The almost had 'ems and the broken bones

I think in this meme, the yelly lady is wrong, but indulging in common misconceptions, while the cat is right, but totally pedantic about it. Neither is "likable", which always says more about us and our societal mores than the individuals that are being studied. For more on this sorta dichotomy, I direct you to search JSTOR and prepare to do some mental weightlifting in regard to sociology and community/pop--aka armchair--psychology. Or you could just join me in giggling at our modern society's absurdities and frustrations.

 

The above meme and a conversation with Ryan (the Owner) about weathers, on which later there will be specifics, got me thinking for the umpteenth time about the function in our society of being right.  As in, knowing the correct answer, understanding a certain atmospheric pattern of flow, eating pasta like you're "supposed to", and so on.  Spoiler alert, slurping and being messy is wrong, no matter what certain cultures might yell at you from the sidelines.  It's never okay to make more noise than necessary while eating.  And it's okay to cut your spaghetti.  It's just food.

Anyhoodles (quoting our local weather pedant): getting it right. I've been constantly reminded of this sorta thing over the years.  It's often frustrating to me, because most folks act simultaneously like there is no value in knowing things and that if you make attempts to educate them for not knowing things, then you're the asshole.  Which brings us to how ski bindings work.

Hopefully this was not simultaneous prerelease. Keep your jokes to yourself.

Bindings are like meteorologists.  They are correct somewhere between 80 and 100% of the time, they require a little knowledge from the end user, and get blamed for things they do not control most often when the user doesn't understand how they work.  Weather folks in this day and age have so many powerful tools at the ready that they can predict to the hectopascal (1/1000 of the natural atmospheric pressure at sea level for those of you who aren't science hippies) how deep an East Pacific cyclone will get three days before one even starts to form.  They can predict how this will affect, say, the Boise Mountain foothills east of Boise, ID, in Boise Ada Boise County, and they'll get it right to within a handful of miles.  If you can read a map, which I know some folks can't don't have much experience doing, you'll notice there are all sorta ripples on the land between the Pacific and Idaho's misunderstood capital city, and if you understand physics, which some folks actively try not to do don't have much experience with, you'll know that ripples on the ground cause ripples in the lower atmosphere, and if you've ever tossed two pebbles in a lake, you'll know that ripples interact with other ripples and, well, you get the point.

Thing is, it feels like people are militantly anti-knowing-stuff.  Take the simple and not-so-humble binding.  It locks your boot to the ski. With minimal exception, it uses some sort of vertical lock on the boot's heel that engages and disengages in an arc, a spring to exert forward pressure through the boot's sole in a consistent fashion throughout the various compressions and extensions of the ski, and if it's the most common variety of binding, has at least two sorts of releases governed by springs that can be compressed or relaxed to stiffen or ease those two release types in case of a crash.  The obvious one is the heel piece that like goes up and down and stuff, and the less obvious one is a rotational release at the toe, managed either by a rotary motion of the entire toepiece or flappy wings that spread apart.  Marker useta make this binding with a turntable heel that hip folks back in the late 80s would get out of by rapidly twisting their boots rather than hitting the eject button that Marker engineers didn't really make all that accessible.  I'll find a picture if I can.  Otherwise, you pretty much push down on the heelpiece and step out.  At any rate, there's not much more to it.  Thing is, to my endless and constant consternation, it's the last thing that folks focus on and misunderstand.  DIN Release value refers to an adjustment that governs how easy and/or hard it is to do said twisting and/or ejecting upward out of said binding.  If your eyes glazed over, bear with me.

Oops.  Wrong DIN.

I wish I could get paid for every time someone has yelled "CHECK YER DINS" from the chair when somebody fell and their skis came off.  Or every time Unofficial says somebody gots ta crank up his dins.  Or for every comment on some silly internet reel when somebody does a backflip off a sweet jump and their skis just go straight without them.  Release value--the name the law goons require us mechanics to call DIN instead of calling it DIN, even though customers all say and know(ish)what DIN is and get confused by me saying "release value"--is only one part of the equation, just like how many inches of snow fell compared to what was forecast.  Folks will get het up when three days ahead of a small storm the forecast said 6-8" only 5" fell.  Never mind that these same folks can't forecast what time they'll finish dinner when they just started eating.  It took xijillions of whoserwhats of comprurtering power to make that forecast, and given all of the various variables the weather gnomes overshot by 1-3".  They knew that it would be cloudy and not sunny, they knew that it would be cold enough to snow, they knew when within a few hours, and they even knew within a few millimetres how much water would be available 300 air miles from the ocean after crossing every sorta ripple-inducing (and therefore precip-inducing) mountain and deserts that encourage frontal regenesis, and yet this very accurate forecast is somehow seen as a complete failure.

Beware the poisonous tail of the bent-back occlusion.

Which brings us to a point of sorts.  First day on the job, 1 December '007, Brad's telling me about bindings.  This is before my Legacy got stuck.  That's a story for another day.  This is after I froze my fingers helping Murphy install the awnings Ty traded for a lifetime storage pass.  He says there's forward pressure, which does all the heavy lifting, and there's DIN.  Then he's like "but the law trolls will tell you to call it release value."  Anyway, he says, and I subsequently verify through daily interactions, that folks will always be confused and that for the next however many years, you'll just be Abe Simpson yelling at clouds.  Most undesired releases are incorrectly set forward pressure.  Super boring, not a marquee word that everybody knows, but like that annoying cat at the top of this page, the truth.  That yellow-booted Look binding user I posted 55 years ago at the not-top of the page is a learning experience.  He could have twisted out of his bindings in a situation where he applied too many rotational yanks on the toepieces--given where he's (frantically checks DIN chart) likely set, at least 105 Nm, but probly closer to 140 or more--which is what the dang toepieces are for in the first place, or his ski mechanic was like "Forward pressure? What?!" and then they be havin words.

Closer.

All of this to say I'm tired.  There is so much easily available, correct info out there, and folks instead wake up and choose violence.  Focus on one thing, and ignore all the other things.  Decide, somehow, that a fairly random number isn't just a representation of ability and human worth and/or manliness, even though they clearly think it is at least that, but the literal, physical embodiment of it all.  That running a 7 makes you less of a person, or less of a skier, or both, than somebody stackin 16s on his Pivot 2.0 18s (and cracking them cos he can't use the provided pole cutout like a normal human, which, side note, has the added benefit of not destroying your skis' bases), or bending brakes to get his never-indemnified Marker Comp 30 (go ahead and fact check, I'll wait) to fit his 114mm Big Mountain Comp Destroyers, never mind that to a rational person like myself and most folks I know, having bendy tendons and boingy ligaments is far preferable to brittle ones that have been surgically repaired thirteen times.

