Writing from the Insurgent49 bunker in a new undisclosed location

Yep, I'm visiting with the old Insurgent49 rabblerousers, Aaron Selbig and Nova Stubbs, here in Anchorage. While spending my days as a mild-mannered publisher hawking cool aviation books, I am spending wild nights on the town with my volunteer marketer, Melinda, or eating red meat and playing Scrabble with my fellow insurgents here in their new digs in Anchortown's outpost by the sea. They just moved to this house from their loft on 5th, and they've got a wonderful big back yard--rare for Anchorage itself.

Aaron, of course, is still getting into loud and noisy trouble (or causing it), as any good insurgent does. He's been the programming director for KUDO and the host of their top-rated talk show (called, naturally, the Aaron Selbig Show), which has featured some movers and shakers not only in the Anchorage area, but statewide, too. But alas, he finally poked one too many oxen, and got gored: KUDO just fired him last week, ostensibly to "cut costs", but later they decided it was because ratings were low. No, wait, it was for both reasons. Aaron points out that the advertising budget for the station to promote itself was close to zilch, so that might have had something to do with the low ratings, too.

An interesting aspect of this is that KUDO is a union-owned station. Yet, their one full-time employee at the station had no health insurance. Tsk. A bit ironic, don't you think? So when he blew out his Achilles tendon and had to have surgery, and then got a staph infection at the hospital and had to have a second surgery and the infection taken care of, there was no health insurance to take care of it. So now he's facing what will probably end up being around $20,000 worth of medical bills.

Lovely. So I brought him a copy of Neil Davis' book, Mired in the Health Care Morass. I'm hoping it will help him trim the bills down to a reasonable size. He's been hobbling around the house here this weekend. He's got a gaping hole in the back of his leg, but it does appear to be healing. (He keeps it under wraps most of the time, but showed it off to Nova and me yesterday to demonstrate that yes, it finally was healing, look! Nova and I pretty much both went, "Ick.")

Aaron is now looking for a job. He's applied to several places, one of them Outside. I dread the thought of Alaska losing such a champion. Aaron won a Liberty Award from the ACLU last year, and well-deserved it was, too.