It was cold here and it snowed. Then it got warm and things melted. Then it got cold again and everything froze up. That frozen stuff is called ice. When it’s on the road, you can’t stop quickly unless you use the bumper of the car in front of you as a brake. Try and remember this as you speed down the street while on the phone, drinking coffeee and, for all I know, having sex in the front seat. Because I swear to god the first one who actually hits my bumper as opposed to skidding crazily behind me
They did Ted Stevens wrong
The news coming out of Fairbanks concerning misspent federal grant money got me thinking about my days writing grants for the North Slope Borough Health Department back in the seventies. I was new to the business of grants and had to learn on the job what did or didn’t impress the feds. I also had to understand that their learning curve about Alaska was nothing short of mind-boggling in its slow, painful progress.
Each year I would write renewal grants to Indian Health Service for a variety of programs serving our eight North Slope villages. Each year I would submit
We can’t win a fight when they aren’t fighting us
I may not know much about policy and war and such but it does seem to me that it’s hard to win a war when the enemy is not fighting us but each other. If the Iraqis had gotten involved in our civil war, they couldn’t win because we weren’t fighting them. And we sure in hell weren’t going to listen to anyone who tried to negotiate a peace. North and South each wanted victory to support their world view and would take nothing less. That’s why we ended up in the war in the first place. So why do
Here’s how you define real friends
Real friends show up at a charity auction dressed in strange bird outfits and work their butts off all night to help make money for a cause they know is important to you. Real friends spend hours making a quilt to be auctioned off at the affair because they know it’s important to you. And real friends drag their kids to the event to be free labor for the evening because everything we get for free leaves that much more for the birds. Thank you Carol and Barbara, Kate and Elaine and Page and Lelani and Nick.
A very brave parrot
For anyone who wonders why I love my birds, let me tell you this story.
I put Abdul, my African Gray Parrot, on my counter while I cut up a pineapple. I took the top of the pineapple and put it on the counter where she was in case she wanted to chew on it or shred it or destroy it in some other creative way. Parrots love destroying things and this seemed like a good idea. But that pineapple top was new to her and strange and scary. In the wild, parrots are a prey animal and so they
The new Anchorage slogan simply sucks
Seriously, we actually paid someone to come up with the slogan “Big Wild Life” for Anchorage. Bring back the dancing moose!
It was all the fault of a snow storm
When my mother was alive and spoke about my birth, the one thing she remembered above all else was the snow storm that raged that day and how my poor dad had to crawl to the hospital with the car. Maybe that’s why I moved to Alaska. Snow is in my blood.
Is this really progress?
I opened the Lifestyles section of our local paper yesterday only to find a full page spread on how Nancy Pelosi is bringing pearls back into fashion. Why is it that I can’t remember one full page fashion spread on Dennis Hastert or any other male House Speaker in all my many decades of life? Why did what she wore while sitting behind Bush when he made his State of the Union address to Congress get prominent mention but no one bothered to comment on what Dick Cheney was wearing? We’ll never really be equal, will we, until the media
Feeding the eagles
It was the look on my brother Phil’s face as I invited him into the eagle mew to rake it out that told me more clearly than anything else that maybe, just maybe, not everyone voluntarily enters an eagle’s pen when the eagle is in residence. He told me he’d take my back and be ready to fling the door open if the eagle attacked but that was as close as he was getting to the whole situation.
I really couldn’t complain. After all, he’d come all the way up from Delaware to spend a week in Alaska and here
Rich Little is still alive?!!!
I can remember sitting in my childhood home with my parents watching Rich Little on Ed Sullivan. Now I find out that the Washington Press Corps has chosen him to give the speech at their annual dinner with the president. For those of you paying attention, this is the same dinner that Steven Colbert addressed so brilliantly last year while Bush sat a few feet away grimacing. Seems the only jokes he can take are the ones he perpetrates on the people of this country by calling them his policies. But even for the gutless wonders that call themselves the