*By “Special Offer,” we mean “Obsequious Solicitation.”
It’s not like we haven’t tried.
In our tireless efforts to increase our gross receipts, we’ve resorted to double-billing, even triple-billing, but our over-educated readership must employ a small army of highly trained accountants to heartlessly snuff out this nearly legal initiative. (If you would like to avoid the menace of multiple billing and its associated surcharges, we have an insurance plan just for this almost certain eventuality. For details, see below, in the space provided after the last paragraph.)
To bolster our resume, we’ve declared ourselves the uncontested winner of prestigious awards (the Stump-Bertoni Award for Excellence comes to mind) that turn out, upon more scrupulous inspection, to have been fraudulently concocted by a dummy organization. (That we also created. But with only with the purest of intentions!) Despite the laurels we’ve accrued in this totally transparent process, our membership rolls have gone down. (Italics supplied to make our plight seem appropriately poignant.)
Because we are constantly being pestered to provide our visitation numbers on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, we engaged the services of trained professionals to address our deficiencies in this department. (I am not making this up.) Despite months of effort by social media savants, we didn’t gain a single subscriber. Whatever activity this initiative engendered remained within the confines of the site whose membership we were attempting to woo into our orbit. In short, we went fishing in an ocean teeming with fish and didn’t get a bite.
Just when we feared all avenues to enhancing our income stream were blockaded, we received several urgent messages from one “George Dawson” promising that “Experian Confirms $307,600 Credit Line for Realskiers!” No personal guarantees required! And here I thought I was up to my knees in skullduggery. I’m a piker compared to the likes of Mr. Dawson (and dozens of others of his ilk who have reached out to us with similar appeals). While the offer is indeed tempting, some tingling in my lizard brain warns me that Experian’s keepers may one day want their money back.
We know what you’re thinking.
“How much should I donate? What’s considered appropriate?”
Logic can only take you so far down this road. Science, trying to be helpful, informs us that there is no single answer, due to the quantum nature of, well, everything.
Such foggy thinking may appease the curiosity of the feeble-minded masses, but those of us who dare to think the improbable know that when words fail us, we turn to math for solutions. To find how much it’s widely considered to be appropriate to give, abide by this simple, 100% recycled, organic, numerology-inspired formula:
- Add up the numerals in your date of birth.
Example: June 6, 1956 = 6 + 6 + 21 = 33. - Multiply by your age. 33 x 68 = 2244
Revel in the eerie mysticism of the total, which won’t tell you how to live, but will suggest an amount to consider donating, depending on where one puts the decimal point. - You’ll be tempted to divide this generous sum until it is much, much smaller, a syndrome known as “Musk’s Fallacy.” Don’t fall for it.
Keep in mind this is the most money you or your heirs will ever pay. (This time.)
How to Raise the Dough You’ll Be Sending Us
Now that we’ve established the scientific foundations for sending us a fat slice or your net worth, permit me to suggest a few ways to raise said funds. (Cue the Christmas music to imbue these suggestions with the Spirit of Irrational Spending.)
- Charge your offspring for financial advice. You know how much financial advisors make? I don’t either, but I’ll bet it’s a pantload. Your kids likewise won’t have any idea, so you can charge the seed of your loins anything you like. Best of all, just like astrologers, you don’t have to ever be right!
- Create a home maintenance account to which you contribute every time you mow your lawn or shovel your driveway. Refer to these activities as “landscaping” and you can charge a pretty penny for it. When the accumulated funds start to become an accounting headache, forward the lot of it to me. (I mean, “us.”)
- You could make boundless fortunes in crypto. What could possibly go wrong?
- There’s always another “George Dawson.” His current offer is $260,000, no strings attached…
The mechanics of giving are simple. Right there on the Realskiers.com home page is a lavishly illustrated Tip Jar. Go tap-tap on the Tip Jar icon and you’ll go directly to the head of the line.
Now all you have to do is not yield to panic nor surrender to attention-sapping distractions. If you live long enough, your mind will eventually wander about on its own. This is not the time to indulge it.
Stay focused.
Find the Tip Jar icon.
Be absurdly generous.
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The Things We Do for Love, Part II
Dear Readers who regularly devour my weekly Revelations know that I have already written at length on the subject of Why Skiers Are Better than Everyone Else. Last Friday I was reminded of my timeless prose as I spent 45 minutes traversing a very short stretch of road that connects I-80 to Route 89, my proscribed path to Alpine Meadows. As I voluntarily descended into this automotive miasma, I could make out the dim form of the interstate traffic snaking down from the west, two dense strands of tightly linked vehicles stretching beyond the horizon.
Realskiers.com Trounces Field to Earn Second Stump-Bertoni Prize for Excellence
In a stunning upset that in retrospect appears inevitable, Realskiers.com has been awarded The Stump-Bertoni Prize for Excellence for the second year in a row.
For those cave-dwellers who snoozed through Realskiers.com’s first triumph in this gilded competition, permit me to bring you up to speed. Then as now, the battle for this cherished trophy (metaphorically speaking – the S-BP lacks sufficient funds for a memento commensurate with its prestige) was fierce, extending both of its eponymous founders to previously unknown limits.
The final ballot was determined by leg wrestling over Stump’s furious protest; he cogently argued that this sort of bias against the vertically challenged has no place in a free society. Bertoni imperiously overruled Stump’s evermore strident complaints, citing a lack of legible documentation, tardy submissions and a tendency to perspire copiously when provoked.
This year’s competition was no less fraught.
Just How Strange Will the 21/22 Ski Market Be?
To (temporarily) kowtow to the cult of brevity, the short answer is, “not very.”
To elaborate, most major ski brands didn’t derail the introduction of new products that were in the works well before the pandemic dropped the hammer. There’s a rhythm to the product renewal cycle that shifts the spotlight every year to a different model family within any brand’s global collection; that rhythm was largely respected despite the unique obstacles imposed on the process this year. If most of the models appearing in 21/22 catalogs seem similar to what was offered this year, it’s because this is how the line renewal machinery ordinarily operates.
What’s difficult to judge from outside the R&D pipeline is what we’re not seeing. That is, were there more new models or upgrades to existing star products ready to launch that were put on hold to avoid overloading a potentially weakened distribution network? Possibly; what might have been a planned six-model launch may have been trimmed to three or four, for example.
Happily, there’s no real downside to this scenario for the prospective ski buyer. All essential model family refreshing and line extensions will unfold as forecast. If you haven’t bought a ski in three or four years – I believe the average span between new ski purchases is over seven – the entire universe of Alpine skis is new to you. You may spot some names you recognize, but the skis that bear the name will almost assuredly be different.
