning myself of course and needs draconian measures to protect that child from even the awareness of the existence of tobacco not to mention all us evil child-poisoning secondhand-smoke spreaders! If you're such an oblivious parent (my own mom, thanks bitch) you can't tell your kid can't breathe that shit especially in a confined area you got no business raising kids! I'm kinder and more considerate to my fucking CAT! I'm also equally sick of the fucking seatbelt nazis! I spent most of my childhood being horribly endangered and abused by my evil parents for not strapping me in to the car every time it moved! Punish them! Even more horribly, I even did such hideously neglectful, obviously terribly child-endangeringly criminal acts such as riding a bicycle without a helmet or supervision and ("GASP") riding in the back of a pickup truck! fuck seat belts, not even a seat!!!!! Imprison them!!! What the hell happened? You wanna know why Columbine happened? And WILL happen again, in increasing numbers? I hear there's an old prison term for it...they called it "stir crazy". Your kids are, quite literally, wild animals. Try to domesticate them at your peril. When did it become viewed as criminal to let your kids run free, unrestrained and unsupervised? Go to the park alone? Wander at will in the real world? When did it become a crime to let the kid ride a bike without a helmet and an adult watching their every move? When did it become a crime to not seat belt the kids in for a run to do some errands? When did it become criminal to allow the kid a boatload of unmanaged, unscheduled, unsupervised time? When did it become viewed as criminal to allow your kid to take a fucking RISK! To swim without a life preserver a lifeguard or even an adult present! Run in the fucking halls! Watch TV without having an adult filter it for any possible positive reference to sex drugs violence alcohol or risky behavior! Learn to use power tools without taking the ul approved Safety Course! Learn to safely handle a gun! Climb things without a safety net and harness! If I allowed my hypothetical kid to climb the tree in my front yard today I'd be arrested! When did mandating everything replace good judgement! What happened to things like responsibility! What happened to letting the kid develop at the kid's pace! What happened to "the kid is ready to handle it when the kid indicates by inclination and responsible behavior that he's ready to handle it"? When did it become necessary to "protect" your kids from awareness of the existence of things like sex, guns, tobacco, danger, REALITY? Every stupid mistake I ever made as a teen out of ignorance and unawareness was made because I was raised in a box and despite my best efforts to self-educate as a child I was successfully "protected" from knowing about puberty, childbirth, female genitalia...(existence, purpose, function and structure of), human development, alcohol, drugs, firearms, self-defense, violence and fighting, ("turn the other cheek! Run away! Go get help! Tell an adult! Pray!" (lot of fucking good that advice and training does me when I'm back to the wall surrounded fighting for my fucking life, been there done that, (picture that recent hazing video that caused such a storm)...been there several times, survived by sheer desperate savage viciousness, they didn't expect the skinny kid to actually really try to kill them with teeth and nails to escape) Several broken limbs and severe injuries resulted from that meelee caught on video. The ones who went down under a lord-of-the-flies wave of struggling bodies probably went down still trying to organize an encounter session group to sit down and discuss their aggression issues....because thats how they were taught to deal with conflict and it is NOT applicable to the real world outside their rules and boundaries. I refuse to have kids because too many other adults will try to govern my raising of them and convince them they need to be helplessly protected from everything. If I ever do have kids I'll raise them somewhere they have room to roam and explore without someone trying to force them to wear a helmet and pads before they're allowed on the jungle gym! Kids have been dealing with unbuffered, unprotected unhelmeted reality for about the last 500,000 years or so, with an unavoidable and utterly necessary level of darwinian attrition: Failure to shield head when wiping out on bike=fatality. Failure to recognize too-deep water=fatality. kid who eats the most marbles or plays alone with hammers and rifle ammo doesn't grow up to have kids of his own! The kids have been doing just fine surviving helmetless bikerides harnessless treeclimbs and restraintless pickuptruck-bed rides for generations, and protecting the kids from everything means they know how to handle NOTHING! The new batch of bike helmeted protected kids can't deal with the pain of a case of road rash caused by falling on pavement. They can't deal with the idea of being on their own, unguarded, unmanaged, unsupervised, unprotected. They can't defend themselves for shit because it used to be a fistfight was par for the course, part of childhood....now its occasion for a psych evaluation, severe punishment and anger management classes and maybe a course of Ritalin! An overactive inquisitive quick learning child is labelled "a.d.d." and drugged so their curve matches the rest...drug induced mediocrity. Splendid. end rant: I'd continue but I've run out of gas and made my point. I dread the stiff and helpless results of todays childrearing trends...I still haven't fully recovered from all the damage caused to my own development by how well I was "protected"...and by today's standards they were criminally negligent. God help tomorrow's adults, because they sure as hell won't be able to help themselves, they'll still be waiting patiently for a grownup to come and do it for them. Previous generations took on the world as they came of age, with various levels of success or failure. The protected ones? I fear for them. When they go forth to take on the world they will do so utterly unprepared for the hostile aggressive dangerous and utterly merciless world they will encounter....and they're going to get slaughtered. In another 20 years I expect a really vicious backlash against this sort of "protecting"....but by then, too late. Nuff said. Somebody had to. I probably just pissed off every politically correct individual within 5,000 miles. I'm ready. Bring on the flames. Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Oh what the hell.... I'm Lurch. I fix things. Specifically theres this plant that makes bottled water and fruit juice beverages, I'm the guy who runs troubleshoots and fixes the machines making the bottles. Lot of running around making things go with a set of hex keys a roll of duct tape and a pair of channelock pliers. Clunky 30-year old plastics automation mixed with modern robotics. I'm also quite possibly The Greatest Forklift Driver The Universe Has Ever Known and can pick up a dime and put it in a bottle, pick up the bottle and put it on top of a post with a 5-ton 12-year old electric nissan. Yes the job is sometimes boring enough for me to have figured out how to do that...what the hell it pays for jumping.... Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Um, the angry sounding sarcasm doesn't go over very well, man. I take this sort of thing rather seriously since rumor has it most nasty damage happens to jumpers right where I am...at around 100 jumps and freshly downsized. Bad place and time to be, better stay extremely wary and cautious. I have no grudge against icarus rides, I can have no opinion of my own about them, having never flown one, they look quite tasty and after inquiring as to where the opinion i heard came from decided to reject it as too subjective, bunk opinion and not accurate enough to influence my canopy choice. I'm not convinced of ANYTHING about cobalts, I've seen lawndart's cobalt spin up a bit on video some time ago, and seen him spin it right back out again. Seems to me ANYTHING hi-performance or not can spin you if you handle it wrong. I AM using a demo canopy and about to switch to another....next time I get a chance I will try that 175 tri, what the hell why not. I buy nothing (canopy/high$ gear related) blind. Not for that kind of money. For me its more like 15-20 jumps, I want to be sure of a decision. You might have noticed I've been info-mining like mad lately and most of that has been not online but in person on the dz. I'm mining here to get an even wider spread of info/opinions/experience than is available at my dz. I'm not ready for a cobalt and thus do not want one yet. If I understand the differences well enough I'll stick with nonelliptical squares for the next season at least...its not like I'm bored up there, I just want to eliminate the disadvantages of jumping something oversized, such as smacking into windwalls everyone else can fly through and wasting time trying to inflate a canopy thats more sensitive to underloading than my old 210 was. I'd say I'm not stupid but you know, every time I hear someone say "i'm not stupid" they're being stupid. There is remarkably little specific info out there about the exact differences between conservative/aggressive canopies, I'm being as receptive as I can in the hopes of educating myself about what I'm getting into to live longer uninjured. I like my knees and legs, they've served me well and I would prefer they remain factory stock...titanium is stylish I'm sure but its something I can do without. Thanks for the input. Filed and noted. edit: I'm not buying an icarus or a cobalt, I see no need to get a lamborghini when all I really want and know how to use is a midgrade camaro. -peace and gentle landings..... -lurch. Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

