Living in Las Vegas for six months, I got to know some of Sin City’s landmarks, most notably its signs. Vegas is a town full of implausible solicitations like “Loose Slots!” and “Breakfast: 99 Cents!” My favorite was one above a strip-mall storefront, in giant block letters, reading: “Free Money!” You can’t fault Vegas for not understanding what people want.…
To understand Alaska politics, it helps to know the politics of capital projects. Big projects – the Susitna Dam, the Juneau Road, Ketchikan’s “Bridge to Nowhere” – consume more than their share of government business in this state. That’s also true on our local level. Consider the numbers of meetings spent talking about boat harbor expansion, rebuilding the firehall, and…
“Their greatest value no doubt lies in the universal interest of the public in seeing and photographing them in their natural habitat, and since they can be observed along most any good salmon stream when the fish are running, they provide a wonderful tourist attraction. For the sportsmen seeking a trophy, however, other areas in Alaska offer larger and more…
For his birthday party Tuesday, Pizza Joe invited friends to the skate park to play pickleball. About a dozen people showed up. The games went on for six hours. A week previous to his birthday, Joe was out at the fairgrounds with a fire hose in single-digit temperatures, putting down layers of ice at the makeshift rink there. Parnell has…
The headline in the Anchorage newspaper read, “In Haines, Divisions Recede as Community Members Rally to Help after Landslides and Flooding.” The story remained on the paper’s website for weeks, proving it was a popular one, generating clicks. It’s a feel-good story, the kind people like to read about folks setting aside differences to help each other during a catastrophe.…
A long time ago aboard a state ferry that may no longer be around someone mounted a display of black-and-white photos of Sitka in winter. They were outdoor night scenes of wet houses and piles of slush, bicycles under an eave, lit by streetlights and illuminated windows. The photos were as somber as they were starkly beautiful, conjuring up this…
Credit the Haines Sheldon Museum for coming to its own rescue. Then fill out the flier that went into your post office box last week and buy a museum membership. The reason you never needed a membership previously was that the Haines Borough and museum were flush. Now both are struggling and your help is necessary to keep the doors…
It wasn’t a big surprise to read that in addition to not knowing how to swim or to drive a car, Adolf Hitler couldn’t dance. Donald Trump can’t dance either. He moves like a man who never had to court a woman. Dancing isn’t particularly difficult, but it’s impossible for control freaks, as it requires a person to momentarily let…
“We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return – prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms.” Henry David Thoreau “All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.” Friedrich Nietzsche “Destinations are downers.” Author Ken Ilgunas, after walking 1,900 miles across the Great Plains…
A friend of mine was at Haines Home Building, ordering an oil heater for a home she was building when the late lumberyard owner Bruce Gilbert interrupted her and asked, “An oil heater? What about the Challenge of the North?” Bruce’s implication, as kindly as it surely was intended, was that real Alaskans burn wood. My friend, an office worker…