I always like your response, but you leave me in a quandary of which book to read.

Most of you,until you visit the Pacific Northwest, have the notion that Oregon and Washington are two very wet areas in this corner of the country. That all it ever does is Rain, Rain, and Rain. What most of you don't realize is that the Eastern 2/3rds of both states is the High Desert where it is very Dry, Hot and Semi-Arid. Temperatures on the Eastern sides of both states will climb into the triple digits and stay there for weeks on end during the summer . I was working in Eastern Oregon this weekend where the temperature is 96 degrees and sunny and have arrived back in Portland where it is 76 degrees and sunny. Come visit we have lots to see and explore.

I would think they measured the oval at the bottom of the track and not at the top to come up with the 2.5 mile distance. If you were forced to take most of the turns high, I could see it being over 500 miles after 200 laps.

A touching poem about a beautiful area of Belgium. I visited the area, site of the Second Battle of Ypres when I was living in Belgium as a teenager.

I know the distance is 200 laps, first person who completes that at 2.5 miles a lap is the winner. This year the race boiled down to a twenty lap sprint. That amazing multi car pile up on the 179th lap, where you suddenly had 6 to 7 million dollars worth of wreckage blocking the racetrack, determined the outcome we saw today. It doesn't take much to cause an accident when you touch tires at 200 mph. You can bet they over boosted those engines for the last fifty miles or 20 laps.

Won by a Frenchman driving a Chevy powered car followed by an American driving a Honda powered car. So that means that the European was driving a car using the imperial standard and the American was using a car built with S.I. measurements. The margin of victory was 0.2 of a second. Indy 804.6 sounds catchy, maybe we should copyright it before someone else does.

I know that, I was talking about most Americans on here, who can only think in feet and have a hard time computing those measurements into meters and it meaning anything to them.

Grandma Alzheimer V. The Adulterer Stay tuned folks.

Ya, they owned most of the teams in Basketball

40' is 12.1 meters in my book. In my trade we go to meters after 39" I would guess what throws most of you guys is their is no metric equivalency for the foot as it is 30.4 cm. In units of measuring there is the Inch to the Centimeter and the Meter to the Yard and Kilometer to the Mile and so on. We have been taught a system where 12 inches is king. We hear Square Feet, Cubic Feet, Linear Feet every day and then we are ask to convert to a system without a unit of measurement for the Foot. We say Mt Everest is over 29,000 feet and The Mariana trench is 36,000 feet deep. We don't use yards or miles to describe those measurements but feet.

I knowI l have a vile of Mt St. Helen's ash as well. I remember after we got a dusting from St. Helen's that the city said they would help with our water bills as we washed the ash down into the stormdrains and sanitary system. After the cleanup the city changed their mind and decided we would not get a break on our water bills. They liked the exter revenue generated from all the extra water used to clean the ash off of everything.

We live in SE Portland and can see Mt Hood from my front door and Mt St. Helens by walking three blocks.

The wife and I had just gotten up when we heard that Mt. St. Helens was erupting. I went outside and sure enough I could see the mountain erupting with it's huge plume of ash going miles into the air. it was really cool to see the eruption not realizing the staggering amount of damage and loss of life occuring at that very moment. Got to see the carnage done by the eruptions soon afterwards, and the area down from where the main eruption occured, looked as if an atomic bomb had been dropped there. We stopped at what was once a camping area to look at what remained of an automobile. all the glass was gone, the cloth interior burned out, the plastic dash had melted and drooped down to the seat frame. The tires had burned away, so the car was setting on its rims. What I found most interesting was all the paint was gone, literally sand blasted away by the volcanic ash, the car polished to a high metallic shine. At the end of the road we were able to see the edge of the crater, as we were about four miles away. but were not allowed any further by the forest service. A few years later the car was a rusting hulk with a fence around it to keep the public from stripping it any futher for souvenirs, and the end of the road overlooking the craters edge had a mobile food wagon on it. My third trip about 20 years ago found things had changed and the Johnson Ridge Observatory had been built near the end of the road and had been open for six years. I havn't been back since, maybe I'm due.

I'm looking to classify the act of a mass shooting at a school or other venue, reguardless of the outcome, as one where the outcome is the death penalty for the perpetrator.

I would like to see it a federal offence and not tried at state leval.