craichead

Who made this whacked out theory of yours a rule? There was a very interesting documentary on the Sundance Channel last night: Our House: A Very Real Documentary About Kids of Gay and Lesbian Parents It seems to me that the children in the film were pretty happy and well-adjusted in their loving families and in society--they go through all the same growing pains that other "traditional" families experience. However, when intolerant, prejudiced friends and family tried to interfere and break up that loving and caring family through force--THAT'S when the children were most emotionally and psychologically damaged. _Pm __ "Scared of love, love and aeroplanes...falling out, I said takes no brains." -- Andy Partridge (XTC)

Mostly Thai, with a bit of Chinese from both my mom and dad's families. Born in Kansas, raised in Tennessee! Most nights I have some Canadian in me. Oh, did I say that out loud? _Pm __ "Scared of love, love and aeroplanes...falling out, I said takes no brains." -- Andy Partridge (XTC)

You gals are SO WEIRD. And Robyn, you haven't answered my PM yet...what's the deal with yer rig at CSC?! _Pm __ "Scared of love, love and aeroplanes...falling out, I said takes no brains." -- Andy Partridge (XTC)

LOL... "Yer Canuck money ain't no good here!" _Pm __ "Scared of love, love and aeroplanes...falling out, I said takes no brains." -- Andy Partridge (XTC)

I would recommend trying Priceline, but then again, Andy's parents had trouble using their Canadian credit cards on their web site. We ended up having to use our credit card (with US billing address) to reserve the room. There's an okay Days Inn in Lincoln Park that is really close to the Briar Street Theatre... _Pm __ "Scared of love, love and aeroplanes...falling out, I said takes no brains." -- Andy Partridge (XTC)

Happy birthday, Professor Kallend! _Pm __ "Scared of love, love and aeroplanes...falling out, I said takes no brains." -- Andy Partridge (XTC)

