tbrown

Sort of academic, because I don't own a gun. In the middle of that sort of situation, I'd be pretty high strung and scared. I'd probably take aim and shout "freeze" and if he didn't, I'd probably start shooting. The complicated feelings would come later, it's not an emotionally free ride, even if it is justifiable. Oh, and to the guy who advocated firing every round into the guy - bad move. He might have a friend in the house. Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !

I'm driving a couple hours, and I find the mailbox, turn up the winding drive, and see a sign that reads: "Home For Wayward Donna Mills Look-a-Like Nymphomaniacs". Just as I'm climbing down from the cab, to go up to the door . . . . . . . . Sounds like the Castle Anthrax again. Did wicked Zoot come to the door ? Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !

The Magic 8 Ball is the fount of all wisdom. Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !

I don't really look at my altimeter after breakoff, it's mounted on my hand and I'd have to break out of my track to look. I think we all get a pretty good sense of the timing and what the ground looks like, and I'd guess I'm clearing myself and waving off about 3'ish and tossing my pilot a bit below that. I'm usually sitting in around 2200-2300, my Spectre takes about 500-600 ft to open. I got distracted once and then saw the ground was bigger than I liked. I'm guessing I was closing on 2 grand (still legal, with a D license), and my sit-in at 1600 with typical Spectre snivel would seem to confirm that. On big ways, you really do need to get down to where things are starting to look a little scary. I really don't like 2 grand & never have. But I also learned in the old days that I sometimes needed to go there and to keep my wits about me. I won't be so boorish as to insist that today's newer jumpers need to learn to tough it out that low. But seriously, if you're going to be in the air with other people, you really do need to learn to trust yourself and your gear down to 3 grand. 3 grand is SAFE. You have TIME for a cutaway if things go wrong. You'll get back from all but the most hopeless of long spots. At busy dropzones and boogies, where it's raining bodies by the minute, it's not cool to opened above 3 grand, unless you're well off the flightline and have told the right people (manifest or whatever) in advance. There's all kinds of good reasons to pull higher, whether you're a student or a red hot swooper. Just remember all those falling bodies above you. Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !

Same thing, presumably without all the gore would happen today. Instead of the crucifiction he would get 25 to life. That or he'd be hustled off to Guantanamo, declared an "enemy combatant", tried before a military tribunal, and lethally injected. Who knows ? He might be there now.... Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !

....Only ONE time!!! It was the day on which i made my 1,200th so the gang let me double manifest and I jumped my Friend Annette's Strato Star So Jimmy, was that Annette from Seneca Falls ? She used to jump a Pap when I knew her. Whaddaya know ? I can never remember Annette's last name, but she went along on the 1977 Pilgrimage to Z-Hills for the Easter Boogie with us in Mary Todd's van. That was sure fun, Mary still had NC plates on the van - and a Fuzzbuster on the dashboard, so we just sailed on by all the NY and MA drivers who were pulled over fer speedin'. I must now confess that the first Square I ever owned was a Cobra 10. I never had any hard openings on it, but the thing wasn't built right. After about 60 or so jumps, a couple load bearing ribs seperated. Sent it back for a repair, free of charge. By 105 jumps, it did it again. Got rid of the fucker and bought a Viking Superlite (made with the 1.2 oz. fabric that was considered "lightweight" before F-111 came along). Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !

Money, or the lack thereof, pure and simple. Today's the first day of summer in Orange County. At least I got to run at the beach with no shirt (sorry if my gut was hangin' out, it should be gone before long). If I had the dough, it woulda been a perfeck day fer skideevin'. Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !

Perris has been my home DZ since the late seventies. It still is too and it's gone through some remarkable changes to become what it is today. And I still find that it's a fun and welcoming place to jump and hang out with friends. And now that I've got my own rig, I've been getting out to Taft and Elsinore as well. Both places are wonderful, with the friendliest people. This winter $14 jumps from Mike Mullins' King Air has been an incredible deal. The Taft regulars and a steady stream of visitors from around the world have made this small DZ a special place. The new Elsinore is wonderful too, a complete 180 turn from the old place I remember from long ago. I've never seen ANY place so openly and completely dedicated to developing their new & lowtime jumpers. Having "only" two Otters actually makes for a less hectic pace, there's not always someone screaming at you to get packed for a 10 min. call right after you get down, which can happen when there are 3 or 4 planes running. The scenery, with those mountains and the lake are just beautiful too. Dropzones are just like anywhere else, it's the people who make them as wonderful or as awful as they want them to be. Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !

What kind of experience does your lawyer have ? Is he mostly into civil stuff, or does he really know anything about criminal, and especially this kind of case ? You shouldn't have to be living in fear like this. I'd recommend you consider getting a more assertive mouthpiece. Back about twenty or so years ago, my brother got in trouble for opening fire with an assault rifle when a gang tried to break into his rather isolated house. The cops came and charged him for opening fire (the gang had fled) and of course they took his weapons away. A frien tided him over with a shotgun and pistol in case the gang returned. Anyway, his first lawyer was a complete milksop, who kept saying, "oh we can't do that" over and over. So my bro fired his ass and called the local NRA for a referral. He got a very loud bellicose and aggresive attny, who got the charges dropped and his firearms returned in really short order. It sound to me like the right kind of lawyer could get your case dropped and have psycho bitch put away in the state hospital on some meds that might do her some good. The best defense is often a strong offense. Furthermore, I'd arrange a check-in system with your lawyer whereby he or his staff go looking for you if they don't hear from you every 12 hours. Best wishes bro, maybe she'll jump off a bridge.... Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !

The Grateful Dead revival, after Jerry Garcia came out of his near death coma experience. "Oh well, a touch of gray, Kind of suits you anyway" Imagine, a bunch of spaced out hippies came roaring back with a song about getting old to become the alltime box office grossing live band of rock 'n roll history. And they're STILL at it, minus Jerry, of course. Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !

My kids, especially when they were little, but even now as teenagers. My wife, constantly, but especially when I first met her, so long ago. We once had the good fortune to meet Archbishop Desmond Tutu. He's old and tiny, and at the time wasn't feeling well, due to treatments for prostate cancer, but that little guy almost gives off his own light. Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !

Venezuelan President brands George Bush an 'asshole' Aside from a "Bravo!" for stating the obvious, the guy's a goner. He obviously doesn't remember what the more moderate Nixon/Kissinger crowd did to Chile in '73. He'll find out though. Oh, just to be fair about it, Chavez is also an asshole. Guess it takes one to know one... Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !

The Paracommander threads have also brought back memories of the Strato Star, "the parachute that squared away parachuting", as an old Para Flite ad used to say. When I started jumping back in '74, most people were jumping PC's and a few Para Plane Clouds. The Clouds had brutally hard openings, I never jumped one, but remember seeing - and hearing - some openings that made me cringe. Then this smaller square, this Strato Star started showing up. It came with it's own little container with bungee chords. It had a ropes & rings reefing system that actually delivered soft openings (though I remember more than a few people had some cutaways before they got their packing of the reefing line right). Then in '75, some people came back from the Nationals with a small piece of cloth called a "slider" and everyone was cutting off their ropes and rings with pocket knives and putting these sliders on their Stars. From then on it was like the gold rush - it seemed like everyone was buying a Strato Star. People were so animated about them, they'd rave about how much they loved them. It was smaller, by virtue of being only a 5 cell, and lighter, and for a few years it set the standard for a smaller container size. Whatever the competition was making, be it round or square, it had to fit into a Star size container if they hoped to sell any. The funny thing is, I never actually jumped one. My first square jump was on a Strato Cloud, and by then the Unit and Cruisair had stolen all the excitement. I ended up buying Pioneer's Viking Superlite, which I have to say was a really decent canopy. But there were still diehards jumping Strato Stars as late as 1980, when I finally left the sport on a 22 year hiatus. Nowadays it seems like the old Strat is sort of vilified and the butt of many unkind jokes. No doubt it's not up to modern standards, but it's earned its place as a canopy that really changed the face of our sport. And I'm sure there are plenty of older jumpers out there who jumped them, or owned one (and maybe still do). Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !

Facts, schmacts, where's the foogin' pictures ??? Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !

You're going to have fun Michele and I'm envious. I haven't been in the tunnel myself, but I did go up to the observer deck and watched a class of whuffo tourists trying it out. They didn't do too badly either, so you're gonna do just great. And if you don't think you're such a good flyer, well maybe you'll learn a thing or two that will surprise us all when you get back up in the big sky. Enjoy. Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !

The Elsinore website has a simple separation rule on its page of procedures. For reported uppers of 0-10 knots, they use 5 - 7 sec between groups. For uppers of 15 knots and up, they recommend using a simple knots/2=seconds formula, with a few examples, like 20 knot uppers/2=10 sec. of separation. You do need to find out what the uppers are (try asking somebody). It's definitely simple, sounds valid, and you don't need a Ph.D. to figure it out. It also probably helps that a lot of people count and wait before even climbing out and doing their exit count. Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !

Jumped in my single days, starting when I was eighteen. I met my wife when she called me up and said she wanted to make a jump and her roomate said I could help. She took the course and made one static line (1980). I'd been in the sport for almost seven years when we got engaged, which is where a lot of people burn out or just move on anyway. I sort of did both, she never asked me to quit. We married and had two kids, who are teenagers now, the oldest one is almost twenty. Finally, last year, after 22 years out, I came back. Wife and kids are happy I'm jumping again, they say I'm happier and not so grumpy. I have a life insurance policy I bought during the years out that is incontestable (they can't change it or deny coverage) as long as I keep up the premiums. Our finances aren't what we'd hope they'd be at this stage of life and I fret about sending the younger one to college in just four more years. I try to balance jumping with living a real life off the dropzone as well. I'm a fairly conservative jumper, I use a Cypres, jump a Spectre and let it out just under 3 grand and keep my landings on the conservative side mostly. I want to make it to both girls' weddings, play with lots of grandkids, grow old with my wife, and make plenty of skydives along the way. Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !

Watching porn is one thing. I like it myself, once in awhile, for about ten minutes before it gets too stupid or boring. The thing is, watching or not watching is a choice. Hearing somebody talk about it at work can really be a drag. I used to work for a well known aircraft company that manufactures wide body jets that most of us have flown on (this company might be located near Seattle). We had a woman in our department who was something of a nympho and all she ever did was talk about it. And talk about it, and talk about it, and talk about it. It got to be a real drag really fast. Aside from the fact that she never did any work, there were her endless accounts of all things oral, anal, etc. It was really incredible, given this company's rigid policies concerning sexual harassment. The thing is, even if we hated her, nobody wanted to be the "rat" to make a complaint, because ratting carries some very bad karma with it. She finally did herself in by putting a picture of her boyfriend, naked and with a big hard-on, on her computer screen as a background (a huge no-no and easily detected by the company web police). She was canned spam in no time flat and nobody shed a tear for her. So if you want to make it big in the porn industry, fine & dandy, go for it. But don't inflict it on the people around you who aren't interested, it WILL get you in the end. Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !

I'm a huge Garcia Marquez fan, the man has one of the most vivid imaginations ever written onto a page. And think, we're just reading the English translation! If your Spanish is good enough, go for the original. "Solitude" won a Nobel Prize. Also fantastic books by the same author are "Love in the Time of Cholera", and his brand new autobiography, "Living to Tell the Tale". Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !

Lord of the Rings has been nominated all three years in a row, for all three pictures. This is the last chance, there ain't gonna be a Part IV. The entire trilogy was such a monumental undertaking and they got it SO right (within the limits of making a movie from a book) that it deserves Best Picture to honor the entire trilogy. Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !

So who's the hunk ? Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !

Since it was made as a movie giving an accurate "story telling" based on the bible gospels, you have to include that the Jewish leadership, not the Jewish people mind you, pushed for the crucifixion of Christ. Haven't seen the film yet, though I plan on seeing it soon. By now it's so big and controversial I'll just have to see it for myself and make up my own mind. One of the problems with the Gospel of John is that it was written considerably later than the other Gospels. And unlike Matthew, Mark, and Luke, which were all written by Jewish believers, John was written by Greeks. The Greeks did NOT like the Jews, it can be said with some evidence that the Greek church had a real agenda to seperate Christian belief from its Jewish roots. The other Gospels blame the leadership, John blames "the Jews". If the film is a faithful rendering of John, it is then portraying all the ancient baggage of whatever it was the Greeks had against Jews. But I'm gonna go see the film on its own merits first. Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !

Mike, I'm still following this thread with interest, especially as the first one is now locked down. It's unfortunate that political debate in an election year has to take such a nasty turn with so many personal remarks flying back & forth. My biggest problem with the ex-Green Beret's letter is that I don't know whether the letter itself or the allegations it contains are real or something someone fabricated to spew out on the web. You not only can't believe everything you read on the web, you shouldn't as a matter of course until you've read it from enough different sources to weigh the facts and use some sound judgement. For the record, I've never served in the military. I was a senior in high school when the Paris Accords were signed and the US pulled out of Vietnam - a VERY RELIEVED senior at that. I did regiszter for the draft and carried a draft card (1-H, a general holding category, as Selective Service's statutory authority to conscript draftees had expired). I am old enough to recall John Kerry leading the VVAW demonstrations in Washington. 1971 was a time when just about everyone, including a lot of servicemen, had turned against the war. Why ? Well, Nixon was gradually withdrawing American forces, while Henry Kissinger and the North Viets were dawdling away the time in Paris. Everyone knew the war was going to end sooner or later, so who the hell wanted to get killed anymore in a war that was essentially over, except that they were still there and still being killed ? Things had gone really sour by then, this is when the dope, racial problems and fragging of officers was rampant. It was not at all the military that had been serving just 3-4 years earlier. As for the atrocities, it's a pretty well established fact that they happened. The only conviction that ever came out of the entire war was Lt. William Calley, who Nixon rescued from the brig to serve his time under house arrest. The other senator/governor Kerrey, from Nebraska, has personally confessed to participating in a massacre of civilians while serving as a Navy SEAL officer. That stuff happened. I've talked to friends, some of them skydivers, who told me they personally mowed down farmers plowing their fields as they flew by in helicopters. They didn't do it because they were evil, or because America was evil. They did it because they were young kids, stressed near the breaking point in a war they just wanted to live through at the far end of the world. There's no logic to this kind of stuff, it's the dark - or some would say "sinful" - side of human nature. It's what war does to people - or so I've been told by those who were there, as I've never been so unlucky myself. This doesn't negate the good stuff that happened either. American GI's have been famous for treating the sick and wounded, for feeding starving refugees, for building schools and clinics in war zones. That good stuff happened too, though I bet it happened a lot more in the optimististic days of the sixties than in the end game of the seventies. I don't know how many months John Kerry served in Vietnam. I do know that he was wounded three times, maybe that had something to do with his early return. But the riverboat Navy was one of the most dangerous of combat assignments in the war and those guys took some of the highest casualties of the war. They were sitting ducks. And if the bullets didn't get them, the Agent Orange did, like the way it sickened and killed Admiral Elmo Zumwalt's own son, who was another riverboat commander. There is a guy stumping for Kerry who was a SEAL who was blown off the deck in an action where Kerry was already wounded. Kerry turned the boat around and went back, under fire, to rescue the guy. Though he's a registered Republican, this guy is out stumping for Kerry, as are some other men who served with or under him. It's also well worth noting that Kerry wasn't drafted - he enlisted in the Navy and volunteered for Vietnam because he felt it was his duty to serve. This was something almost unheard of among his social class, especially as the war was already becoming unpopular. This alone says something about the man. As for Bush's Guard service, I had a friend, Fred, who also went into the Guard to beat the draft. He also skipped over a long waiting list, possibly because his day was an Asst. District Attny. Also because his dad was unhappy with the way his oldest son Bob had returned from Vietnam with a drug habit and decided that one son in the war was enough for him. The Guard nowadays gets mobilized, they serve and fight in Iraq and Afghanistan. Back then they didn't. They were a pretty safe bet for staying out of the draft and out of the war. I don't hold it against Bush anymore than against my friend Fred for taking the Guard as a way out. But Fred doesn't get up and lie to Congress, nor does he run around masquerading as a jet pilot onboard aircraft carriers. It's Bush's latter day "wannabee"-ism that really bugs me. That and Dick Cheney's answer to where he was during the Vietnam years. Cheney "had other priorities" - his own words. So here we are, it's an election year. I'm voting with all my heart for a Kerry ticket, that I hope will include John Edwards in the no. 2 slot. I'm an American and I think Bush is bad for the country and has got to go and I intend to vote that way. And I can say that to you Mike because I know you and just met up with you a few weeks ago for the first time in 24 years and I know you're a good man. Let's all just be thankful that we change or keep our leaders with our votes and not with tanks or rioting mobs in the street, like the shit that's going on in Haiti at this very moment. Even in the middle of our own Civil War, we held a presidential election. Lincoln insisted on it and he ran against one of his own generals who ran on a peace platform. Lincoln knew the whole war was pointless without our basic freedoms at home. So it is now. Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !

A lot of porn stars insist they're just ordinary people when they're not working. I imagine some are, though there are more than a few with serious drug problems, or who have committed suicide. Marilyn Chambers has been around for over thirty years and is still making the occasional film in her fifties (she still looks good too). Don't know if I'd want sex with a porn star or not. If it happened naturally, then alright, but a date should also be about two people being themselves and having a good time. Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !

[ If you ever get to jump it, look down at your altimeter and watch the needle go up for a change. Great fun. And that's not all. It is crowded in there, so when you do get to altitude, Mike gives you a zero-g curve to help you up on your feet. That way there's no struggling, climbing all over people, farting in somebody's face, or any of that other nasty stuff. You're suddenly weightless, floating up off the floor. You have to actually THINK about pushing your legs down. Then Mike turns the gravity back on and you're standing up. The door's already open by then and people are leaving. Your humble servant.....Professor Gravity !