Author: admin

Bird TLC held its annual Owl-O-Ween events over the weekend. We bring our education owls to various locations and in some, the kids come in costume and get to do all kinds of fun things. So I went with my friends and their grandson to one of the events. And all I could do was wonder what the owls thought as they watched freakishly dressed humans enter the rooms.  Did they wonder how we ever became the pre-eminent species on this planet (at least in our own minds)? Did they think their caretakers had finally lost their minds, as they

Kids trick or treating in Anchorage usually have to wear their costumes under heavy winter coats. On the other hand, kids in Barrow had to wear their costumes OVER winter coats because it was so cold and the city had to have something called the Polar Bear Patrol to make sure the kids were safe from any bears wandering in town. Up there, kids really have to work for their candy.

If you were raised Catholic, I wouldn’t have to explain what All Hallow’s Eve is. Look it up, heathens!

Anyone who’d like to see how smart birds really are should come and meet the Stellar Jays that feed on the peanuts I put out on my second floor deck. They have apparently figured out that if they don’t see me through the windows wandering around upstairs, they are apt to find me by looking into my office windows downstairs. So they line up on the fence outside my office window and stare for a few minutes, then fly up to the tree branches over my deck, then return to the fence and stare at me again. This is my

There. I’ve said it out loud and I feel better admitting it. And now I get three hour stretches at a time of reruns on cable. Life is good.

It’s said that those who don’t remember history are doomed to repeat it. I think of this while watching the Occupy Wall Street protests. My mind goes back to the French revolution. It was the obscene disparity between the haves and have-nots that finally led to that blood bath. If you don’t think that can happen here, I’d suggest you consider that at some point the have-nots will realize they have nothing left to lose because the “haves” control it all. Why not get extreme?

Interestingly, some bankers are now changing their tune and saying that even though they aren’t

When I was young, I thought Romeo and Juliet was the most romantic and tragic story ever.

Now I just think, “Kids!”

I was watching an ice dancing competition on TV the other night and saw one couple in which the man was black. I would use the politically correct term of African-American except I’m not sure if he was an American. At any rate, when he took the ice with his partner, I thought to myself, “Wow. Talk about being a minority. Being a black ice dancer has to win some kind of award in that category.”

These are the philosophical thoughts that come to my mind on a Saturday night as I sip my sugar free lemonade and tequila. Deal

Every time Harold Camping declares a day when the world will end or judgement will come or the apocalypse will occur, I spend the night before indulging in all sorts of activities I would normally avoid on the assumption that after the next day, it will no longer matter as the world will have ended. And it never happens. But those pounds from the cookies sure do!

Fall comics seem to fixate on the joy of jumping into a pile of raked leaves. It’s something I don’t understand. I was raised in the city. We didn’t have trees until much, much later when Donald Trump planted some along the street to make the approach to his casino a little nicer. Having grown up in the 50s, I imagine the nearest we could have come to jumping into a pile of leaves was to rake up discarded cigarette butts from the gutter and jump into them. But somehow that’s not quite as picturesque.