I just thought I'd share this with you all...it's very well-written essay about my friend's first tandem experience. She hesitated to send it to me at first because she felt guilty that she wasn't "hooked" after her jump--like she somehow disappointed me and AndyMan, her "skydiving parents." I told her that it was okay that she wasn't hooked, we were just glad that we could share our skydiving passion with her and that she enjoyed the experience. If she hadn't had a good time, then WE would feel guilty! _Pm Snivelling at 4000 Feet by Kendra Greene Skydiving, sort of like jaywalking or petting a stray dog or eating a sloppy joe just before a job interview, is the sort of thing you could do and probably nothing would happen. But if it did, for any reason, through any conceivable chain of events, no matter what, you would simply have no excuse for what happened. It's not the sort of thing you go into just knowing you'll regret it, but rather the sort of thing you can imagine having to explain, possibly while wearing a cast, and being met unconditionally with no sympathy. Not for you and certainly not for your fool predicament. This isn't the sort of thing you can explain to skydivers. Two years ago, Piriya jumped out of a perfectly good airplane and it changed her life. I've never asked, but I suspect she was hooked before she even hit the ground. What I do know is that she had an unshakeable goofy grin for days afterward, and it wasn't long before she was busy logging jumps and shopping for altimeters and trying to figure out why on earth I wasn't going with her. I don't have a fear of falling. I don't mind heights. In fact, the thought of skydiving inspires in me no visceral reaction of any kind. I tried explaining to Piriya that really the only part that got me was being strapped to someone I didn't know for a prolonged period of time. "Clearly," she said, "you've never seen a skydiving instructor." When I was a freshman in college, the captain of the men's cross country team sat me down at a party he was hosting with the promise that we would talk until I could give him a good reason not to drink with him. These are the sort of conversations you can't win, the sort of conversations that reward argument about the same way quicksand rewards thrashing. These are the sort of conversations you have with the converted. And they are the sort of conversations Piriya and I had about skydiving. For a long time, the only way to sidestep to less contentious topics was to remind her that I still couldn't justify spending the money on it. It occurs to me now that, after a while, these conversations came to coincide with Piriya's attempts to find me part-time jobs. Last week I accepted an invitation to dinner and found myself surrounded by skydivers. If you are one, a skydiver, it's a big part of your life and, eventually, the conversation fell into the familiar paces of why wasn't I trying it, too? I hardly had a chance to say something polite but non-committal when Piriya added, "and we'll pay for it." I can't say that sold me on the idea, but it did change things. I had nothing to counter with. A few days later, waiting to meet Piriya and the train that would take us out to the dropzone, I was still undecided about jumping. What I did know, what I was sure of, was that I wanted to witness this thing, whatever it was, that draws my friends out of the city every weekend. It is hardly an overstatement to say that Piriya and Andy spend every weekend at the dropzone. It's how they met, in fact. They're married now, and it seems the only reason to stay away is the Chicago winters that effectively end the season from November to March. A shoulder injury from an off landing has kept Piriya grounded for months, but she still goes. She had to start working in the pro shop so she'd have something to do while all her friends were busy jumping, but she's still there. And I can't blame her. Skydivers may be the single most pleasant group of people I've ever spent time with. Friendly, engaging, generous, interesting. What everyone kept telling me about skydivers that weekend, and they were all skydivers so they should know, was that nobody knows what anyone does for a living. People from all walks of life do it, they'd say, gesturing across the bonfire at a group that, for all we knew, included a doctor, a bartender, and a landscape architect. The point was, they explained, that no one ever thought to ask, sometimes years passed before it even came up. (The other thing I learned about skydiver social customs was that single women don't stay single long, and that skydivers don't "break up," they just "lose their turn.") When Piriya introduced me to her dropzone friends, naturally my jumping status (or lack thereof) was part of the introduction, followed by Piriya's belief that I could use some convincing. I braced myself for a hard sell, a wide-eyed enthusiasm, an intensity appropriate to an adrenaline-junkie. It's not what I got. What I got was a the thoughtful silence of people who seem never to have needed to articulate their passion, people who had no convincing arguments because it wouldn't have occurred to them that there was another point to argue. I expected "You gotta do it, man!" and was met with something more akin to, "Well, why wouldn't you?" The more people I talked to, the more the whole thing sounded almost meditative. "It's like, you're some place you're not supposed to be, and you just have to think about how lucky you are to be there, to get a chance to see things like that." One of the people I'd met that first day, one of the Toms actually, was Loud Tom, and he was the only one who seemed interested in disarming whatever reason I might have to not jump. "You like great views? You're the kind of person that takes the window seat on airplanes?" I do. I am. But, I had to point out, I also hate rollercoasters, my ears don't handle so much as elevator trips up tall buildings especially well, and I don't have the health insurance to cover so much as a sprained ankle. Tom was unmoved. "It's not like a rollercoaster, your ears will clear in a couple of days," he made me follow along as he pinched his nose and exhaled, practiced getting my ears adjusted after an imaginary jump, "and nothing's going to happen to you because you'll be with me and I won't let it." Tom has a day job that involves his name being embroidered neatly on the jacket he was wearing, but as you might guess with a skydiver, I couldn't tell you any more about it than that. Weekends, anyway, he's a tandem jump instructor, tall and lanky which