<p>I was training for a marathon until I got pregnant. My goal was to do it in under five hours. Obviously, I was never going to qualify for Boston but I was still going to give the race an all out effort.</p>
<p>I volunteered at the finish line of a marathon and we still had runners coming through at the seven hour mark. God bless 'em… they weren’t the fastest runners but they had some of the most inspiring stories out there. One woman had lost 130 pounds and had been training for five years.</p>
<p>I love that Bill Iffrig, the runner we saw falling down, is 78. 78 years old and finishing in four hours! Talk about inspiring.</p>
<p>I’m not too optimistic about tracing the purchase of a pressure cooker. If they were bought separately, for cash, months ago at a Wal-Mart, you’ll never figure out who bought them. And I’ve seen them for sale at Goodwill. I hope something comes up in the photos and videos.</p>
<p>Why would you think that the perpetrator would buy any of these things at the same time? Sadly, he’s probably smart enough to have avoided anything that will make it too easy to catch him.</p>
<p>It’s sad that people wanting to help need to be cautioned about bogus charities set up after an event like this but unfortunately, there are some awful individuals out there. Be careful if you’re making a donation.</p>
<p>I agree, lindz126. I hope the substance is not really ricin. The letter to the senator has tested positive on the first two tests, but an expert on TV said that there are many false positives. It is undergoing the definitive test now.</p>
<p>I also learned that ricin is made from castor beans, the source of castor oil (does anyone still use it? - another throwback to my childhood.)</p>
<p>If it is ricin, couldn’t it have exposed postal workers?</p>
Certainly quite possible, but that reminds me of poor, late Richard Jewell, the security guard who was falsely accused of planting the olympic park bomb in 1996.</p>
<p>And now the Ricin laced letter to the president. Oh boy. And the stock market always tanks when these things happen.</p>
<p>Sax- so maybe hard to carry translates to local parking. Lots of meter checkers record plates as they patrol, to later tag the right offenders. (Conjecture, I know.) ?</p>
<p>Maybe he did break up the purchases but maybe not. And maybe the pattern is still visible- Walmart is quite clever in their data mining. query model numbers sold same day, same city, different store. </p>
<p>I wonder about the switch from ball bearing to nails. Why not both bombs with one or the other. Maybe sourcing ball bearings isnt so easy.</p>
Not to be logic-snotty, but your conclusion doesn’t follow from your evidence. </p>
<p>“Most” means “at least 50% plus one”. “Many” means “more than one”. So if a thousand runners crossed the finish line then, and six hundred were on charity bibs but the other four hundred were older women, injured runners, or people taking it easy, then “most” of the people there would be on charity bibs, the existence of other time-qualifying runners notwithstanding. </p>
<p>I take free demo classes at Williams Sonoma. The cook uses pressure cookers periodically. It has an auto on/off switch and its own heat source. Have read mixed reviews, especially those sold with non-stick coatings, which is how all of the ones Wms-Sonoma sells are. The nonstick coating peels off early in the life of the appliance. Was interested if I could find it in plain stainless steel, but so far no luck. Our neighbors regularly use their old-fashioned pressure cooker to make breadfruit and beans. Probably other foods too.</p>
<p>Parking is severely restricted, if not impossible, along the marathon route, particularly near the finish line (where parking is never easy to begin with). Most of the streets are closed to traffic so there really isn’t anywhere “close” to park. Much more likely that the perpetrator came in on the T, which has stops relatively close to the place at which the bombs were left.</p>