Further.

You asked for specifics, so I'll give you some.  Ryan (the Owner) was talking to his daughter before his work shift and her school shift.  She was all excited cos there were some snowflakes falling out of the textbook Treasure Valley Inversion stratus deck.  She was 11.  I remember 11.  Any snow in town at all and I'd almost poop myself.  At any rate, Ryan tells her it's not snowing, it's just that the cloud has pollution or dust or something and the stratus (he called it fog even though it was above ground level) is freezing onto the particles and they are collecting ice until they're heavy enough to drift down and appear to us earthlings as snowflakes.  Which is, poetically, a succinct and accurate description of snowflake nucleation and snowfall.

There we go. That DIN. I even remember when this chart came out cos it was the first chart I ever used and now Salomon hates me or else WHY WOULD THEY KILL THE 747?!?!?!?

The other day, let's call it "yesterday", cos it that makes it immediate even if you're reading this in The Future, I rode Chair 1 at Bogus with a fairly big cat and his lady-friend.  Not sure if they's partners or on a date or just ski buddies, but duder was real hard tryna impress her.  Falling over himself explaining the concept of damping (killing vibration) and why he "needs" a DIN of 14.  If you look at that ever-exciting chart up yonder stairs, you'll notice there is conspicuously NOT a 14 to be seen on the chart.  He said, and I'm paraphrasing a little but only cos I can't remember verbatim, "If I run a 12, there's like pressure and I fall out when I land a big trick."  The woman unfortunate enough to spend a glorious ski day listening to Macho Man Randy Shrinkage talk about DINs reacted like my 7 year-old niece Abby did when I explained why I rented a 7-passenger Ford Flex when I was only one person.  A sarcastic "Oh yeah?"  Randy just plugged right along.  "Yeah, my buddy and I ran my DIN chart, y'know, like if you were renting skis?"  (Italics most definitely his, disdain heavy and judgment dripping.)  "I ended up a 12, but like, that was as a Type III."  (Again, his.)  "I'm a III++."

Now, even if you've never performed the simple task of running a DIN chart for a customer, you can still pick up from my tone that this cat was abjectly full of shit.  The lack of III++ notwithstanding, why should I care?  I don't, at least not about him, but it's this adherence to a misapprehension that pervades the ski world and at times makes my job harder, or at least more frustrating.  I have to waste time, time which I could spend on literally anything else, like breaking down cardboard or, I don't know, rearranging my metal scrapers, explaining DIN again, to another customer who doesn't understand physics or care that physics exists and governs everything.  I have to explain how, just like spoke tension vs deflection, DIN is one value and boot sole length is the other, and that on its own, DIN is meaningless.  If you look at my handy chart I stole from Salomon, you'll notice that to the left, where the body has more leverage over the boot, there are higher values, and to the right, where the boot has more leverage over the body, there are lower values.  Up to 2 DINs lower.  All resulting in the exact same amount of torque being exerted on the binding's springs.  Such that, if you have a boot sole that is 335 mm long and you just gotta have that 12 DIN cos yer buddies do, but you're only 5'9" and a buck seventy, say good bye to your Achilles' tendons and all of your cruciate ligaments cos that puts you in the same range as somebody who's taller than 6'4" and at minimum 40 ell bees more massive than y'all.

And, icing on the cake, you can't even chart a 12 as a Type III.

The legendary double e on a backflip.  Silouhette Bros on the Snow are yelling TURN YER DINS TO 37 but in reality, he probly overloaded his skis and they flexed away from him like they were rafflesia flowers opening and he their evil death stench escaping.  Release value doesn't even affect the situation at all.

- -

Title from the unexpectedly good and poignant Nashville country song Dear Rodeo by Cody Johnson, made even better by Reba McEntire cos, well, Reba McEntire could make a song about slug eating a mushroom growing out of dog poop good.

Warning: this post is fulla all sorta arcane minutiae and pop culture references you need to know to get all the jokes.  Wait.  This shoulda gone at the top.

The summer's beginning to give up her fight

 

The shot.  Lee Cohen, Utah Episode of Powder Mag, c 2000.

Pika are lagomorphs.  You will not be surprised that the native pika on Hokkaido is ridiculously cute.  North American pika, however, are also ridiculously cute.  Like, the bestest.  Pika like higher altitudes and a mix of broken rock and meadow.  They make their homes in various formations in covered gaps under scree and piles of talus, somewhere they can take shelter and can store their hay.  Pika make hay in the summer, the same as we do.   They dry it out on slabs and boulders, saving the heartier bits for winter.  Apochyphally, anyway, they store any plants that might be toxic behind or underneath vegetation that is easier and safer to digest.  The going theory is the toxins can leach out over fall and winter and be safe to eat by spring.

Pika are not endemic to any month of the year.  In point of fact, they are one of the few alpine mammals that do not hibernate in any way.  They prepare for winter, the same as skiers, seemingly frenetic in late summer when the light begins to change and daylight starts to noticeably shorten.

What is this new sense of time?

So much of skiing isn't actual skiing. Anticipation, planning, dreaming, grumbling, complaining, and in this modern internet-addled existence of ours, poring over vast metaphorical volumes of ad copy, summer sales, and if you're lucky to find them, back issues of other folks' memories from days long gone. There's only minimal snow to find, way up high and harder to access than the spring turns we often call "summer skiing". Even in my most ambitious days, I still never made any August turns.

This is Silly Season, time of prognostication, although this summer it got off to an early splosion of a start with the promise of a Super El Niño and all of the ABSOLUTE CERTAINTY that that brings.  Y'know, confusing the thing you expect, climate, with the thing you get, which is weather.

Those long August afternoons, sunsets when you can feel the climatic corner being slowly turned, those aching State Fair sorta days when you realise just how much of a redneck you really are when you tear up just a little at the smell of a horse barn and the waft of fried onions you never even liked as a kid.  The tractor club across from the hot tub seller, you know, the one with the single-piston demonstration engine.  Sooner or later it'll be September, and then it may as well start snowing because October, also known as The Best Month, is about a week long and that goes by so quickly you hardly have time to enjoy it.

September come, please take this heart away.

I could rarely make it through August as a kid without pulling out my ski pants "just to see if they fit", or buckling the boots and clomping around our small living room in front of the dormant wood stove.  I'd make some excuse about how Ski Bonkers was in a couple weeks, and maybe we'd hafta go see what was left after all the folks more well-off than we were had picked through the end-of-season clearances back in March and April.  It was never very comfortable in the heat, never satisfying, but that never stopped me.  It's not about being satisfied.

I don't remember it ever being as smoky as it is this summer across the PNW.  It certainly could have been.  I didn't really know about fires.  I do remember one, or at least the plume above it in the evening light from town.  I don't even remember smoke on the Wet Side, for that matter.  The Cascades kept it all at bay, or I've simply forgotten.  August when we moved to Ashland was new and different, and sometimes meant standing on our little porch and trying to decide if that street lamp, conspicuously on in the daylight, was three or four blocks away.  It was probably three.

In three years there we didn't weather a fire near town, but the Rogue Valley is fairly deep and narrow and smoke from fires west of GP and any that snuck over Siskiyou Summit from California would get stuck.  Ash drifted out of the smoke-stratus, some twisted version of cloud seeding in an inversion regime.  Some days you just had to stay inside.

6 August 2026.  I think the correct exclamation is "ick".

I spent the summer of '99 running 3 and 10 and 11 at Crystal.  A couple friends from school, Peter and Dustin, carpooled with me.  Dustin and I would throw rocks at each other across Midway and then head home and maybe have band practice, or whatever else we could get into with what little time we had before bed and doing it all again.  Crystal is 40 miles from where we grew up, and though neither of us was good at staying below the speed limit, it was a long drive.  Tall trees, ten or more conifer species with some vine maple and devil's club and salal for good measure.  The White wandering this way and that all the way up the valley to the Park boundary.  Six miles of steepish, true mountain road and then the quiet base area, long before the instacrowd and all the tourists that seem to be everywhere.  I practiced driving my old '81 Tercel without the clutch, cos it occurred to me that my clutch might go out, and what then?  What if I didn't know how to match revs?  When I wasn't grinding gears, I'd turn the engine off to "save gas".  I claimed the power steering made the car's handling to jerky in the mountains, and that I was fine heading home from work with just my wits until I compression-started heading into the last corner at Silver Springs.

In August that year we had a surprising number of thunderstorms.  One afternoon I got booted from the top of Rex when a big cell snuck in from the south.  I was in the shack and didn't really watch it build, and once I was down in the base area all I could see was rain, which that year was like seeing grass on a golf course.  Another evening in the same cycle I sat down at the fairgrounds and watched two slow-moving cells light up the sky.  I lost count after over a hundred lightning strikes in a minute.  Continuous thunder rolling across the Plateau.

I ain't ever satisfied.

The light shifts, especially if you're north of the 45th.  Slowly at first.  The sun sits so high in July, the shadows are crisp and feel harsh.  The subalpine rocks act as something of a microscope.  Everything, time especially, feels slow.  As the light shifts, it softens.  Some of that is the now-inevitable smoke of the Western summer.  It feels like whatever's out in the trees is getting impatient.  You catch glimpses, maybe just a Douglas squirrel, or maybe some cousin of the skunk ape.  Bugs that haven't died off with the drying of the land get pissed, start acting erratically.  Or maybe I do.

On the wet side, bear grass is the definitive in years it chooses to bloom.  Some years it just shrugs and you don't see it.  Late July, early August, somewhere along the trail you'll see those goofy fuzzballs and think, wait, I haven't seen you since the last time I felt this way.  The last baseball game of my short season had passed, I'd finally got my driver's license, I'd got used to working a job, things changed, or colleges started letting the freshman class move in and start developing those incredible and incredibly unearned superiority complexes.  The bear grass, and the pika making hay.

Here in the desert, it's the rabbitbrush.  It starts blooming up high, first, 6 or 7 grand, little tufts of yellow and then an explosion.  Sunflowers, numerous buckwheat, globemallow, all are still flowering, but rabbitbrush is the last big wave.  For some, it's an allergenic nightmare, for others, a gentle wave across the foothills and a reminder that the burdensome heat will wane.  Once the wave descends toward town, the mornings have already begun cooling, and the sun just isn't as brutal.  

She feels the changes in the wind.

Fremont is the highest peak in a seemingly endless ridgeline draped with northeast-facing bowls that would make for some righteous turns were they not behind a locked gate.  The west face is bare shale along the ridge, utterly exposed to the westerly zonal flow that pummels the upper White every winter.  Sluiskin is the only peak near Fremont's elevation, and it's a spiky tower that falls off dramatically to the north, leaving nothing but thin air between the coast and this unforgiving alpine zone.  It is stark and somehow welcoming at the same time.  The valleys below shimmer in the heat late in the day.  The shadows start to play, and that mid-July focus loses out to what is already advancing autumn.  The sun still burns, and the ptarmigan chicks aren't big enough to leave the hen behind.  Everything feels fragile, tired.  Stuck between stations.

I can sit at the lookout for hours, shivering, my sweaty hiking clothes slowly drying in the wind.  I always lay my pack down with the back pad pointed toward the sun, hoping it'll be dry by the time I need to head to town.  Mid-August on the Wet Side is no longer hot like the 29th of July almost always is.  The trail back to Sunrise isn't steep, mostly a false-flat traverse over moderate exposure high above the West Fork.  Little puffs of duff erupt from each footfall.  My shoes will be dirty.  If you are looking, you'll probly see a pika or two up this high.  There's a lot of loose rock amongst the heather and fading lupine in which they can build their caches, hide from the November Pineapples and the late February snow.  There is krumholz fir and spruce and pine to anchor the snowpack somewhat.  

I could watch the clouds for hours, and never need to know their names.

Tahoma looms over everything, as you well know, even Fremont.  The upper White is 12,000 feet below Columbia Crest.  By mid-August, the glaciers are into their angry era.  Most of the winter snow has melted off, especially in this waning-snow epoch.  Some years, 1999, say, the glaciers will keep their blankets, but this year, 2026, they won't.  Booming cracks at the toes of these old giants echo across the valleys they carved.  The tumble of rock confuses the air even further. On the windward side below Sunset Amphitheatre, the Puyallup and Tahoma Glaciers regularly kick out debris flows and glacial outbursts.  The rock is anything but solid.  It is baked and rotted from the inside, temporary.

