badmigraine

Ocean11, Nozzle is for the end of February with our charming young lasses in tow. Before then, we have to emerge uninjured and financially solvent after scads of Niigata day-trips and one full week at Niseko. If barok and freestyle boards have their way with me, I will be neither uninjured nor solvent by the end of February. But thank god for the mobile onslope vending machines someone described in another thread on this board. I never heard of such a thing, but is sounds fantastic! I wonder if they have aspirin and tequila in those things? In Walled Lake, Michigan, after p

It's no secret that Dy-Doo, Yakult, Coca-Cola of Japan and a major but nearly bankrupt Japanese automaker are testing prototypes of onslope mobile vending machines. Last weekend at Kandatsu I thought I saw an illuminated polar bear picking its way through the trees under the lift. Upon further inspection, it proved to be a roving vending machine full of drinks and snacks, horizontally mounted on small cat tracks with optical, motion and stalk-like antenna feeler sensors. "biiru, koohii, hotto cocoa, sunikkas baas ikaga desyou ka" was the tinny mechanical refrain it spouted over

Nice!! Barok, you may be onto something here! This is definitely a shopping-positive concept! What would a freestyle board do for a person? Would I go in halfpipes and off kickers and ride rails and berms in the park on it? Would it make me better or more comfortable at all that than the 550 does?! FYI I can't do any of that stuff yet. I just started trying recently, and all I seem to get is smashed down on concrete-hard ice! I'm ready to step up with full body armor and a freestyle board, if that is what it is going to take! I even read about the difference betw

Come on, don't keep us waiting! What's the punchline?!?!

Great! Keep them coming!! I am listening, and I am starting to feel really good about this! Come on!! Give it your best shot!!

Sociobiologists posit that shopping is merely a modern acting-out of a vestigial, genetically-embedded instinctive hunter/gatherer behavior. Certainly medical science (this particular line of inquiry no doubt funded by your friendly retail conglomerates) has documented the discrete physiological state the body assumes during "shopping": dialated pupils, rapid darting eye movements, a complex cognitive state akin to meditation in which brain functions neatly balance a river of comparative visual imagery with memory, emotion, planning/organizing, personal financial accounting... Observe th

Here I am again having tooled around the Net in search of tips on how to wax textured bases. I found virtually no useful information, but did stumble across a review of a textured-base Forum board. Here is an amusing snippet from the review: "One neat thing about the base is that it is textured with little ridges. This is supposed to help with tracking. I kind of noticed it help, but wasn't sure. What I did notice was a neat little sound the board made, kind of like the "zipzip" corduroy pants make as you walk with them on. The fun unfortunately doesn't last forever. After my first

Any tips on waxing a snowboard with a textured base? I have a Salomon 550 and the base has thousands of tiny lengthwise channels in it. It is a fast base, but I have the feeling that if I wax it, I'll just be clogging up the channels with wax and turning it into a regular base. Are my fears baseless? Please advise.

Mogski and I plan to show our ladies a good time by setting up a 2-3 night stay in Nozawa. Naturally we need lodging, preferably with a bath or hotspring nearby or on the premises. We'll pretend to spend romantic, quality time with them (clearly this will require separate rooms with thicker walls), then from dawn till dusk abandon them on the slopes as we bog off on our own in search of Fun, steeps and the Floaty Stuff... I'll be boarding of course but I heard the resort still doesn't allow boarders on Every slope...is that true? I may rent Fat Skis one day just to see if I can

From my point of view, the height of onslope fashion this year is my brand-new used disgusting brown one-piece 1980's women's snowmobile suit with giant revolting cream collar, dirty white reflective strips, bunched-elastic waist, and fake leather clasp belt now cracked and moldy from hanging neglected in Joe's Surplus Store in Plymouth, Michigan for over 10 years. Thanks to my dear sister, Good Girl, the best bikin' n boardin' bitch in Walled Lake, for this $19.99 Xmas gift. The best gift I've gotten since the year they gave me a Lite-Brite AND a Spirograph all at once.

I tried my new boots last weekend at Kandatsu and there was zero heel lift... I also tried out my new Palmer Power Link binding risers. I don't know the actual share of credit each of these two products deserves for the vast improvement, but they have solved my problem. The outer part of the tongue of the K2 boot is hard plastic, like on a hard boot (even though the inner part, and the rest of the boot, is soft). This means when I ratchet down the two straps on my binding, there is no pressure point, the entire tongue is pushed evenly down onto the top of my foot. Comfy and tight!

Mobi, online advice is probably the only safe way to help Mogski with his boot/binding issue. About a week ago, I was briefly exposed to the noxious fumes that emanate from his boots. I woke up hours later in the hospital with space-suited Hazardous Chemical Removal workers prodding me with probes. Be careful.

