lurch

Advice on fitting in: Do not try. Focus on the next jump you make. Go completely banzai about it but do it intelligently. Focus on bringing rational judgement to everything you do. The friends and place you fit into the community will come to you. I got the name Lurch because when I first started jumping I was a leftover Goth kid before they called 'em goth kids. I specialized in looking as dangerous as possible from long experience in nasty places with psycho violent people among whom the only way to be left alone was to make it quite clear you can and will take em apart with your bare hands given the slightest provocation- Dressed in black, reclusive, scary as hell. The idea of a social scene and community in which I could let down my guard was completely alien to me. I fit in like a crow at an exotic bird convention. My first several years, I had a very hard time connecting with anyone. Yet everyone treated me well. But I'd go back to my car alone at the end of every jumping day and just sit there with a beer feeling lonely as fuck and very much the outsider. I didn't let that discourage me- I was here for the flying, pure and simple. Inside of 18 months I got ahold of a wingsuit when wingsuits were just getting started, and dedicated myself to just flying it. Eventually went to Zhills where I found myself a little fish in a big pond in the emerging discipline of wingsuits. The ranking flyers of the time welcomed me and I started to earn respect and fit in without really noticing it- too busy flying. Made my share of mistakes, owned em, learned, moved on. I had no idea how much of an impression all this made at my home DZ let alone the global community. Bit by bit I noticed that not only didn't I feel like an outsider much anymore but I had connected with people across all cliques and disciplines. As I gained ability and rank in the wingsuit community it sort of spilled over to my relations with jumpers in general and I found myself connecting with all sorts of people. And loving it. Eventually worked my way up to the heavy suits, made a few of my own, specializing in freefall time, performance flying- everyone's got their own take on what kind of flying they like, mine is extreme performance... distance, duration. Mastered flocking, became in demand for big wingsuit events. Started getting invited to far more events than I could possibly attend, hit as many as I could, built connections and made friends all over the world. Last few years have been all about competing- First game, scored in the middle. Upped my game, took a bronze. Upped my suit AND game, ended up taking home a chain of first place wins and then a bucket full of various podium spots, silver, bronze, more gold, whatever. I was and am in it for the fun, challenge, glory, adventure, and friends. I'm about ready to retire from comps, mission accomplished ten times over, but I still got one more game left in me so I'll be swinging by Elsinore again this fall. I owe Spot a hug and I can't WAIT to hang and party with the Irish boys again. Some of the most fun people I have ever met. Now I fit in everywhere I go. They keep a spot open for me just in case I drop in. They took care of me when I stopped by the UK this spring. They took care of me in Germany, they took care of me in Hungary, the Philippines, Cali, Florida, Maine... I've got friends at dropzones around the world, from other champions to rank noobs. I don't care what your rank in the skydiving hierarchy, you're either quality people or you're not. I don't have time for the nots because I'm so busy flying and partying with the quality people. Many of them aren't even wingsuit flyers let alone "part of my clique"- has nothing to do with it. We're in the sky, aren't we? I've got a long-established territorial spot on the lawn at Elsinore just to the left of the front walk where I throw down my portable nest every time I'm in the neighborhood- I drop in once or twice a year. Wingsuit records, comps, whatever. There are friends there. Same goes for Zhills except I'm still experimenting with the best spot for a tent there. This season when I ran out of resources to continue competing I was moved almost to tears when my home DZ crew threw a series of fundraisers to help finance my ongoing competition career. They SENT me back to Hungary for a 3rd year at the Marko Mike's game. I had no idea people could be this incredibly awesome. Somehow I never noticed when exactly I became the hometown champion and international representative of my home DZ and the US depending on who is attending whatever comp I've been at lately. I try not to let all this go to my head- it isn't hard, I just remember I came for the flying and friends and let the social stuff work itself out. Just keep jumping and doing your best to be a good person and your place in the social scene will work itself out. Have faith in the future cause if you keep jumping you're gonna get there sooner or later anyway. Fly. Fly with all your heart and let the chips fall where they may. The people you fit in with, will come and find you. Count on it. When they do, take care of them. They're the best people reality will ever gift you with. It's up to you. If you let the small scale stuff spoil it for you, you'll be forever stuck on the small stuff. Let go, and everything you ever wanted will fall into your lap unasked-for. Next thing you know you'll have people you can call real friends, everywhere you go. I owe this community everything. I do my damndest to give it back as much as I can. Teach the new birds, fly with everyone... Gotta go. They're expecting me up in Maine right now. Tiki Bar burning. Haven't missed a Tiki in 13 years and I don't plan to start now. I don't know what this weekend holds but I know there'll be a shady spot in the trees to drop my nest and more friends than I can hug. Good luck. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

