Coconut crashes on Don Young's head

The New York Times had a story yesterday on Representative Young's assistance in providing an earmark for one Daniel J. Aranoff, Florida real estate developer, who needed a little road built to help increase the value of his property on Coconut Road. Coincidentally, we're sure, the developer threw a fundraising party for Rep. Young, and raised $40,000 for the Midnight Sun political action committee (Young's very own)--only days before the earmark went through:

A consultant who helped push for the project spelled out why its supporters held the fund-raiser.

“We were looking for a lot of money,” said the consultant, Joe Mazurkiewicz. “We evidently made a very good impression on Congressman Young, and thanks to a lot of great work from Congressman Young, we got $81 million to expand Interstate 75 and $10 million for the Coconut Road interchange.”

The county doesn't want it, though, and the local Florida representative, Mr. Connie Mack, didn't ask for it. Environmentalists are not happy (but who cares what they think? certainly not our Donnie-boy) because it would cause problems.

the Lee County Metropolitan Planning Organization voted twice last year to block a preliminary study for the interchange, mainly on environmental grounds. Studies by the Army Corps of Engineers, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Federal Highway Administration have all warned that the proposed interchange could threaten wetlands.

But Don Young is not to be denied. He owed a favor, and by gum, he was going to return it!

In a Jan. 23, 2006, letter to the chairman of the planning agency, Mr. Young warned that his committee would draft another bill taking away the $10 million if it was not used for the interchange.

My, my, my. And now that he's no longer chair of the Transportation Committee, his good works for the neglected developers of Florida are finally being noticed by the wrong people.

The public, that is.

Eating crow

Well, my supposedly fine edition appears to have a few pretty obnoxious flaws in the newspapers article. I've been researching it (again) for the last five days...and this time the problems became apparent like sore thumbs--urk. Why couldn't I have caught this stuff BEFORE publication? What's even more obnoxious is that I didn't catch it, the muckrakee did, and had to call me up and (politely) yell at me about it.

A proper correction will be run in the next issue.

This particular species of crow tastes really, really bad.

From Tyrannovibos moschatus to mild-mannered tundra hippie

From the Scholastic entry on muskoxen, An Arctic Survivor:

There are not a lot of animals in the Arctic that would satisfy the musk-ox's appetite, so it has evolved into a plant-eating animal.

Sometimes doing research for articles in Agroborealis reveals little-known factoids like these. I never in my wildest imaginings suspected the muskox's dark evolutionary secret, that it made a conscious choice, long long ago in the Jurassic, that its preferred raw red-meat diet of hapless cute little animals would have to be given up because, well, there just weren't enough of 'em to go around to satisfy the prehistoric muskox's rapacious appetite. Apparently the modern muskox's ancestors decided that it was time to get enlightened (in a self-interested way) and head off to the arctic commune, there to become shaggy longhairs and eat a vegan, nonviolent diet.

But wait, there's more!

In the winter, it is estimated that the long hair keeps these animals a few degrees above the freezing point, no matter how cold the temperature of the air might be.

Yep, muskoxen run around with a core body temperature of around 36-39 degrees in the winter. I bet the researchers at LARS would be interested in THAT little detail.

In fact, one of the reasons the musk-ox maintains some of its mystery is due to the difficulty it experiences in our own environment. There are not a great deal of them in our zoos. Originally, Westerners tried to use the musk-ox as a source of wool. This was a relatively short-lived experiment however, for the animals would die of pneumonia when shaved.

So...I guess the Musk Ox Farm and the Large Animal Research Station and Windy Valley Farm and the last half-century of commercial qiviut production hasn't happened...all them sneezing muskoxen. Too much snot in the qiviut, dead muskoxen all over, ick. No wonder farmers didn't want to shear their muskoxen! (Guess they didn't notice that muskoxen conveniently shed each spring, huh?)

And of course, since we all live in a zoo, it would get pretty messy pretty fast having coughing and sneezing muskoxen (with no handkerchiefs!) to worry about. And think what it did to the zoo visitors' morale, having to see all that in our pens. (Maybe we Alaskans are zoo escapees...wait, now actually, that's pretty close to the truth, looking at the transplants from the Lower 48...)

The things one can discover on the Internet!

PDF subscriptions

Here at the UAF School of Ag (as it is familiarly known), we send out copies of our newsletter via e-mail, as a PDF. This works fine so long as the PDF isn't too big. The same thing is true for posting Agroborealis as a PDF on line--fine for downloading so long as the file isn't too huge, which can be a problem. I'm contemplating doing something similar for the Republic, only e-mailing it rather than putting it up on the website.

Local publisher makes good

McRoy & Blackburn, Publishers, has won its first big award, for The Red Mitten, by Talkeetna resident Sarah Birdsall. Red Mitten won the 2007 Independent Publishers Bronze Book Award for Best Regional Fiction, West-Pacific region. The publisher's pretty happy about it (go, Mom!). I designed this book, so I feel pretty good that it's gained some recognition. And it's a good read!

Cartoon exhibit catalogue is at the printer!

Whew. Boy was THIS job a lot of work. But it's a really nifty book. The opening for Cartoon North should be a blast. Jamie managed to get a bunch of really great historical cartoons, and while most of the artists represented are from the Tanana Valley, there are still a ton from elsewhere in the state: Anchorage, Soldotna, Juneau, Chickaloon, Palmer, Copper Center, Barrow.

I'm VERY excited.

The old editorial cartoons are pretty interesting. Statehood, it turns out, was something people here had been agitating for back in the twenties; I hadn't realized that there'd been previous pushes for statehood. I also was reminded (by the later cartoons) of the partisan issues that came up during the statehood fuss: Hawaii was Republican, and Alaska Democratic, and that caused problems in accepting one or the other as a state by itself. The fact that both states came in so closely together is probably due to the partisan issue: it would affect the composition of the Senate and the House in terms of party. Funny how partisan politics gets in the way of governance and representation of the public.

So this show has already achieved the goal of educating the public (at least this member of the public)--and it's not even opened yet!

Buy Back Alaska!

Brought to you by the folks who produced the "Tribute to Murkowski", a clever plan to get the Alaska legislature in the pockets of -- gasp! -- the People!

Comic art in Alaska

and Australia, and California, and Pennsylvania, and...I've been having the most delightful time contacting the various artists associated with the Cartoon North show. I spoke with Norman Lowell today, and e-mailed back and forth with Ben Templesmith yesterday, and later with his editor at IDW Publishing.

Comic art is VERY interesting!

The Squirrelator

Mary Haley, fine dining reviews and varmint extermination. Yep, that's my kind of contributor. I don't call them irregulars for nothing...

Postal hit

Well, the new postal rates are gonna kill me in the mailings.



I am going to have to raise the cover price of the Republic, which has been a dollar since 2002, and before that was only fifty cents. The jump in postage prices is so dramatic that subscriptions are going to have to go up pretty significantly, too. They've both been underpriced for years anyway, but this is going to hurt my sales, badly I suspect.

A fine edition if I do say so myself

This issue of the paper was a bear to get through, but I'm pleased with how it came out: some great photos, a wide range of subjects (poetry to history to satire to opinion to muckraking) and locales (local to national) in the stories, not too many typos, lots of different contributors, some very nice writing. I don't seem to have forgotten any of the advertisers, either.

Hannah Hill and Kate Billington have been writing a column on the Bill of Rights, "Live Free or Die", which is going through the different amendments from 10 through 1. The third installment in the series was published in the May issue, and I'm struck by how informative the articles are, even though they're only a page and a half each, and by how very little I seem to know about these important amendments to the Constitution.

The paper is getting closer and closer to what I want it to become; I don't have that clearly in my mind, exactly. It's sort of an intuitive process, dependent both on what I get and what I ask for. People make suggestions: some I jump on with enthusiasm, others don't leap out at me. The paper evolves, working its way toward something good.

And the next one? Well, so far I have all the poetry that I couldn't fit into this one, a pencil illustration of the view of Denali, a prose fiction/commentary piece exploring the paranoid mind and the myriad conspiracy theories out there, a topical piece from the Cooperative Extension Service Advisory Council (very interesting, that one), a piece on the elements of fascism by Laurence Britt (also thought-provoking), a review of Geek Love, some wonderful photos taken in the Bush, and several articles by Brian Yanity (renewable energy policy, energy efficiency, coal and nuclear fuels, oil, gas, etc.).