Ocean, my O'Neal Azonics body armor is a mesh zip-up shirt with hard clamshell/soft pad shoulder and elbow protection, a padded kidney/pelvis velcro wraparound, and best of all, a full articulated plastic/padded spine protector that looks like nothing so much as the back of a common pillbug or woodlouse (armadillidium vulgare - you can see a picture of him at www.ze-card.com/images/insects/insects1.htm and tell him I said hello). I used to do a lot of motorcycling when I lived in Michigan and California, so this supersafe-seeming product appealed to me and my soft pink flesh i

Not really on topic, but the media and video scene, with its ludicrous overemphasis on the pipe/park/big air scene, has at least in Japan spawned a generation of hucking twits who attempt to imitate what they saw in a vid or mag by launching off kickers and q-pipes in the various resorts and fun parks you will find nowadays. Some of them are getting pretty good at it, too. More power to them--it keeps them off the real slopes and away from the places where I'd like to do some real Riding... I've not seen a one of those jumping, jibbing fools do anything but flop and scrape like a beg

The tiny acorn-hat alarm clock tapped out its wakeup call on a very grey and cold morning. It was 5:30 a.m. in Undertree Forest. The light filtering dimly through the layer of snow around the knothole in the hollow stump revealed two furry balls curled comfortably into circular nests of dry grass. After a minute, one of the balls--for it was a mouse--twitched its pink nose and pipped out a mouselike sneeze. "Heigh-ho"squeaked Crispin Fieldmouse (for that was his name), "We'd best be up and eating our brekka, if we are to meet Arthur the Hedgehog at Kandatsu Kogen this fine morning!

Who found the Tail? "I," said Pooh, "At a quarter to two (Only it was quarter to eleven really), I found the Tail!" My contribution to this thread is a set of turns made directly under the longest lift at Kandatsu yesterday around four-thirty in the afternoon... The only feedback received from the lift above was a single "ganbare!", immediately after which I did an endo but came right-side up and still making those nice powder turns like I had planned the whole tumble. Mogski, who orchestrated the entire escapade and was not to be outdone, gave a demonstration of

I'm tired of having to ratchet down my binding straps so tightly that the blood stops, in order to get the quick, stiffly linked response that I want from my edges. By the end of the run my feet are killing me and I have to loosen the straps for the ride up. It is just too much of a pain in the foot...always having to deal with weird pressure points and vise-like clamping. I've just upgraded to a boot that fits my foot shape and ankle better, and should cut way down on heel lift, maybe even eliminate it. While shopping in Kanda last night I was drawn to the hard boots and risers and

Er thanks Ocean11, but I am Mogski's ski date...not some unlucky chick. I've had my doubts about Mogski's masculinity for some time now. So if he tries any of your lines on me, that'll clinch it. This is the just the type of controlled scientific experiment that exposes the bare facts. Well, now that I think about it, it's not really a true test because my brown 1-piece snowsuit with clasp belt and cream collar is so utterly irresistible, it will have people seeing stars and crossing lines all over the place. I tried it out at Mt. Bohemia in Michigan's beautiful Upper Peni

Hi Ocean11, Thanks for the brutal honesty. I am still single, and when possible I take my beer cold and my women, hot! Lately there has been a rather unfortunate amendment to this mantra, along the lines of: "I take my beer cold, and then another beer cold, and then another beer cold..." ad nauseam (er literally ad nauseam, on occasion...) But things are looking up. I've got a strong feeling that my $19 used disgusting rude brown 1-piece snowsuit with metal clasp belt, wide cream collar and bunched elastic round the waist for that extra-wide-hipped look will get

This is too good to be true!! Can those snow forecast people also predict what mood my girlfriend will be in over the next 72 hours? Nothing I can do seems to affect it much.

You know, I have often suspected that Japan rules in annual snowfall. Especially in Hokkaido, where it never seems to stop... But I am not sure what to make of snow-forecast.com's list of the "top ten snowiest"... Do you think it means "top ten average annual snowfall", or "top ten snowfall so far this year"? If the former, then the list seems incomplete because Whistler-Blackcomb only gets about 360 inches (914cm) per year, while many other resorts in N. America alone average lots more. For example, the Utah resorts Snowbird, Brighton etc. average 500 inches (1270cm) per year,

Yes, it's true. The quality and volume of snow in Japan are terrific! And I will be surfing the powder at Niseko in about 5 weeks. Meanwhile, there are more local fixes to be had, every weekend... But I do wish I could play on the advanced terrain that one finds at resorts in the US such as Kirkwood, Snowbird, Brighton, Mt. Baker, Big Sky, Jackson Hole... Kirkwood's annual snowfall is 500 inches. That's 12.7 meters for those without calculators and conversion tables. That's a LOT... Twiki, props to you for your Swiss upbringing! I went to the Ecole St. Michel in Fribourg, a smal

I do not profess to have full details, but was nonetheless informed by reliable sources (Deep Throat - aka Mogski) that the nefarious Paddy was found drinking with friends in a disreputable Queenstown pub. He e has been studying the culinary arts in that town for the last year...Paddy is to become a chef.

Maybe you guys won't believe it, but as Mogski can attest I spend most of the time on my snowboard in the moguls...I love the moguls. And I hate them... I never mastered them in my ski days and then I got bored with skiing in general. That was years ago. I took up boarding in 1993 and after all these years I realize I am just a skier on a snowboard after all. If there were more steep and exciting slopes and long powder runs and glades here in Japan, then I probably wouldn't spend much time on the moguls after all...but that is what I have come to here. I never got into that pipe

I just got back from Xmas/New Year's in Michigan, USA. For those who don't know, that state gets tons of dry powder (thanks to the "lake effect" off the Great Lakes), but the terrain is mostly FLAT. I went to a new resort called Mt. Bohemia that is purpose-built for advanced skiers/boarders only. Located at the tip of Michigan's upper peninsula, it gets more snow that Vail, Colorado and the quality of the powder was terriffic - dry, fluffy, light...well, you can check out their website at http://www.mtbohemia.com/ if you're interested. The thing about it is, there are no be