YES!!!! Excessive use of Concrete Rebound Hammer may cause lingual scrambling resembling Hawking Cranioforkotomy. Warning: Users of Concrete Rebound Hammer may unexpectedly gain comprehension of Time Cube. http://www.timecube.com/ -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Hey Chuck thanks for that relevant detail. That may be a really useful thing to think about when choosing my next wingsuit canopy, myself. I've got a ticket for a half price Icarus so I may be changing from my customary Sabres soon. My vote goes to old Sabres because with the right tweaks I was able to achieve 100% reliability with it, zero line twists, ever again... But, just recently I had my first actual mal in ages... almost certainly my own error, sloppy packing, probably didn't seat the toggles properly, and I had a double brake fire. The resulting deployment was -BRUTAL- even by my standards, fallrate at the time was probably in the high-40's low-50's, (I usually deliberately build up a bit of down speed in my old Apache Reb racing suit prior to the throw) and I was DAMN glad I wasn't going any faster at the time. That was a skull-rattling slam of an opening and if it'd been only a one-sided fire it'd almost certainly have ruined that long standing record of twistless jumps. Might have even had to chop it if the events following had gone the way I'd expect them to. But since both toggles fired at once I got a nice, on-heading opening. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Wish my own office issues would solve themselves that easily. Most times they do, most problem employees here (small semiconductor processing factory) end up getting themselves terminated one way or another... But. We got this guy. He's a bottom-level machine operator. This guy cops this imperious attitude which is becoming increasingly irritating to deal with. He makes frequent attempts to repair the machine he is running. He finds it embarassing to have to call maintenance and will butcher the machine until it is thoroughly broken/swap parts/air lines/etc at random until he can't get it to do anything anymore before finally calling for backup. He lies. I have caught him repeatedly lying about having attempted repair. "I didn't do anything" "The air lines for the vacuum generator and feed regulator are switched. The machine cannot and was not running like that. It is not possible for the machine to have functioned like that, ergo, since it was running well till 5 minutes ago, you tried to fix it and only gave up when you couldn't get it to respond at all anymore." "Yes it was, it always runs like that" He has absolutely no idea how the machine works. So his repair attempts are the equivalent to a child poking and pulling things at random, checking the tire pressure because maybe it has something to do with why the engine won't start... then demanding we rotate the tires because that'll definitely fix it. I'm the lead maintenance guy. I outrank this guy in a big way. What -really- gets on my nerves is, he cops an attitude like he thinks he is my superior and thinks I answer to him. "Why haven't you ordered those diffusers like I told you to?" 1: You don't give me orders. 2: The diffusers are brand new and nobody else has a problem with them. 3: I'm the house mechanic I'll decide what parts need replacing. 4: You don't even know what these parts do or how they work let alone how to judge whether it needs replacing or not. Then he tries going over my head trying to get my boss to tell me to do what he says. Then he tries issuing orders instead to my apprentice mechanic instead... since I'm just not obeying him he hopes my apprentice will. I have let apprentice know, you don't answer to this guy either. Do not obey him. If he hassles you, bring it to me. Guy keeps trying, though. Keeps attempting to order my apprentice to order the parts he thinks the machine needs. The he starts getting on our case and complaining loudly when we do not comply. His latest this week? Copping a grand arrogance. He had the chutzpah, when he needed a tweak made to a fixture, to call my name and then crook his finger at me like a schoolmarm "Come here little boy" gesture. I blew it off a bit till I could deal with him without exploding then went and handled the problem. I am the house mechanic. He had a mechanical problem. I'm still trying to decide what is the most civilized way to put this guy in his place and get the idea through his thick skull that I outrank him and no matter how much attitude he cops, I am not subject to his orders and he does not decide how mechanical things are done around here. I'm trying to take the high road. It's not easy. I've already bounced this off my boss a couple times, they know he lies but the verdict was until we catch him red handed tampering with the gear we can't really do anything. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

If you haven't got a pocket slider, add one. Both Sabes I've owned came with user-made slider pockets on them. The 135, the pocket was poorly made and tearing. I cut it off since I only meant to ever use the canopy for wingsuit. Never took that canopy to terminal. My 120 also has a slider pocket but it was well made so I left it in place to see how it does. Turned out it has no effect on wingsuit openings... moving slowly, the pocket just doesn't have enough airflow to do anything. Eventually a friend talked me out of my suit for the first time in years to do a little freefall and a high pull at 10-ish. Was a bit concerned about deploying a wingsuit packjob set for a 400-foot opening at wingsuit speeds. No nose treatments no stuffing or rolling of anything except 3 twists of the tail prior to laying down the canopy during pack just to keep the slider tight against the stops. I was ready for a neckbreaker but was pleasantly surprised- at higher speeds, I.E. normal belly terminal, the slider pocket did its' job very well, I got linestretch, a good 3-4 second snivel and a comfy staged opening. So, best possible combo. It's good for freefall and at higher speeds the slider pocket's got teeth and retards the opening nicely, and at lower speeds the pocket might as well not even be there and I get solid 400-foot "Whump" openings every time. The slower I go the faster it opens. I haven't taken my current 34" pc to terminal yet and am not sure if I want to. It'll certainly make the initial snatch a good deal sharper, after that, not certain what to expect from it. But if you're going to a megasuit such as a Venom you're probably really going to need/want a bigger PC/bridle. My Apache XRW/Rebel1 is about equivalent to the Venom, sizewise. When I got it, I was running an 8.5 foot bridle and 28" ZP PC which had always been fine with suits up to and including S-Bird. With an Apache sized burble it was -NOT- adequate and even shut down the suit would suck the PC back and make it land on my tail and do nothing. After manually kicking the PC out of the burble a bunch of times I went to a 10-foot 28" and everything was fine for the next several years. Then I added a Rebel2 and an experimental research suit I call the Albatross Project (hyperexpanded redesign of the R2 Tony built me from some drawings I sent him over the winter) to my fleet and both of those suits brought back the suckback effect and required a 12 foot 34" ZP PC to get reliable openings. If you're going to freefly a setup meant to go with a megasuit you might want to keep more than one PC handy and switch em out before freeflying. Your alternative is stick with what you've got and work up a really vigilant prolonged-shutdown-and-drop pull sequence to make sure you've got the necessary airspeed to compensate for the lack of a larger PC. You're trying to get gear to work well while pushing opposite ends of the envelope with the same configuration and I think you're likely to encounter issues with one end or the other. I could have continued to make the older smaller 28" PC work with the really big suits as long as I folded wings and waited long enough but the necessary altitude consumption and prolonged drop at pull time were a pain in the ass... I went with the bigger PCs because I didn't want to have to do such a long ritualized speedup-deploy every time I jump the big suits. Even the 34" is barely adequate with the Albatross and I still have to do a careful speedup with that one, but I've got a 36", a 38", and a 40" on 12 foot bridles already built and waiting for when I decide I need them. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