At 111 jumps I know just barely enough to stay alive up there if I stay razor sharp heads up and don't hesitate to act NOW when something unexpected happens, and will keep that attitude, probably permanently. I'm wicked paranoid about being blindsided by 100-jump-wonder syndrome and determined to -not- fuck up. Jesus its fast up there....complacency kills, does it not? Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Oh. Ok. The only use I have for high high altitude is something to jump off.... Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

I know that attitude is probably offensive as hell to the politically correct greenie granola environmentalist crowd, but you know, it makes absolutely NO DIFFERENCE! You know what the forest floor is made of? Decomposing organic matter. Guess what human shit is made of? Take a wild guess. Go ahead, leap. Thats right, same stuff! I want to ask why mountaineering types bag it, but I'm afraid of the answer... Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

That makes absolutely no sense to me. Every other animal out there shits in the woods and nobody gives a shit but somehow humans are so anal they consider their own shit to be pollution somehow? Sorry. I go hiking out somewhere I'm not lugging bags of shit back home with me. Trash, yes, but if its something organic that'll disappear on its own in a week after I'm gone, (food leftovers, post-nutritive substances, etc) it stays where I drop it till the forest eats it. Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Oh my god I just realized most of this website is purple too. I'm surrounded. Its over. I give up. The purple wins. Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

What. you mean there actually IS a purple otter? NOOOOOOO! (I wanna ride on a purple otter dammit) Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.