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Freeballing

May 16, 2011 Friends / Pictures / Post-A-Day 2011 / Stories
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It took us a while to pull Tim C up after his first jump just because Dan gets loqua­cious and we had asked him about his tour in Afghanistan. Tim C just rolled with it, though. After com­ing up, he just tossed the hel­met and hel­met cam onto the bridge and set up for the sec­ond jump:

With­out the hel­met, or even a sweat­shirt, Tim C was def­i­nitely the free-​est of all jumpers. You’ll have to ask him if that was a good thing or not.

Now that I’ve got this checked off my list, I’m get­ting two ques­tions a lot.

The first is if I would go again. I def­i­nitely would. Dan men­tioned that this is his “fall­back” bridge since ho never has prob­lems jump­ing from here, but there are other bridges he likes more. He men­tioned that one of his favorites is Weitch­pec, and if we wanted, we should shoot him a mes­sage and he would let us know when he was going to that loca­tion. Appar­ently it’s a higher bridge in an even more beau­ti­ful area. We also asked him about dif­fer­ence bridge height makes, and he men­tioned that higher jumps obvi­ously give you more freefall time, but shorter jumps give you a stronger bounce at more Gs.

The other ques­tion is what I’m going to do next year. That is a tough one; it will be tough indeed to top the last two years. Andrew P sug­gested naked BASE jump­ing. (Tim C demands that if we do go BASE jump­ing, I need to do the Bat­man cos­tume.) There have also been sug­ges­tions of hang-​gliding. I dunno about that, from my ini­tial research, it looks both more expen­sive and less fun than bungee jump­ing. Per­haps I’ll just have to orga­nize a round of The Most Dan­ger­ous Game. (Either version.)

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Warming Up

May 13, 2011 Comic Books / Friends / Money / Pictures / Post-A-Day 2011 / Stories / Work
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I’m pretty damn excited about my bungee-​jumping adven­ture tomor­row! Tim C was ask­ing me what to pack, and I briefly toyed with the idea of doing it in a Bat­man cos­tume. Which, is bad ass in the­ory, but would very likely fall short in execution.

A cou­ple of peo­ple have asked me why I don’t jump from the Golden Gate Bridge. I guess that’s not a real thing. One site claims that it is ille­gal because of the boat traf­fic under­neath. I don’t know if that par­tic­u­lar rea­son is the defin­i­tive answer, but it does look like bungee jump­ing from the Golden Gate Bridge is frowned upon. Here’s a story of some peo­ple who did it any­way, though. That would be awe­some, but prob­a­bly not some­thing a newb like me could just jump into. (Yes, I used the most tired pun possible.)

Inter­est­ingly, when I got the final instruc­tions from the coör­di­na­tor on Wednes­day, he men­tioned that we weren’t sup­posed to tell any­one where we were going to jump, and that when we got there, we weren’t sup­posed to tell the locals what we were up to, either. Color me curious!

Any­way, in prepa­ra­tion of my impend­ing doom, I decided to knock another item off my bucket list, just in case I don’t get fur­ther chances to work on it. Thanks to a recent Liv­ing­So­cial deal, I quickly and cheaply named a star.

Exact coor­di­nates have not been sent to me yet, but it is the bright­est yet-​to-​be-​named star in the Tau­rus con­stel­la­tion as of the moment I am writ­ing this.

Any guesses as to what I named it?

A Luong Time Ago In A Galaxy Far, Far Away

That’s right. My nerd­dom lives on for eter­nity. (Or when that star goes out, or the Inter­na­tional Star Reg­istry goes down.) I hope all Luongs every­where are proud of this.

UPDATE: I just got my Star Reg­istry packet is the mail today. You can (try to) find it at Tau­rus RA5h43m58.07s D25°35’50.90″. Sadly, I’m hav­ing trou­ble find­ing it on SkyView or WikiSky. I’ve always had a tiny sus­pi­cion about this ser­vice, and through my post-​registration research, I found out that only the Inter­na­tional Astro­nom­i­cal Union offi­cially names stars. I sup­pose the Inter­na­tional Star Reg­istry is a harm­less fake, sim­i­lar to a “World’s Best Dad” mug, it is def­i­nitely a scam. And it seems to be worse than I imag­ined… they could have at least given me an actual star!

Looks like this list item might be a lot more dif­fi­cult than I first thought.

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Jesus vs. Batman

May 5, 2011 Comic Books / Friends / Internet / Life, the Universe, and Everything / Money / Pictures / Politics / Post-A-Day 2011 / Stories
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Thanks to Vince T for shar­ing this with me!

Beware, the fol­low­ing could be con­sid­ered offen­sive or sac­ri­le­gious. I think it’s fair game since one troll was out­done by another.

These images might be a bit dif­fi­cult to read, so check the orig­nal link above the pictures.

As I some­what jok­ingly replied to Vince T’s post on Face­book, I am insulted that the Jesus team implied Bat­man would kill Jesus and allow him to use his res­ur­rec­tion abil­ity. Every­one knows Bat­man never kills. Then again, they also called him a Mar­vel hero.

But on a more seri­ous level, I’m kinda dis­turbed at the fact that one of the Jesus team used the “fic­tional” argu­ment against Bat­man mul­ti­ple times. Yes, obvi­ously Bat­man is made up. That’s why Bob Kane always gets cred­ited. I do not believe that there was an actual man named Bruce Wayne who sharp­ened his sur­vivor guilt, need for revenge, and super­hu­man willpower into a crime-​fighting super­hero alter-​ego. At the same time, whether an actual man named Jesus lived or not, I also do not believe he did all those things the Bible says he did. Over a thou­sand years of oral tra­di­tion, trans­la­tion, hand-​copying, edit­ing, com­bin­ing mul­ti­ple sources, and pol­i­tics pretty much guar­an­tees that.

These are both mytho­log­i­cal fig­ures, and their sto­ries are meant to inspire, to teach, to explain, and to enter­tain. Isn’t that more than enough?

Oh, and on a bit of a tan­gent, Azrael and Cru­sader are cast­ing judge­ment on all the heroes of Gotham at the moment. Here’s Tim Drake’s encounter with them:

Tim would actual be the one I’d put money on to pass the chal­lenges, but he is dis­qual­i­fied for being an unbe­liever. This is one of my big­ger stick­ing points with Chris­tian­ity. Why is belief a pre­req? Why can’t you go to Heaven just for being a good per­son? This rule instantly screws any­one who did not know about or was born before Jesus’s life­time. (Sim­i­lar to the unbaptised/​virtuous pagan “Limbo” level of Hell in Dante’s Inferno.) As a pagan (and I’d like to believe a fairly vir­tu­ous one), this both­ers me on an intel­lec­tual level, despite the fact that I do not believe in Heaven or Hell.

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