Elise Sereni Patkotak

If politicians don’t already know what makes the general public mad, try wasting money at a time when most of us are looking for change in the couch to pay our electric bill. The $10,000 the Anchorage Assembly voted to spend on investigating the pay out of a life insurance policy to the estate of George Sullivan is a classic example.

Let’s take a look at some facts without using the prism of political game playing.

Sometime back in the early 80s, the city assembly voted to provide the former mayor with a life insurance policy. No one seems to

… when you are chilled by the freezing rain instead of the freezing snow.

My old Mac went tits up after six years of hard labor. I went to the Mac story and bought the newer version of iMac. They took my old one, resuscitated the fried hard drive long enough to transfer all data and programs to my new one and by that evening I was sitting in front of my new Mac with everything from my old Mac right there where I’d left it. AND…. when my AOL wouldn’t work and I called Apple support, they answered my call with a live person in less than five minutes and sent me the

I try to be nice to all living critters. I don’t want to kill anything unnecessarily. There’s enough killing that’s considered necessary in this world.

So when I heard the banging of some little critter in my dryer tube that vents my dryer to the outside, I knew two things. One, I didn’t want to kill it. And two, I didn’t want it to die in the tubing as I suspected the smell would get pretty ripe after I ran the dryer the first time.

So I did what I always do in a panic. I called Lenny. I would

My poor baby sister is stranded in London due to the Iceland volcano erupting.  Poor baby. Couldn’t she have found a nice place to be stranded? Oh wait, that’s right. She’s in London. She found the nice place.

So I’m walking my dogs the other day down a road I usually avoid because there is a house there inhabited by assholes who apparently have no idea how to be responsible dog owners. Usually it’s the little white dog that charges down the dirt driveway to try and attack. Because that dog is so loud in announcing its intentions, I have time to back up screaming and run the other way while looking for a branch or stick to defend myself and my dogs if need be.

But this day it was the yellow lab mix that was loose.

Yet another study on the future of many children raised in the foster care system shows that their chances at success are so minimal as to be just this side of non-existent.

The New York Times recently reported on a study done in Illinois, Iowa and Wisconsin showing six in ten men who aged out of the foster care system had a criminal conviction by their mid-twenties. Three in four women in the same age group were receiving some form of public assistance, while struggling to raise children without a high school diploma. In a second group of the same

He said he’d leave if health care was passed. Well, Mr. Limbaugh, it passed. Now get the hell out of my country and move to… where was that you said you were going… oh yeah, Costa Rica. Good choice. They’ve had universal health care since the early 1900s.

I woke up yesterday and thought life would remain the same. Then my computer went tits up. And now, a short 24 hours later, I am $1500 poorer… though I’m not sure you can be poorer if you didn’t ever have the money in the first place and just put it on a credit card… and the proud owner of a new iMac with an updated office program.

To my old computer I can only say, “Go in peace, my friend. You served me well for six years which, if I understand correctly, is not unlike a millennium in computer