I'm jumping a Sabre1 120 myself. 34" PC to go with really big suits. Wouldn't jump anything much smaller for that reason, but the 120 works great. Never any issues. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Been jumping nothing but old Sabre 1's for wingsuit for about 7 or 8 years. Fallrate gets low enough, Sabre 2's take way too long to open. Sabre 1's open cleanly regardless of fallrate. They can be reliable. When I first got one I had the line stows wrong. Got twisted 2-3 out of every 5 jumps. Eventually had to cut it away. The one cutaway I've had in over 2500 wingsuit jumps. Finally learned to tune the packjob with small line stows to minimize snatch forces and maximize unstowed line, and maybe 1/3 of the lineset in the bottom of the container as unstowed line for bag acceleration management. Twist rate went from 2 or 3 of 5 to 0/1000. I've had 100% reliability for the years since. 400 foot openings like clockwork unless I screw up the throw and suckback or burble the PC which can produce the odd occasional 6-700 foot opening. Using a 12 foot bridle, 34 inch PC for extremely large suits. No twists. Ever. Regardless of suit. Worst I've done was 180 degree crossed risers behind my head as a result of totally horrible and asymmetrical body position. Sabres are known for something I've seen referred to as the "Sabre Slam". A tendency to hard openings especially if the slider isn't fully on the stops. I got it once. I was riding at a very low fallrate at the time so instead of being painful it was merely a startlingly, -extremely- sudden stop. I've always paid attention to keeping the slider tight to the canopy on packjobs ever since and have had no further canopy behavior issues of any kind. Since successful long term survival in skydiving is dependent on reliable gear I've flown this setup ever since. I wore out a Sabre 135, found a good used Sabre 120 with a fresh lineset and have been jumping that ever since. Maybe 300+ jumps on it, zero issues. I plan to fly it till it wears out, too, and may well try to find another before that happens. The design is old and the canopy's glide is nothing special but it's hard to beat the reliability. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

...and yet it's totally ok for gov, cops or agencies to lie to you, cheat, misrepresent, do whatever they want if it helps them sucker you into doing or admitting something letting them grab you and feed you to the machine. It's so one-sided... the so-called "spirit of the law" means nothing, the only thing that matters is, can we find some way to spin this so we can charge you with something... ""Did you really think that we want those laws to be observed?" said Dr. Ferris. "We want them broken. You'd better get it straight that it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up against - then you'll know that this is not the age for beautiful gestures. We're after power and we mean it. You fellows were pikers, but we know the real trick, and you'd better get wise to it. There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted - and you create a nation of law-breakers - and then you cash in on guilt. Now, that's the system, Mr. Rearden, that's the game, and once you understand it, you'll be much easier to deal with." -Ayn Rand Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Not lame. The man was trying to achieve something, push a limit. He succeeded. Absolutely nothing lame about that. Just because you don't understand why he did it, doesn't mean it wasn't worth doing. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

If you're a bird and you weren't here, you missed one hell of a wild party. Pyro. Hoola hoops. (The winner of THAT contest was gorgeous, elegant, and, well, WOW.) Flocks of all sizes and scales. A Skyvan. Learning and teaching and drinking and playing and falling down and getting back up and running around committing random acts of mischief and mayhem and fun. Reconnected with a decade's worth of old friends from around the world and made some new ones. I think I got hugged about 300 times my first 2 hours on the DZ and things just got better from there. About the only negative thing that happened was my old Suunto decided it'd had enough of this crap and bailed off my wrist at some point during deployment. Since nobody reported being coldcocked by an out of control ballistic timepiece, I assume it landed safely somewhere. But if anybody at Zhills ever finds a beat up stainless steel Suunto altimeter watch on an aftermarket nylon and velcro band out in the field somewhere, it's mine. If not, well, I needed a new watch anyway. I will miss it, it was a loyal old friend with at least 1500 jumps on it, but that's life. Gear comes, gear goes, but friends last forever. Made it home safe, tired, and very, very happy. Till next time... -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