someone later told me is supposed to be ideal for that sort of thing, with a colored eyebrow ring and a number of ear piercings. "I don't want to be that person who gets up there and then realizes it's a bad idea," I finally told him, at the end of a list of all possible reasons I could decide not to jump. "That only happens to girls who need a lot of attention, and they end up jumping anyway. You're not one of those girls," he assured me. Then, with a twinkle in his eye he followed up, "Are you?" . . . There are a lot of things I remember about the weekend, most of which have nothing to do with skydiving. The near-forgotten pleasure of putting up a tent. The way you can be woken by four trains, a few low-flying airplanes, and a barking dog and still sleep better than you have in weeks. The all-you-can-eat pancake breakfast some pilots had put together one hangar over. How many conversations I had because someone just walked over and started one. One thing I don't remember is quite how I got signed up to jump. Jump school is short. It takes approximately an equal amount of time to initial the fifty different ways the legal disclaimer advises you that "skydiving is inherently dangerous." And then you wait to get assigned a flight and an instructor. The plane at chicagoland skydiving is decorated with colorful dots all over the tail and is called the "Spotted Otter." I was on the ninth load; people who go up in the first one are called "test dummies" because no one's figured out the winds for the day and it's unlikely the jumpers will land on the field. I watched Sunday's test dummies come down and all but one landed in the corn or the soybean fields that surround the dropzone. I should mention here that Chicagoland Skydiving is based in Hinckley, Illinois, a town with only a handful of stoplights and, curiously, the home of the debut game of the Harlem Globetrotters. Which is all to say that there's a lot of corn to land in, if it comes to that. Tom assured me it wouldn't. Tom, a man clad in a lime green jumpsuit with jungle print patches who likes to joke about being narcoleptic or having taken an extra dose of his medication, had been awarded the responsibility of getting me safely to the ground from 12,000 feet. He taught me how to kneel at the plane's open door. How to rock out into an arch. How to pull my hair back so he wouldn't end up with a mouthful of red curls. He offered me a flightsuit, but made it clear the 70 degree day would be too hot for it. It occurred to me while I was waiting for my load to come up, that skydiving, at least your first time, is one of those activities you should really do with a group of friends if you can help it. Which made it particularly nice when Piriya closed up the pro-shop long enough to ride co-pilot on my flight, and Andy volunteered his videography services. Skydiving flights have the goal of getting you to altitude as fast as possible, which means a sharp climb up, the sort of thing that makes you wish the darn thing would just level off and let you out. Perhaps they do that on purpose. Tom joked and teased all the way up, and didn't seem to care that our altimeters had different readings. Apparently it's not that important. It's cold up that high, up at 12,000 feet, and I began to wish Tom hadn't talked me out of the flightsuit. Soon, though, my thoughts were occupied with how to cross my arms to fall out and then spring into an arch and look for Andy and remember to look at the horizon and smile and not look down because everyone looks down and breathe because no one remembers to breathe and we were out! and upside down and unstable and then fine again. The time it takes to reach terminal velocity is relatively short, which is good because it's the getting to that point that throws your stomach. And then it's the dark ribbon of the horizon. The wind rushing past you. The ease with which another person can move toward you, take your hand, swing you around as if with no effort. When you hit 6,000 feet, you try to pull the parachute, yanking at an orange cylinder on your right hip that's harder to find than you might think. Our parachute snivelled, Tom's and mine, deployed but wouldn't open for a thousand feet. Time enough for Tom to start explaining what was happening, time enough for him to decide that in 500 more feet we'd have to cut and go to the reserve. We didn't, the shoot opened, hard, my legs swinging up in a clean arc from where they'd been tucked up behind my back. Tom loosened up the harness and we fell slowly toward the ground under a full canopy. We watched Andy fall away from us, pull his chute some thousand feet below. "You like carnival rides?" Tom called out. "Hate 'em!" I shouted back. "Then you won't like this at all!" I could almost hear him grinning as he swung us sharply to the side. Back on the ground I had the same sort of zen feeling I had in the air, of the whole thing being no big deal, and started to wonder if I'd done too good of talking myself through it. If in deciding not to be nervous I'd sacrificed the sheer enjoyment of it. I had had a good time, was glad I'd done it, would recommend it to anyone interested, but I had kind of hoped for a little bit more, kind of expected to be one of those people with passion in their eyes and plastered across the face with that permanent grin. The night before, in one of the conversations about why I could possibly resist jumping, I explained that everyone I knew who had tried it became addicted and I saw no reason to go looking for an expensive addiction. And now I was just a little disappointed not to be hooked. Sitting at the bonfire that first night, I was on the one side next to a mother of three who had gone back to bartending, actually took a second job to pay for all the training it would take to get her certification, put it all on her credit card before she even took that first jump because she knew that she'd love it. On my other side was a former tandem instructor who laid it out simply. "Out of five hundred people I've seen jump, maybe five really didn't like it. Maybe five or six stayed with it. So your chances of being at either end isn't good, but your chances of going out and having a great time is huge. Life's all about experiencing things, and you pick the things you want to experience again," he paused here before summing up. "So you go out, you give your instructor hell, and you enjoy it." Simple as that. Easy. Like falling off a log. From twelve thousand feet. __ "Scared of love, love and aeroplanes...falling out, I said takes no brains." -- Andy Partridge (XTC)