Cartoon-O-Rama

Somehow, don't ask me how, I've been roped into publishing an exhibit catalog for Cartoon North, a show that will be at the Annex for the month of June. Jamie Smith is the curator of the show. We're going to try to get the catalog published in time for the show.

This means that I must pull a rabbit out of my hat in less than a month, from design to printing. Ha!

Kiwi green cutie

Okay, here's the green box on wheels. Hans can fit "all the tools necessary for building a house" in it, and all the bumps in the road magically smooth out. I'm reluctant (!) to put any bumper stickers on it.

For the first time in my life--and believe me, I NEVER thought I'd EVER say something like this--I find I want to wash and wax the car. I want to keep it clean!

O, gack. I've been yuppified. The horror!

Bedroom communities

This morning on KUAC's local news, at approximately 8:35 a.m., Dan Bross, in discussing the Parks Highway expansion/upgrade project between Ester and Fairbanks, referred to Ester as "a bedroom community of Fairbanks." My hackles immediately went up. "Harrumpf!" said I, and then wondered: why did this description of our fair village irritate me so? I mean, if Fairbanks were to suddenly drop off the map, Ester would be in a world of hurt.

So what, exactly, is a bedroom community? Well, per Wikipedia, it's a commuter town, "an urban community that is primarily residential, from which most of the workforce commute to a nearby metropolis to earn their livelihood." Per Barron's business dictionary, it's "A residential community in the Suburbs often near an employment center, but itself providing few employment opportunities." In other words, it's not financially independent. Well, this is true enough, so why was my first reaction that it was a perfect example of unthinking bias on the part of a reporter? I think that it's that it places Ester in subordinate position to Fairbanks. It defines Ester in terms of Fairbanks, as though the community exists only when we are zonked in our beds, and we only come alive when we go to Fairbanks.

But the village is far more than that, and, if we include the vicinity (Gold Hill) actually does have a lot of businesses: the bars, Dreamworks, Gold Hill & the Chevron station, the mines, the lumber mill, the Gold Camp, Judie Gumm's, Goldstream Water, Water Wagon, the Annex, and a farm. Plus there's all the self-employed types: carpenters, designers, artists, journalists and other writers and photographers, etc. (Alas, I cannot really count the paper as an employer, not yet.) And we are notorious for providing our own entertainment.

Ester is full of independent-minded people, and so even if technically we are dependent on Fairbanks for jobs, to use a term like "bedroom community" rather than "outlying community" or "nearby community" or some such diminishes our village.

Perhaps Dan forgot for a moment that we are a republic, so declared by no less than a borough assemblyman. Fairbanks doesn't even have a flag (and ours has been to both poles)!

So I say again, with feeling: harrumph!

A new green machine

Hoo! We did it. We signed our lives away (well, the next 6 years, anyway) and got a new (as in, NEW) car, a Honda Element, metallic green. It's a box on wheels, and it's cute in a very Japanese mechanistic way. I love it! Names suggested so far: Kermit, Herman Munster, Melvin the Green Beast (after my dad's tale). However, it seems like a she rather than a he to me, so we were trying out names like Pea, Emma (Pease). Or maybe we'll just call it the Green Box. Dunno.
Megan Boldenow, of the Lorax, has a green Element just like ours, so Mom was suggesting that we put something to differentiate it, like a giant dragonfly on the hood. By valentine suggested flames, or a frog tongue. It's very amphian-like in appearance.

Why people like Bush

as president, that is. I, as any reader of my blog or paper knows, find him a horrendous president. And I said so today in conversation with one of my office mates. I enjoy conversing with her, but we disagree strongly in several arenas, George's presidency being one. She said that she thought he was modest, and credited him with preventing further terrorist attacks on American soil. She believes that history will reveal him to be a great president. She also said that she knew of five dirty bombs that had been confiscated and attacks blocked (she's in a military family) since 9-11.

So I looked it up on the web. I found this site, a page on akdart.com, but the listing there seems to include a lot of minority-group individuals who went off the deep end all by their lonesomes, rather than organized terrorist groups. I also found this story on Accuracy in Media, which has a bunch of links to as-labeled conservative organizations and media, but not to liberal ones (thereby shooting their own supposed nonbias in the foot). The stories for this site seemed aimed at only the left's badness and inaccuracy.

The only stories about a "dirty bomb" that I can find are all on Jose Padilla, against whom this charge was dropped, and on the possibility of such a weapon being used. My co-worker suggested that the media or perhaps the government was squelching the story, viewing the American public as children who couldn't handle real news.

I'm suspecting that a lot of this is made up, or hinted at but not actually verified, and that the highly politicized environment is tugging government information and news stories into slanted presentations all over the place. It would be nice to know what the truth actually is. When a website or news organization blasts people for inaccuracy or bias, and disregards what their political or social stance is, THEN I'm more likely to believe them. For example:

FactCheck.org
SourceWatch.org
Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting

It wasn't Duke

Alas, the mystery photo that won the 3rd place sports award at the Alaska Press Club was not Monique's spectacular photo of Duke Celedinas diving for the football at the Ester Community Park, it was Ben Stuart's. Well, congratulations, Ben, and sorry for the false alarm, Monique. For those of you who are curious, here's the lovely shot anyway:

A fine spring day

That was yesterday, that was. A bit bleary and chilly in the morning, but toasty in the afternoon, enough so that I hung out on the porch with a companionable bumblebee and went through the next poetry manuscript in the queue, The Calligraphy of Birds by Gene Ervine.

Much accomplished in the last two days: first whack at the yard (raking, trash-picking-up, junk chucking, compost-pile-stabbing), greenhouse cleanup, mudroom cleanup and organizing, nasturtium planting, tomato variety selection for planting, Cartoon North temp website construction, general website updates. The cats found my industry entertaining, and did a lot of extravagant lolling about in the grass while I swept and lugged and chucked and hauled.

Tomato decisions: Ropreco paste, Stupice, and red currant. I have packets of seeds from 1993, 1994, 1995, 1998, 2000, and a few from last year. Lots of old seeds. The ones I have from Seeds of Change have proven to have phenomenal viability--and all organic, too.

Alaska Press Club 2006 awards!

Yes! We did it AGAIN! This year, Jamie Smith took first place in editorial cartoons, all papers, the judge noting two cartoons in particular, Ted Stevens and ANWR and Smoke a Pack. The judge wrote, "Clear messages with strong visual metaphors and some nice ironical twists. Bold graphics with effective use of grey tones. Despite some lapses into scatology, a strong entry....”

Monique Musick also won an award this year, probably two: 3rd place in Best Arts Photo for "Billington in Visqueen gown" and 3rd place in Best Sports Photo for "Duke misses the ball," published in the February 2006 issue as part of the Stupor Bowl photo essay. For some reason, they weren't sure about the origin of the photo (even though I labeled it according to their instructions like all the rest, it evidently didn't make it to the judge with all info intact, either on my CD or from the press club to the judge...anyway, the description of the winner matches).

Woo-hoo!

The Culture of Control

I've been thinking about the rabidity and internal contradictions I see in this modern-day radicalism/nationalism from the Religious/Republican right, and the common thread that sticks out is the apparent urge to control other people. The dominionists who seem to be running things these days are concerned with domination--and they'll go to ungodly lengths to get control over the rest of us.

Think about it. Women must be kept under control--we have no rights, we are not human beings, we are sexual objects. We are our uterus, our mammaries. We cannot be trusted to make our own decisions about our own bodies, as the New York Times aptly summarizes:

Justice Kennedy actually reasoned that banning the procedure was good for women in that it would protect them from a procedure they might not fully understand in advance and would probably come to regret. This way of thinking, that women are flighty creatures who must be protected by men, reflects notions of a woman’s place in the family and under the Constitution that have long been discredited, said a powerful dissenting opinion by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, joined by Justices John Paul Stevens, David Souter and Stephen Breyer.

Sexuality in general seems to be very theatening to these people, as evidenced by the intense fear and disgust toward homosexuality and transgenderism.

As Fred Dyson (R-Eagle River) puts it, "I think government has the right to decide which relationships are forbidden and which are approved." Fred, old boy, you've got it so massively wrong here it's amazing. First of all, government doesn't have the right to do anything. People have rights. Governments are tools. What you've really said here is that some people have the right to use the tool of government to tell other people who they can hang out with, who they can love, who they should be with. This is a very, very dangerous belief. (I'm still sort of flummoxed that the state's libertarians don't seem to have noticed this. They're griping about smoking bans instead. Woo-hoo.)

But Fred's belief fits right in with the high regard in which corporate institutions are held by these rightwing types. Time Warner gets to write our postal rate plans and regulations. The oil companies get to write our foreign policy and war plans. Institutions such as government and churches and corporate entities are apparently better at directing our lives than we are.

Didn't know that, did you?

There was a country, a democracy, that changed, and used fear to herd the public, used religion to control them, used business to consolidate economic power, used war to keep in control. It became a textbook example of how nationalism develops into facism, of how a country can self-destruct. That country saw women as brood mares for a better future, placed heavy emphasis on the nuclear family, detested gays and intellectuals and peaceniks and people who didn't like to be controlled (like gypsies) or people of minority religions, either. Versteh?

Attention, women: you are mere uteri

The Supreme Court's decision (PDF) today is appalling. It is a politicization of medicine.

But why should I be surprised? Everything in the last six years has been politicized, from our foreign policy to our defense to our educational policies to our social policies to federal hiring and firing decisions to science.

John McCain, whom I used to admire (before he approved of torture, that is, by voting for a crap bill), has proven himself a fuckhead, to put it bluntly.

So what issue is it that's gonna get YOU? Hmm? At what point, dear reader, will you be mad enough, hurt enough in a personal way, that you'll decide that amused indifference (gee, I'm not interested in politics) is no longer an acceptable stance? At what point do you wake up?

See, it's not the "Sanctity of Life" that these people are talking about. If that was the case, they wouldn't be forcing women to risk their lives for their fetuses. It's the "Sanctity of Highly Emotional Leverage" -- this gives the right-wingers a handle on the public's gonads, literally, so they can swing John and Jane Q. Public the way they want.

Ethics, my ass. A fully grown person with all faculties intact (i.e., the mother) is expendable. She's more useful as a uterus. And doctors obviously are less capable in the eyes of the court than lawyers on making these life-and-death decisions.

The case of the disappearing bees

Honeybees have been disappearing, abandoning their hives in the last year. It's not just the United States, although that's where it started: Canada,Great Britain, Germany, and elsewhere in Europe. Vanishing Bee syndrome, Colony Collapse Disorder, or Marie Celeste disease, as it is known in England, is now worldwide.

To get a sense of the magnitude of the problem, consider that 70 percent of bees have vanished in Texas and in parts of New England. It's a serious problem, not just some obsure issue relating to the beekeeper's art. Honeybees don't just make honey, they pollinate agricultural crops and wild plants. A drop in population like this could cause massive agricultural failure. They affect ALL of us.

The cause? Nobody knows. Two recent possibilities include cell phones and other radiation-producing widgets, and genetically modified plants. Here's a quote or two from Der Spiegel on GM foods:

The researchers examined the effects of pollen from a genetically modified maize variant called "Bt corn" on bees.... The study concluded that there was no evidence of a "toxic effect of Bt corn on healthy honeybee populations." But when, by sheer chance, the bees used in the experiments were infested with a parasite, something eerie happened. According to the Jena study, a "significantly stronger decline in the number of bees" occurred among the insects that had been fed a highly concentrated Bt poison feed.
According to Hans-Hinrich Kaatz, a professor at the University of Halle in eastern Germany and the director of the study, the bacterial toxin in the genetically modified corn may have "altered the surface of the bee's intestines, sufficiently weakening the bees to allow the parasites to gain entry -- or perhaps it was the other way around. We don't know."
...
Kaatz would have preferred to continue studying the phenomenon but lacked the necessary funding. "Those who have the money are not interested in this sort of research," says the professor, "and those who are interested don't have the money."

(Sounds awfully familiar, doesn't it?)

And on cell phones, this story from the Independent, on the effects of radiation on bees' navigation. Science A Go Go also has some info on this:

Placing handsets near hives, Kuhn observed that GSM cell phone radiation in the frequency range 900 MHz - 1800 MHz caused the bees to avoid the hive.

The House Agriculture Committee's investigation on the bee disappearances has begun, with a hearing by a subcommittee.

coping with the new postal rate design

And if we can't beat 'em, here's how to cope with the incredibly obnoxious requirements, per Folio magazine.

Or, just skip the paper part altogether. Voila! no mailing at all!

The seamy underside of the postal rate hikes

Well, well, well. I was under the impression that the new rate hikes coming our way from the post office would be the standard sort of stamp increase that we've been getting. But no--this is going to hurt, and maybe wipe out my subscriptions (which finally, after nine years, went up to 151 subscriptions--yay!). According to Robert McChesney of Common Dreams:

Under the plan, smaller periodicals will be hit with a much larger increase than the big magazines, as much as 30 percent. Some of the largest circulation magazines will face hikes of less than 10 percent.

The new rates, which go into effect on July 15, were developed with no public involvement or congressional oversight, and the increased costs could damage hundreds, even thousands, of smaller publications, possibly putting many out of business. This includes nearly every political journal in the nation....

What the Post Office is planning to do now, in the dark of night, is implement a rate structure that gives the best prices to the biggest publishers, hence letting them lock in their market position and lessen the threat of any new competition. The new rates could make it almost impossible to launch a new magazine, unless it is spawned by a huge conglomerate.

A thirty percent increase in my subscription mailing cost means I'm going to have to up the cost of the subscriptions from $20 per year to $24 per year. At least. That is a humongous increase.

The Free Press has more:

Earlier this year, the Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC) rejected a postal rate increase plan offered by the U.S. Postal Service. Instead they opted to implement a complicated plan submitted by media giant Time Warner.

What? a corporation is writing our postal plan? since when did we become a subsidiary of Time Warner?

Under the original plan, all publishers would have a mostly equal increase (approx. 12 percent) in the cost for mailing their publications. The Time Warner plan overturned this level playing field to favor large, ad-heavy magazines like People at the expense of smaller publications like In These Times and The American Spectator.

Sooo....if you want to help out your local small publication and send a note to Congress and the Postal Board of Governors, use this link to the Free Press. I'll be grateful for your help!

Sustainable Living Conference

This is going to be quite the to-do, but it's not getting the publicity it needs. It takes place on campus, mostly, and features an incredible array of presentations, events, and tours. So, here's a quickie listing of what's going on:

Monday, April 16: Do It Yourself Energy
Coordinator: Tom Marsik fttm1@uaf.edu
Natural Sciences building room 201A

4:00 – 4:40 pm -- Presentation: “Knowledge is Power; Turn it On” - Todd Hoener (GVEA)
4:45 – 5:25 pm -- Presentation: Energy Savings at the Workplace - Pam Seiser (Interior Alaska Green Star)
5:30 – 6:30 pm -- Slideshow: Powering a Homestead with Renewable Sources - Phil Loudon
6:35 – 7:15 pm -- Workshop: How to make biodiesel, winterize windows, & more

Tuesday, April 17: Do It Yourself Food
Coordinator: Jacquie Goss fsjdg@uaf.edu

Wood Center lounge
2:00 – 5:00 pm -- Workshops: Bow hunting, Fly tying, Beer brewing
WC Conf. rms. E/F
5:00 – 5:30 pm -- AK Grown/Organic Potluck and Cooking Contest
5:30 – 8:00 pm -- Workshop: “Living off the land… Fairbanks style!” - Larry Landry

Wednesday, April 18: Do It Yourself Transportation
Coordinator: Nick Toye fsnjt4@uaf.edu

Wood Center lounge
10:00 am – 5:00 pm -- Workshop: Bike Repair - Free help fixing your bike. (out in front of Wood Center)
2:00 – 5:00 pm -- Workshop: Learn how to build an electric powered car & bike (prototypes displayed)
Schaible Auditorium
7:00 – 10:00 pm -- Presentations and Discussion: Urban Sprawl and the Fairbanks Downtown Plan

Thursday, April 19: Do It Yourself Clothing
Coordinator: Eli Sonafrank fsaes1@uaf.edu

Wood Center lounge
5:00 – 8:00 pm -- Workshops: Knitting, Cloths Making, and Bookmaking
5:00 – 8:30 pm -- Knanook Knitter’s Stash Swap: drop off craft swap items from 5-6pm, shop until 8:30
Schaible Auditorium
5:30 – 7:00 pm -- Presentation and Films: Electronics Waste: Exporting Harm; E-Recycling in Fbnks

Friday, April 20: Do It Yourself Building
Coordinator: matthew.klick@gmail.com

Library Media Classroom
Also: Tour of the Cold Climate Housing Research Center at 10:30am
1:00 – 2:00 pm -- Presentation: Recycling and Building – creativity and cleverness - Peter Adams
2:00 – 3:00 pm -- Presentation: Remodeling for Energy Conservation - Richard Seifert
3:00 – 4:00 pm -- Presentation: US Green Building Council and LEED standards - Thane Magelky
4:00 – 5:00 pm -- Presentation: CCHRC, “Introduction to Green Building” - Mike Musik
5:00 – 7:00 pm -- Panel Discussion: Green Building and Design

Saturday, April 21: Earth Day Fair
Coordinator: Aaron Simpson fsajs6@uaf.edu

Constitution Park
12:00 – 6:00 pm -- Outdoor booths and informal workshops, live music, free BBQ, beer tent, games, fire juggling, art contest displays, and more.
4:00 pm -- Recycled art show winner announced, prizes distributed
3:00 – 6:00 pm -- Free BBQ with locally procured meat, salmon, and organic veggies.
Taku Parking Lot
10:00am-4:00pm -- Electronics Recycling Collection Event

Sunday, April 22: Sustainable Living Tour of Fairbanks
Coordinator: Maegan Weltzin fsmmw4@uaf.edu

10:00am – 6:00 pm or 10:00am - 9:00pm -- Meet at Patty Center. Transportation provided to tour five homes with sustainable design, with additional trip to Chena Hot Springs for geothermal tour.

Dyson: an honest man

Fred Dyson, Republican senator from Eagle River, has revealed the truth:

"I think government has the right to decide which relationships are forbidden and which are approved."

Check your April 10 issue of the SunStar. According to them, this came out on the AP wire (I still haven't found out which was the originating paper) on April 4, right after the advisory vote.

So why aren't the Libertarians screaming bloody murder?

ECA's spring meeting

So Sunday I walk into the bar and lo! there on the outside of the door is a poster announcing the spring annual meeting of the ECA, complete with an agenda. Funny thing is, I'm on the board and nobody called me about a board meeting. None of the other board members I've talked with so far (Margaret, Amy, or two-thirds of the five members) were contacted, either. The board is supposed to have a meeting where they set the agenda and the date of the general membership meeting.

Methinks the new prexy and the sign czar FORGOT the proper order o' things and usurped some powers they weren't supposed to. More of that Frank-like "unitary presidency". Oh, well. Hannah's new at this. We'll have to tease her a bit.

Book bash bonanza

Well, the book bash was a grand success. We didn't make my (admittedly grandiose) goal of $10,000, but we did match last year, or will once all the payments are in. The lasagne was scrumptious, the hats were really cool, and a ton of people came. The entertainment was pretty good! I was impressed with Mary Haley's troupe, Cold Fusion Tribal Dance. Hans and Al and Jeremy did pretty well, too, even though it wasn't quite how they planned it. They did a shadowbox effect which worked out really well.

Eric Glos got all fired up about the library and has been talking people's ears off at the Eagle ever since the lallapalooza, with his ideas for the new building. It's pretty cool to have somebody so excited about it. With any luck, we'll be able to start brushing the property some more in a couple of weeks, and maybe get a foundation in this year!

Pathetic.

The vote on Tuesday was disappointing, to say the least. Fifty-three percent of the people who turned out see nothing wrong with treating a whole group of people like second-rate citizens. Get out your white sheets, everybody! Time to join the damn Klanners, apparently.

I am DISGUSTED with my fellow Alaskans. Evidently, people up north no longer understand why protecting a minority is important--and that says volumes about the state of our understanding of just what democracy and freedom really are.

Lallapaloozers, rejoice!

Yep, it's another bibliophile bash: and the goodies are rolling in! Hoo!

Margaret, who is organizing the auction, and I, who am supposedly publicizing the heck out of the JTEL lallapalooza, have made a pact: we can't panic until Thursday, and we can't panic at the same time. This means, effectively, that I can't panic until Friday. So come the stroke of midnight, I will have one lallapalooza of a freak-out, so to speak.

See, here's what we're doing. We're trying to raise enough money that we can start building the library AND pay for the rest of the land payments this year AND pay for the heating fuel AND pay for the rent until the building's built AND pay for the supplies. That's what the lallapalooza is for. So Margaret and Alice are hustling for items to put up for auction. I've been making gift certificates (the Republic, Metropolitan Garage, Calypso Farm, Northern Therapies, Wild Rose Camp) and a seeming interminable pile of posters (for posting all over town) and signs (for putting up at the lallapalooza itself). And I'm working on a beaded hat for the hat walk. Tomorrow a bunch of us meet at the Annex to make gift baskets for auction, featuring, of course, tons of books.

The big question is whether we'll have enough stuff to auction. And whether people will have even heard about it. I sent announcements to every radio and TV station in town, but I haven't heard anything on the radio yet.

So, here I am, staving off incipient panic...

"Wow, words mean things."

Quote of the day, courtesy Tom Malone! There's a lot in a word. Whole histories and languages and cultures wrapped up in each little sound-symbol-meme. Amazing things, words.

And there's lots of word fans, too:

World Wide Words

Word Spy

the Word Detective

and the inimitable

Word of the Day

The nastiness of HJR 9: "no other union"

Now, this is interesting. House Joint Resolution 9, sponsored/authored by Representatives John Coghill Jr., John Harris, Vic Kohring, Peggy Wilson, Bob Lynn, Carl Gatto, Nancy Dahlstrom, Mike Kelly, Mark Neuman, Bill Thomas Jr., and Bill Stoltze and introduced to the Alaska legislature February 12, 2007, would not just mean that employee benefits would be denied to gay couples and common-law (heterosexual) married couples by the state and any dependent organizations (such as cities, boroughs, universities), it would also prevent creation of civil unions as an alternative to marriage: "the only union that shall be valid or recognized in this state".

The text of this bill does not match the advisory vote question (which asks that the legislature do a pretty crappy, mean-spirited thing), and instead does an even more crappy, mean-spirited thing--so the vote (or the bill) is deceptive. Here's the text of the bill:

Section 25. Marriage and related limitations. To be valid or recognized in this State, a marriage may exist only between one man and one woman. No other union is similarly situated to a marriage between a man and a woman and, therefore, a marriage between a man and a woman is the only union that shall be valid or recognized in this State and to which the rights, benefits, obligations, qualities, or effects of marriage shall be extended or assigned.

This is EXACTLY THE SAME TEXT as was placed before the legislature last year, and was resoundingly rejected by the public in hearings across the state.

And again, like last year, this text says nothing about being limited to state entities: this would apply across the board, to privately held entities like businesses, for example. Why? because it is an AMENDMENT TO THE CONSTITUTION! and it doesn't say that it applies only to public employees, or public benefits. Nope, this is a general amendment, written to discriminate generally. Even the League of Women Voters doesn't like it, due to the deception involved in the advisory vote language vs. the bill above, and the bass-ackwards procedure. They are recommending voting NO.

Me, too. I can't wait to see the first lawsuit brought by a business against the state for proscribing giving same-sex partners the benefits that opposite-sex partners get, if this stupidity passes.

And again, we have the same problem as before (since it's exactly the same text as before): this will mean that the Alaska constitution will cease to be about limiting the powers of the government, and become about limiting the rights and powers of the people in the form of social policy dictation. Top down, state to borough, state to city, state to private entity.

Coghill dissembles when he claims that the

Supreme Court has ordered Alaskans to pay for a benefit that the majority of people disagree with philosophically. Once the state requires same-sex benefits for partners of state employees, it is only a few more legal steps until private businesses are forced to provide the same benefits lest they “discriminate.”

The bill he has sponsored would require that businesses be denied the option of offering same-sex partners benefits. It requires that cities be denied that option. He says that the majority of people disagree with employee benefits for same-sex couples, but where's the poll? That would have been a much cheaper option, and more accurate (if done properly, by a reputable outfit that doesn't do push polls). No, instead, he wants this expensive and deceptive advisory vote, and it looks like he wants it to mask the amendment he's already sponsored that was REJECTED by the public the LAST time he did this.