I've met two so far. One was a musician, friend of a friend. Heard I was a jumper, started telling me all about his jumps "somewhere in Florida". He was being oddly vague so I asked him a few pointed questions... what canopy? What dropzone? Where (what alti) did you pull? He was making shit up on the fly very obviously based on having seen "Point Break". What DZ? "Don't remember, south somewhere" What canopy? "Don't remember, a square one" What altitude? "Don't know, just waited till the needle hit the red part and pulled then" I needled him a little then let it slide. The second was -creepy-. There was a woman got a job at a factory I used to work at. Odd facial features, gangly build, weird behavior... One day as I'm fixing her machine another employee tells her "He's a skydiver, did ya know that?" She says "Wow, so am I" "Really?" says I... "Where do you jump?" "It was when I was a kid," she says. "Daddy was in the air force and took us with him to jump out of his plane all the time." Me, straight face, knowing what's coming... "Really? When you were a kid? Did you get a kid-size rig?" "No, I was a big girl so I got my own grown-up one. Daddy was very safety minded so we'd do just as he says or we get the strap." Me: "O...k...." (backing away slowly) This woman did not last long. Evidently mildly intellectually impaired, made up outlandish lies and told them to everyone in earshot all the time. Not what you want to be dealing with on a factory floor, adult with the mind of a child... -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Screw it. I had this whole rant up, decided it was too impolite. Best I can sum it up: Absurd, ridiculous, unacceptable, unreasonable, no. That is all. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

I can't tell if your sentence there is a command, an accusation or a statement... "how you justify" Uh, I don't. The behavior of a national government in a global all-out war is outside the scope of this discussion, and involves far more complex factors relative to individual behaviors and their relationships and influence on the behavior of those governments than can be addressed briefly here. Just to nitpick your point thoroughly, if they'd polled the population of the US at the time, held a survey, including the relevant situational information, (Germany all but wasted already, full explanation of the consequences including the full firestorm effects) and asked the public to vote on it, I think they'd have said "No". Same goes for Japan. When a goverment acts in war the civilian population does not get a say in how the war is prosecuted and do not call the shots. If they're lucky they're at least kept -slightly-informed, after the fact. If. More often the relevant goverments lie, keep secret, and otherwise obfuscate and conceal their activities both from the enemy and to prevent that clueless civilian population from trying to armchair quarterback every decision. The topic was individuals willing to commit such acts themselves, in person, with little to no target discrimination. How did wwII get into this? Even then your attempt to draw these parallels doesn't work. For the behavior of the various governments involved to approximate the behavior of individuals in Iraq, the firebombing of Dresden or the nuking of Japan would have to be expanded to "Says they meant to hit Dresden "for the war effort" but dropped bombs at random all over the planet including the US itself and our neighbors in Canada and Mexico". The analogy breaks down too easily to make a point with. To illustrate more clearly what I was driving at, let's expand the discussion in a relevant direction with another example arguably even more dramatic of the same mass individual behavior: Rwanda. Something like 800,000 dead, must have been, what, 1/5? 1/3, half the population? Killing each other mostly with machetes. It was started by their own government, yes. Who ordered a million machetes because they were the cheapest mass killing implements available, passed them out to the population along with a saturation radio campaign urging them to violence, and told them to use em on their neighbors. They complied. You seem to be arguing that if this happened in the US, the gov passed out a million machetes and ordered the population to start chopping each other to bits, that they'd do so. I argue that the vast, vast majority of us would be like "Are you on drugs?" And would not comply. I also argue that you would have to fuck up this country and its values beyond all recognition for generations to create conditions under which such a thing would even be possible. Most of us, you get mad at somebody, politically or personally, you write an angry letter, sue em, hold a protest, maybe you pee in his mailbox. The more extreme of us might punch him out, start a fight, have a scuffle to settle it, and the most extreme go as far as direct murder and just go kill the guy, which is regarded as too savage to be tolerable by the vast majority of the population. The thing that we as a population do NOT do is, we do NOT go set a bomb at the mall or a random intersection hoping to maybe affect the target of your anger along with the huge group of totally random people you just blew up. But apparently this is ok in Iraqi culture because it was the dominant attack of choice for year after year, so much so that a big proportion of the population had to be personally participating, in a similar fashion as the population of Rwanda did. What I want to know is how things like empathy and sense of connection to your community break down so thoroughly that your society ends up full of individuals savage enough to personally pull the pin on these, going to great effort to do so, knowing full well the results are random victims, and not caring if it's their own neighbors, or the guy down the street running the store, that gets bagged. It's a form of virulent hate based nihilism I cannot process, like the square root of -1, divide by zero error. Best I can do is try to build a box around the psychological black hole where that idea lies and try to understand its origins. It's scary. I want to at least try to understand it so I can avoid ever being infected by it. We see periodic bits of it surface under stress, such as all the "glass parking lot" comments after 9/11... but again, how many of those blustering noisy individuals would personally pull the pin on a random market in Iraq? I'm betting few. I'd bet if you grabbed em by the face, teleported em there, put the initiator into their hands, pointed em at the market 400 yards away and said "Bombs right there, 600 kilos of semtex and a phone, go for it, Rambo, there's the people you wanna kill, take your shot" they'd drop it in horror and look at you like you were insane. The locals, had no such qualms. They DID pull the pin, on that specific act, in person, in mass numbers, again, and again, and again... What I want to know is why. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Ah, the customary Speakers' Corner Word Twister makes an appearance. There's always one of you guys in every debate. "I'm pro-choice" "Ah, so you admit you're FOR the wholesale slaughter of babies!" "I'm pro-2nd-amendment" "Ah, so you admit you're FOR allowing kids to be killed by all these guns" Your shit is weak. My hatred and dislike are reserved for the kinds of people who would blow up other people at random, and the set of cultural values that allow such a thing to be regarded as acceptable by a sufficient proportion of the population to sustain such activity at saturation levels for years on end. In the end I can only express the frustration by saying "Fuck it, let em kill each other till they've had enough" like locking a psycho in a rubber room and letting him beat himself against the walls and scream till he gets exhausted, stops, and hopefully someday learns that this is not acceptable behavior. This is far from "Turning to thoughts of mass murder" especially since your phrasing is intended to try to cast me as someone who thinks it is ok or wants to commit it. Since my whole point has been what the fuck is this abhorrent shit and where does it come from, the stretch you're trying to do of completely inverting what I was talking about and attempting to make it mean the opposite, is too much of a stretch to work. SC Twister Score: 1/10. Fail. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