Hey, isn't it "Kraft Dinner" where you come from? _Pm __ "Scared of love, love and aeroplanes...falling out, I said takes no brains." -- Andy Partridge (XTC)

Too late! He has already posted them! He does look kind of cute in them, though... _Pm __ "Scared of love, love and aeroplanes...falling out, I said takes no brains." -- Andy Partridge (XTC)

Dude, are you SURE you're not gay? _Pm __ "Scared of love, love and aeroplanes...falling out, I said takes no brains." -- Andy Partridge (XTC)

Yeah, I know...but, you DID say, I think my buddy really likes straight boys, too... _Pm __ "Scared of love, love and aeroplanes...falling out, I said takes no brains." -- Andy Partridge (XTC)

Oh, that's so great of you, Adam! I've got this buddy who's a bit of a drama queen, but he's not TOO flaming. I'll tell him you're available! _Pm __ "Scared of love, love and aeroplanes...falling out, I said takes no brains." -- Andy Partridge (XTC)

Er, I don't think it's your ego that us ladies wanna be stroking... _Pm __ "Scared of love, love and aeroplanes...falling out, I said takes no brains." -- Andy Partridge (XTC)

I've already contributed my nudity to the forums! You have to go searching for it, though. Hint: It was a Merry Xmas present to my fellow post whores. _Pm __ "Scared of love, love and aeroplanes...falling out, I said takes no brains." -- Andy Partridge (XTC)

Hey...um...how YOU doin'?! _Pm __ "Scared of love, love and aeroplanes...falling out, I said takes no brains." -- Andy Partridge (XTC)

Hmmm...you mean this thread? _Pm __ "Scared of love, love and aeroplanes...falling out, I said takes no brains." -- Andy Partridge (XTC)

I dunno...with the size of that tent in your pants, your penis appears to be rather happy! _Pm __ "Scared of love, love and aeroplanes...falling out, I said takes no brains." -- Andy Partridge (XTC)

I guess this is HH's semi-annual reminder for this feature request? _Pm __ "Scared of love, love and aeroplanes...falling out, I said takes no brains." -- Andy Partridge (XTC)

Why Kev, are you scared about your first time? I'll be gentle with ya, baby. _Pm __ "Scared of love, love and aeroplanes...falling out, I said takes no brains." -- Andy Partridge (XTC)

You can ask...but I might not tell. _Pm __ "Scared of love, love and aeroplanes...falling out, I said takes no brains." -- Andy Partridge (XTC)

Americans are just now being introduced to Sue Johanson via the Oxygen women's cable network. I'm so glad Andy got his sex education by watching her show in grade school. _Pm __ "Scared of love, love and aeroplanes...falling out, I said takes no brains." -- Andy Partridge (XTC)

Yah, those pervy Canadians know everything about sex! _Pm __ "Scared of love, love and aeroplanes...falling out, I said takes no brains." -- Andy Partridge (XTC)

Yeah, I know what you mean! Those Canadians are nasty, filthy creatures! Uh, I mean...those Canadian GEESE are nasty, filthy creatures! _Pm __ "Scared of love, love and aeroplanes...falling out, I said takes no brains." -- Andy Partridge (XTC)

