It was overheard that the USA Olympic Gold medal skier Picabo Street, is donating the money she gets from endorsements to the local hospital in Denver. In return, they are going to name a wing of the hospital after her. It will be called: "Picabo, I.C.U." Ski season is fast approching. To get in the mood, follow this list of handy exercises. Visit your local butcher and pay $30 to sit in the walk-in freezer for a half an hour. Afterwards, burn two $50 dollar bills to warm up. Soak your gloves and store them in the freezer after every use. Fasten a small, wide rubber band around the top half of your head before you go to bed each night. If you wear glasses, begin wearing them with glue smeared on the lenses. Throw away a hundred dollar bill- now!! Find the nearest ice rink and walk across the ice 20 times in your ski boots carrying two pairs of skis, accessory bag and poles. Pretend you are looking for your car. Sporadically drop things. Place a small but angular pebble in your shoes, line them with crushed ice, and then tighten a C-clamp around your toes. Buy a new pair of gloves and immediately throw one away. Secure one of your ankles to a bed post and ask a friend to run into you at high speed. Go to McDonald's and insist on paying $8.50 for a hamburger. Be sure you are in the longest line. Clip a lift ticket to the zipper of your jacket and ride a motorcycle fast enough to make the ticket lacerate your face. Drive slowly for five hours, anywhere, as long as it's in a snowstorm and you're following an 18 wheeler. Fill a blender with ice, hit the pulse button and let the spray blast your face. Leave the ice on your face until it melts. Let it drip into your clothes. Dress up in as many clothes as you can and then proceed to take them off because you have to go to the bathroom. Slam your thumb in a car door. Don't go see a doctor. Repeat all of the above every Saturday and Sunday until it's time for the real thing! A few friends were on a holiday ski trip. While on the ski-lift on the way up, One of the women in the group complained to her husband that she was in dire need of a restroom. He told her not to worry that he was sure there was relief waiting at the top of the lift in the form of a powder room for female skiers in distress. He was wrong, of course, and the pain did not go away. If you've ever had nature hit its panic button in you, then you know that a temperature of 12 below zero doesn't help matters. So, with time running out, the woman weighed her options. Her husband, picking up on the intensity of her pain, suggested that since she was wearing an all white ski outfit, she should go off in the woods. No one would even notice, he assured her. The white will provide more than adequate camouflage. So she headed for the tree line, began disrobing and proceeded to do her thing. If you've ever parked on the side of a slope, then you know there is a right way and a wrong way to set your skis so you don't move. Yup, you got it. She had them positioned the wrong way. Steep slopes are not forgiving, even during embarrassing moments. Without warning, the woman found herself skiing backward, out of control, racing through the trees, somehow missing all of them and onto another slope. Her derriere and her reverse side were still bare, her pants down around her knees and she was picking up speed all the while. She continued on backwards, totally out of control, creating an unusual vista for the other skiers. The woman skied, if you define that verb loosely, back under the lift and finally collided violently with a pylon. The bad news was that she broke her arm and was unable to pull up her ski pants. At long last her husband arrived, putting an end to her nudie show, then went to the base of the mountain and summoned the ski patrol, who transported her to a hospital. In the emergency room she was regrouping when a man with an obviously broken leg was put in the bed next to hers. "So how'd you break your leg?" she asked, making small talk. "It was the damnedest thing you ever saw," he said, "I was riding up this ski lift and suddenly I couldn't believe my eyes. There was this crazy woman skiing backward out of control down the mountain with her bare bottom hanging out of her clothes and her pants down around her knees. I leaned over to get a better look and I guess I didn't realise how far I'd moved. I fell out of the lift. "So how'd you break your arm?" he asked. A Skier's Dictionary by Henry Bread and Roy McKie Alp: One of a number of ski mountains in Europe. Also a shouted request for assistance made by a European. Avalanche: One of the few actual perils skiers face that needlessly frighten timid individuals away from the sport. See also: Blizzard, First Aid, Fracture, Frostbite, Hypothermia, Lift Collapse. Bindings: Automatic mechanisms that protect skiers from serious injury during a fall by releasing skis from boots, sending the skis skittering across the slope where they trip two other skiers. Bones: There are 206 in the human body. No need for dismay, however; the two bones of the middle ear have never been broken while skiing. Cross-Country Skiing: Traditional Scandinavian all-terrain technique. It's good exercise, doesn't require purchase of costly lift tickets. It has no crowds or lines. See also Cross-Country Something-Or-Other. Cross-Country Something-or-Other: Touring on skis along trails in scenic wilderness, gliding through snow-hushed woods far from the hubbub of the ski slopes, hearing nothing but the whispery hiss of the skis slipping through snow and the muffled screams of other skiers dropping into the puffy powder of a deep, wind-sculpted drift. Exercises: A few simple warm-ups to make sure you're prepared for the slopes: 1) Tie a cinder block to each foot and climb a flight of stairs. 