Friday, January 9, 2009
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
Why You Should Always Wear Layers When Skiing

Skier Suffers Exposure
Man left dangling upside down, pantsless after Vail lift mishap
JANUARY 6--In a bizarre incident that will surely lead to litigation (or an out-of-court settlement), a skier at Colorado's ritzy Vail resort was left dangling upside down and pantsless from a chairlift last Thursday morning. The January 1 mishap apparently occurred after the male skier, 48, and a child boarded a high-speed lift in Vail's Blue Sky Basin. It appears that the chairlift's fold-down seat was somehow not in the lowered position, which caused the man to partially fall through the resulting gap. His right ski got jammed in the ascending chairlift, and that kept him upended since his boot never dislodged from its binding. As seen in the photos on the following pages (which were snapped by fellow skiers), the Skyline Express lift was stopped shortly after the pair's botched boarding resulted in the man dangling from the lift. The exposed skier was stuck for about 15 minutes before Vail personnel backed the lift up and successfully dislodged the unidentified man from the four-seat chair. In a statement released this afternoon, Vail Resorts, which operates the ski area, reported that the skier was not injured after being "suspended for approximately seven minutes." The press release did not explain how the mishap occurred, only that "the man was caught on the chair." (3 pages)
Mitch finds Plinko on Wikipedia, Big fave with Honest Abe
The game bagatelle evolved from efforts to bring outdoor games, such as croquet and shuffleboard, inside and atop tables. History records the existence of table-based games back to the 15th Century, and a 17th-century table is preserved in the Great Hall at Hatfield House. While some games took the wickets croquet and turned them into the side-rail pockets of modern pocket billiards, some tables became smaller and had the holes placed in strategic areas in the middle of the table.
In France, during the reign of King Louis XIV, someone took a billiard table and narrowed it, placing the pins at one end of the table while making the player shoot balls with a stick or cue from the other end. Pins took too long to reset when knocked down, so the pins eventually became fixed to the table and holes took the place of targets. Players could ricochet the ball off the pins to achieve the harder, higher-scoring holes...."
