ddirgo

I bought an issue at Barnes & Noble yesterday. Edited to add: Of course, that was an Omaha Barnes & Noble. (Oakview, to be specific.) Availability outside the Omaha area is, of course, suspect.

I think that's accurate, with one caveat--you're required to identify yourself if the state has a so-called "stop-and-identify" statute. In other words, the Supreme Court said that a state may, within the bounds of the Constitution, pass a law making it a crime to refuse to identify yourself in the context of an investigation based upon reasonable suspicion that a person may be involved in criminal activity (i.e. Terry stop). The case in question, for anyone who's interested, is Hiibel v. Sixth Judicial Dist. Court of Nev.,Humboldt Cty. And if you're really interested, you can actually download video of the arrest from this site, among others. I've watched the video, and I think it's fair to say that it probably doesn't represent the proudest moment in life for any of the participants.

You might consider changing your sig line then.

The number on the bottom of each Jeep, as far as I can tell, has nothing to do with the tracking number or the number in the name of each bug. Mine have all been different. When I saw my first handful of Jeeps, my concern was that I couldn't tell if the "O" in the tracking number was a letter 'oh' or a number 'zero.' As it turned out, all of my tracking numbers have had zeros in them. At least, I think so. The zeros don't appear to have slashes through them, and they look a lot like letters.. In short, you might check (if you can figure out how) on whether there may be some confusion between "O" and "0." You might try looking up your tracking numbers both ways, so that you can tell if that's a potential cause of a "duplicate."

Trust your instincts. Use the Force.

If you're coming to town for the CWS, don't overlook the Field of Dreams v-cache.

And we were able to get the game on the radio, which meant that Carleen almost lost the game for the Cubbies. We got to a parking spot and the Cubs were leading by 3 runs with two down in the Pirates 9th, and I asked if she wanted to sit and listen to the end of the game, or find the trailhead. And Carleen said... wait for it... "No, I think it's safe." You all see the problem with that sentence, right? These are, after all, the Cubs. Not 5 seconds after she speaks those words, the Pirate batter gets a base hit. And then the next guy gets another, and the tie run comes to the plate. The bad thing about having a good team is that sometimes, Cubs fans forget that these guys are still Cubs. It's "safe." Ha. The Cubs don't know what safe is. But then Carleen came to her senses and decided that the Cubs might lose after all, which restored her karma and saved the game for the Cubs. So perhaps she's learned her lesson about when to say that the Cubs are going to win--when the game is over.

[hijack] Hehehe. Every once in a while, I see things that make me realize my liberal arts education wasn't completely irrelevant to everyday life. This is actually a pretty straightforward example of John Rawls' original position. Which I think is pretty cool. [/hijack]

I'll change my username to whatever you would like it to be for a free hiking staff It was bad enough when arenas and stadiums started selling their naming rights. I'm not sure geocachers need to follow. "This travel bug was last seen in the hands of 'Citibank Jeff'..."

Mmmmm... chocolate....

But it looks to me like the subject of this thread has more to do with indecency than obscenity. "Prurient appeal is an element of the obscene, but the normal definition of "indecent" merely refers to nonconformance with accepted standards of morality. . . Webster defines the term as 'a: altogether unbecoming: contrary to what the nature of things or what circumstances would dictate as right or expected or appropriate: hardly suitable: UNSEEMLY . . . b: not conforming to generally accepted standards of morality: . . . .' Webster's Third New International Dictionary (1966)." F.C.C. v. Pacifica Foundation, 438 U.S. 726 (1978). Now, the government isn't involved here, and the "owners" of this particular forum have the legal right to establish whatever sort of behavioral standards they like. Which isn't to say that they should, or that more precise guidelines wouldn't be advisable. It's just to say that legal definitions aren't particularly useful in this context, except insofar as Groundspeak or GC.com might be breaking the law by hosting particular content. Indecency, however, is entitled to First Amendment protection, and any government regulation which sought to sanction anyone for the type of conduct at issue in this thread would likely run afoul of Reno v. ACLU, 521 U.S. 844 (1997). I doubt that there would be any significant opposition to moderator removal of the type of material that actually could get anyone in legal trouble. All of which is to say, in short, that I doubt the Attorney General is really concerned about any of this, and Groundspeak's and/or GC.com's policies regarding moderation of content are largely left to their own judgment. The debate should be about whether or not that judgment has been exercised wisely. P.S. It occurs to me--as part of that debate--that Groundspeak and GC have corporate partners, sponsors, and advertisers to be concerned about, and that we all benefit from the support that those revenue streams provide to the sport. They, in turn, have public images to protect. If those folks no longer wanted to be associated with us, for whatever reason, then we would all suffer. Just something to think about when we're considering why moderators might want to keep the forums and cache pages clean.

hehehe. My companions and I actually retrieved one like this when the park was full. I won't give away our master plan, because the details would reveal too much about the cache location, but I will say that it involved a feigned injury and the careful use of a hooded sweatshirt.

Actually, as a followup to my last post, I'll ask about this hypothetical. Last fall, Pepsi ran a promotion for free NFL hats, for which you needed to match two 20-oz. bottle lids with the same NFL team name printed on the otherside. Well, the University of Nebraska sells 20-oz. Pepsi products at home football games, and when 78,000+ people are done watching a football game on a hot day, it's a fairly simple matter to collect about a billion bottle caps walking through the stands. We collected a lot, and ended up with more matching caps than we could ever use. So here's the question: had I put all of our extra matching caps into a Ziploc bag, and left it in a cache, would they have made for good trade items? It would have allowed the finder to take two of the matching bottle caps and send them in for a free hat. I didn't do this, and I'm not planning to do anything similar--I'm just curious to see what people think of it.