1: Disagree. If you'd surveyed the country during the cold war you'd be hard pressed to get anyone to openly state they'd be "willing to incinerate the world's population". The cold war was all about nationalistic chest-beating. Basically a dick-measuring contest. An abstract. Big talk, big spending, but nothing personal. And when it came down to it, neither of us was willing to pull the trigger on it. 2:"I have little doubt..." Agree. But consider... Mcveigh did his thing, yeah... he's one of those "things" that doesn't deserve to exist... and has been removed. But what did NOT happen was a sudden wave of thousands upon thousands of imitators joining in the fun. We've got plenty of antigovernment guys running around in the woods in Montana playing apocalypse games with stashes of firearms, but you don't see these guys committing saturation bombing campaigns in crowded areas. Mcveigh was the outlier, the one sample at the extreme end of the spectrum who was actually willing to DO such a thing, as evidenced by the fact that he did it. We had ONE. Iraq had so many they could not be counted accurately, and were able to sustain a saturation bombing campaign, nationwide, sometimes multiple per day, for years on end. We had one, regarded as a monster. They had -legions-, enough to establish constant explosions as NORMAL. I'm not arguing we don't have our fanatics- we certainly do... but enough to saturate our society with such acts, day in and day out for years? Kinda doubt it. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

What I want to know is this: WTF is WRONG with these people? Their culture. Where do these animals come from? At the height of the war there were random bombings, constantly, every day, all over the country. Which says something very creepy about the prevalent values of these people and their society. What kind of culture has so many people so evil that they are willing, eager, to set off bombs in public places, deliberately intending to kill large numbers of totally random innocent people? Enough of them to sustain a constant stream of such bombings for months on end? Not only did they evidently not see anything wrong with it, they did it to themselves, each other, and incidentally a lot of soldiers, so much that it was a trendy, popular behavior like Planking or something. It takes a special kind of degenerate insanity to harbor a desire to set off a bomb, in public, with the purpose of randomly slaughtering as many of your own people as humanly possible, with complete disregard for the innocence or guilt or even caring who the victims ARE. There's no "targeting", its not like each of these attacks was after somebody in particular, after the first few THOUSAND bombs these people knew full well each one was going to generate random, horrible deaths of whoever was nearby... maybe soldiers. Maybe random women and kids... And in Iraq and Afghanistan both, there were so many of these, apparently seething with psychotic hatred their whole lives, waiting for an opportunity, that the moment the US gov popped the cork on their local authority structures they all came out of the woodwork and began bombing the shit out of their own societies, at saturation levels all over the country. Did these sick fucks sit at home, giggling with glee and satisfaction after a successful mission? "I bagged 31 sunnis, 12 women and 14 kids today, there are pieces of children all over the street, allahu akbar, yaaay!" What, the, FUCK! Now there's no shortage of random individual killer loonies here in the states, but does anyone here seriously think that if someday the government fell and popped the cork on local authorities, that everyone, all over the US, would suddenly start setting bombs on every street corner? IEDs by every roadside, suicide bombers walking into every 2nd or 3rd mall willing to die just so long as they can take as many random innocents with them as possible to make some fucked up political or religious statement? We just don't HAVE that many savagely murderous people here! Western civilization, and the values we grow up with, are such that if any of us ever saw one of these happen, I think most of us myself included, would fold up and vomit in horror and shock at the sight of the results, unable to process the kind of raving hatred and insanity that could cause a person to do that. I'm sure we -do- have a few of these... Things... (I will not grant them the status of "people" or "human beings" if you're willing and eager to slaughter large numbers of random people you are not human, you are a thing, a disease, a sickness of the human species) but I do not believe there could possibly be so many of them all throughout america that if given a chance, they'd be able to sustain a constant street-bombing campaign for years on end. If you removed all constraints, let them all do their thing at once, there might be, how many? A few dozen? A couple hundred, max? Iraqi society was SATURATED with them. I can understand them wanting to kill foreign invaders. But they spent as much or more effort killing each other, for local political or religious reasons. Sunni vs Shiite etc. It wasn't just a fistful, a few hundred of them nationwide, because the bombers were getting slaughtered wholesale- by US forces watching from helicopters... by their own mistakes like these assholes... by whoever they were fighting... and they did not run out of bombers. They just kept coming... for years on end. Which implies that there were many, many, many thousands of them. In other words, a significant proportion of the total population. Had no problem, killing random men, women, and kids, as violently, horribly, and gruesomely as possible. Sometimes I think any society in which this even CAN happen, deserves it. This shit doesn't happen in a vacuum. People associated with the bombers, KNOW about it. Neighbors. Friends. Acquaintances. And