"Snagged by balloon ropes, woman soars, falls"

By Joe McDonald Tribune Newspapers: The Morning Call
Fri Nov 4, 9:40 AM ET

Standing by the hot-air balloon as it rose, Kathleen Long was warning others to watch out for the vent ropes when two of them caught her ankle and hoisted her into the air.

Her husband, John, who was the pilot with two passengers, heard a commotion below. He looked over the side of the balloon and saw his wife dangling upside down, 60 feet above the ground.

He saw the bottom of her sneaker, yelled and heard her calmly say, "I'm OK," as people on the ground screamed, "No, no, no" and the balloon swept Kathleen Long away.

John Long described Sunday's mishap in Hunterdon County, N.J., during a news conference Wednesday in St. Luke's Hospital in Fountain Hill, Pa., where his wife is recovering.

As his wife hung in the air, Long, a steam-fitter from Warren County, N.J., said he remembered the balloon safety tapes showing how "it's always bad" when accidents like this happen and kept thinking, "I have to get her closer to the ground."

There were big trees and one smaller tree looming. Long said he "got lucky" and his wife, 58, a former teacher who works at a Lowe's store in Phillipsburg, N.J., hit the smaller one.

Long, 55, hoped "Toady," as he affectionately calls his wife, would catch onto something, maybe a limb.

He later learned she crashed through the tin roof of an old barn and landed head first on rotting floorboards.

If she had sailed through the barn at any other spot, Long said, she could have hit old machinery or bracing that probably would have killed her.

He said the part of the roof where she fell through, leaving a 4-foot hole, was at a seam with no underlying supports.

"If she landed anywhere else, we wouldn't be having this conversation," Long said. "Everything was rotted and soft."

The Longs were working their side business, The Flight Fantastic, which takes people on balloon rides.

He was taking a couple for a ride that was supposed to include a proposal.

After the balloon was filled with hot air, Long told four people holding it down to let go, and as it began to lift, his wife's ankle got snagged.

At the speed the balloon was rising, it would have reached 500 to 600 feet in a minute.

"Toady, are you OK?" Long said he yelled over the side of the basket. "She said, `I'm OK."'

After his wife fell from the ropes, the balloon gained altitude, Long said, and he began looking for a place to land, but there were no good spots.

He got on his two-way radio and told his ground crew he needed help and called his daughter, Jess, at her home in Frederick, Md., telling her there had been an accident and her mother was hurt.

"I need you home now," Long told his daughter.

Long spent about 45 minutes searching for a place to land, and along the way asked the couple to do him a favor and get engaged. They said "no."

"We're going to pray for your wife," he said they told him.

Long said he finally found a place to land, a cornfield near the Mountainview Youth Correctional Facility near Annandale, N.J.

He told his passengers, "It's going to be a little rough." The rectangular basket hit the ground on one of its narrow sides.

After landing, he said, "I just started to cry and said, `I made it."'

Neither he nor his passengers were hurt.

Long said his wife spent 25 hours in the hospital's intensive care unit and her condition has been upgraded to fair. Doctors have said Kathleen Long, who suffered broken bones and bruises, will be "back to normal" in two or three months.

"Your wife is one lucky lady," he quoted doctors as saying. "I told them `No kidding."'

Long said he has not decided whether he will return to the skies after the balloon is repaired, or whether he will sell it.

Thanks to painkillers, Kathleen Long thinks she's in the hospital to have a baby. At least for now, her husband said, she doesn't remember the real reason.

Copyright © 2005 Chicago Tribune

Question of the day

Do balloon manufacturers adjust for inflation?

Bring Back the Breakfast Drink

Bring Back the Breakfast Drink by Jeffrey A. Tucker. "Don't waste your youth: it is up to you to bring back the breakfast drink!"

Interesting Blogs re U2 from a Christian Perspective

To read later:

http://u2sermons.blogspot.com/
http://www.livejournal.com/community/u2christians/

Collusion by Comic Writers -- 9/14/05

Non Sequitur from 9/14/05
Pearls Before Swine from 9/14/05

As should readily be apparent (as long as the photos are available), the authors have used the same joke on the same day, to wit: birds being denied bail because they pose a flight risk.

While I grant that the joke itself is funny, I think the authors must have the same Far Side calendar or something which triggered the same thought processes which resulted in the same joke being published on the same day (obviously filtered through the mind of the artist).

Maybe it's just oddly coincidental.

Another Namesake

The Deige recently entered a contest at a local unique hand-crafts store, Impulsive. These are not just your run-of-the-mill hand crafts like quilted pot-holders. The contest involved suggesting a name for the store's mascot, a large, brass frog. The frog, when the store is open, is setting on a bench in front of the store, reading a book. The prize, to the person whose suggested name is selected, is a $100 gift certificate from the store.

The day The Deige was there last month turned out to be the last day of the contest. The Deige, always resourceful, especially in the way of frog-naming, suggested my name (Jeremiah). As it turned out, the owner narrowed the names down to either five or 10, then ran them by the employees. Each time my name was mentioned, the staff broke into the lovely strains of "Joy to the World" (Three Dog Night version, obviously). Eventually, there was no option except to name the frog Jeremiah.

The gift certificate was used in short order.

Texas Suffering in the Hurricane Katrina Aftermath

As reported everywhere, but this specifically from the Chicago Tribune:

Mrs. Bush, after touring the Astrodome complex in Houston on Monday, said: "What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them." She commented during a radio interview with the American Public Media program "Marketplace."