Lallapalooza looming!

Yes, it's coming! The librarypalooza and book bash is soon to be held (April Fool's Day, in fact) at the Annex, and so I'm getting the press releases and posters and flyers and radio announcements and whatnot this weekend. That's my job for this event: publicity agent. So far, I've sorta blown it, since I failed to get it to the correct person at the News-Miner to be included in the spring events calendar. Last year I missed it because I missed the deadline. This year I missed it because I sent it on time to the wrong person, and the e-mail bounced back.

Oh, well. It's a fun event, and this is the third year. I'll see what I can do to get the word out there.

Largo's in trouble now

According to Transgender Workplace Diversity (Dr. Jillian Todd Weiss' blog), Steve/Susan Stanton has decided not to take this blatantly discriminatory firing lying down. Stanton will be filing an appeal. Dr. Weiss believes that Stanton may have a good legal case should a lawsuit be necessary.

Since the basis for calling for his firing seems to be primarily on religious grounds, I suspect she's right. And it looks like Stanton may actually have a preponderance of support in the the area.

Stanton was interviewed in Newsweek about the whole mess. Here's some info from the Human Rights Campaign on transgender basics.

Bye, bye, Brutus

On our way home today, we saw the tow truck/flatbed speeding off toward Fairbanks, Brutus' sorry skeleton aboard. Jeff and Stanley Rogers saw it too.

No more truck, but still plenty of burnt bits in the drive...we'll probably qualify as a toxic zone for a while.

The ashen aftermath of Brutus

Brutus' rear was the best-preserved part (hindsight is always 20-20, of course).



And the contrasting end. Note the relative good condition of the license plate.



Note the remains of the rear view mirror (that melted black mass by what used to be the side window).




And the remains of the interior.

Flames shooting nine feet high

Yup, our faithful Brutus is no more. Our 1997 Mazda/Ford pickup went down in classic, conflagrationary style last night.

We were down at the Eagle last night and, since it was, oh, 30 below or something, we had the car warming up for a bit. Hans went out to turn it off when we decided we would stay a bit longer, to discover the hood steaming away in clear signs of overheating. So he turned it off and came back in. We hung out for about fifteen minutes, and then went back out again to go home and watch a movie we'd rented from Gold Hill (Zoom: Academy for Superheroes, starring Tim Allen). Car seemed fine, temperature gauge was midrange. So we go driving down the road, and we're about halfway home when steam starts rising again. Halfway, of course, is partway down Alpha Way. But the gauge still doesn't seem too hot. We get to the corner, about 150-200 feet from our house, and the gauge suddenly shoots up to HOT. We figure, what the hell, we're almost there.

So we go the rest of the way, turn off the car, and go into the house. After about five minutes, Hans goes back out to plug it in. He comes back in. Another five minutes, and he's putzing around in the entryway, and notices light coming from outside.

HUGE flames are shooting up into the air from where a vague car-shaped form is. Hans whoops, runs outside with the fire extinguisher, shouts at me to call the fire department (takes me three tries, but I finally manage to correctly type in 911). He's pitching buckets of snow on the hood as I'm frantically trying to find another bucket, but by the time I do, he's given up. We can hear the sirens going. Bob LaChaussee, noble neighbor that he is, comes over with his 20-lb fire extinguisher, but we frantically shout at him to get the hell out of there because it's going to blow up (at least half a tank of gas in the thing). He scoots. Poisonous clouds of smoky melted car are billowing all over the place.

The EVFD comes to the rescue inside of two minutes. We're cowering behind the other side of the house by this time, watching the spectacular flames shooting up into the branches, melting plastic and whatall dripping down the front of the truck, flaming tires, hearing the occasional BOOM! as something explodes. I called Mom right after I called 911, sort of hysterically saying "Hi, our car's on fire, do you have one we can borrow, don't worry, the fire department's on its way, ha ha....". Then I called the bar to warn people away from that end of the village, and Judy and Bob, and Dan and Jennifer (no answer--turns out they were attempting to leave for the airport at just about that time--had to wait until the fire trucks left).

The only things that survived the fire were the license plates (both fore and aft, amazingly), the rear tires (at least, they look okay on cursory inspection), and the slightly smudgy tailgate, complete with bumper sticker collection. The gas tank, fortunately, never exploded, but the windows all shattered (as did the headlights), the interior and cab and pickup bed are ash, the battery went kaboom...I heard at least three explosions. The engine, of course, is, um, toast.

I didn't sleep too well last night.

Sarah Wolfe, Mark Simpson, Ryan Williams, Torie (the new station manager), John Debbaut, and I think Cameron and another guy whose name I can't remember were all there. They hosed the car down good, and some brave soul pried opend the fused door so they could drench the inside and make sure it was out. There are rivers of ice all over the driveway. They had face masks and oxygen tanks, which is a good thing. Hans got a whiff of smoke and was coughing last night. His throat is still sore, but he's stopped coughing.

I am SO grateful that my neighbors volunteer as firefighters. They may have prevented both a forest fire and a house fire by getting there so quickly...

This morning, down by the Eagle, we could see what we couldn't last night: radiator fluid on the snow. It looks like we sprung a serious leak, as it was just pouring out, even as we backed down after the engine had cooled. I'm going outside now to clean it up in case any dogs decide to taste it.

Largo's problem in a nutshell

This quote from the Miami Herald narrows the problem with Stanton's firing down to the bare bones:

''I do not feel he has the integrity, nor the trust, nor the respect, nor the confidence to continue as the city manager of the city of Largo,'' said Commissioner Mary Gray Black, who introduced the resolution to fire Stanton.

''They're saying, we don't want to fire him because he's transsexual, we want to fire him because he won't get support from his staff,'' said Mara Keisling, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality. "This was said when women were put in charge of people. When African Americans were first put in charge of people. It's just embarrassing that we as a society seem to learn about it a group at a time.''

And that's just it: this is EXACTLY THE SAME as bigotry and discrimination against blacks (the Jim Crow laws, for example) or women. Or Catholics. Or Native Americans. Or gays. Or people over sixty. Exactly the same damn thing.

And guess what? Mike Kelly and John Coghill and those like them are trying not just to make it LEGAL to discriminate against people who are in committed relationships with people of the same gender (and just how do we determine that? DNA testing? secondary sexual characteristics? what? what about hermaphrodites? where does that leave them?)--no, they're trying to REQUIRE that we discriminate.

This prevents cities or villages from bucking the trend, too. Here's the language of the advisory vote question:

Shall the legislature adopt a proposed amendment to the state constitution to be considered by the voters at the 2008 general election that would prohibit the state, or a municipality or other subdivision of the state, from providing employement benefits to same-sex partners of public employees and to same-sex partners of public employee retirees?

In other words, even a local branch of government can't make the decision for itself. It's a top-down governmental prohibition. This ought to get the Libertarian crowd pissed off. I hope.

More lunacy in Largo

My, my. Largo, Florida, is getting QUITE the reputation! Nadine Smith, an equal rights activist, was handing out fliers at the Largo coucil meeting where Black's resolution to fire Stanton was voted on. The fliers read, "Don't Discriminate". But it seems that one must have a permit to hand out fliers, and that

Fliers present a fire hazard; plus, when they end up on the floor, people can slip on them, [Largo police spokesman Mac] McMullen said.
Given the already emotionally charged meeting, city officials also thought that fliers could become further disruptive, McMullen said.
Smith also lacked permission to pass out the fliers, as required by city law, he said.

However, according to a commentator, Bill, who was, he says, there at the scene,

This is out right discrimination, since the police allowed Religious groups to distribute pamphlets before and after the meeting. At approximately 5:00 PM, I approached Officer Sahoski, who shrugged his shoulders and stated he knew

Perhaps the difference was that she was inside the building, rather than outside? It's not clear if the people with the religious fliers were distributing them during the meeting, or inside the chambers. It's also not clear if these people had a permit.

Of course, the mere thought of being required to have a permit to hand out pieces of paper is repugnant.

Reviewed in the Utne Reader!

With a cover photo and everything! WAHOOO!

Per their reviewer, Evelyn Hampton, the Republic is "a witty monthly magazine." Jeff Rogers and Dru Heskin's articles in the February issue were mentioned, too: check it out!

This just made my day. Many thanks to Dru, who found it on the web.

