tbrown

When my Pilot was brand new it was slippery, but nothing like some brand new PD canopies I've struggled with. Also a rigger showed me how to be more assertive with the way to grip and handle the canopy to make it do your bidding. The other truly valuable piece of advice I got from Dominic was to land in the student area (which at Perris is a plowed up dirt field) and drag the canopy around a couple times. The results are truly miraculous. As far as fwd speed goes, I couldn't say, other than the Pilot has got absolutely the flattest glide of any canopy I've ever jumped. It's even a little too flat of a glide in no wind, you'll need to get on your fronts so you won't overshoot the dropzone. The payoff is the way it gets you back from some really long spots. Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !

It's impossible--Lois could never have Superman's baby. Do you think her fallopian tubes could handle the sperm? I guarantee you he blows a load like a shotgun right through her back. I was gonna say something like this, but a little more delicately. I would think the physical rigors of sexual intercourse with the Man of Steel would probably kill poor Lois. Clark's bedroom probably looks like someone went crazy with a machine gun - and that's just from teenage masturbation. (Anybody here still remember "killing kittens" ? It would be more than a metaphor with Clark Kent). Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !

I was going to mention the "rich sap meets a gorgeous sweetheart hooker" trap in "Pretty Woman". But at least Julia Roberts used condoms. Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !

Find a lawyer who specializes in employee/management labor law. And document everything. Document, document, document. The lawyer will know how to put it together. By the time a lawyer gets done with this noxious boss, the boss' life will be such a living hell that suicide will be a viable option. Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !

Dude, that's some good acid you're doing. Just don't jump on it, promise ? Jump on her instead. Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !

Nope. Lost interest when Keith Moon died. Entwistle's dead too. For the price of a lousy ticket you can have the excitement of a cutaway and a good story to tell when you've been drinking. Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !

Let loose, have fun tonight (but if you're a drinker, go easy on that, nothing worse than a hangover to compound your anxiety!). Not so fast Krisanne. Our FJC completed training on a Friday evening and they made a point of taking all fifteen or so of us to town and making sure we got completely trashed. Then they drove us back to the airport, where we all slept (and God only knows what else) on the hangar floor. At 6:30 am the lights snapped on and we were told to hit the deck and there was coffee in the lounge room. By 8am the first load was wheels off the runway. Of course this was back in the glorious seventies and we were all young, dumb & bulletproof. I'm probably supposed to admit this is really rotten advice for a newbie, but we really don't know how much of a party animal she is. But if she sticks around she sure will be! Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !

Anybody who wants to start a war, not just with the U.S., but with anybody, should stop and think about the price. Anyone who goes to war puts their civilian population at risk of all sorts of horrible things. People get maimed and killed; women children, the elderly. Nobody thinks it's a good thing. But some of these people aren't thinking of that when they go launching rockets into Israeli cities, or sending suicide bombers into crowded civilian marketplaces. I believe they do so with a cynical calculation that they expect innocent casualties among their own people so that they can further whip up people's emotions and gain recruits to their cause. General William Tecumseh Sherman not only said "War is hell", he also said that since the Confederacy had made the choice for war, he intended to "give them war in full measure". Sad but true. Wars are a lot easier to start than they are to end. Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !

I think the world right now is in a similar state to the 1930s, when the Second World War had in fact already begun in places like China and with Hitler's adventures in the Rhineland, Austria, and the Sudetenland. The war's already started, the Muslims started it. Let's just acknowledge it and ge it over with by whatever means necessary. Like we did with Japan - saved a lot of lives, including japanese lives, though they'll never admit it. That or go on believing in "peace in our time". I'm not happy about this, not at all, it truly sucks. But it's already begun, so what else is there to do ?? Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !

You didn't mention whether you'd packed your rig or you had a packer do it. ALWAYS set your own kill line, brakes, and slider before giving your rig to the packers. You might have just flipped the thing into your burble, hand deploys have no spring to give them any shape, so they'll just collapse like a jellyfish on your back. And have a rigger check your kill line for shrinkage, even if the rig is only a year (and how many jumps ?) old. Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !

Usually if you pay an instructor's fee for packing or anything else, you get a commitment to help you out for as long as it takes. Look at it this way, whatever you pay to learn how to pack, vs. $6 a packjob - any price will quickly pay for itself and you'll be set for life. It's like that old adage about teaching a man to fish and he eats for life. Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !

Ask instructors at your dropzone. If you jump at San Diego you guys have an Otter and there's a door mockup on the ground. Just ask somebody and they'll show you on the mockup and show you some of the fine points on who presents whhat & so on. Meantime, expect your early efforts will funnel some of the time and don't worry about it, it's part of the fun. Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !

What you really need to do is to take a canopy control course. If you want to try a drill that simulates a spinner opening, the instructor can tell you how to go about it at a safe and sane altitude. Besides, most canopy courses also teach you fun stuff like stall recovery, where they have you literally repack your canopy and go back into freefall - feels just like a streamer malfunction - and recover from it in a safe controlled manner. But all that stuff is done from hop & pops at 5 grand and you're under orders to finish your work above 2 grand and just fly the pattern back to the dropzone after that. This is stuff you need to learn, it's every bit as important as knowing how to cutaway and pull your reserve. Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !

More of a question, as I've never jumped a Stiletto or a Katana, but isn't it a fairly regular practice to stuff the nose of a Stiletto ? At least that's what I've heard a lot of people say. Just asking, as your packing method states that you don't do anything special with your nose. Something's definitely up, one in four hard openings can take the fun right out of jumping. Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !

Okay, fair enough question. After all we had a lot to do with the founding and continued survival of Israel. I'm even willing to admit we helped establish the Israeli state after our miserable failure to do more to stop, or at least attack the Holocaust before and during WWII (questions like why didn't we bomb Auschwitz when even the inmates wanted us to, etc.). Maybe the West was guilt tripping, mixed in with strategic considerations of the Cold War that was just beginning to shape up. But that's all past now. What are we going to do now ? Desert Israel, the ONLY democracy in the Middle East, to a bunch of Arabs who don't appreciate democracy and never will ? Hand the place over to fucking al Qaeda and the Wahabi Muslims ? Stand by and watch the Arabs deprt and murder more Jews by the millions, while we lose a real ally and watch the Palestinians turn a productive state into another Islamic shithole ? I think not. I used to take a harder line about the "excesses" of the Israeli state. Which is not to say they don't have some problems of their own that could use some attention, but first their neighbors can just give it a fucking rest and try and get along with them for a change. And until they do, Israel can have a blank check as far as I'm concerned and I won't ask too many hard questions of them. Because they're our FRIENDS. We don't have to worry about Israelis hijacking planes and flying them into skyscrapers full of people, now DO we ????????? Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !

Back in the early seventies we were taught in 10th Grade health class about "how it works", venereal diseases (as they were called back then, which at the time was just gonorhea and syphilis), and how birth control, i.e. the pill, IUDs, condoms worked. That was about it, but for the time was pretty decent I thought. Didn't learn about herpes until college, from reading Newsweek magazine. Took a college course called "Preparation for Marriage" that went into a lot more depth and we had a teacher who propounded the radical idea that condoms should always be worn for casual sex. The first I ever heard about AIDS was an article in TIME magazine about this strange new immune disorder that had killed a few gay men in LA, I was already a newlywed by then. My kid in high school now has had courses in thhe mechanics and though condoms and "safer sex" are covered, there's also a stiff dose of obstinence (make that abstinence...) mixed in. Fuckin' Orange County Republicans (pun intended....) As a family we take it all seriously enough that we don't leave it to the schools. We talk about it and bring up topics sometimes, I mean we don't want to sound obsessed either. We make sure our kids know what they need to know. High school kid's big sister is a fountain of information who has dragged her friends to Planned Parenthood on several occasions for pregnancy and STD testing and I know she looks after her little sis' even closer than we do. Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !

The second problem was a little scarier - the small knot that stops the toggle from going through the little metal ring, went through the metal ring. so it was basically stuck in full flight and took me a good 2000 feet of yanking and pushing the knot back through to fix it for a safe landing. (thank god I opened high in order to perform some maneuvers for A requirements). Oh girl, you're so lucky you didn't spend the rest of your life trying to fix that one. What you did was a real no-no that we call "improvised rigging" and it's killed a lot of skydivers with way more experience than you (even people with thousands of jumps). You really lucked out because when you try to fix a problem, you're also FIXATING on it and losing altitude faster than you could possibly believe. You'll never get an inch of that altitude back and your options are vanishing fast. Now a more experienced canopy pilot might have decided that your problem was something that could be landed with rear risers and for them it would be their call and could be a reasonable one. But for somebody with your experience, that was a canopy out of your control and therefore not safe to land. But whether or not you cutaway, your decision should have been to either keep it or cutaway (I'd strongly favor cutting away at your stage of the game), but under NO circumstances should you divert your attention to trying to repair a problem. You're not a rigger and this was no time to learn. If you can't perform a controllability check - left turn, right turn, flare - forget it and go for those handles. You must have a really great guardian angel, go easy on her and don't make her work so hard. Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !

Some way that you could get rid of a pilot chute in tow. Good as our rigs are, having to fire a reserve past a p/c in tow is a horrifying crapshoot - whether or not you cutaway the main first. A two out is a "happy" ending, the bad ending is a fatal entanglement. Prevention is still the best defense, but some kind of a slicer for the bridle might be nice. Downside of course is you want it not to slice all those thousands of other times. Or a better way that I can't even imagine as yet, sure would be nice if some bold new designer with a simple "why of course !" idea would come along with a fix. Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !

On my recurrency training after a 22 year break, my instructor politely told me to "stick my dick out" and point my toes. Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !

Who rembers spotting and using the "buttons" red, yellow and green for direction? Back then when you were over the spot you would alternate the buttons (sending flashing lights to the pilots) to tell them to cut the power. There is somthing fundimental about spotting for youself and your load that has all but dissapered, sad really. It is sad.....real spotting was FUN !! Especially if you did it consistently. I always felt honored when people asked me to spot. Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !

There's a saying that arguing with these kind of people is like wrestling with a pig in the mud. You can't win and the pig just enjoys it. Of course it doesn't help much when the military does a dumbass thing like drop a headless dummy into power lines like they did near a well known So Cal DZ recently. The rumors of a dead headless skydiver are still circulating and it's hard to convince people that what they saw wasn't a real person. Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !

I would also bet that if a country decided to supply a another country with weapons far more advance then us and watched us get slaughtered with out any issue we would have the same hate towards them that the Palestinians have towards our goverment. Well that's just the nature of war, anybody who's ever been in one (I have not) will tell you that. What you won't see is Israelis blowing themselves up in crowds of teenage kids outside discos, or on city buses, airliners, in restaurants, at weddings, etc., sickening etc. Maybe it's because Israel's also been busy builing a modern state and agricultural country out of a desert. All the Palestinians are good at is killing people and complaining. A friend of mine who lived over there said that in the neighboring Arab states, Palestinians caught outdoors after curfew are shot on site. And that's by their beautiful Islamic brothers. The Palestinians had theur big chance in the nineties. And they blew it. Completely bigtime, they blew it. Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !

Ya know Jean, my wife came home with exactly the same theory. She thinks Kenny finally realized the White House either couldn't or wouldn't bail him out of this one and they knew he knew too much. She thinks Dick Cheney put out a hit on him. So do I now. You chix are pretty smart.... Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !

Burn them out. Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !

Wow, my original thread has generated a second thread on another forum. (So where's the fucking "beer" icon ? Sigh...) Just for the record, I take HIV/AIDS very seriously, having lost a couple old friends to it, and being appreciative of the fact that it is a real global social and economic disaster. The point of the original thread has to do with the term "safer sex". Historically, the notion of "safe sex" came into vogue in the early years of the AIDS epidemic. And with it came the anti sex reaction, with horror stories like "condoms break" (not very often if used properly), "condoms don't work" ( a bald faced lie), etc. So pretty soon, some realists addressed the problem by admitting that any sex outside of the fantasy world of lifelong monogamy between two abstinent virgins has to be something of a crapshoot. But you can definitely make your crapshoot a much safer and more responsible experience if you follow some sensible rules about the practices you indulge in, with whom (and how many), and the protections you use. And "safe sex" was ratcheted back to the term "safer sex", which I think we can all admit is more realistic. So it is with skydiving. Personally, I believe our sport is "safe enough" or I wouldn't jump. It's the reason I choose NOT to BASE jump. Any time you jump out of an airplane might just be the last minute of your life and it's something that always gives me this little "uh-oh" feeling every time we open the door - no matter how much I love it. I'm also really AGGRAVATED by the way I feel too many people in these forums - including one greenie in particular - sound off about skydiving "not being safe". I believe that is not the message this website is here to communicate. The public at large already believes our sport is not safe and that we should all be put away in a padded room for our own protection. I am DEEPLY disappointed that the very people who should be defending our sport can trash it as easily and often as they do in these forums. I'm a realist, over the years the list of dead jumpers I've known has grown out to more than two dozen and I've personally witnessed five fatalities, so I'm not speaking from la-la land where nothing bad ever happens. But I do believe in "safer skydiving" as a real and attainable practice. Besides, the connection between fuckin' and jumpin' is something we all know and love about our sport. Skydivers will jump anywhere and with anyone they can. It's too funny to think about who you jump with, what kind of rig you're wearing, malfunctions, and dare I say when to go head down ? Life without fuckin' or jumpin' would be unbearable. Neither are risk free, sadly eithher one can kill you. But both can be made safer, and hopefully with good humor. Eat, fuck, skydive !!! Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !