We know that all of Alaska's recent US Senators are Crazy.
Turns out, the old-school the Old School Alaskan Senators take a back seat to no one.
I did get a chance to view the Crazy Fish Plane up close, when a flight
I was on parked next to it at Anchorage international.
On the other hand, this article mentions seven - SEVEN - inflight
depressurization events in a week. Throw that on the pile with the
five they had two months ago.
Crazy Fish Plane - what the hell's going on?
http://www.adn.com/news/alaska/story/7478826p-7388873c.html
A minimally tempting Housewive
A distinguished graduate of Yale University
A broadly popular African American
A Presidential Assassin*
His accomplice*
Another distinguished graduate of Yale University
Another broadly popular African American
The Fraud Against the American Taxpayer which is
(UPDATE: The below-discussed "Maggie's Song - Walls Of Stone" Is it me, or is there more than a hint of Phil Collins' Coming In The Air Tonight in this)
this one's for my buddy Anthony because I know he is, like me, a
collector of unredeemably horrible radio ads, which is a hobby anyone
here in Anchorage must take up if they want to listen to the radio.
Anchorage, for obvious reasons, doesn't have the highest ad rates
for radio, most notably on its hopelessly feeble sportstalk network
(major announcement from earlier THIS YEAR: "we finally have a
website!"), and now, i've found, on it's Air America affiliate, which
carries Al Franken (snapshot opinion: Al is great; the rest of AA's
talent is unlistenable).
Anchorage's radio, in fact, is so feeble that the sports station -
which has nothing but ESPN's network feed and, inexplicably, Seattle
pro teams, but nothing local - fills a solid half of it's commerical
time with public service announcements. I assume they just can't sell
the time.
So these PSA: there are, maybe, 4. All horrible, all boring, all
insulting ('don't be an energy hog' 'natives saved lewis and clark,'
'poverty sucks' 'gun crimes' etc).
They suck.
And then, over the horizon and gone from the pack, is the Arbor Day
Foundation ad.
This ad, which i guess is supposed to help trees, incites me nearly
to forest arson. It's this soaring, pulsing, hateful song by some
overwrought woman singer, extolling trees, who wants you to plant
"trees across the nation!!!"
It's like Helen Ready-goes-Green. Absolutely the most brutal 30
seconds you'll ever sit through in your car short of an engine fire.
I actually have seen a toned-down version on TV - similiar music -
but the radio one is 30 times as grating. And it's on EVERY SINGLE
commercial break, occasionally TWICE.
It's been probably a year since i heard the end of it - it's a
stone-cold channel turner everytime.
I know Anthony and I have had several conversations about the
unassailable horrors of the Arbor day ad.
Well, we have a serious contender:
over here on 1080, during Franken (and other times) is the Maggie The
Elephant ad.
Maggie, you'll recall, is the Anchorage Zoo's elephant, which they
shouldn't have. It's Alaska. We don't need elephants! Not surprisingly, she's gotten a
lot of press over the years.
Evidently, there is a "save maggie" group. (UPDATE: it's called Friends of Maggie, and this is their site). They want Maggie out of the
state. As far as i know, they might be a front group for some Lower 48
Zoo looking to get Maggie on the cheap. I don't know. I'm not getting
involved.
And i'm REALLY not getting involved after being subjected - over and
over - to their ad.
So you get the over-wrought woman, but this time just talking and
reading a script, with every cliche of useless feel-goodism imagineable
("we love maggie but we need to think of her needs" "elephants are
social, and they grow lonely when seperated from their own kind").
But over the top of this ad is - well, it's amazing.
It's another woman (maybe the same one) chanting - yes, chanting -
in a distinctly native-america way, only in complete white-girl
English. Only not in sentences. Just words and phrases. Just
uninterrupted moans of "Free! Freedom! Set us free! Love free" I'm telling you, tuneless moaning. Unreal.
See the link above to hear it.
It's the audio-version of a trunk covered with bumper stickers.