Here's the (very long) Chicago Tribune article on it, btw! _Pm http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-0409170317sep17,1,3096023.story Jet's engine explodes, drops debris on Niles Bird collision suspected; aircraft lands safely at O'Hare By John Bebow and Jon Hilkevitch, Tribune staff reporters. Tribune staff reporter Patrick Rucker and freelance reporter Brian Cox contributed to this report Published September 17, 2004 They heard the boom all over Niles. A sharp crack from American Airlines Flight 1374 broke the everyday drone of jet traffic over the near north suburb shortly after 2 p.m. Thursday. The plane returned safely to O'Hare minutes after takeoff. No one was injured. But the shards of metal that rained down on neighborhoods, play yards and a town fountain reminded residents of the potential dangers in the sky. As at least one large bird apparently was sucked into the left engine of the twin-engine McDonnell Douglas Super 80 bound for Philadelphia with 107 passengers and a crew of five on board, the resulting roar drove Jeanne O'Grady's cat under the couch. Later, as O'Grady, 43, walked near her home near Howard Street and Harlem Avenue, she found a 4-inch piece of jagged metal thought to have fallen from the plane. "If that had hit a kid in the head, that would have been really bad," she said. "Of course you can't blame anyone, because it was a bird. But it worries me that they want to make the airport bigger. Thank God nothing has happened before." In a harrowing few moments, police scanners blared calls for all available ambulances to report to O'Hare as witnesses on the ground saw flames coming from the plane. On board, passengers heard one or two loud booms and felt the left side and tail shake and dip. Some concluded death was imminent. Joe Richardson, 44, who lives in a Philadelphia suburb, looked out the window and saw that "the whole left side" was on fire. He said he was "absolutely" convinced the plane was going to crash. The MD-80, however, is designed to fly safely with one engine. Pilots quickly turned the plane around as flight controllers at O'Hare cleared runways for a successful emergency landing. "The pilots thought they saw about 20 geese, and I think one got cooked, at least," said American spokeswoman Mary Frances Fagan. "The pilots did their job. They did what they were trained to do." The plane, piloted by a captain and first officer with more than 8,000 combined hours of flight experience, departed O'Hare on a northeast heading shortly after 2 p.m. The plan was to climb to 24,000 feet by the time it was well over Lake Michigan, 40 miles from the airport. But 10 miles from the airport, at about 3,000 feet with the plane still in a critical phase of flight, the pilots saw the flock of geese, then heard a cockpit alarm as the left engine burst into flames. The pilots deployed an external fire extinguisher, shut down the charred engine and immediately banked back to the southeast. The O'Hare tower momentarily stopped all arrivals and departures, allowing Flight 1374 clear access back to the ground, where it safely came to rest at 2:19 p.m., according to officials at the airline and the Federal Aviation Administration. Back on the ground, passenger Jeff Mueller, 38, a former Delta Airlines mechanic from Chicago, said both wings of the plane were splattered with bird blood. "The outside of the engine was just like charcoal," Mueller said. "You come down the stairs and look back, and you think you're very lucky." None of the passengers or five crew members required medical treatment, Fagan said. They were whisked to a new flight that left O'Hare at 4:44 p.m. and arrived in Philadelphia shortly after 7 p.m. The kind of bird strike suspected to have caused Thursday's spectacle is an everyday occurrence in commercial aviation. But rarely do the mid-air collisions between fowl and jets cause such a scare. "It's a dangerous thing, but not unusual, and not excessively dangerous," said Fred Culick, emeritus professor of mechanical engineering and jet propulsion at the California Institute of Technology. The FAA's National Wildlife Strike Database shows planes made contact with animals, including birds, 2,237 times this year so far. It happened 6,819 times last year and 61,907 times since 1990. Canada geese have been the victims of 89 such collisions with airplanes in Illinois in the past 14 years, according to the FAA. But in more than 80 percent of bird-plane collisions there is no noticeable effect. Only 8 percent of such mishaps result in engine shutdowns or precautionary landings. In 1995, an Air Force AWACS radar plane crashed in Alaska, killing 24 crewmen, after geese were sucked into one of the plane's