Dirtbag Chic

I learned a new phrase today from Freddie Wilkinson, another course participant, and it’s called “dirtbag chic”. We were sitting around the writers’ lounge when he downloaded the idea to me.

“It’s the Yuppie who wears ratty outdoor clothing and drinks Pabst Blue Ribbon at the bar to fit in with the other lifestylers.”

I meant to ask him if being a money-flush drug dealer while living and climbing out of your truck fell under this category, but Franki chimed in and the conversation quickly turned to politics. Luckily Tony walked in and broke up the meeting, which will convene again this afternoon at the climbing gym.

It’s pretty easy staying up at the Banff Centre around the clock and delving into our projects, but Freddie and I are running low on stores and will be making our first trip into town tonight. Christian Folk from Outdoor Research arrives in a few hours and I want to have some good beer on hand to celebrate his first Banff Mountain Film Festival.

As for my writing, it’s going really well. My strength is volume; I have absolutely no trouble coming up with content. I am working on structure and flow, focusing on telling the story in concrete detail instead of theory, rhetoric, and abstraction. I am so ready for feedback, both from the program editors and the other participants.

Glitter Girls - On Ice (Update)

Here is an update for all of you Ice Maidens. After your feedback on airport transfers and outdoor hot tubs (mandatory apparently) we've dropped the former and acquired the latter, which means a price drop from $1250 down to $1050 (all CAD of course).

There is more information at: www.glitter-girls.ca

Or you can sign up HERE

Glitter Girls - On Ice

The Glitter Girls is proud to present their first event in the Canadian Rockies. We are hosting an ice climbing extravaganza the week of February 5th to 12th, 2010. We have found luxury accommodations, in our former hometown of Canmore, Alberta, just 20 minutes from the entrance to Banff National Park and the gateway to some of the best ice climbing in the world. The weekend kicks off with the Canmore Ice Climbing Festival, where you can sign up for clinics by day and choose from a host of festivities each evening. For more details click here. If you plan on signing up for any of the climbing clinics I recommend you do so as soon as possible because they will fill quickly.

Monday to Thursday are your own personal climbing days, where you can go out as a group, in pairs, and have the option of going with a guide. As your logistics coordinator I will make sure that you know where you are going and how you will be getting there. I will also help you find the best guides if that is what you choose to do. There will be organized dinners out on the town, as well as nights where we stay in and cook for ourselves. Each person has the option of creating their tailor-made dream ice climbing vacation, using the Solara condos as our Base Camp.

Cost is $1250 CDN (including tax) and includes one week accomodation, airport transportation (of course you might prefer to rent a car), breakfasts and lunches, and logistical support.

To book your place or for further information email me at margo@glitter-girls.ca

Training for Life

Autumn is upon us and so are thoughts of dangling from ice tools on the frozen sculptures of nature. Those of us who were lucky enough to rock climb all summer might feel well prepared, but those of us who had commitments of work and family might well be wondering how best to train for the upcoming season.

When I was working on a cruise ship in the Antarctic a few years back a passenger asked me how I stayed in shape given the fact that most passengers would be leaving the boat weighing an average of twelve pounds more than when they boarded.

“It’s simple”, I told her, “I don’t allow myself to gain weight. Then when I do get back on shore and into a regular exercise routine, all I need to work on is strength and cardio, not weight loss.”

It’s easier to stay in shape than it is to get in shape. Lucky for me I love doing physical things. I have a weight training bench not ten feet from my computer desk, and beautiful running trails within a kilometer of my home. I recently started doing yoga and after making fun of the activity for decades find that it increases my flexibility and balance as well as has many internal benefits like cleansing the lymphatic system.
Physical exercise is one part of a two part system, the other being food. We literally are what we eat, and as such I eat fresh organic food whenever possible, eat a whole foods diet, and cut out all chemicals and refined sugar. I also drink well water that contains no fluoride or chlorine. I originally went on this diet at the behest of my naturopathic doctor to clear up a liver/ skin problem, and I saw so many benefits that I never went off of it.
Someone once described duty as’ love under will’. I encourage you to learn to love giving your body the exercise it needs and to keep it in shape for everything that you encounter in life, whether that is an ice climbing clinic or carrying food home from the grocery store. The benefits are many, especially the underlying feeling of well-being that you will have from moment to moment in your everyday world.

Financial Coup d'Etat

We are currently witnessing a highly-engineered restructuring of the world’s capital system right before our very eyes. The world will never be the same once the process has been completed. But because we don’t understand what is happening we have trouble connecting the dots of this ingenious form of economic warfare. In the United States there is a merger going on between the highest levels of the banking industry and the government. What we will end up with could arguably be a more communist system than China currently has. There is nothing free market about government intervention, in fact it is the opposite and could also be called socialism. Anywhere in the world that we are seeing the banks being bailed out by government, we are witnessing this phenomenon.
This scenario has been building for decades under the banner of globalization. And because the citizenry has no understanding of even the most basic economic principles it has gone on largely uncontested and I would dare say has even been embraced.

Free Market Rhetoric

You hear a lot of talk about the free market these days, but I can’t find a vestige of it left when I look at the big players on the scene today, and the recent bailout of the U.S. banks is the best example there is. What they call “free market” is synonymous with privatizing the profits while socializing the losses of the major banks and corporations. In a truly free market these players would sink or swim according to their bottom lines, not some taxpayer bailout. If these companies cannot make it in the real world they should fail, and we should be glad of it. We want the world to be populated with healthy companies and banks, not virally infected ones. I do not consider this deal to be a bailout at all, it is a parting gift from George Bush to the people who helped him to get and maintain power. The looting of the treasury and the attacks on the trade centers will go down in history as the greatest acts of piracy in the history of the world.

Crime of the Century - Reprise

Despite the fact that the so-called experts and high-ranking politicians are acting surprised by the recent events regarding the economy, there really is no mystery as to how we arrived at this station. There are investigative journalists who have been telling us what is going on for decades. The real question is: why did they go unheeded? We all knew the football scores, we all knew the latest celebrity faux pas’, but we did not know one thing about the economy. In fact, before the patsy called the sub-prime mortgage meltdown arrived on the scene, you couldn’t find anybody who was even remotely interested in the topic. Now you can’t escape the opinions of every pundit and armchair economist in the world.
Below is a list of brilliantly researched books that I highly recommend if you are at all interested in following the marriage of politics and economics in the past century.

Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein
Rogue Economics by Loretta Napoletani
The Rise of the Fourth Reich by Jim Marrs
And the Truth Shall Set You Free by David Icke

Watch the movie Zeitgeist



...and Zeitgeist Addendum