But here's the hammer: somebody has a drum. Ya know, a
drum-circle, bongo-like drum.
And they have no earthly clue what to do with it.
bangbang-bang-(pause)-bang-bang-(pause)-bang-(pau-)bangbang. Like,
rhythm-on-opposite day. Absolutely no connection to the voice, nor to
any sense of time.
bang bang.
Just absolutely horrific. Moaning, rhythm-less banging and an
annoying woman prattling on about an elephant's feelings.
Anthony - you need to get in on this.
ps - i just realized: the sports network has local programming - high
school football playoffs and hockey - local minor league (go Aces!) and
UAA.
Which still doesn't explain why the hell they think anyone wants to
listen to the Mariners.
Happy Halloween - In the vein of Holiday Craziness, do not miss Christopher Walken, replete with echo
effects, screaming wind and accompanied by eerie guitar, reciting The
Raven. Still another gift of Coverville, the best podcast I know
about.
And straight from the U. Alaska-Anchorage catalog:
Distance learning, from New Hampshire (really!)
- enrolled students must have access to broadband internet, spreadsheet and database software, extreme cold and lotsa Crazy.
And that's his own press release.
Some of the better lines he let fly on the floor of the Senate: he
said he would quit the Senate if the Coburn amendment passed, saying "I
don't threaten people, I promise people."
I do enjoy the comparison between the Bridge To Nowhere and the Golden
Gate Bridge.
among the highlights: the state rep referenced in the top of the story
is my local rep. muldoon, the stated neighborhood, is my nieghborhood.
and as good as the story is, go through all 10 of the pictures - don't
miss the one with the gator at the top of the stairs and the nervous
cat at the bottom.
i said 'gator'.
matt
http://www.adn.com/news/alaska/story/7105489p-7012472c.html
Only half a mil? But winter's coming and baby needs new muckluks!
That was the real headline on Yahoo! sports all weekend. Couldn't
have picked a better word. (Here's what I thought)
#2: Meanwhile, back in CrazyLand: "Inmate flees after father's
funeral"
it's not for all the marbles from the one-inch line in hip-high grass.
Just another weekend in Crazy.
Here's a great story that covers several drums I like to bang here on
the Crazy list.
http://www.adn.com/news/alaska/story/7055837p-6959976c.html
This story provides both the context and details of the absurdity of
the "The Bridge to Nowhere" in Southeast at Ketchikan. $223 Million of
federal money for a bridge connecting an isolated town with a
population of a few thousand, and a completely empty island.
Now you will be able to take flights be able to get on the Crazy
FishPlane at Ted Stevens International, land at Don Young International
and take the Bridge to Nowhere - all of it courtesy of the American
taxpayer.
I can't wait.
Oh, fish plane... will you ever learn?
and I'm one wise-ass remark away from putting John McCain on the
Rabbi's Enemies List.
He may love Freedom, but McCain clearly hates Crazy, which in my book
is the same thing.
matt
Hurricane Katrina hits Alaska. Sort of.
Those gunning for Don Younge's bridge - which, really, is anybody on
earth who's looked at it - are now using Katrina to slow it down. Of course, what
they're really doing is trying to defund stuff they already hated,
using the hurricane as a cover, but there it is.
If you like Crazy, then this may break the record: Don Younge may have
to go to bat for PBS.
matt
How the bankruptcy changes are playing against the PFD.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/A/AK_BANKRUPTCY_LAW_ALASKA_AKOL-?
SITE=AKFAI&SECTION=HOME
http://www.adn.com/news/alaska/story/6979973p-6880201c.html
"Neighbors said the man who lives in the apartment upstairs from the
shooting was not home at the time the shots were fired."