The Republic also received a mention in their December 2006 Shelf Life column, about the many interesting periodicals, books, CDs, and DVDs in the Utne Reader's library.

Largo, Florida: a city of bigots

The city council of Largo, Florida, voted recently to fire their city manager, a man who for fourteen years had worked hard for the city and earned the public's respect. Why this abrupt firing? Was it because he'd been caught embezzling? No. Had he dowloaded child porn on his computer? Absolutely not. Had he used his position to gain grants or loans for a personal business or charity? No. Was he getting kickbacks from politicians or developers? Definitely not.

Nope, this man was fired because he'd decided that he wasn't really a man, he was a woman in a man's body, and he needed to get a sex change operation. He'd decided this after having gotten married, having a son (13 years old), trying counseling, etc. In other words, this was not a decision made lightly. The news of this was leaked to the public, before he could tell his son about it. He decided to confront the issue head-on rather than let rumors fly, and made an official announcement. An uproar ensued, and the city council voted 5 to 2 to throw him out. To their credit, the mayor, Pat Gerard, and Commissioner Rodney Woods looked at the quality of his work, and voted to keep him on.

Commissioner Mary Gray Black was apparently the driving force behind the ouster:

[The] meeting was called by Commissioner Mary Gray Black and could echo a bitter 2003 debate over an ordinance that would have protected gay and transgender residents and city employees.

Black was recruited to run for the commission by a leading opponent of the antidiscrimination ordinance. On Monday, she proposed placing Stanton on paid leave while the city prepares to fire him.

Black has a history of bigotry, evidently, and won her seat on a very slim margin.

This is why we need civil rights protections for transgendered, gay, lesbian, and intersex people.

Looking ahead

Hans and I were discussing the price of fuel oil the other day (our tank is getting low). It seems pretty clear to me that we have to get away from No. 1 fuel oil and propane; both are REALLY expensive and getting more so. But what to go to instead? We have a nice little wood stove for backup, but it can't heat the whole house and the wood produces a lot of soot. We can do some cooking on it, but it's not a cookstove, so that's pretty limited.

I think there are a few things we can do that will help our winter heating and our cooking problems:

1. better windows. We have quite a few double-pane windows; we could, slowly, replace them with triple-pane, superinsulated windows.
2. curtains. I could finish the stupid curtain project; that would also help with the heat loss.
3. summer solar cooker/barbeque.
4. a backyard digester -- methane, alcohol, or some other biofuel generator for our cooking fuel. Natural gas is bound to be plentiful for a while once the pipeline goes through, but that too will soon be gone. We need something we can generate ourselves. Maybe even hydrogen?
5. The digester might be able to provide some kind of heating fuel, also; in combination with wood or paper trash, we may be able to get by.
6. Use of solar heat for the transition periods in spring and fall, when we get lots of light and it isn't too cold. This, however, would involve a lot of setup and initial expense, which is our biggest problem.

Treehugger has some useful tips on home heating. Also, the Cold Climate Housing Research Center seems to have a few useful items on its website, but we'd be doing a retrofit -- on a VERY tight budget -- like most people, I imagine. The info at CCHRC seems mostly to involve health of existing houses or plans for new construction. There's lots of things anybody can do if they have the tens of thousands of dollars to throw at their house, but when you're living month to month, your choices become much more limited.

Oil and blood: the corporate reign

The Iraq oil partition being ballyhooed in the US media is a nightmare culminated. It is, as Mr. Escobar says, a "done deal".

The law was in essence drafted, behind locked doors, by a US consulting firm hired by the Bush administration and then carefully retouched by Big Oil, the International Monetary Fund, former US deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz' World Bank, and the United States Agency for International Development. It's virtually a US law (its original language is English, not Arabic).

But wait! didn't they try this earlier this year, and large fusses occurred?

The US government has been involved in drawing up the law, a draft of which has been seen by The Independent on Sunday. It would give big oil companies such as BP, Shell and Exxon 30-year contracts to extract Iraqi crude and allow the first large-scale operation of foreign oil interests in the country since the industry was nationalised in 1972.

Apparently the fuss just wasn't enough...

But I can't see the reaction to this on the ground in Iraq being good.

Oily politics

My, my, my. We aren't in Iraq for the oil, right, Georgie? Well, then, what about this?

A proposed new Iraqi oil and gas law began circulating last week among that country's top government leaders and was quickly leaked to various Internet sites - before it has even been presented to the Iraqi parliament.

Under the proposed law, Iraq's immense oil reserves would not simply be opened to foreign oil exploration, as many had expected. Amazingly, executives from those companies would actually be given seats on a new Federal Oil and Gas Council that would control all of Iraq's reserves.

In other words, Chevron, ExxonMobil, British Petroleum and the other Western oil giants could end up on the board of directors of the Iraqi Federal Oil and Gas Council, while Iraq's own national oil company would become just another competitor.

The new law would grant the council virtually all power to develop policies and plans for undeveloped oil fields and to review and change all exploration and production contracts....[These] big British and American companies had been shut out of Iraq, thanks to more than a decade of U.S. sanctions against Saddam.

I believe this is what we call "corporatocracy", a form of facism.

They're not even trying to be subtle anymore.

Body parts unmentionable

Apparently, the word "scrotum" is now on the censorship list. See, those wicked authors are trying to get one past the elementary school library censors, according to Julie Bosman of the New York Times:

Authors of children’s books sometimes sneak in a single touchy word or paragraph, leaving librarians to choose whether to ban an entire book over one offending phrase.

But, you know, any word for "balls" is going to be axed, 'cause it's one of those Unmentionable Body Parts, and the point behind censorship is to erase ideas, not words. In other words, even though every little boy (unless they're very unlucky) has a scrotum, they aren't supposed to know about it until they're, what? 18?

(Thanks to Joe of Joe Irvin's Blog for this amazing bit on vocabulary dimunition.)

Black & White party at the Annex

Alaskans Together is holding an organizing meeting at Noel Wien library tonight at 7, and on Friday they are putting on a fundraiser at the Annex, the Black & White Cocktail Party ($25 to get in). The group is attempting to defeat the discriminatory and bigoted benefit ban that certain twit legislators are trying to foist on us.

And Don said, "Duhhh..."

Don Young: hypocrite, ignoramus, and just wrong, wrong, wrong. Caught in a falsehood, he wouldn't retract his 'hang 'em high' nonquote of Abraham Lincoln--at least not at first. According to the Ear, though, he finally did on Friday, but I can't find it anywhere.

Here's what Lincoln actually said about war and presidents:

"Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so, whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose and you allow him to make war at pleasure. Study to see if you can fix any limit to his power in this respect, after you have given him so much as you propose. If, today, he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada, to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, 'I see no probability of the British invading us' but he will say to you 'be silent; I see it, if you don't.' The provision of the Constitution giving the war-making power to Congress, was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons: Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This, our Convention understood to be the most oppressive of all Kingly oppressions; and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us."

Back on track

The LEC is printed and is being folded and stapled today. So now I owe humongous amounts of money to our local xerox shop (along with everybody else) and a major project is about out of the way.

Whew!

LEC on hold...

Alas, the proof of the Local Et Cetera is on hold, as I just found out last night that one of the articles had some errors that needed to be corrected.

Sigh.

Books up the wazoo

Or rather, book manuscripts:

Jamie Smith has two manuscripts for me, one being the last collection of Freeze-Frame cartoons, the other being the first collection of Nuggets cartoons.

David Stone has a manuscript by a geologist acquaintance of his who spent many years looking at rocks near the gulags in Siberia, and sent carefully-worded letters back home to Ma. Interesting history and geology book.

Layla Lawlor has a collection of Freebird strips, plus a sci-fi graphic novel for me (and oh, yeah, I'm also distributing her graphic novel series, Raven's Children).

The Calligraphy of Birds, a book of poetry by a friend of Diane Hunt's, was submitted to me last fall, and I have to get that figured out and printed up, too.

So that's, let's see, seven books, including the distribution items. So now the only question is, where to get the up-front cash from? (Of course, that's always the question....)

Okay, so NOW can we impeach them?

We sent TWELVE BILLION DOLLARS IN CASH into a war zone. And poof! it vanished. Well, it wasn't a war zone at first (after the first few weeks), just an unsecured, restive country with lots of looting and murder and rape and improvised explosive devices and other signs of guerrila warfare--oops--flowers in the streets...I mean, the Mission was Accomplished back in May 2003, right?