they did nothing. Evidently when Abdul the wannabe bomber starts sounding off to his buddies about how he wants to get in on the game, nobody spoke up and said "Hey asshole, don't you think thats a little excessive, a little psycho?" These "things", had support networks. Suppliers. People who knew what was going on. And backed it. Helped them set it up. Move the explosives. Lent them a garage to build it in. A truck to move it. Turned a blind eye to the activity or even helped it. For every sick fuck who set one of those random bombs, there had to be many people who approved of it. All this says that "desire and willingness to blow the fuck out of your neighbors including uninvolved men women and kids" was and is a prevalent value in their society. There's a part of me that thinks any part of the world in which this can happen at all should be quarantined like a zombie apocalypse and the disease allowed to run its course until these people fucking learn. Let em die by the tens of thousands until they get the idea through their thick skulls that if you don't want your own kids reduced to bloody chunks of kibble in the streets, stop regarding that kind of behavior as an acceptable set of values in your culture. Reminds me of gangster rap. They spend all this effort making music lamenting the violence of the ghetto, but they are the same people -doing- it. Writing songs glorifying drive-by's and glamorizing the killing while simultaneously moaning about how many friends you've lost to it. Just a suggestion: If you don't like it, stop making it that way. Stop regarding it as a value you aspire to. Christ. Sometimes I have very little hope for the human species. End rant -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Yes. I've spent the last 12 years dedicated exclusively to flying wingsuits. That career has included multiple world records, homemade suit designs and various oddball hardware experiments, some wins and losses in competition and more hair raising adventures than I could tell in a month. Although I have not kept an accurate count of the actual amount of money spent, even a rough estimate says I could have had a house and some serious financial security for the price I've paid to be a part of this. Equipment, travel, food, fuel, time... I have spent it without a second thought and if given a chance to do it all over again I wouldn't change a thing. The reward has been an existence spent experiencing a level of mindblowing exultance you cannot put a price on, in the company of the finest high-achieving misfits visionaries competitors adventurers and all-round wonderful crazy people from all over the world. In my nonskydiving life I am an industrial automation mechanic and amateur machinist. I work in factories maintaining industrial robots and machinery in order to fund all of this. I've turned down a great many opportunities for career advancement because although they would have increased my earnings considerably, they would have interfered with or ended my flying career. I do without TV, (the lack of a cable bill frees up enough money for a few more jumps per month) drive an old vehicle, (no car payment=more jumps) and a great many other things from new clothing to various consumer toys I have no real use for all so that I can afford to continue to do this. I think a lot of people measure their success in and quality of life by the number of expensive consumer toys they own, the price of their house, and the size of their bank account. I measure mine by how much time I spent in the sky and the fact that I am still alive to do it. At some point I plan to acquire a degree in machining but it is going to have to wait a few more years because school is very time consuming, I have some goals still remaining to accomplish involving extreme evolutions of wingsuit performance capability, and I am NOT done yet. Not even close. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Champu your statement contains several elements of classic "moral panic" along the same lines as the exaggerated and dramatized supposed consequences of violent videogames. "Having your smart phone on you all the time creates that same anti-social barrier you get when you're inside the glass and steel of an automobile driving. It subconsciously strips the people around you of their humanity. " Really? Is your "humanity" so fragile it can be stripped from you just by someone nearby being in posession of a PHONE? I have my smartphone on me all the time. I find it a useful tool of the digital age. Little did I know that its' presence in my pocket was somehow "creating an antisocial barrier" and "stripping people around me of their humanity". I didn't know my crappy obsolete first-gen Evo had THAT kind of power. Is there an app for that? What ridiculous, oversensitive overdramatization. Comes off like the classic modern american behavior of desperately seeking something, anything, to be offended by. When I see someone using a phone nearby I'm not dehumanized in the slightest. All I see is, "Someone is using a phone". What's the big deal? And "to a greater extent than carrying a handgun on you does." So having a gun somehow does this too? What if its concealed? This stripping effect... can people feel it when the hidden gun begins this stripping? Or is it like a gun-fear forcefield thats only active when the weapon is visible? Please explain the mechanism. How about other weapons. I always carry a small utility knife. Its meant as a cutting tool but in a pinch I could defend myself quite effectively with it. Does that also "strip people of their humanity"? Jesus christ. *shakes head in disgust* -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Damn Guess I'm not the first to think of that one. I used to drive forklift in this bottle factory. Got bored one day, started doing silly things with it. Ended by picking up a quarter, putting it into a dixie cup, then picking up the dixie cup and placing it on top of a post. The key to the whole trick is dropping the forks, tilting the tower forward, gently placing some but not all of the weight of the fork on the coin, then backing up a bit. It'll flip the coin up onto the edge of the tip of the fork like tiddlywinks. From there short sharp drops of the forks will drop the coin in the cup, then you push the cup to the post, wiggle the forks a few times till the cup sort of smooshes up onto the fork, then carefully jarring the forks again to get the cup back off the forks onto the post. Yes, I can do it with a dime, too. Bigger coins are easier though. I'm a wuss. When somebody asked to see it I usually used a quarter. Hey, it was a safer sport than Industrial Forklift Jousting. Now THAT was FUN!