I understand Mrs. Bush's plight. I'm just grateful that the refugees aren't coming to Virginia.

DWPGAH: Driving While Playing Guitar and Harmonica

This guy was on Route 7 yesterday, driving and playing the guitar and the harmonica. But I didn't actually hear any music. There were three Mexicans riding with him, and he had a ladder on top of his car with a suitcase on top of that.

Approaching...

...closer...

...Ok, here he is.

Then, a blurry one for lagniappe.

Salty dogma: Bono gives an explicit confession of being saved by Grace, not Karma

Salty dogma
Bono gives an explicit confession of being saved by Grace, not Karma | by Gene Edward Veith

Is Bono, the lead singer and songwriter for the rock group U2, a Christian? He says he is and writes about Christianity in his lyrics. Yet many people question whether Bono is "really" a Christian, due to his notoriously bad language, liberal politics, and rock star antics (though he has been faithfully married for 23 years). But in a new book of interviews, Bono in Conversation by Michka Assayas, Bono, though using some salty language, makes an explicit confession of faith.

The interviewer, Mr. Assayas, begins by asking Bono, Doesn't he think "appalling things" happen when people become religious? Bono counters, "It's a mind-blowing concept that the God who created the Universe might be looking for company, a real relationship with people, but the thing that keeps me on my knees is the difference between Grace and Karma."

The interviewer asks, What's that? "At the center of all religions is the idea of Karma. You know, what you put out comes back to you: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, or in physics—in physical laws—every action is met by an equal or an opposite one," explains Bono. "And yet, along comes this idea called Grace to upend all that. . . . Love interrupts, if you like, the consequences of your actions, which in my case is very good news indeed, because I've done a lot of stupid stuff."

The interviewer asks, Like what? "That's between me and God. But I'd be in big trouble if Karma was going to finally be my judge," says Bono. "It doesn't excuse my mistakes, but I'm holding out for Grace. I'm holding out that Jesus took my sins onto the Cross, because I know who I am, and I hope I don't have to depend on my own religiosity."

Then the interviewer marvels, "The Son of God who takes away the sins of the world. I wish I could believe in that."

"The point of the death of Christ is that Christ took on the sins of the world, so that what we put out did not come back to us, and that our sinful nature does not reap the obvious death," replies Bono. "It's not our own good works that get us through the gates of Heaven."

The interviewer marvels some more: "That's a great idea, no denying it. Such great hope is wonderful, even though it's close to lunacy, in my view. Christ has His rank among the world's great thinkers. But Son of God, isn't that farfetched?"

Bono comes back, "Look, the secular response to the Christ story always goes like this: He was a great prophet, obviously a very interesting guy, had a lot to say along the lines of other great prophets, be they Elijah, Muhammad, Buddha, or Confucius. But actually Christ doesn't allow you that. He doesn't let you off that hook. Christ says, No. I'm not saying I'm a teacher, don't call me teacher. I'm not saying I'm a prophet. I'm saying: 'I'm the Messiah.' I'm saying: 'I am God incarnate.' . . . So what you're left with is either Christ was who He said He was—the Messiah—or a complete nutcase. . . . The idea that the entire course of civilization for over half of the globe could have its fate changed and turned upside-down by a nutcase, for me that's farfetched."

What is most interesting in this exchange is the reaction of the interviewer, to whom Bono is, in effect, witnessing. This hip rock journalist starts by scorning what he thinks is Christianity. But it is as if he had never heard of grace, the atonement, the deity of Christ, the gospel. And he probably hadn't. But when he hears what Christianity is actually all about, he is amazed.

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Copyright © 2005 WORLD Magazine
August 6, 2005, Vol. 20, No. 30

Backstreet Boys are bad

From the Chicago Tribune: Headline: "Backstreet Boys are bad imitators." This, apparently, is news.

Clever Blog

I know, blogging about blogs is stupid, but: I Had A Thought

Bizarre Blog

News, from India, in limerick form: news in limerick

Mainstream Nudity

That's two days in a row now that the Washington, D.C. newspapers have had a picture of a naked child on the front page.

Quandry

Why is making love fun, but making fun is not love?

Good Start for the Bears Pre-Season

The Bears pulled one out in the fourth quarter to start the season with a win. Ok, so it was the pre-season. It still feels good. Need something to root for since watching the Cubs has been like dining on crap, having lost six in a row. I guess I could be a White Sox fan for the rest of the season. My back-up team, the Nationals, are little better than the Cubs; they're more like dining on vomit.

A Critic Takes On the Logic of Female Orgasm - New York Times: Here's an interesting article about a book analyzing the thoeritical evolutionary explanations of the female orgasm. The author of the book seems to debunk most of the explanations. Evolution seems to create more problems than it solves.

Now we know evolutionists think about after they've had sex. You could almost picture one, taking a drag on a cigarette, contemplating how and why an evolutionary process could be so much fun.

"Oh, my gosh, they're talking about my burrito."

School Mistakes Huge Burrito for a Weapon

Eight months until Christmas!

Song of the Week:
Kings of Leon, Milk:

Quick Quote:

She saw my comb over, her hourglass body
she has problems with drinking milk
and being school tardy
She'll loan you her toothbrush
she'll bartend your party

Funny article on Micro$oft Word and its grammar check "feature": A Word to the unwise -- program's grammar check isn't so smart

9 months until Christmas!