engines. Six people in the United States died of injuries attributable to collisions between birds and non-military aircraft in the 1990s, according to federal data. It is nevertheless dramatic when the bird is a big one, and the place it hits is the center of an airplane engine. Small birds go right through, Culick said. Larger birds first smack into a rapidly whirring metal fan that likely cuts them apart before sending pieces through the engine's compressor, combustion chamber and turbine, tearing metal along the way and spraying burning fuel into the air. "One would guess seeing flames that something happened in the inner core," Culick said of Thursday's incident. "One would think a piece of the bird, a fairly big piece, went through the combustor and turbine." By mid-afternoon Thursday, Niles residents had turned wreckage hunting into an impromptu pastime. Niles police received more than 100 calls reporting the explosion or debris, said Cmdr. John Fryksdale. Chunks of metal fell into the Niles Veterans Memorial Waterfall at Touhy and Milwaukee Avenues. Dozens of bystanders gathered at Pioneer Park at Touhy and Harlem as police picked up more scraps that fell on baseball fields, in batting cages and on a miniature golf course. A caretaker at St. Adalbert Catholic Cemetery on Milwaukee Avenue called Niles police after two pieces of the airplane fell there, said Niles police Sgt. Jim Elenz. "He said he actually saw the stuff falling from the sky, and he pointed out the pieces," Elenz said. "They were about the size of a half sheet of paper. They were flexible, kind of looked like fiberglass." On the roof of the Niles Shopping and Medical Center, seven workers heard a loud noise and looked up to see the plane trailing flames and smoke behind it. People at the busy intersection of Touhy and Milwaukee stopped and looked at the sky. "First there was a pop and a roar," said roofing contractor Greg Dobbs. Another man on his crew, Ivaylo Toched, said he "heard something like thunder." Street traffic slowed and then stopped, said Toched. For a minute, maybe two, the workers on the roof watched the plane, which had apparently still been climbing out of takeoff, bend south toward Chicago, then limp back toward O'Hare. The flames went out once, reappeared, then went out again. "What happened today is scary," said Ron Smizera, 57, whose condo is less than 100 feet from where some of the debris fell in Pioneer Park. "This is rare. How often does stuff fall off a plane?" Others reveled in the oddity and the happy fact that no one got hurt. "We love it," Niles resident Mary Sullivan said of the steady roar overhead. "Sometimes we just sit out and watch because we have a passion for planes." - - - Plane lands after engine damage An American Airlines flight to Philadelphia returned safely to O'Hare International Airport Thursday after one of the plane's two engines apparently struck a bird. So far this year, about 80 airplane-bird strikes have been reported in Illinois. Left engine was significantly damaged. The plane can fly safely with one operating engine. PLANES WITH MOST BIRD-ENGINE STRIKES Reported strikes in the U.S. for commercial aircraft with fuselage-mounted engines 1990-99 McDonnell Douglas MD-80, 145, 7.36 McDonnell Douglas DC-9, 122, 7.83 Boeing-727, 106, 5.08 Fokker 100, 29, 8.14 Canadair RJ, 21, 79.73 AREA WITH MOST BIRD STRIKES Reported strikes in the U.S., 1990-99 California, 2516 Florida, 2,367 Illinois, 1,482 Kentucky, 723 Washington, D.C., 705 MCDONNELL DOUGLAS MD-80 Passenger capacity: 172 Engines: 2 Max takeoff weight: 140,000 pounds Wingspan: 107 feet, 10 inches Length: 147 feet, 10 inches Height: 29 feet, 8 inches STRIKE'S EFFECT ON FLIGHT Reported wildlife strikes in the U.S., 1990-99 None, 15,360 Aborted take off, 653 Precautionary landing, 1,344 Engines shut down, 156 Other*, 461 *Other includes reduced speed because of shattered windshield, emergency landing at destination airport or crash landing Sources: Federal Aviation Administration, National Wildlife Strike Database Serial Report 6, American Airlines,"Modern Commercial Aircraft" Chicago Tribune - See microfilm for complete graphic. Copyright © 2004, Chicago Tribune __ "Scared of love, love and aeroplanes...falling out, I said takes no brains." -- Andy Partridge (XTC)

I agree! However, the one time it was entertaining was at an Eric Idle show (Eric Idle Exploits Monty Python). It was getting towards the end of the night, he left the stage, a projection screen descended, and these words appeared "SPONTANEOUS ENCORE IN" with a 2 minute countdown. It was pretty amusing. _Pm __ "Scared of love, love and aeroplanes...falling out, I said takes no brains." -- Andy Partridge (XTC)