Imagine that. Loose cash in a lawless zone goes away. Huh.

It's at the printer!

Finally! After being glued to the computer screen for what felt like months, the 4th edition of the Local Et Cetera is finally at Date-Line. I ended up not putting in the Index of the Absurd (no room), but it's still a good 80 pages long. The Ester Lexicon expanded quite nicely and Ansgar Clausen's photo collection yielded some great shots for it. There were fewer ads, which was a problem, but more directory listings.

Hopefully they'll sell like hotcakes and I'll be able to pay Date-Line fairly quickly...

$175,000 down the drain so far

So far, due to our so-called conservative legislators' bull-headedness, the Division of Elections has spent $175,000 on printing up ballots for the special advisory vote (lots cheaper to just take a poll, guys). And it's none other than North Pole's John Coghill who sponsored this stupid $1.2 million advisory boondoggle in the first place.

Hooray for Mike Doogan, who's got a sense of fiscal responsibility and is trying to head off this colossal waste of money.

Amazing, the effort and expense so much of our legislature is willing to go to so that a segment of Alaska's population can be relegated to second-class status. Just makes me feel all rosy and proud of our great state.

Not.

Let's all just be as mean and nasty as possible

...and waste as much money as we possibly can doing it. I mean, c'mon, folks, get real. The next time I hear some right-winger bitching about how much money we waste on, say, Denali Kid Care, or library vans, or rehab centers, or, hell, ANYTHING, I'm going to ask them how the hell we can afford $1.2 million on a stupid advisory vote to have a constitutionally mandated second class.

Home of the free and the brave, right. More like the home of the bigoted and fearful. Sheesh.

Garrison gets Cake

Garrison Keillor has opened up a new bookstore (I think the grand opening was late last fall), Common Good Books, and I recently received an order for Doreen Fitzgerald's book of poetry, Cake. Keillor's read three of Doreen's poems on the air so far (or will as of this week's Writer's Almanac): Dog Days, Sisters, and now Jack + Judy. It's extremely gratifying when a good poet gets some recognition for her work, and Dodie's good.

Moving

Today I spent a few hours sledding from the Clubhouse down the drive, across the street, and over to the Old Post Office Espresso Publishing House & Art Gallery (which is completely frosty), where I loaded up the sled with boxes of old issues and fodnickers and books and artworks, hauled 'em back up, and found places to stash 'em. Among the fodnickers was my old business license, framed. I replaced the old one with the new one and hung it up on the wall to the right of my desk.

Amy, who's been working away on her game (based on a Mexican card game, Loteria, and using some great photos she's taken of plants, insects, and a certain dog, among other subjects), decided that she needed to put up her business license, too, so now the Clubhouse is the official place of business for the Ester Republic and for Bad White Dog. Then Jeremy came up to play guitar for a while.

Hannah has yet to even see the interior of the place. I went over to the cabin yesterday, to get a few more items and rescue a plant from dehydration; it's amazing how much brighter and bigger this cabin is, even with a bed, couch, coffeetable, easy chair, and cozy chair (not to mention my and Amy's desks.

The Republic is still spread out in four places, but mostly gone from the cabin and the house. LOTS of paper to sort through.

Stupid typos and silly errors

The bane of the publisher's existence.

One of the things about publishing a newspaper and writing an editorial every month is that one's errors are right out there in print where people can point to them and show you how silly you are. I'm developing a thick(er) skin, but it still makes me wince when I take someone to task in my editorial--and then I screw up in some silly fashion like this:

Don Gray kindly pointed out that I had promoted Representative Mike Kelly to the Alaska State Senate in my January 2007 editorial. The gist of my editorial is still on, however, and it doesn't matter to me WHO utters the nonsense that Kelly did--it's still prejudicial nonsense.

Bigotry is, however, more dangerous when it is spouted by a government official or an elected representative, as they are in a position to put their bigotry into law or regulation.

Back on line!

Man, there is nothing like not being able to get on line or check your e-mail to make you appreciate it once you get it working again! The phone got disconnected, and then the Republic moved to one of the cabins behind the Eagle, and so for about two and half weeks I've been dependent on e-mail at work and on borrowing various folks' computers here and there. For a while I couldn't even check my webmail (mostly because I had forgotten how to do it and then kept looking at the root account instead of the e-mail account). Hooba, hooba! Now I can finally update the Republic website...

The new office is NICE. Big, bright walls, and I've painted my desk a color field of red and orange and sienna and yellow swirly brushy bits. Veddy cheerful. I'll have to take a photo of it and post it online.

Going solar: The problem with the SNAP program

In researching the possibilities for GVEA's SNAP program, the overwhelming issue for the Republic is one of initial setup costs. This is considerable, but GVEA's financial incentive doesn't come in the setup, only after everything's paid for. Elsewhere in the country, they aren't doing it this way:

Net metering essentially allows people to become mini-power producers. Programs vary state to state, but they are typically coupled with financial incentives that make it easier to invest thousands of dollars for photovoltaic panels, windmills or fuel cells. Since sun and wind are intermittent, customers still rely on the grid for steady service. The meter runs backward when more energy is produced than a customer consumes.

GVEA's program requires a separate meter, rather than net metering. Small producers can't expect the SNAP program to make it worth their while. But larger ones can, and so a few people are starting to supply GVEA with electricity. This is a good thing, but to get to their 20% renewable goal by 2014 (which is, I'm sorry to say, probably way too slow and too small a proportion), GVEA will have to get a larger, decentralized production from far more people. Still, GVEA is advertising the heck out of it, which sometimes isn't the case in other states or with other utilities.

Have you figured it out yet, Representative Young?

Yes, Don, you ol' dinosaur, you, there really is global warming.

First issue of the ninth year

Whew. Now the 93rd issue of the paper is at the printer, and I get to do yet another update to the website--er, once I get my internet connection hooked up again. It'll take a bit.

Here's the cycle of paper publishing:
1. late in the month, the early authors start sending me stuff. I see them around and they ask me what I think of their article/photo/poem, and I look at them blankly for a moment and say, "Huh? Oh! Oh, I haven't managed to look at it yet, I'm still cleaning up the last issue's stuff. I don't look at anything until after the first." The contributor looks faintly disappointed, and I walk away feeling guilty. So I go check my mail, if I can (a problem this last month). And maybe read some of the contributions.

2. It's the 2nd or 3rd, and I realize that I haven't read all the contributions I've received so far. I'm usually reminded of this because I get an e-mail or a phone call from some conscientious person letting me know that their piece needs a correction or addenda, or that they're really sorry they're late. I feel guilty.

3. I read the stuff I've got. "Hmm," I say to myself, "So-and-So hasn't got that thing in yet. And wow, look how nifty this unexpected beauty is. And omigod, I forgot to answer whatsizname!" I'm immediately buried in work. How did that happen AGAIN?

4. I send off a bunch of articles to my noble, long-suffering, hard-working, really really talented second editors, Lisa Sporleder, Jackie Stormer, and me mum, Carla Helfferich. Whew. Outta my hair. Oops. Forgot that one. And that one....

5. It's the 9th, and I'm getting antsy because I don't have any ads yet. Of course, they're not due until the 10th, but I start nagging my poor ad guy anyway. He's very patient. I start layout.

6. Somehow it got to be the 12th, and the paper's due at the printer tomorrow, and I haven't finished editing, and I don't have all the ads, and I don't have a cover photo, and I can't find my jump drive and where the heck is my checkbook???...AAAAUGH!!!

7. the 15th. I'm trying to shoehorn all the articles and photos and ads in. I hate this stupid thing. this is it, no more, I'm never doing another dingnabbed issue ever. I'll sell it. I'll throw all the papers in a bonfire and dance around it naked getting drunk and laughing hysterically. I'll run away to some impoverished tropical island and die of malnutrition and cockroach bites.

8. the 16th. IT'S LATE!

9. Later on the 16th, or maybe it's the 17th. It's late, but nobody notices. We pick up the paper at the printer and it's beautiful. We take it to the Eagle and people up and down the bar snatch up a copy and bury their heads in it. Conversation mutes to a quite rumble. I'm delighted, exhausted, all sniffly. Guess I'll do this again.

10. 17th or 18th. Update the website, deliver papers. Enter sales invoices. Mail out subscriptions and ad copies and contributor copies. Still buoyed by the paper's arrival, though. At least for a few days. Looking forward to the next batch of articles (and forgetting the frenzied pace of three weeks' worth of paper preparation).

