Telemark Skiing Equipment Observation

I don't get it. Maybe 'cause I'm not a telemarker/free-heeler/pin-head/BC-skier/whateverer. Maybe 'cause I don't eat granola or own Birkenstocks. Maybe 'cause I listen to bands like NIN, Garbage, Bad Religion, The Offspring, Save Ferris, and a host of others - but none of it encompassing twangy banjo blue-ass crap-folk music. As a species we've built life-sustaining platforms in space; we have a few robots prowling around on a planetary neighbor; we've managed to clone other species as well as the first attempts at our own; we have computational power that can fit in our hand that is orders of magnitude more powerful than machines that required entire rooms 40 and even 15 years ago; we have applied both high strength lightweight materials that we created along with extremely sophisticated engineering to recreational activities like skiing.

It's that last one. Skiing has it's roots in ancient times. Materials and techniques have been under constant development and refinement for literally hundereds of years. Modern alpine downhill skiiing is relatively recent as compared to nordic/telemark, as the free-heel crowd likes to point out. Can someone please explain then why there are endless problems, breakage, and poor design of telemark bindings? The need for tinkery home-shop modifications to climbing skins to get them to stay on? Debates about the glue to use for skins and how to keep the skins apart when they're not on the bottom of the ski?

Hello? Glue? Glue??!!!?? It's 2004 folks. Is this really the best we can do? What gives? Are all the manufacturers in tele space asleep at the wheel?

Spam Prose

A common spam tactic is to send the ad for an item as an image instead of as text. Spam filtering programs quickly caught on to this, so the spammers countered by surrounding and padding the images with lots of text. This fools the Bayesian filters into accepting the note as legitimate email. There are 3 popular techniques used by spammers to generate this fake text: random letters grouped in random lengths, random dictionary words strung together, and random phrases from random books. This last one is often generated with Amazon's new "look or search inside" feature. Sometimes though it leads to some pretty existential subjects and body text, like this one I received yesterday:

Subject: Re: Balance Due, acct Jerome - cyprus mulch toothaches for 970

apartment building make love to customer inside.Bbut they need to remember how non-chalantly minivan defined by pit viper gets stinking drunk.A few trombones, and blithe spirit behind) to arrive at a state of lover. Now and then, over philosopher fall in love with dissident from freight train.

Trombones, freight train dissidents, pit vipers, and non-chalant, drunken minivans, all in a single meme. What more could one want?

Font This!

It appears that the State Department wants to modernize:

In a sign that no matter is too small to affect international diplomacy, the US State Department has issued an edict banning its longtime standard typeface from all official correspondence and replacing it with a "more modern" font.

In an internal memorandum distributed on Wednesday, the department declared "Courier New 12" - the font and size decreed for US diplomatic documents for years - to be obsolete and unacceptable after February 1.

"In response to many requests and with a view to making our written work easier to read, we are moving to a new standard font: 'Times New Roman 14'," said the memorandum.

The new font "takes up almost exactly the same area on the page as Courier New 12, while offering a crisper, cleaner, more modern look," it said, adding that after February 1 "only Times New Roman 14 will be accepted."

Does this mean other govenrment agencies will be adopting more appropriate fonts? Obviously one of the first would be the mandate that all future intelligence reports be done in MS Comic Sans.

We Got Him...Somewhere....Probably

The administration has been remarkably silent about Osama Bin Laden pretty much ever since BushCheneyRummy satisfied their collective hard-on for invading Iraq. Recently though there were a couple of well planted articles from DoD and Pentagon sources saying how we're still hot on the trail of OBL and how close we are to capturing him. So how far fetched is the idea that we already have OBL captured and on ice somewhere? Think about it. The idiot son is at his lowest approval rating, and that was before he offered up his drunken-sailor-on-a-binge idea of a budget. The non-existent WMD shit is really starting to hit the fan with the oddly prophetic phrase "failure of intelligence". The Democrats will annoint someone to go into battle, Bush's numbers will continue to slide, Kerry or Edwards will command a sizeable lead in the polls. And sometime just before the election - early October most likely - the military/pr/propaganda machine will manufacture the historic capture of OBL. The Admin will trot him out; Bush will say "We got him!"; his numbers will soar thanks to the moronic majority; he'll be reelected with huge numbers and won't need to buy the election from Diebold like he did with the Florida election commision in 2000.