I don’t want to sound like I’m whining here, but what is it with all this rain in December? Does Anchorage not have any idea at all about how to do winter?
I look out at the street in front of my house and instead of those lovely brown snow berms, I see four inches of ice so smooth you could hold Olympic tryouts on it. The mud that I associate with spring break up is a Christmas phenomenon here.
At the risk of sounding like a displaced bush rat, let me just say that in the bush we know
Of all the things I expected my mother to become in her old age, a female Dirty Harry did not even make the Top 10. And yet, this 83 year old Italian lady has taken to chasing intruders out of her house with telephones and colanders and then going back to bed without giving it another thought.
The first time this happened, the family was more than a little amazed but felt that since it happened in broad daylight, she was probably feeling braver than she would have otherwise. Someone had climbed into her kitchen window as she watched her
It occurred to me recently that if America’s position on tobacco were to be represented graphically, it would look like a pretzel on acid.
I say this because I find myself smiling cynically every time another public figure expresses outrage over something a tobacco company has done. In particular, I find myself grinning at the latest brouhaha that developed when one of our fine tobacco companies recently tried to convince an Eastern European country that they were actually some positive benefits to their product. Like, for instance, early death that keeps down all those pesky health care costs incurred when
Pure pork fat covered in chocolate – does it get much better than that? A Ukrainian chocolate factory apparently doesn’t think so. This is their newest offering. In what can only be called a truth in advertising campaign, the name of their product is “Fat in Chocolate”.
It’s true that life’s greatest pleasures are its simplest, isn’t it? Just plain old Fat in Chocolate. No fancy name to cover up its deadly sin. No jazzy advertising campaign to make us believe that eating pork fat covered chocolate will make us prettier or sexier or more virile. In fact, it will
Here’s one of those professional excuses you are not going to hear very often. As I made my later entrance to a meeting recently, the only explanation I could give was that my parrot will not poop unless he is in a familiar environment.
Let me back up here for a moment. A few years ago I became the proud owner of a slight neurotic, extremely needy but ultimately very loving African Grey parrot named Abdul. Abdul had had at least a couple of previous owners that I knew about and this meant that I would never know where some
No one has ever accused me of being particularly graceful or coordinated. In fact, there are some who, having seen me attempt to dance, would suggest that I am “differently abled” in that regard. As a child, the only time I ever danced was to slow music with my father at weddings. Everyone else was simply afraid to ask me. Dad had no choice.
At some point in my slightly misspent youth, I was actually known to get up and try to fast dance at the Polar Bear Theater’s nightly festivities in Barrow. But even the mind-altering substances of the
About a month ago, I wrote a fairly positive column about Alaska Airlines and their services aboard a flight I took. I recently took another flight with Alaska that re-enforced for me the fact that, for whatever reason, Alaska seems to be able to hire some pretty good staff.
During the flight in question, a gentleman sitting across from me slammed down five drinks in a row and then got angry when he was refused service for the sixth. He got fairly loud and looked to me for sympathy. He stopped doing that after I told him I didn’t think
In my 53 years of life, I’ve only ever experienced 25 fall seasons. Due to acute hay fever as a child, most of those autumns were times of misery. Starting in July, I would go to my friendly allergist twice a week to get injections and have my sinuses drained. Dr. Dittenfass was the allergist’s name and he tried his best to be gentle and caring. But I could just never warm to someone coming at me to stick sharp metal rods up my nose.
What I remember about autumn back east is not being able to breathe. I remember
A few months ago I wrote in this column that I was going to put a potted plant on my stove when I moved
to Anchorage and then start with the A’s and work myself down to the Z’s of every restaurant here. I guess I was having a bit of an overreaction to the dearth of restaurants available in Barrow during my 28 year tenure there.
Well, let me tell you something. That old truism that you should be careful what you wish for cause you might get it is – well, how else can I put it –
Alaska Airlines has been getting some pretty bad press lately. As a very recent ex-patriot of a community solely dependent on them to get further than 15 miles out of town, I was routinely more than willing to add my voice to that chorus. Thanks to the most erratic schedule ever created by man, enhanced by normally marginal summer weather where dense fogs suddenly appear our of nowhere, Alaska Airlines has a reliability factor somewhere south of zero for most Barrow residents. Such grumblings about our local airlines had not been heard in Barrow since MarkAir attempted to post a