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Faithful readers of Bank Gothic Overload:

As you might remember from last year, I traveled to Washington state in February 2008 for a fundraising event called the Jimmie Heuga Snow Express for Multiple Sclerosis. Once again, this year my brother Alan and I, along with some people who hail from the Pacific Northwest, are traveling to Crystal Mountain to compete in this unique event. I am sending this email to you in hopes that you will be able to donate some money to our team so that we can help fund the Heuga Center to better do what they do.

The Snow Express for MS supports the Heuga Center in Colorado, which is a research and treatment facility for people with Multiple Sclerosis. The Heuga Center helps people with MS learn how to live healthier, happier, more active lives. Most of you probably know someone who’s life is affected by MS. Our friend and team captain Alex was diagnosed with MS in 1995. Further testing called this diagnosis into doubt, but as he puts it “I still feel the after-effects of the ‘attacks’ to this day.” The Heuga Center has made it easy for you to support our team by setting up an online donation site.

Just go to our Snow Express for MS donation page and give your pledge. There are all sorts of graphs and stuff so you can see how our team is doing. As usual all donations are tax-deductible, and this system will get you your receipt right away.

What is this event? Well, we’ve got two teams this year (much as last year). Hilariously and idiotically, our names are very similar:

Team Teledu – the original team. A teledu is a Javanese Stink Badger. See below for image and a bumper sticker we used for self-promo purposes a few years ago.

Team Teledeux – I’ve never taken French, but I’ve been informed that deux means two. This is a genius second name, because now both teams sound the same. Organizers were very confused.

Both these teams are named Teledu because we are all telemark skiers – like the dudes in this pretty cool ski video:

Teams Teledu and Teledeux all travel to Crystal Mountain in Washington, ski a few days, drink a few beers per hour, eat these disgusting meatballs, and ski in the charity event on Saturday. We all pay our own way to get there, and all of your donations go directly to charity.

I’ve decided that I’m going to take last year’s HD footage of the event and will try to make a video of it in the near future. Stay tuned.

Hopefully you have a few bucks to spare, but in today’s economy I understand if you don’t.

-Josh (and the rest of Team Teledeux, Matt Wiley & Alan Mishell) and our new mortal enemies/evil twins, Team Teledu. (Alex Olsen, Jeff Koenig and Perry Brown)

*Not knowing French is sort of crappy because I really would like to go to northern Africa, and French is the official language of many of them (e.g., Mali). C’est la vie, whatever the fuck that means. OK, I know what that means.