Friday, April 13, 2001

Thursday, April 12, 2001

There's a pretty interesting article in today's Post about what was involved in sending live TV pictures of the 24 crewmen boarding their plane out of China.

CNN -- not Fox News Channel, not MSNBC -- was the only network able to send jumpy, grainy, footage from the civilian airport of Haikou, 11 days after the collision of a Navy reconnaissance plane and a Chinese fighter jet triggered a tense standoff between Washington and Beijing. It used videophone technology, wherein footage shot by a traditional camera is transmitted using a satellite phone. The whole miracle of that makeshift technology was being powered by a car battery in a hired van sitting in a field in front of some water buffalo a couple hundred yards from the runway.

"We scouted [the transmission site] out a couple of days before; we anticipated that security would be an issue and that we would not be able to get that close to the American crew members," Weaver told The TV Column in a phone interview; she was speaking from the security office at the airport, where she was being detained by Chinese authorities. "We were lucky [those authorities] showed up after the plane took off," Weaver continued. "I don't think that was planned. It just took them that long to figure out where we were."

posted by MES 4:06 PM ET | discuss | link

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Wednesday, April 11, 2001

Tuesday, April 10, 2001

More from Doug and Everest. A`ll I can say on this one is Holy Cow!!!

Hello All,
I went through the Khoumbu Icefall today for the first time and it lived up to it's reputation. It was both potentially dangerous and unquestionably spectacular. We woke early around 5 am and although it had been snowing fairly hard when we went to bed, the snow covered ground was now illuminated by an almost full moon that hung in a perfectly cloudless sky. The first part of the route was a gradual up and down through almost mystically frozen ponds and the sharp jagged edges rising above our heads thrust there by the pressure of the ice fall slamming into the relative flat of the khoumbu glacier where we have our Base Camp. I soon found myself up ahead out on my own from my three other campanions and was feeling very much at home in the secluded jumble of ice. About a fifth of the way up I hit the first ladder over a crevasse. An amazing convenience having a route put through the ice-fall at the begining of every season using alluminum ladders to bridge huge crevasses that would take too long to rappel into their cold depth only to have to climb out the other side 5 to 15 feet from where you just stood. The same thing was done in Sir Edmond Hillary's day except then they would use sapplings instead of ladders, unfortunately adding greatly to a deforestization problem the Nepalese highlands are already suffering. But seeing as aluminum ladder lengths are fixed and crevasse width is not, occasionally there would be three or four ladders lashed in sequence to bridge a rather large gap. You then have to walk across these spidery bridges being careful not to get your crampons caught as you flex up and down over the abyss. Some of the ladder placements and even some of the ladders themselves ae quite commical in their precariousness. As I got higher and higher into the icefall you get these great building sized seracs as promised leaning over your route at somewhat gravity defying angles. I was needless to say very rushed in skirting below! them and front pointing the walls between them to get through as quickly as possible. I had just flown up a 70ft face (as much as someone can fly at 19,000ft, but the front points were totally bomber as the ice is the deepest blue and absolutely solid) and most relieved to come over the top of this particularly drunkenly leaning serac and stepped onto a large desk-sized block of ice that looked completely secure but when weighted decided to tip like a toy-top on end. Must remember, this is a moving river of ice-blocks. We can hear it moving all night. As well, we can hear the many avalanches comming off the faces surrounding the ice fall and especially from Pumori behind us. In fact I just heard a humongous slide coming off Pumori. Its like hearing a blast of thunder while riding the roof of a freight train. I made it up to Camp 1 in about 3 hours which is fast for the ice fall and gaining another 2500 ft. It's not a race, but I'm glad I am still feeling so strong and at 20,000 ft. I spent about an hour up there, but as I was only doing it to acclimatize I then headed back down - around, over, under and through crevasse and serac alike, like some scurring mouse through a collapsing woodpile as the sun got higher and the creaks and groans got louder.
Oh. It's snowing again. I expect more fireworks from Pumori.
All the best,
Doug
posted by LT2 5:34 PM ET | discuss | link

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Oh yeah, that's sure to help.
posted by LT2 12:18 PM ET | discuss | link

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Caught the last 20 minutes of THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE on IFC last night. Damn! That is one F-ed up movie. I don'ty know how well most of you remember it, but there's this one death scene earlier in the film that I maintain is an actual snuff film. It's death by hammer and the dude drops like a ton o' bricks. Freaky stuff.
posted by LT2 11:23 AM ET | discuss | link

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Monday, April 09, 2001

Sunday, April 08, 2001