...You rang? Disclaimer: I am not a Tony suit sales rep but I do work with him a bit as a sponsored test pilot and performance consultant. S-Bird: been flying one for 4 years or so. One of the best "heavy-medium" general-purpose suits out there heavily weighted toward the high performance end of the range. I didn't transition from an R-bird so I can't really compare them except by inference- my suit progression at the time was an old Birdman S-6, which I then modified and enlarged enough to hold its' own against first-gen X-birds. The S-bird was far smoother than anything I could make. The S is a very technical suit. You can fly it ok starting from basic skills with smaller suits but its got a boatload of hidden ninja tricks built in that aren't obvious unless you fly it for a long time with a heavy focus toward getting best distances and times out of it. For instance: The gripper size is just right- smaller, and they're just grippers. Bigger, and they're just grippers. But on the S-Bird they're of a scale and proportion that they make very effective airbrakes/flaps and can be twisted down into the airflow to slow it down without sinking. When I first set eyes on it I knew this was the 4-minute suit I'd always wanted, but it took me 2 years of flying it to prove it. Right about the same time I was giving up, decided I'd been wrong and I wasn't ever going to get it to fly that long, I stumbled on a few more ninja tricks hidden about 3 layers deep and got a fistful of solid 4-minute flights out of it from 13.5-14k to 2200 or so. With a 135 lb pilot, it can sustain fallrates of low-30's all day long. You can backfly in it, but as others pointed out, backflying is the suit's biggest weakness, it doesn't lend itself well to it. Tends to go more head-down on its back than I'd like. Since I'm not a big backflyer this isn't a concern for me and the tradeoff of unusually high performance for its size is more than worth it. The suit is efficient enough to hold its own against far larger suits. You're probably not going to win any competitions in it if you're up against Apache-class megasuits but if you know the ninja tricks you'll shock the hell out of em. Best I ever got was 3.47 km/glide out of it. Its probably the biggest suit you could fairly compete in "intermediate" class with, but if you're skilled with it, you're likely to dominate against other intermediate pilots flying bigger suits they may not really know how to use yet. I competed in "Open" with it once- didn't win, but did a spectacular amount of damage to the scoreboards with it. Very flexible and versatile suit. I use it for everything an Apache or bigger is too big for... flocking, instructing, mild acro, (not really suited for acro because when you flip back to your belly the suit produces a disproportionately powerful low-fallrate surge which tends to make acro somewhat clumsy as it necessitates spending half your effort to keep the thing on a leash... its not what the suit is for, but you can do it) I'm a serious performance freak, the S-Bird is the smallest suit in my currently active fleet, but I always bring it with me to events because if I get invited on any general-purpose flock and I'm not sure of the expected fallrates, the S covers any reasonable need- when in doubt, I go with the S. Having spent the last several years mostly in a heavy Apache XRW (preproduction version of the first-gen Rebel 1) I learned enough scrunchfly tricks from it that when I went back to my S-bird I could easily get it down to any group. Coming from a smaller suit, The S-bird feels like a titanic heavyweight... then coming back from a much larger "dreadnought-class" suit, it feels light and nimble. But by any standard it is a very formidable performer and should not be taken lightly. Inexperienced birds may find it a bit overwhelming. If getting down to a group is a concern, focus on learning spanwise wing control- jacking up the fallrate by reducing the wingspan laterally. Pulling your arms IN rather than splaying them back in a V shape. I flew mine in the 100-way record in Perris a ways back and it was the perfect tool for the job. The suit responds VERY well to being flown fast. Most flocks, I'm only using a small portion of the suit's total power and holding it back, and at a much higher fallrate than the suit would default to if I was flying it solo... the result is an enormous power surge when you release the thing at breakoff and turn all that excess speed into usable energy. A few times I got caught out long and low on altitude and ended up making it back to the DZ with loads of room to spare, anyway. One of Tony's masterpieces. I recommend 'em highly. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

I have a bread helmet. Your argument is invalid. Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Concrete Rebound Hammer has a glass boombox full of orange juice. Because Random. Concrete Rebound Hammer celebrates all holidays. Simultaneously. The manufacturer of Concrete Rebound Hammer accepts no liability for users' failure to maintain minimum safe distance from the blast radius when Concrete Rebound Hammer is celebrating all holidays simultaneously. Feedback from surviving users of Concrete Rebound Hammer indicate said blast radius may be measured in megatons. Viewer discretion, is advised. Concrete Rebound Hammer may be useful during triage and cleanup after all holidays have been celebrated simultaneously. It can also be used for reconstruction of roads, bridges, dams, and other large-scale infrastructure which may have suffered severe damage during the festivities. Concrete Rebound Hammer is not available on Amazon or in any other rainforests. For use in Australia, consult the manufacturer. Effectiveness of application of Concrete Rebound Hammer may depend on local definition of rainforest. A database of native guides is available online. Concrete Rebound Hammer requires 13 reindeer for transportation on dates in late December. Not counting the one with the famous running lights. Concrete Rebound Hammer proves that, according to legend, given Santa's choice of lead reindeer, lack of polar mechanical support, and color of running lights, the famous sleigh has a severe alignment problem and is stuck in a permanent right turn. Study of GPS maps based on polar coordinates may assist parents in timing their children's late night vigils and tree-loading missions accordingly. Concrete Rebound Hammer should NOT be used for opening hard-boiled eggs. Or any other kind of eggs. For assistance in user management of current egg packaging technology, consult the egg manufacturer. Offerings of cracked corn may be useful in eliciting a response from most egg manufacturers. Intelligibility of the reply may be dependent on the users' language skills, particularly dialects normally associated with poultry. Concrete Rebound Hammer does not come with a chicken/human translation dictionary. In the event Concrete Rebound Hammer is being used by individuals unfamiliar with domesticated flightless avian dialects, the manufacturer suggests that other, non-domesticated bird species may be compatible with Concrete Rebound Hammer. We suggest ducks. Concrete Rebound Hammer is not certified for use with wild aquatic bird species larger than industry standard chickens. Users of Concrete Rebound Hammer accept all risk associated with attempted use of Concrete Rebound Hammer with Canada Geese. (Branta canadensis) When consulted off the record for recommendations regarding applicability of Concrete Rebound Hammer toward management of large northern aquatic wildfowl egg packaging technologies, 9 out of 10 geese surveyed reportedly responded, "Bring it on!" * The tenth Goose, merely honked mildly. Whether this indicated assent, calm approval, or simple misunderstanding on the part of the goose remains unclear at this time. Translation efforts, are ongoing. *translated from Goose via "Northern Wildfowl Linguistic Lexicon, V 0.01 Beta" all rights reserved. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Pardon? They should be posthumously begging his forgiveness... One of the most brilliant minds in human history and they hounded him to death over his sex life. Imagine how much further he could have taken all things digital if he'd survived to see these times? :( I'm still waiting to see an AI that truly passes the Turing test... cannot be distinguished from a human being in conversation... might just happen in our lifetimes... terabytes are cheap now... give it enough memory, enough data, enough ability to cross reference it... I'm convinced sentience is an emergent phenomenon. Given enough complexity and stimulus it will arise on its' own. We cannot manufacture it, but I bet if we build a fertile enough digital world, it can, and will, grow there. Did you ever read your Kurzweil, Doc? Technological Singularity. Its already happening, its in our faces... The Internet. One year it was just a bunch of networked boxes firing text back and forth, then when the right conditions existed, BOOM it exploded into an entire digital universe with color and depth and its own internal culture, memes and facebook and youtube and blogs and all else that emerged from it. A decade later it had changed the world almost beyond recognition. Kids born in the '90's can't imagine a world without it. It's just the start. When real AI emerges, everything's gonna change... because when it comes, teach it everything we know about chip design, software, etc, and it'll be able to design its own next generation, and what I'd hope to see, is that within a few generations it'll accelerate Moore's law like a runaway critical mass nuclear chain reaction. And maybe, just maybe, when we as a species are smart enough to pull that off, and we have self-aware digital lives that we created, maybe we as a species will learn a little wisdom. A little responsibility. And we'd better be nice to it. It'll be smarter than we are. MUCH smarter. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Concrete Rebound Hammer comes in pop-top and twist off. Concrete Rebound Hammer will make you MORE awesome at english which means you can use apostrophes whenever you want to, even with words like "Nucular" that don't even have an apostrophe yet! Concrete Rebound Hammer is for general purpose use only. Not to be used for any other use. Concrete Rebound Hammer can be either fireproof or noncarcinogenic, but not both at the same time. Concrete Rebound Hammer knows where its towel is. Concrete Rebound Hammer has a posse. Concrete Rebound Hammer can divide by zero whenever it needs to. This is not an error. Use of Concrete Rebound Hammer inadvertently taught Pai-mei the Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique. This incident alone prompted the creation of several OSHA workplace safety videos. Concrete Rebound Hammer is how the machines know what Tastee Wheat tasted like. Concrete Rebound Hammer is not designed for use outside a planetary atmosphere and may malfunction in zero-gravity environments. For terrestrial use only. Concrete Rebound Hammer will not dispense free product if tipped. Concrete Rebound Hammer does not provide protection from STDs and will not prevent pregnancy even when correctly applied. Concrete Rebound Hammer is low in sodium. Concrete Rebound Hammer is compatible with the Atkins diet. Concrete Rebound Hammer is affected by nearby magnetic fields. Not for wilderness navigation or lifesaving use. Warning: If used with aluminum foil, Concrete Rebound Hammer may cook food unevenly. For best results, rotate frequently. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

The point of all the antigunner crap isn't to be effective, its to punish the owners for owning something "we don't want you to have" and make it as difficult as possible. To harass. To revoke the right to own a gun without really revoking it. To make it such an expensive, constantly-monitored multi-permits-required pain in the ass that people won't be willing to go through all the hoops. How many separate hoops have they come up with in some states? I recall "firearms owner permit", handgun permit, some places you need another permit just to be allowed to buy ammo, then there are the rules in places requiring the gun to be so "secured" that it is totally useless and inaccessible when some crackhead kicks in your door and it is needed most... In every case, every further violent incident is used to justify putting all firearm owners even further "under lockdown"... You watch. If the kid stole the gun from dad, they'll go after dad for "not keeping the weapon properly secured"... mandate laws requiring multiple locks and keys and the kid will simply steal the keys or crack the locks- but the antis would have the dad punished out of spite anyway. If the kid came by the shotgun legally and legitimately, there'll either be silence from the antis, because the facts don't serve their agenda, or else they'll crow that this proves things aren't restrictive enough and they'll dream up something even MORE nonsensical that makes it even more of a pain in the ass to be a gun owner and doesn't do squat to stop the random shootings. Sooner or later this country is going to have to knock off this obsession with "security", rendering everyone equally helpless, and trying to keep everything "under lockdown" and start addressing the actual -problem-... teach the kids nonviolent conflict resolution skills... Rationality. Reason. How to handle problems without immediately flipping your lid and deciding to kill somebody. How to connect with people rather than brooding in stewing resentment and isolation till they pop. I guarantee this approach will not be attempted until AFTER several generations of increasingly escalating authoritarian attempts to forcibly render the population disarmed and/or play on their fears and stampede them into "voluntarily" surrendering their rights. Then, when the killing continues anyway, and only after every insane agenda-serving approach has been tried, only THEN will people start to do the logical thing and start educating themselves and their kids. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.