tbrown

All I know is that we have some friends whose son is finally O-U-T of Iraq. He's been rotated back to Germany. While he was there he had two close calls with Baathists or Al Qaedas or whatever they were (they're Al Deada for their trouble), who were trying to kill him and his friends around him. One of the dumb fucks blew himself up with the grenade he was about to toss. The other one shot first and then they shot him. We're just glad he's out and back with his girlfriend in Germany. We hope everyone else's kid gets out of there too. Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !

Noisy. Stinky. Hot (low airflow) Hard to spot. PITA Door. Did I mention Noisy? Yeah they're noisy, but ear plugs are dirt cheap and highly effective, I don't board the 'Van without them. I like that it's roomier than an Otter (I love Otters, but they're a little like being in a submarine with wings). It's just FUN to run out the back or launch a nice chunk exit. Let's face it, when people start dissing a Skyvan it shows just how SPOILED some of us are... Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !

I just bought a beauty of a rig through the dz.com classifieds. It helped a lot that the deal was brokered by a reputable dropzone gear dealer, who also posts on these forums. In fact, the previous owner is also a very well known dot commie. But I didn't know it was him until later on. Anyway, for my size, I'm hard to fit, I'm outside of the standard easy to fit male "envelope" of 5 ft something and 160-180 lbs. The canopies caught my attention, then the harness size, made for a guy my size. I ended up with a BEAUTIFUL rig that had been immaculately cared for, has everything I wanted - and more - and looks fantastic. The price was more than reasonable. But as I said, the ad was posted by a reputable gear dealer on the owner's behalf. You need to excercise common sense caution and must insist on using a rigger's loft for a 3rd party inspection of the rig, and it should be agreed that you have something like 10 days or two weekends to return the rig for your money back. Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !

Lemmings on Ecstacy ? Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !

Thanks for sharing. Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !

And I've got your old 190 Spectre and am having the time of my life with it (black/green/3Xpurple/green/black. If I were designing a custom color scheme though, I've thought of a "watermelon" canopy, bright green with watermelon pink ribs and maybe an off center cell or two of blue and yellow. I like spare asymmetric designs. Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !

Paris Hilton and all the rest of these upper crust trash should be on a "Celebrity Brothel" reality show, where they work turning $20 tricks for coal miners. Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !

Glad you're staying with the sport. I did give it up at the end of 1980, but have been back now for almost a year. A lot of it depends on how close or personal some of this stuff can get. I have never known of a fatal accident among my crowd that didn't cause somebody to quit. Somebody dies, somebody else quits. It happens. When I left the sport, it was going through a bad time, with too many deaths. In just two months, two friends went in and two more had reserve openings below 500 ft. I could probably admit that at the time, it got to me. And then some of the years I was out were due to having small children. I know lots of jumpers with small kids who are able to go on jumping, I didn't feel that way. We make our own choices about things like that. Skydiving's just not for everyone, if anyone could do it, quite a few of us would quit and go looking for something else that was cooler. We know two things: jumping's not nearly as dangerous as the public thinks, but it's more dangerous than we might want to admit. But where else will you ever find anything half as beautiful ? The only other thing I can think of might be scuba diving, which a lot of my friends do, but they have their share of accidents and deaths too. You can always stay home watching TV and praying a meteor doesn't come through the roof. Or you can get out and feel alive. At some point you might legitimately conclude that it's time to leave. It doesn't mean you won't be back. Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !

32 in 2003, which is 32 more than I've made in any year back to 1980. Would've been more if I wasn't out of work for 5 months. It's going to be a whole lot more this year! Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !

Try Barnes & Noble.com. Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !

Didn't Freefly Hol once have her friends pick her up and toss her out ? She wanted to pretend she was being 86'ed "like a drunk". That sounds fun and she reportedly loved it. Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !

I just bought a rig with a Spectre 190 (which I'm loading at 1.29) after renting demo Spectre 230's and 210's and Sabre2 210's. Between a Spectre and the original Sabre, which I've never jumped, I'd say Spectre because the Sabre is already an obsolescent canopy with a rep for hard openings. If you have a chance to get a Sabre2, I guess it's up to you. They open a quicker than a Spectre, and quite comfortably. They're fun to fly, but personally I just can't seem to find the right flare with a 9 cell. The steeper glide of a Spectre is only apparent on final, there is no problem at all with a Spectre getting you back from a long spot. Spectres can be quite snappy and a lot of fun and they have one hell of a nice flare. They do take a long time to open, I typically burn up a good 500-600 ft on my openings. So throw it our just under 3 grand and sit in just above 2 grand, you'll be fine. The opening is so NICE that I like to tell people it's "like falling into bed with a blonde", which if you think about it is pretty darn nice regardless of gender or preference.... Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !

Replacing Hubble would be the way to go, it really is getting the shit pounded out of it in orbit and a newer better replacement would be just the thing. Only problem is, I think the Bush Space Inititiative is an election year ploy. Congress will never fund it, which sucks, but they won't. This is how it will play out by the end of the decade: no Shuttle, no Hubble, no Int'l Space Station, no Moon program, no Mars, no nothin' in the way of live human space flight. I wish I could be more optimistic, because I've loved the Space Program ever since I was a kid. I still even have my first grade essay on John Glenn, written in the HUGE lines, with the dotted lines in the middle. I wish all the good stuff would happen, but it won't. All the money's gone to Baghdad. Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !

"Bad hair day." What a beautiful little tomato she is ! Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !

But I have my eye on a Starlite that a local rigger has; I might just have to haul it out to the DZ Ow, I jumped a Starlite just once. It was a fun canopy to fly, but oy, that opening. And that was one of the later models, with the spider slider. I used to own a tie dyed 28' cheapo, one of the original R/W/B 1964 Paracommanders (I LOVED that canopy), and a very lightweight 21' miniature PC type canopy called a Sparrow. Have also jumped a couple Piglets, a Competition PC and the occasional Papillion (sp ?). Not to mention the Navy conical reserve and a Security LoPo, both a few more times than I care to admit (all with square mains, I might add, I've NEVER had to chop a round). They were GOOD canopies and they were SAFE. But as with many other excesses of our youth, I find that the ravages of time and age lean towards sticking with my Spectre these days. That and I'm about 60 lbs more "substantial" than the scarecrow hippie I used to been. Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !

Three times. As a static line student, when the pilot announced he was having a problem and would be turning back. That was in a Cessna 180. The other two were DC-3's, one turned back due to an advancing tornado front and the other turned back after an engine cowling blew off at about a grand after takeoff. All three landings were uneventful. Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !

In the olden days (1978) I bought a brand new custom built Handbury harness/container system for a king's ransom of $245. Also bought a Cobra 10 ( a five cell Strato Star clone, made of the 1.25 oz lightweight fabric used before F-111). That piece of shit started tearing apart at the ribs within about sixty jumps. The dealer felt so bad he practically gave me a Viking Superlite (a Strato Cloud clone that was actually a damn decent canopy, by Pioneer). Kept that rig 'til I quit jumping, the reserves were all used. Last week I bought my first rig in 22 years. It's all used, but only 2-3 years old. The Spectre is still slippery enough to annoy me and the PD reserve has had a few rides, so I know it works. The Cypres is only 3 years old (yay!!!), and the Javelin is just beautiful. It even fits me, it was made for a big guy more or less my size. I easily saved about $2000, if not more and have a lovely rig that will last me for as long as I ever want it. Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !

I just wish we had The Simpsons back in the sixties or seventies when I was a kid. It could never happen of course, but we had so much CRAP on TV back then. At least by 1975 we had Saturday Night Live, and that was totally RADICAL. Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !

I read an article in an April '01 edition of The New Yorker Magazine that reported "a faction in the administration is pressing for an invasion of Iraq". That and numerous media quotes that on 9-11 Dick Cheney burst forth with, "So does this move the Iraq thing onto the front burner ?" at a Cabinet meeting. The idea of invading Iraq goes back to the same people in this administration who were around during the reign of George I. But daddy was at least smart enough to squelch them, he had a better grasp of the hornets' nest it would stir up. Jr. has no comprehension of anything and more than his share of obsessions. And it is an obsession; the insistence on ignoring intelligence he doesn't want to hear, fabricating false intelligence from unreliable sources to back his position, and just plain old fashioned LYING. We're paying for it now, with blood and with taxes. Just wait 'til the interest rates go up... Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !

I don't. Know how much it costs to simply defend a case like that? Do you really think skydiving equipment manufacturer's have that kind of money? All too true, but by not answering anything, Precision defaulted the case. The judge might have even instructed the jury to that effect (I don't know if he did, but he may have). When you're sued you're sued, if you don't defend yourself you lose. Nightingale's right, Mr. Galloway could've appeared in person and tried to present his own defense to the jury. Precision's complete absence from the courtroom was not a smart move on their part and probably made a lousy impression on the jury. And juries by the way are just people like you and me. They resent not being able to work at their jobs and want to get it over with. Nevertheless, enough of them really do try to be fair and take their duty seriously. I've sat on a few juries and was a jury foreman once, signing a felony verdict that sent a man to prison. It's something every one of you should do sometime. But skydivers who sue skydivers are still assholes. Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !

As I recall, the tail section that fell off was built with composites and not metal, as you'd find on a Boeing plane (so far anyway...). This particular plane had been written up on the flightline, prior to delivery, for a delamination of the composite material in the tail. A delamination is when layers of the composite start seperating, for those of you not familiar with composites. Think of layers of cloth, impregnated with resin. When cured under heat and pressure, the resin flows and binds all those layers together into a very strong part, but delaminations are a common recognized defect in the process. Anyway, the engineering fix on that particular problem was to rivet the delaminated section. It has been suspected of leading up to the failure. I was still working at Boeing as a final assembly inspector at the time and we read everything we could on this accident to keep ourselves up on what could go wrong, even though our planes were all metal. Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !

I forget whose it is, but I liked the one that was a hit of acid blotter. Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !

Sean, those are my views. If you're a Christian, then good luck and God bless. I think it's a mistake to talk religion and politics with other skydivers. We're a very mixed sack o' nuts. I'd rather drop the whole thing and maybe this year we can make a few loads together and enjoy what we both have in common, which is that we love to skydive. Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !

Has anyone out there PERSONALLY had a good headbashing while wearing a Bonehead ? I'd like to know, as I own a Mindwarp and really like it. I know the graphite shell is strong, but this talk about padding is making me a little uneasy. A long time ago I owned a Cooper hockey helmet with lots of good padding. The thing split in two when I hit my head on a rock or something under several inches of water. It did what it was designed to do - sacrificed itself to protect my head. I've also worn Protecs in the past. So I'm not interested if "a friend of a friend" has experience with a head blow wearing a Bonehead, but if it's happened to you, please post and tell us your story. Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !

Well done! Ain't it great to be alive ?! And now that you've got your malfunction for the year out of the way, Happy New Year and Blue Skies ! Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !