Telling it like it is

3780 vertical feet today. A little saturday skiing for a couple of hours whilst Paula got back into the swing of cross-country skiing. Not sure if I'm going to be going tomorrow or not - temps are coming down again and it was fairly hard-pack and icy up there today. We'll see.

Ski helmets - I apparently have the same problem with them as I do with motorbike helmets. In short : my head is too big for the average helmet. We trawled around REI, Garts and Dick's before ending up at Sports Den in Foothill Village. Fortunately the bloke I spoke to there is also afflicted with a large bonce and he immediately recommended a 2007 model helmet with an adjustable lining. It looked promising - it was the first one I tried all day that actually fit. At $200 though it was more than I was looking to spend. We came down a little and I ended up with a Giro X10 XXL which fits a damn site better than the Giro9 XXL. Apparently Giro have no consistency in their sizes. Of course getting a helmet meant getting a new pair of goggles too so that it all fit together properly. Ho hum. The most interesting place was Dick's who told me they only did children's helmets. Go figure.

That's how much Ford lost last year. A $12.7 billion (with a B) loss. I know they build crappy cars but that's still a pretty amazing figure. It makes you wonder how they can stay in business. I wonder if Jim Oyler moved there or something?

I guess that pesky "Constitution" thing isn't binding after all.

Human-caused global warming is here -- visible in the air, water and melting ice -- and is destined to get much worse in the future, an authoritative global scientific report will warn next week. "The smoking gun is definitely lying on the table as we speak," said top U.S. climate scientist Jerry Mahlman, who reviewed all 1,600 pages of the first segment of a giant four-part report. "The evidence ... is compelling." I still have a problem with all the "evidence" that we're being shown to support these theories. For example, that temperature has risen 1.2°F between 1901 and 2005. The climatologist freely admit that they only have reliable climate data going back 60 to 65 years which would put the earliest reliable measurement sometime around 1940. Any time before that and you're looking at woolly, unreliable data. The temperature change between 1940-ish and now is about 0.4°F positive. So it seems the majority of this shift happened in the 40 year...

It's good to see standard have dropped so low back in England. In Devon, the Brits' latent criminality has come to the surface after the MSC Napoli beached off the coast and containers started washing ashore. Hundreds of people have been looting the containers for SUVs, car parts and BMW motorbikes. The police have been totally useless (as they always are in England) and have basically given everyone forms to fill in to declare what they've taken. Because that's going to work. These fuckers who are looting the ship obviously don't think anything of it, but they'll be the first to complain when the price of cars or motorbikes goes up. Then they won't be able to see the correlation. I think that whole country is in need of some martial law - the police are too soft on the crimes that count, and too Nazi on those that don't. 5mph over the speed limit? You're a criminal. Looting, robbing, mugging? That's fine - just don't be too overt about it. ...

9400 vertical feet today. And in SSX-speak, I've unlocked Peak 2. Yes. I've ridden the high-speed quad - Eagle Express - 1500ft up and come down Sunshine Bowl. I'm sodding knackered. 8 Moonbeams, 2 Sunrises, 1 Apex and 1 Eagle Express.