I've done this a few times, mainly on short hikes, when Jordan and I walk from the car to get to the cache, then one of us asks the other for the bag... Doh! Of course, that doesn't justify making someone else pay for your mistake, by leaving pocket lint as a trade item. P.S. You know, I've heard that some people collect bottle caps, so they might think that good ones (whatever that means) are nifty trade items. I suppose there might also be a defense for lids that contain game pieces or confer prizes (e.g. free iTunes), provided that they aren't expired, and that they're not traded for anything of particular value. (Although I've never taken or left one.)

I suppose it's food... but is it food in a cache? If anything, the food is the cache. So I suppose the question is this: what is the intent of the general rule that food doesn't go in caches? If it's just to prevent animals from looting the cache, or maybe to prevent food poisoning of anyone who eats a stale trade item , then those purposes aren't implicated by this puzzle.

A lot of people use Magellans, and a few even cache without GPSr's at all. I also don't know whether the interface on the eTrex is substantially similar to that of other Garmin models. I do know how to use an eTrex, but I don't have the capacity to attach a GPSr to my computer. In short: to be safe, I would attach instructions to the bug explaining how to manually enter a waypoint.

But actually, he's probably thinking, "How much longer do I have to sit out here making sure that idiots don't come speeding over this hill and drive into the water and drown themselves?"

I understand your point, Eric. I like macro caches better too. It's just my preference. (I have started to make a habit of carrying some tiny trade items, that I can still leave behind in some of the larger micros, such as PVC pipes and Altoid tins.) But I don't believe that we should make rules that make it harder to place micros. Some people prefer micros, which are generally more challenging, just because they're easier to hide in wicked and malicious ways. We also need to trust the judgment of the person placing the cache; there may be reasons for a micro of which others aren't aware. Are there a lot of muggles? Snoopy children? Animals? Does the ground cover disappear in the winter? And these are just a few examples of things that may be important to the placer, but not apparent to the finder. Another thing to consider is that placing a well-done macro cache can require a significant financial investment, in obtaining a suitable container, necessary supplies, and a sufficient number of good trade items. I don't think it's safe to assume that every geocacher can afford to do that, especially more than once, and I'm disinclined to support rules that preclude those geocachers from placing some sort of cache when they have the creativity and initiative to lead the rest of us on a good hunt. If people find nice locations for caches, they should be able to place whatever sort of cache they feel they can appropriately maintain. They shouldn't be forced to choose between placing an poorly-done macro, or nothing at all.

Counting Crows: Mrs. Potter's Lullaby U2: Angel of Harlem Bob Marley: Redemption Song (Man, there's some stuff that's killing me, though. Duke Ellington, with Ella on the vocals. Stevie Wonder. Jimmy Buffett. Sarah McLachlan. John Mayer. Prince... Ah, well. rules is rules. )

I didn't have anything interesting to add to this thread until yesterday. (Just gum wrappers, movie ticket stubs, and the usual trash.) But yesterday, I found this in a cache: A locked, rusty, broken, bolt-cut padlock with no key. I trashed it out and left a toy fire engine, which wasn't one of my best trade items, but certainly was a trade up!

I have no dog, so I'm a little out of place here. (If I didn't know Carleen's dog personally, I probably wouldn't pay attention to this thread at all.) But I would like to make sure that those who are planning on traveling or caching with their dogs are aware of the toxic algae problem that's become rather serious in Nebraska and perhaps elsewhere as well. A few dogs have been killed, and others sickened, by ingesting the algae while swimming. Several lakes in Nebraska have been closed to swimming and others are being tested. (You can read the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services report at this link. At this point, it seems prudent just to keep dogs out of the water in Nebraska, unless you know that the water has been tested recently. I know some of you probably have heard about this already, but I don't know what kind of national attention it's received, and I wouldn't want an unwary traveler to lose a pet because of unfamiliarity with our local news coverage of the problem.

Taunt, taunt, taunt. A 13 year old found it (3rd to find)! Waiting to see yours, although I know that I won't be FTF. All that far away in Omaha and other stuff. For what it's worth, he turns 14 on Friday. Does that help any?

For Mac users (Classic OS or OS X), I find Excalibur to be an excellent freeware spell check. Instead of limiting itself to a particular browser, it spell checks your Clipboard contents, so you can spell check anything that you can copy. It can be downloaded from the Excalibur home page at this link.

Jordan and I went on a cache hunt yesterday that, entirely unintentionally, took us through some of the areas damaged by tornadoes and flooding here in southeast Nebraska over the last couple of days. The details and photos are posted in this cache log for CarleenP's Spring Creek Nature Cache. The short version is that we drove through the remains of a house, because it was spread on both sides of the road over at least a 1/2 radius. (We assume it was a house because of the bathtub.) Then we ended up on a two-hour detour because flooding had (has?) apparently closed just about every east-west road through Lancaster County south of Lincoln. And we didn't even get close to the real damage. (Not that the National Guard would have let us near it anyway.) And more storms are coming in this afternoon. EDITED: because the permalink wasn't cooperating.

Well, today, he's in school. But yesterday, he was at the cache.