Usually, the flow is moderate, a danger if you're along Tahoma Creek.  Sometimes, it buries the whole Puyallup Valley.  Most folks don't really think about it on a daily basis; a thing that only happens once in a few thousand years.  For the cities down along Puget Sound, Tahoma is sometimes little more than a disappearing poster on the wall and an unearned identity marker.  

Up close, Tahoma is everything.  The sky, the ground, the weather, life, death, music, spirit, Maker and Destroyer.  The rough edges; rocks and till and sometimes trees covering the lower reaches of bigger glaciers like the Nisqually and Carbon and Emmons and Winthrop.  It is imperfect, constantly destroying itself.

Summit Lake under a late-summer-coated Tahoma.

From Fremont, or Burroughs, or Tolmie, or Bearhead, or Summit Lake, anywhere you are close enough to get a good whiff, Tahoma is bleak this time of year.  The Elkhead is vanishing, some years almost completely.  Glacial dust whipped up in afternoon convection, collected over the years, melting out, rocks and trees ripped from the upper reaches of glacial valleys, the ice looks both tired and wizened.  This mountain has seen some stuff.  The volcanoes up and down the Cascade Arc all start to gather insect debris, loess, juniper pollen, anything that a strong easterly can carry up from the desert.  Local Abies needles and bark dust.  Ghostly gray.

I remember where I was, when the word came about you.  It was a day much like today.  The sky was wide, and bright, and blue.

When I was younger, and to be honest, still today, mid-August was the corner around which the entire year turned.  The last two weeks always flow quickly.  I keep checking climatology for the last day it's possible to hit 100 here in the desert, even though after 10 years I know it's still a month out.  I start reading football prognostications, although that, too, is losing its luster with all the realignment and massive payouts.  Dr J says it's time to watch Div III instead of FBS, which I guess makes sense.  FBS is the Vail of football, now.

Autumn starts peeking out from behind the curtains in the high country.  It's sneaky, the colour appearing at the edges of shrub and forb leaves as early as the first week of the month, at least in the hot and smoky summers like this one.  Autumn is already here by the time September comes.  Time feels like it accelerates again, the days rapidly shortening, the mornings becoming cooler and the afternoon heat letting go sooner.  Everything is dry.  Fire season is months old now, not barely starting like it used to.  Most years we're lucky and the burning happens somewhere else, some years you can still smell the fire in the Doug fir down on 410 at Deep Creek.  The wind picks up, rustles the dried leaves and fading buckwheat. 

It's a lock.  There's no way we could be wrong.

-

Title from Emily Saliers' Indigo Girls classic, Mystery. Back when I drank beer, I'd start thinking about pumpkins.  I still do, just not in beer.  Maybe now that I'm almost 3 years sans alcohol I should start having PSLs again.

You may or may not have noticed some of the captions.  If you did, good for you.  Nerd.  100 double happiness points if you can name all of the songs referenced here today.  200 if you can get even one of the artists to come to BoyCee.  And play, as one does indeed own a bar here.  23 year old me woulda went.

Apologies to B Evans.

Lastly, D and I quit throwin rocks at each other when I spied a real good one on the ground right under 11's top terminal and jumped off the summer ramp.  Without looking.  For those who don't know, a 6-pack Doppelmayr EJ chair weighs like eleventy milliones and at a line speed of 5 metres, even while in the decel zone, the chair is probly doing a ground speed of almost-orbital-breaking and has a kinetic energy of, to quote Carlin, fuckin meow.  Ask me and my broken glasses how I know.

Lindsey Vonn's Olympic Crash: a Movement Analysis

Lindsey Vonn broke her leg in the first alpine race of the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics, on the Olympia Delle Tofane in Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy.  She was considered a favorite to win the downhill race, despite tearing her left ACL the week before.  Lindsey came back to the US Alpine Team last season at the age of 40, after a partial replacement of her right knee and getting bored of retirement.  She's been dominant in downhill this year.  She came into the Olympics with 5 podium finishes in the discipline from the current World Cup season, including two gold medals.  As a lady in my 40s with bad knees, also retired from my ski career and getting bored of it, her comeback has been incredibly inspiring.

So, here's some movement analysis of Lindsey's run and crash.  But first, I take a close look at the same section of the course by the race's winner, Breezy Johnson.  Breezy skied a spectacular run and her win was well deserved.  Despite her consistently competitive finishes over the last 11 years on the World Cup circuit, she's podiumed only 9 times. Her hard work certainly paid off!

Video of both runs, as well as the other 3 top racers, can be found HERE.  I suggest watching it on .25 speed to pick out all the details, then watching it at normal speed to see how it all goes together.

Breezy Johnson:

• She makes a strong push out of the start gate, skates down the fall line then drops into a straight run and tuck with skis running flat on the snow.
• She tips her skis cleanly on edge and takes the middle line around the second gate.  The video doesn't show her skis here but her angulation is perfect.  It looks like a clean, smooth turn.
• Breezy takes off from the jump and sucks her legs up under her.  She keeps her skis parallel to the snow, which allows her to absorb the landing and move immediately into the next turn.
• She takes the low line on gate #3.
• The snow between the third and fourth gate is very rough.  Breezy is only racer #6 but the snow is already cut up.
• Breezy comes into this rough section with strong pressure on the outside (left) ski.  She gets bounced and bucked around quite a bit at first.
• However, she reacts to the bumpy snow by softening her legs, pulling them up under her body and keeping light pressure on the left (outside) ski.  This allows her legs to absorb the bumps with her knees and ankles, and allows her skis to glide through the snow, maintaining ski-snow contact.
• There’s also quite a bit of spray coming off her skis, which means she’s throwing on the brakes just a little (by adding leg rotation), in order to point her skis towards that next gate, which is placed wide across the hill.
• I assume the rough snow in this section is from forerunners and other racers extending the bottom of the third turn in order to control their speed out of the jump, and get across the hill to the 4th gate.
• Breezy absorbs the slight compression right before the 4th gate, and extends into a small jump as the terrain drops away from the 4th gate.
• Her right ski stays parallel and close to the snow.  She lands lightly on it and quickly sets an edge with both skis.
• She finishes the run and wins!  Go Breezy!

Lindsey Vonn:

• Lindsey is skiing on a torn ACL in her left knee, which she injured in a ski crash the week before.
• Lindsey makes a strong push out of the gate and skates down the fall line, dropping into a tuck on the last skate stroke.
• She rolls her skis cleanly on edge and takes the middle line around the second gate with lots of angulation.
• She takes off and lands the jump after the second gate without incident.  She fully transitions from right edges to left edges, and moves quickly into the third turn.
• She takes the low line, putting the apex of the turn below the gate.  The top three finishers took this line, as well as the majority of racers, judging from the the ruts left behind.
• She moves into the rough snow section with strong pressure on her left, outside ski.
• Through this rough section, her skis barely bounce.  They bend from the center and carve through the rough snow towards the next gate.
• She makes slight adjustments with her ankles and hips to absorb the bumps.  It looks like she is guarding the left knee and bracing against it, rather than flexing and extending it to absorb the rough snow surface.
• Her left ski is bent and loaded as she moves into the slight compression immediately before the 4th gate.  Her left leg remains relatively straight and she launches out of the compression.
• As her skis leave the snow, the tips are pointed up and toward the outside of the course.  Her head and shoulders are directed down the fall line and she is starting to adjust her body position in the air to face down the fall line.
• Her right hand hits the gate, which twists her upper body away from the fall line, past the tips of her skis, toward the surface of the snow behind her.
• Her right hand is also pulled backwards and her hips and midsection move back over the heel piece of her bindings.
• The tips of her skis follow her body and end up perpendicular with the fall line.
• Her body lands at an acute angle to the ground.  A cloud of snow, shoulder roll, tangle of legs and skis follow.
• She breaks her leg.  Ouch!

The moment it all went wrong.

So, why did she crash?

1. When she hit her hand against the gate, it twisted her body away from the fall line.  She did not have time to adjust before she crashed.  This is the primary reason she crashed.  If she hadn't hit her hand and gotten twisted around, she probably would have made adjustments mid-air that would have enabled her to land the jump.
   
   However,
2. Bracing against the left leg (rather than absorbing the rough terrain by flexing and extending it) meant she did not absorb the compression or jump, and provided the kinetic energy that launches her into the air.
3. She entered the jump at the fourth gate in a disadvantageous position, with her skis tipped up and away from the fall line.
4. The lack of flexion in her left knee as she hit the compression and the jump put her in this position.

Conclusion:

Lindsey Vonn's injured left knee (torn ACL) did not cause her crash.  However, she may have been able to better manage the snow conditions on the course before her crash and set herself up for a better jump if she had a healthy knee.

Video source: "Breezy Johnson, Emma Aicher, Sofia Goggia take on downhill test | Winter Olympics 2026 | NBC Sports." NBC Sports and NBC News YouTube Channel.  February 8, 2026.  https://youtu.be/4Y-I1FBwWeY?si=1bGepj8UzVMMp7iM

You can't be young and do that

Loss is universal, and yet individual loss is personal.  It's hard to talk about loss without injecting yourself into it.  We can share, we can feel and understand and extend empathy, and sympathy.  We can never truly know the loss.  When Steve Backstrom brought a pair of brand new skis to the shop for me to mount, the loss he felt was palpable.  Steve and Betsy's son, Arne, had designed the skis.  He didn't just draw some art for the topsheet, or provide feedback on what the Austrian nerds drew up in Solid Works, he conceived the ski whole cloth, including some of the manufacturing processes, and helped shepherd the ski into production.  Arne passed away in a skiing accident that summer.  Details were scarce, but for those of us who didn't know him, they weren't important.  Another light blinked out.  An older sister and a younger brother lost their middle sibling.  Two parents lost a child.  Arne was 29.  From a distance, we all saw a rising star disappear.  Blizzard released their Anomaly series, replacing the bullrider series and their three sheets of metal a couple years ago, and the last nod to Arne's original idea quietly disappeared.

Loss isn't meted out in tidy batches.  Nor is love, or joy, or anything else for that matter.   Neither are loss, or joy, or love, necessarily recognisable immediately, especially when presented with an abstract, a small swatch of canvas with a few colours and shapes, a part but not always representative of the whole.  Sometimes you see it looking back, sometimes you don't, or maybe you don't look back at all.

Better to have skied and forgot than to have never skied at all.

Kelci Cook dropped in on me from time to time my first year in Brad's shop at Crystal.  I never really knew her, probly eight years younger and certainly in a different phase of life.  She made jewelry, and came running through the door one day when she heard me using the Dremel on something or other, a boot fit or toe riser, or just cutting of an old broken basket from a customer's pole.  I can't remember her face, really, some vague impression of a young adult, blonde hair and dreams.  She loved the Dremel.

Kelci flipped her car one morning right by Kastner's house on her way to work for Gerry in the rental shop.  Nobody knows what happened, but there are always elk around the Villages.  I think of her every time I drive by her memorial sign, not surprisingly since that's the whole point.  I feel her presence as one of many spirits out in the trees, watching us, hopefully benevolently.  I never really knew her, nothing more than a flash in the sweep of time, but each flash represents little chip off the veneer.  It can be a single leaf fallen, or a major limb, or sometimes the whole tree.  

I still reach for my phone to send my buddy Jake Sawyer a picture of some broken bike or a coworker's home-customed Trek Sawyer.  It still hurts knowing he's gone, that there's no one there to smirk and chuckle a little under his breath.  If I am at the grocer when I can't find something, or at my eye doctor when I get a new prescriotion, I still joke with Amy's cousin Adriene, gone two years now.  She was in grocery analytics, the sort of field responsible for all the seeming randomness you find instead of finding the capers that are the specific reason for visiting the store in the first place.  She and I had a friendly competition of who could see worse.  She won every time, always at least a half correction ahead of me.

The author, in younger days.

We can only guess at this life of ours, given and taken by chance or fate or by the divine.  Some among us have immense faith in their version of things, that an omnipotent and omniscient God holds His hand above it all, or that it's all a stew of random change, that we've somehow crawled out from the ooze to become The Destroyer.  As in all things, I'm stuck in the middle somewhere, tearing up a little hearing Keith Whitley sing a Christmas song but not sure there's anything more than the things we carry along in our little baskets of the past.

Sometimes loss is just the things we've never done, or never seen.  The Christmas Eve service at Frikirke in Alta, Norge.  A line we might coulda skied if we'd ever learned how to travel.  The way the wind feels in Ushuaia, or the feeling of being home for some important moment that's long past.

When I was 20, I tried to get a patrol job at Crystal.  Baugher wouldn't hire me because I wasn't 21.  He never explained it, and it always felt like a cop-out, an assessment which was bolstered by two subsequent rejections made all the more frustrating by my having references from most of his top lieutenants, including both his number two and the wife of Crystal's owner.  I've done alright in the career I fell into, and I've skied my share of deep Tuesdays, but that memory always bites hard.  I never wanted any sort of glory, just to put the pack on each morning and throw a few charges, to shovel my share of snow and run my share of ropelines.  Pull a few people out of South if they needed it.

