To My Dear Readers and Dear Listeners:
No sooner had I posted my (wonderful) podcast with Kim Reichhelm, than I started to feel queasy. In short order I was felled by a respiratory infection that got me in its grip and refused to let go. I won’t regale you with my abundant symptoms (the photo above bears silent witness to my body’s gift for effluvial production); suffice it to say, I was reduced to total helplessness that persisted for days.
I’m on the mend now, thank the Lord, but not yet up to par. With your kind indulgence, I’m going to take a brief sabbatical from churning out new content until my recovery is complete. I fully intend to return to my usual publishing schedule in the not-too-distant future. I will continue to answer all Member Consultation requests, so please share queries as they arise and I’ll do my best to get back to you ASAP.
Lest anyone feel shortchanged by this temporary suspension of newsletter and podcast publication, I remind you that my weekly Revelations and podcasts are a FREE service that always are available for the edification of all my Dear Readers and Dear Listeners.
With eternal gratitude for your continued support, I remain
Your Humble Servant,
Jackson
Related Articles
The Best Women’s Skis of 2020
Before getting down to the business of picking favorites, let’s re-examine the fundamental question, what makes a ski a women’s ski?
Not to be flippant, but any ski its maker markets as a women’s model qualifies in that it will come in shorter lengths, which are scaled to match smaller people, a considerable percentage of which are women. To drive this point home, the women’s models will also be decorated in themes deemed – however correctly – to be more appealing to women.
The Best Skis of 2020
I’m of two minds when it comes to the “best of” business. I realize that many consumers appreciate this shortcut to any further research, take the gold medal as Gospel and act on it. From the designer’s perspective, even though I might make dozens of prototypes, I would still only manufacture one model. From where the ski review purveyor sits, for any given set of criteria, it stands to reason that the ski with highest aggregate score would be the best.
The other side of the coin is that there is no best ski, nor can there be. Within the key All-Mountain categories where most consumers correctly shop, the diversity of on-snow behaviors is astounding. It’s impossible for all these skis to register identically with all the skier types who might consider them. Since there is no one definition of “best,” it’s not possible to identify a single “best” ski for all skiers.
Resurrecting Realskiers Resources: The Revival of Ancient Review Archives & The Restoration of the Test Card App
One of the most popular features on Realskiers.com’s member site is our Ski Review Archive, where Recommended ski reviews dating back to 2015 can be easily exhumed and examined. Longtime site subscribers know that this is only a partial collection, that in fact our review archive reaches back to the turn of the millennium.
We’ve been keeping these well-aged scrolls under wraps in part because, like actual ancient documents, the software they were written on (so to speak) has grown old and rickety. There are some serious downsides to continuing to operate obsolete platforms, but to a certain cadre of our readers their contents are as precious as holy relics.
