Before this year, I didn’t think much about drag shows. If I thought of them at all, I regarded them perhaps like jai alai: Fun and exotic for folks who are into that but nothing I couldn’t live without. Men dressing up as women for laughs or because they like silk undies. It’s a free country. Knock yourselves out. So…
“People under 30 don’t read printed material.” First and Pike News owner Lee Lauckhart, 2019 Alaska Airlines magazine is gone. The newsstand at Seattle’s Pike Place Market is gone. Newspapers are almost gone from Hudson News at the airport. See if you can find them. They’re tucked back in the corner, beneath pop fiction. Hudson News has officially dropped…
Perched on a hill in the rolling farmlands of eastern France stands a lone windmill, or “moulin” in French, a towering structure on those low fields, so stark and out of place that a passerby can’t help but stop in curiosity. The place is Valmy, in the Champagne region, an area that boasts the world’s most valuable grapes and some…
My favorite flavor of concerned citizen is the government worker, often a retired one, who stands up at a public meeting and says we have to get government off our backs. Astonishing how many of these guys forget to offer up their pensions as a place to start. A good number of these people – including retired policemen – were…
When I was a child, my father would sing to me to sleep with “The Big Rock Candy Mountain,” an ode to hobos and a life lived freely as a wandering bum. On the Big Rock Candy Mountain, lemonade bubbled up from springs, cigarettes grew on trees and they hung the jerk who invented work. It was an odd lullaby.…
I knew about four people in Alaska when I was invited to an “orphan’s Thanksgiving” in Anchorage in 1984. I had overstayed my plans to head south at summer’s end and was living in an apartment behind a strip mall on dreary East Tudor Road. November had been the coldest and darkest of my experiences with cold and dark. I…
Sen. Murkowski: Congratulations on your recent re-election. I’m sorry that the nature of politics compelled you to go on television during the campaign saying that you loved Alaska to the bottom of your heart. Your long career in office leaves no doubt that you are most dedicated to our state, exponentially more so than your recent challenger. I am writing…
A few weeks when I became so obsessed in my efforts to catch a coho I started trolling Main Street looking for anyone who could help me get my canoe in the water, I got to thinking about Jack Hemingway. The son of Ernest, the famous writer, Jack was an angler so possessed that he packed his fly rod when…
Mary Peltola stands a chance of being re-elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. If she does, Democrats might be onto a formula for winning and holding statewide office, but only if the Alaska Republican Party clown car stays full of shills, carpet-baggers and stooges. Peltola would be no match for a Jay Hammond or even a Wally Hickel or…
Chances are, your local librarian is a subversive, and if you’re religious, you should thank God for that. Or perhaps not. God is not a free-thinker, at least he wasn’t in the Old Testament. Old God took an eye for an eye. He smote the Philistines. And he wasn’t tolerant of you thinking there might be other gods every bit…