My buddy Tim died under a truck on Highway 16 one morning.  I mean, he made it to the hospital, but there was nothing to be done other than try to ease him onto the next chapter.  It hurts today, over twenty-one years later.  I think of him often, usually riding my bike.  It's been a long time since mid-October of 2004 so the sting is muted, but it's there.  These things add up.  They hurt, with very little difference between the literal aches in our muscles and the metaphorical ones in our bones.  There are stabs, sometimes, or needle pokes.  Nothing ever really goes away.  The loss of possibility, the loss of actuality.

I don't want to trade places with anyone who's gone on.  I'll get there someday, and I don't want to know the hour.  I don't idolise Keith Whitley like Grady the Bullrider did back in the day, and I hope he doesn't either.  I hope Grady's grown up, done whatever it is old bullriders do if they survive the years on the circuit.  17th on the NFR bulls ranking is cool while it's here, and pretty awesome to talk about, but you don't get there by takin it easy and slow, and the human body wasn't built to handle that shit anyway.  Regardless of where any of us thinks we came from.

The author, in modern times.

Turns out, despite some folks having their ears plugged, They did tell us, and They were right.  Just wait, you'll be here too, if you're lucky.  You'll be older, and yes, you'll hurt, and yes, you'll miss those young knees.  You'll miss your friends if you ever made any, and you'll miss, too, the folks who just passed through, spraying you with snow while you waited for somebody else by the side of the run.  Maybe you snapped a picture on a mountain top, and maybe that person melted into the distance like the snow on which you were standing.  Maybe the circle shrank until it's just you and the wind.  Maybe you got lucky, maybe that one lady from Minnesota found she liked making dinner with you and talking about skiing.  Maybe she's still here, just as beat up as you from all the falls and shoveling snow and picking up toddlers and working for dirt pay and free tickets and access to slightly cheaper gear.

I've never had any major injuries, thankfully.  I've done my share of smashems, the kind I write about and the kind that might could scare my Ma.  Some things are just bumps in the road.  Some things linger, dig into the tele tendon--patellar, should you not be enough of a boring nerd to know intimately just which part it is that does all that heavy lifting--and shred it until you gotta make James Beckmann's acquaintance in Covid-quiet surgery just to walk.  Pain be damned, just to walk, to turn the pressure and heat of inflammation off for a minute.

There are tons of pre-season workouts out there for your perusal, and just like that day back in 8th grade when you got the cast off your arm, you should do some PT.  The excuses come easily, though, and quickly.  Yeah, that one-legged angular semi-squat feels amazing after doing them for a month, but it hurts now, so maybe we'll skip it tonight, just do the easy ones.  Yeah, it'd be good to do a set tonight, but it's raining, and I don't want to walk in the rain to warm up after standing on concrete for nine hours, so, maybe we'll wait for a nicer day.

Here, too, They were right.  The nicer day does come, and depending on location, quite often, and it doesn't matter.  You can't wait for it.

The author used to have other interests besides being the best skier on the mountain.

The scariest moment for me, probly in all the years of being in and around the ski world, was in the Heather Meadows aid room when this kid named Carson came in.  He was early to mid-twenties, a rippin snowboarder.  It was Sunday afternoon, and the radio had started going crazy.  Somebody had hit a tree after dropping the 542 rock wall.  If you've never skied at Baker, this story's not as wild as it sounds.  The highway, 542, winds its way up to Artist Point along the western edge of the permit area, and for some of that stretch is inside the ski area.  A few runs cross the highway, and one, Home Run, even runs on the highway grade for a while.  It snows so much up there that you don't really notice the highway if you aren't looking.

Near the bottom of Pan Face, skiers' right, is the rock wall, something folks in big storms are willing to send.  Carson did, but got hung up somehow and took on a tree with his head.  He was shocky when the volleyballs brought him in, and my gut started churning immediately.  We needed to get him down the hill as soon as possible, but I was just a fresh EMT, twenty years old, and the patrollers all talked over, under, around, and through me.  Since I had been checking vitals and monitoring Carson's condition, I kept it up while they were jostling about.  I was super worried about his blood pressure, with his major symptoms all pointing to shock/hypoperfusion in addition to his obvious TBI, but they were all so loud and pushy that I couldn't hear a proper BP with a cuff.  I took a basic radial BP, which gets you systolic at least, which isn't ideal when the kid is in and out of consciousness and showing all the classic signs of shock, but it's not nothing and I needed continuity.  One patroller even yelled at me, telling me I was an idiot cos I was taking his pulse and BP simultaneously.  I just pulled back and called the Director.

Once I got them all cleared out, Patrol Director Chris came in to check on Carson and went white.  He asked me why I hadn't already sent him to town, and I pointed out the door at the last receding volunteer patroller.  He just looked sad and got his emergency phone connection going.  I don't know how it worked, just that it wasn't a normal landline.  By then, Carson's partner was with us, and Chris had her get her car and meet the paramedics along the highway.  Bellingham is 56 miles from the Heather Meadows aid room, way too long to be waiting for an ambulance that can't drive as fast through all those dark corners as a small sedan can.  She and Chris got Carson in the front seat, and she put her foot in it and that was the last I ever saw of him.

I don't know if he lived, and I've spend twenty-four years hoping that he did, that he recovered well.  I got booted from Baker, and while I can guess, I don't actually know why.  A friend from childhood asked around, and the only answer he could get was "he knows", which, no, Ole, I do not know.  The only thing I know for sure is Baker is a small, petty, beautiful, gnarly, heartbreaking place.  The sky is rarely blue, and some years the snow never stops.

Snow is like a metaphor, man.  You just gotta endure, and like, you'll build experience and stuff.  Rime tells you the direction the wind came from, and experience tells you where the, um, experience came from?  I don't know, man, I haven't been in English Class in a really long time.

That winter was 800 inches, an absolute gobsmacker if you don't know the Cascades.  It's big even if you do.  When people ask what it was like, I say "my arms got bigger", cos, as they say, you just had to be there, man.  And besides, the big winter was only a couple years prior, and somewhere close to an A-Basin year's worth deeper.  Still, it was humbling, and terrifying, and challenging, and some of the most intense moments and memories I have.  On the other hand, it was just getting up in the morning and going to bed at night, same as it ever was.  Deep days, dark days, sunnybreaks, the moss, the aid room and its--mostly--innocuous injuries.  I skied 127 days that winter, the last of which was on the 9th of July.  The year that followed was dark, long, the strange absence of what, I don't think I knew then and certainly don't know now.  It felt remarkably like getting low blood sugar and then overeating to compensate.  Over, and over.

One afternoon, somewhere between January and April, my roommate Twig asked if I wanted to race.  I don't really know what his motivation was, but I certainly had the hubris necessary to say yes without hesitation.  He said he wanted to race top to bottom down Diehl's to Nose Dive, turning for directional purposes only.  I asked, confused, if he was sure, and he said yes.  I won by quite a bit.  It wasn't really a contest, not cos I was the better skier, though at twenty I would definitely have been adamant that I was.  Really, I just outweighed him by 50 or more pounds and had skis with 30ish more centimetres and a turn radius in the high 20s.  He was on his 165 slalom skis, which get their pop from construction and loading, meant for speed in turns, never meant to be flat.  I still wonder what that kid is up to, and why he was so bad at math.

My last day at Baker was a typical North Cascades day, soupy, chilly, hard to read.  It snowed the next day, all the way to the water in Vancouver.  Denny and I had--literally, like, actually really literally, with Dyno AP--blown up a gun mount in order to get it out of the twenty foot snowpack earlier in the week, and he'd pushed it with the D-4** from the knoll at the bottom of Gold Mine to the bottom of Chair 5.  I and Sam and Sean spent the whole day trying to keep it burning.  We went through probably 20 gallons of propane via torch, and uncounted gallons of diesel that we dumped with growing annoyance on the pile, which was probly 50% creasote-coated 6x6 gun mount timbers, 30% snow, and 20% dirt.  Not to mention the gas driving the sleds back and forth to the shop at White Salmon to retrieve said propane and diesel.  Then, as tends to happen with these things, the next day I threw my stuff into whatever bags I could find, mostly can liners, shoved it all in the back of my friend Chris' Escort, and headed back to Enumclaw.  Eight months with my shoulder to the wheel and then, nothing.  Unemployment, and what felt like failure.  Loss, at the very least.  Weight on my shoulders that I still struggle to lift.

The author, looking dapper in his new glasses and trademark t-shirt.

The conversation streams in every shop I've worked roll and dip in similar ways.  I imagine that to an outsider, it'd be pretty random, running the gamut from actual potty humour all the way to philosophy and psychological theory, from date-night hookups to the physics of weather and even geopolitics.  I won't claim that all of our conversations--and, by extension, likely most shops the world over, since by 44 I've got way more than two plot points and am willing to draw trendlines on that basis--even those about deep topics, are actually deep.  Sometimes nuggets of truth and introspection hide amongst the randomness.  As I age but don't age out, the bulk of my coworkers tend to get comparatively younger, such that at one point I was the youngest by far and am now surprised when I find I am not the oldest.

I have two coworkers who are around 19 or 20, one of whom is a hirsute and stocky Yooper who is even easier to rile than I am, the other a woman only months out of high school.  She was in the back shop with me and a few mechanics, and like normal, the conversation jumped from skis to life goals and the perception of success, and she said she felt she had to finish college with a degree and immediately grab hold of a career in her field, or she "won't feel accomplished".  The other two mechanics, like me, do not have college degrees and are also chasing something, but nothing any of us really know.  We all stopped, unsure what she meant, whether it was simply stating an insecurity out loud, or if it was a dig of some kind.  Likely the former.  We're all of us, all 8 billion or whatever, supremely self-centred.  Her comment stung, though, just the same.  I tried to ask what her comment meant about me, but she was definitely not making any sort of judgment.

I joke when people ask that those two coworkers and I have the same degree as a fourth who got his degree in recreation from Appalachian State in Boone--coincidentally the same school from which my roommate Twig was on sabbatical--the only difference being we didn't have to pay and had fun the whole time.  As expected, it's a supremely self-centred joke.  There's more than a twinge of jealousy, and more than a skosh of self-critique.  Even in those moments, fleeting conversations among folks thrown together temporarily by circumstances we each only barely control, there's the sting of loss, of missed opportunity, of self-recrimination.  I joke, or Sam or Matt do, and none of us can really finish with any gusto.  I've noticed both of them, Matt in his mid-thirties and Sam his mid-twenties, stop short of laughing more than a little and change the subject.  I do as well.  The moments pass, and we bring up the lighter subjects again.  Purposefully awkward segues along the lines of "speaking of tractor tyres, what's for lunch?"  There's always skiing to keep the day moving.

Sometimes you gotta just leave it all down there somewhere, under that one cloud.  That one, right there.  Next to the yellowy-white one.  No, not that yellowy-white one, the other yellowy-white one.  Sheesh.

-

Title from James McMurtry's recent "Canola Fields", the lead song on his tenth studio record, The Horses and the Hounds.  I don't have a thirty-year crush, but I seent some shit, man.

** I think, don't quote me on it; it was a big but not too too big yellow dirt Cat, not a snowcat.

If I had a hammer

If I ran the circus, the fridge would be quiet.  Also it would be spelled frij.  And people wouldn't drive by other people's's houses at 20 over.  There's some big stuff, obvs, but other people would take care of that.  I'm here for the really important stuff, like slapping the inventor of Boa with a broken, um, Boa cable.  

This will make sense in a minute.  First gratuitous shot of Soldier Mountain.  Chair 2, and the surrounding hills, to be exact.  Looks like late season, but it could be early season.  Or January.  Soldier's unpredicatble like that, and better for it.  Just go ski.  Photo by Peter Landsman of LiftBlog and JHMR.  I stole it cos I didn't have this shot.  If we ever make any money on this post, Peter, you get a cut.  I'll roll some ones to make it look fancy or smpn.  

