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July 13, 2000

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Well, back in 1999, when I started skydiving I'm sure I made plenty of mistakes. Much like this one here. For all of you non-skydiving people out there, then the term "Flare" is when you actually slow your parachute down to come in for a nice landing (of course in this picture, there is no open parachute to "flare"). "Pull" means to open your parachute (which, at this point would have obviously been a little too late). And lastly, its a general rule that it cost a case of beer for every screw up or anything that you do for the first time. For example; bouncing (this is where a lot of skydivers didn't find the humor in the image).

I got mixed emotions and reactions back from skydivers. Some laughed and some just said it was bad "Joo-Joo" or bad "Karma" and didn't like the morbid sense of humor involved. But trust me, nobody was hurt during the making of this image. Well, except for my friend Rob when I accidentally ran into him on the jump where he video-taped me.

How I did it...
From a video clip of me skydiving, taken by my good friend, Rob Lowe, I captured the image of myself. My right arm was not actually in the shot so I copied, flipped horizontally, and paste the left arm onto the right shoulder. I paste the body over the background image with the jump plane and fuel truck in the background. Then I added all the little balloons with the comments and blurbs.