Probably a good thing, huh?

Bipolarity

Writing to you from the Annex, where a few of us (Karl Franke, Hans Mölders, Amy Cameron, and I) are hanging out after the majority of the art viewers have come and gone. I had a wonderful time speaking with a woman by name of Céline (of France), and sold a couple of copies of Stuck in a Rut to some Scandinavian sorts. Our show was very nice, pretty much 2-D art, whereas McMurdo's show was mostly sculpture. Very fun show. Had to shout over the kids playing with Photo Booth (distored faces, weird colors, etc. on photos from the in-built camera on the computer here at the Annex (a Mac, of course).

In a free country, you'll do as I say

As Steven Zunes points out, it's a little odd for George Bush to be saying something like this:

To give every Iraqi citizen a stake in the country's economy, Iraq will pass legislation to share oil revenues among all Iraqis. To show that it is committed to delivering a better life, the Iraqi government will spend $10 billion dollars of its own money on reconstruction and infrastructure projects that will create new jobs.

Zunes' response:

it inevitably raises questions about a government's independence when the president of the United States can confidently announce that its parliament will pass certain legislation and spend a specific amount of money. Furthermore, the Iraqi government's budget is just over $20 billion. It clearly does not have the capacity to increase reconstruction efforts in the magnitude the President suggests.

Zune's piece, "Bush's Iraq Speech Annotated," is well worth reading. I couldn't bear to read the speech without those annotations; every other sentence Bush utters is bullshit, and I can't listen to him on the radio anymore or read anything he's said or written without losing it. It's hell on my concentration. But Zune's careful, point by point examination of this speech makes it possible--actual honesty and constructive suggestions are put between Bush's distortions and funhouse worldview, giving me the hope that sane people really could help Iraq and America.

The Mike Kelly Award

This year's Publisher's Picks will include the Mike Kelly Award, presented to the author who has provided a valuable lesson in civics or science, or who has provided much-needed sex advice in an article, poem, or whathaveyou. The award is inspired by District 7's current senator, Mike Kelly, who seems to need all three...

2006 in review

January

Plans for the 7th annual birthday bash fell through after nasty cold weather made it impractical. Hmm. Sounds like this year, although the 8th birthday bash is still on schedule.

The car died, the heater blew up, the house froze. We're still paying off the debt.

Redesigned the Republic.

February

Our local supporters of theocracy (Seekins, Coghill, Kelly) introduced a constitutional amendment to make it impossible for benefits to be offered to anybody but legally recognized spouses. The bill was written so broadly that heterosexual, unmarried or common-law couples would be affected, as would private business. Kelly, whose manhood seems to be easily threatened, is still ranting about the dire awfulness of offering (gasp!) health benefits. Apparently equal work does not deserve equal pay, in his eyes...

The state of Alaska decided it wouldn't release the 2004 voting data/database to the Democratic Party.

Don Young was implicated in the Abramof scandal.

The Green Party of Alaska got back on the ballot.

The Ester Republic held its 7th annual birthday bash. Delivered the Publisher's Picks for the first time.

March

Don Young voted for a food labeling bill (it passed) that prevents states from requiring stricter labeling than the feds. This means that, contrary to the unanimous vote of the Alaska Legislature, we can't require that GM fish or farm fish be labeled as such.

The second Library Lallapalooza and Book Bash raised a bunch of money for the Ester library but frayed the librarians' tempers. We resolved to be more relaxed and better prepared for it next time.

April

We got hit with a huge tax bill which we're still paying off.

Hans and I went to Anchorage for the Alaska Press Club conference. The Republic won third place for Jamie Smith's editorial cartoons.

May

The Republic's new office, the Old Post Office Espresso Publishing House & Art Gallery, was moved into the village square by Scott Allen.

Amy Cameron, Kate Billington, and I had our show, Vanishment, at the Annex. I sold a few pieces!

June

It snowed.

The new Republic office held its first opening on June 5 for the first Ester Art Walk.

Fairbanks Open Radio started up its website.

I gave Hans an electric guitar for his birthday. He's had fun all year frightening the cats with it.

Al-Zarqawi amazed the world by dying once again (for something like the third or fourth time). This time he wasn't able to get resurrected by the State Department or Bush's press secretary, as before.

We went to a Scandihoovian solstice party on Happy Road (read: St. Patrick's) where the partygoers took turns (in between drinking akvavit and mead and eating sild) charging down the road as horse and chariot and whapping a knight of the Crusades upside the head with an axe. Later a large malfunctioning trebuchet provided life-threatening entertainment by pitching boulders directly up. And then down again.

Senator Ted Stevens earned his nickname as "Tubes" Stevens for an unfortunate choice of words (and evident lack of understanding) regarding the Internet and e-mail.

July

Hosted Carnival of the Green #35.

Had my 45th birthday and felt old.

A new low in Alaska politics was struck: Frank Murkowski sent me (and far too many others) a piece of propaganda on his oil/gas proposal, disguised as "information," and featuring a photo of Murky Frank from 20 years ago. The net effect was that practically the entire state started wondering how to bill him personally for the expense of producing this little green gem.

August

Tim Easton, Rod Picott, and a bunch of local musicians appeared in a concert at the Malemute Saloon to benefit the Ester library. Wahoo!

Pat Davis and Chris Barefoot died.

September

Our Congressional delegation voted unanimously to give the US president dictatorial powers via the Military Commissions Act. Through some fancy-pants redefinitions, the term "accused" became synonymous with "guilty" and "torture" became softened to "interrogation". Christians everywhere were shamed by Reverend Louis P. Sheldon, who appears to think that medieval standards of justice are appropriate when somebody Muslim has been suspected of, well, anything.

The Ester Post Office celebrated its 100th year of service to the "Arts & Mines of Ester". I stood up in front of my neighbors and made a speech, and -- astonishingly -- had fun doing it!

October

Don Young demonstrated his legendary prognostication skills once again with his firm pronouncement that the Democats wouldn't take over the House.

Ralph Seekins, theocratist (see above), deigned to visit Ester's firehouse to discuss the possibility of not bumping the expansion project from the top of the list anymore and maybe funding it this year. If, of course, Mr. Finance Chair got back in office. Funny, when he was in office he didn't seem too interested in what Ester or its fire department needed.

In a stunning display of fiscal irresponsibility and plain stupidity about the history of walls on borders, Congress and Bush pass into law the American/Mexican fence bill. Never mind the delightful price tag it comes with.

The borough assembly played ostrich and voted down a resolution that would have called for Donald Rumsfeld's resignation.

Mike Musick tromped Bonnie Williams and won a seat on the borough assembly.

November

The American public, sick to death of the corruption in Washington, threw the bastards out. Alas, Diane Benson only gave Don Young a scare with 40% of the vote. Alaska's voting lunkheads stuck us with Yon Dung for another two years. Ralph Seekins and Jim Holm got tossed out on their ears, and David Guttenberg was reelected with flying colors.

A flap commenced with GVEA and certain fishy financial figures were promoted by our electric utility. Much fuss commenced.

December

GVEA's G&T proposal failed, with a whopping 21% turnout. GVEA's CEO and board president demonstrated clearly that they didn't believe that the membership had a clue. It was, according to them, just a problem in public relations, rather than anything substantive. Well, now the membership knows where the problem lies.

Solstice and Christmas and New Year's all came again much too quickly, but it finally dawned on me that next year, I should take vacation the week BEFORE, and maybe I can get what I need to done in time!

Eight years of publication

The Ester Republic has produced 92 issues over the last eight years, and has gradually but steadily improved in quality and timeliness, I'm happy to say. The News-Miner has yet to quote from one of my editorials in their "What Others Say" section, but we've been skunking them in the editorial cartoons department every year since 2002 at the Alaska Press Club awards banquet, so I feel mollified.

The Publisher's Picks Awards have been VERY difficult to determine this year...I thought last year was hard! Ha! Even with runner-ups and inventive categories it's been really hard--the contributions were just so much better this year. I've been very pleased that I've been able to provide some renumeration occasionally, although it's not much.

It's going to be a rough month: the Local Et Cetera is almost done, I have to pick out the Alaska Press Club submissions, I'll be moving (again!), and it's FORTY BELOW ZERO! Brrr.