Herewith, my woefully inadequate list of demands.  I'll start with the most obvious thing everybody probly already knows, which is STOP IT WITH THE GRIP WALK SHIT.  To start with, ski boots are harder to walk in than regular street shoes cos THEY ARE MADE OF PLASTIC AND GO CLEAR TO YER NIPPLES.  Of course they are less intuitive than some would prefer.  Furthermore, Your Honour, NONE OF MY BINDINGS ARE GRIP WALK AND I AIN'T BUY NEW STUFF.  It's one thing if your collection of ski is just a Nordica Enforcer 94 and a picture of those edgeless plastic-strap skis from 1976 you got from your aunt when your cousins grew out of em.  You probably don't care if your 16th pair of bindings works with your current boots cos you don't have, need, or care about even a second pair of bindings.  The money side of things just isn't that bad.  For me, yes, I do have at least 16 pairs of bindings, and no, I did not pay retail for even three of them.  Heck, I didn't even pay for more than half of em.  One pair I got in trade for a lesser pair I got as a tip and some labour.  One pair came from my father-in-law off a pair of ski-swap race sticks they didn't match that were also above his din range.  One pair came on a $10 pair of GS skis that I still ski.  And so on.  It took me a long time to get this haphazard mishmash of a wore-out binding quiver together and I ain't give up on all that work without a fight.  

And the supposed function of GripWalk, aka walking easier with more grippy?  Fail.  GripWalk is harder to walk in than real boots cos there's a weird hitch in the giddyup under the ball of your foot such that it feels like you're wearing a high heel backwards.  We did ask for way hella mass grippier boot soles, yes.  And boot companies long ago figured out how to make their retail boots with a both giant, safe, slippy, power-transfering ISO Alpine 5355 anti-friction plate AND walking lugs.  We didn't ask to walk even more funnier or replace all of our bindings just to walk weirder and hafta use stupid terms like GripWalk.  Fkn Marker.

-

Second on the list is SALOMON MAKE ME MY OWN 997 BINDINGS WITH THAT ONE RED COLOUR STAT.  Thank you.  Make sure they mostly metal and brand new and also don't make them for anyone else, just me.  And DO NOT OFFER THEM IN GRIPWALK.

This colour but, like, in the fancy kit and 16 dins cos I'm the best skier on the mountain.  And actually, sure, fine, go ahead and make them for everybody.

This all has got me thinking about the current squabble surrounding binding delta.  Even if you don't know what I'm talking about, you probly do know why there shouldn't be a discussion.  The correct delta is a big fat nothing.  Zero.  Binding delta, if you're somehow still reading and not passed out from boredom in some hotel lobby in the south of Le Français, is the difference in height (or, alternatively here in BoyCee, "heighth") between the AFD and the brake zone.  This sets the starting ramp or rocker (toe down/toe up, respectively) of the boot.  Since the boot necessarily holds all sorta variables, starting with a neutral delta means you can keep all the fiddlin' around between you and your bootfitter and your eccentric boot designer of choice, who is hopefully named something artful and pretentious like Bertrand or Celeste, and the binding won't negate or exacerbate any gains or losses you may create.  While I have not been to see Brent in PC or Charlie in Taos or what have you, I have had some boot work done and there was definitively no 17-point questionaire about my various binding setups.  So, binding gremlins, listen up: STOP DOIN STUPID $#!+ AND MAKE ME A DAMN FLAT BINDING THANKS AND GOOD NIGHT.

Simple as that.

Fourth on my list of demands is keep them old chairlifts going.  In this modern day and age we have instant coffee, instant tea, and instant disbelief.*  We don't need instant transport.  It's the reason we'll always be overdemanding.  If everybody's in a hurry and scurrying by you, you'll know you're on the right track.  I as much as the next cat benefit from shorter queues and shorter lift rides.  I also as much as the next guy benefit from a slower pace and fewer folks on the slopes.  

Yet another excuse to post pics of Soldier Mountain.  1970 Städeli double, which has a name, I'm sure of it.  Chair 1.  There we go.

There is a lot of noise about how double chairs are "rickety", which, sure, maybe there are some that are.  Mostly there are just chairs that are aged, aging, sure, maybe tired, getting expensive to maintain, but they aren't intrinsically bad because they are doubles.  Or cos they are old enough to have been legally drinking when I Can't Drive 55 was heatin up them airwaves.  Heck, I was old enough to be learnin how not to shit my pance and I'm not rickety.  Don't ask my PT or my ortho or my GP or my chiro or my LMT too many questions, but yeah, I'm fine.  Or my coworkers.  Or Amy.  I'm still the best skier on the mountain.  Shut up.  Leave me alone.

In the scheme of things, a new detach is totally fine.  No matter what, no matter how often I complain about it, though, something is lost.  Not in the sense that boring days don't make good memories, or any other purposefully obtuse attitude you've encountered; I don't know.  It's just, hm.  Tech seeps into everything.  I know that some purist back in the deep woods of the Wood River Valley probly got mad when the first single chair went up back in 1936, cos, well, that was some real tech right there, and at every advancement somebody has sat down to do exactly what I am doing right now, yelling out the window at clouds.  And even though Matt Groening can make fun of it doesn't mean I'm wrong, exactly the way being paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you.  We have encouraged tech of every kind into every corner of our lives, and yes, it's probly silly to complain about it when the very act of skiing is enabled and emboldened by technology of all kinds.  I don't care.  Enough's enough.

Now we're cookin with av gas.

If nothing else, I really think every ski area everywhere should carry that one hot chocolate that was at the Pine Marten Lodge in 1989.  I think it was cinnamon.  It should have its own public tap.  That weird automatic kind that might could spray all over you or it might should pour you the nicest cup of cocoa you've ever had in your life.  It should be right next to the Buck Hill pancake machine**, say, or maybe one a them popcorn machines that tyre shops and Jayhawks (SunBird, Yard Birds, Menard's, Farm and Fleet, the list goes on, I bet they had em).  Popcorn doesn't really make my boat cross the road, but people seem to dig digging a giant scoop of the stuff out of the "butter" vat and spilling half of it on the traction mat.  Good food is great and all, but regardless of the view from Needles or Seattle Ridge, English wool carpet takes away from the experience of skiing.  If you need that sort of luxury, you can probly afford Europe, and the Euros can have you.  Besides, it's cheaper there, innit?!

-

Title from the eponymous folk classic made famous by Mary Travers of Joey, Jimmy, and Roxanne back in 1937 at the Redding Film Festival in Sudbury, Ontario.  Or was it The Police?  I don't know.  It's a famous song, anyway.  Don't ax questions.

* Quote from Death Cab for Cutie's album Somethin Bout Them Aeroplanes', from the ever-so-smooth trasition between "Amputations" and "Fake Frowns", or for those of you (and by that I mean me) who say things like Trail 5 and Chair 6, between tracks 8 and 9.

THIS JUST IN THE ACHD TOOK OUT THE TROLL GATE ON BOGUS BASIN ROAD PUT IT BACK PUT IT BACK YOU STUPID @$$#0/&$

** You gotta watch to the end