2) Sit on the outside of a fourth-story window ledge with your skis on and your poles in your lap for at least 30 minutes. 3) Bind your legs together at the ankles, lie flat on the floor; then, holding a banana in each hand, get to your feet. Gloves: Designed to be tight around the wrist to restrict circulation, but not so closefitting as to allow any manual dexterity; they should also admit moisture from the outside without permitting any dampness within to escape. Gravity: One of four fundamental forces in nature that affect skiers. The other three are the strong force, which makes bindings jam; the weak force, which makes ankles give way on turns; and electromagnetism, which produces dead batteries in expensive ski-resort parking lots. See Inertia. Inertia: Tendency of a skier's body to resist changes in direction or speed due to the action of Newton's First Law of Motion. Goes along with these other physical laws: 1) Two objects of different mass falling side by side will have the same rate of descent, but the lighter one will have larger hospital and home care bills. 2) Matter can neither be created nor destroyed, but if it drops out of a parka pocket, don't expect to encounter it again in our universe. 3) When an irresistible force meets an immovable object (see "Tree") Prejump: Maneuver in which an expert skier makes a controlled jump just ahead of a bump. Beginners can execute a controlled pre-fall just before losing their balance and, if they wish, may precede it with either a pre-scream and a few pre-groans or simple profanity. Shin: The bruised area on the front of the leg that runs from the point where the ache from the wrenched knee ends to where the soreness from the strained ankle begins. Ski!: A shout to alert people ahead that a loose ski is coming down the hill. Another warning skiers should be familiar with is "Avalanche!" (which tells everyone that a hill is coming down the hill). Skier: One who pays an arm and a leg for the opportunity to break them. Stance: Your knees should be flexed, but shaking slightly; your arms straight and covered with a good layer of goose flesh; your hands forward, palms clammy, knuckles white and fingers icy, your eyes a little crossed and darting in all directions. Your lips should be quivering, and you should be mumbling, "Am I nuts or what?" Thor: The Scandinavian god of acheth and painth. Traverse: To ski across a slope at an angle; one of two quick and simple methods of reducing speed. Tree: The other method. An avid skier decided that he would ski all the major mountains in the world. He spent a decade at this, climbing and then skiing the world's major peaks. Finally he decided he must ski Mt. Fiji, in Japan. He bade farewell to his wife and set off for the Land of the Rising Sun. The fateful day came, the weather was right, and the skier climbed to the top of Fiji and then skied down. So thrilled was he with his achievement that he decided to send his wife a postcard of Mt. Fiji, describing his feat. While in the shop buying the postcard, he decided, on a whim, to buy a postcard picturing a young, scantily clad geisha to send to his old college roommate. Unfortunately, he wrote the wrong messages on the cards, and sent them to the wrong recipients. On the back of the card showing Mt. Fiji, which he mistakenly sent to his old roommate, he wrote: "Having fun in Japan!" And on the back of the card showing the scantily clad geisha, which he mistakenly sent to his wife, he wrote, "Here's a picture of the slope I went down on Thursday!" This was on the Leno show (9-7-99). Jay went into the audience to find the most embarrassing first date that a woman ever had. The winner told about her first date experience. She said it was snowing and cold and the guy took her skiing. It was a day trip (no overnight). They were strangers, and truly had never met before. The date went OK until they were coming back that afternoon. They were going along in the car and she had to pee real bad, but it was still about an hour or more back to civilization. He said she should try to hold it, and she did for a while. It finally came to the point where she told him that he could either stop and let her pee beside the road, or in the front seat of his car. They stopped and she went out beside the car and pulled her pants down and started. Well, she didn't have real good balance, so she let her butt rest against the rear fender to steady herself. He was a real gentleman and looked the other way. When she was finished, she quickly noticed that her warm butt had stuck to the fender. Thoughts of tongues frozen to pump handle nightmares immediately came to mind and she soon realized that she had a real problem. She was thinking of every way she could to get released from his fender. He was getting a bit concerned too, and finally cried out to her asking if she was OK. Well, with a red face, she said she was freezing her butt off! She finally had to ask for assistance. Now this isn't the worst of the story, there's more to come. She took off her sweater and covered herself as good as she could and asked him to come around to see if he could help. After the laughter subsided, they assessed the situation. They had a real problem. They agreed that they needed something warm to melt her butt off of the fender. Thinking about the pee that she just sprinkled on the ground made her think that pee is about the only thing that they had that could get her free. Well, after exploring every other possible solution, she looked the other way, and so did he, and proceeded to unzip his pants and pee her butt off the fender. The rest of the trip home there wasn't much conversation. |
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