Phew. course, who could live upstairs from a raging Anchorage XBox
party?
matt
had the football waiting for him.
http://www.adn.com/news/alaska/story/6956452p-6856256c.html
http://www.adn.com/news/alaska/story/6943903p-6843093c.html
"He plans on using the new cannonball as a doorstop. That's what he was
going to do with the other one."
matt
twice in one day - crazy is on the march!
http://www.adn.com/news/alaska/story/6933283p-6832200c.html
i flew over this bridge a few months back. nicest bridge. big river.
you have to drive about 50 miles of horrible road from the nearest
anything to get there. and by 'anything', i mean, a town you can't
drive you to in the first place.
and then you cross the bridge. and a mile later, no more road.
matt
When he called police and the bomb squad showed up at his Anchorage home last week, Yale Metzger just wanted them to examine the cannonball he had picked up in Cordova. He didn't want them to bring out the remote-controlled robot, haul away the cast iron ball and blow it to smithereens.
But that's what they did.
Now Metzger is saying the Anchorage Police Department was looking for an excuse to dynamite something and that they owe him a cannonball.
The police are calling Metzger "an idiot" for carrying the incendiary device around in his truck, then bringing it into downtown Anchorage, where they say it could have sent shrapnel flying for blocks had it exploded.
Metzger, a 45-year-old Anchorage attorney, found the 4-inch, 8-pound, cast iron ball in downtown Cordova last summer while excavating property he had purchased. It was unearthed in what was most recently a snow dump.
Metzger put it in the back of his pickup, where it rolled around for a year, he said. Over time he began to investigate how a cannonball -- an archaic projectile that stopped being used more than a century ago -- could have ended up in Cordova at the southeastern end of Prince William Sound in the Gulf of Alaska. One possibility he came up with was that it came from the ships of Russian or European commercial traders in the 18th century that were in the area looking for lucrative sea otter pelts.
State archaeologist Dave McMahan said other cannonballs have been found in Anchorage, Valdez and Sitka, adding that the Russians were pretty much all over Alaska during their occupation in the 1700s.
But "it is doubtful we will ever know where exactly it came from," he said of Metzger's find.
Linda Yarborough, archaeologist for the Chugach National Forest near Cordova, says round iron balls were used to crush ore in gold mine machines. Not having seen Metzger's, she can't say for sure, but her hunch is that it could have come from a mill at the historic McKinley Lake Mine east of Cordova that dates to the early 1900s.
"Unfortunately, not having it, it is really hard to look at a picture and figure out what it might have been," Yarborough said. Photos of the object are the only evidence Metzger now has of his souvenir.
Anchorage police, however, say a fuse hole in the device convinced them it was a cannonball, and the explosion when they destroyed it backs that position.
The experts say whichever possibility may be true, the ball was of historic value. And that is precisely what incenses Metzger.
Several weeks ago, he decided to bring his find to his Anchorage home on 11th Avenue. He got a friend to pack it with him on a state ferry. Metzger had heard of old cannonballs blowing up, but he chalked up those stories largely to urban myth or at least something that happens extremely rarely.
Still, once it was in Anchorage, Metzger was slightly concerned the ball could be still active and thought he would check it out. He wanted to know if his cannonball was solid or hollow, and if it was hollow, did it have volatile black powder?
He tried to get a friend at the airport's Transportation Security Administration to put it through one of the machines. That didn't work; it would have gotten his friend in trouble. He tried to get a friend at a medical office to X-ray it, but the machine was judged not powerful enough.
So he called the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. They told him to call the Anchorage Police Department.
Police said they would take a look at it. Last Monday, the bomb squad took one look at it sitting in Metzger's garage and treated it like a bomb seconds away from blowing.
"Could it have exploded?" Metzger asked. "Sure. So could a meteor fall out of the sky and hit your truck."
The bomb squad vehicle contained a portable X-ray machine that could have determined if the cannonball was hollow, but that wasn't an option, said police Sgt. Ray Jennings, head of the bomb squad. The super-powerful rays to see through metal would have punched through Metzger's walls and his neighbors', exposing everyone to the harmful rays, he said.
Taking a look at it, the police knew by the fuse hole that it was potentially live, they said.
"A cannonball is nothing more than a large grenade," Jennings said. "It could have sent metal flying blocks."
Metzger wanted the squad to take the cannonball and X-ray it elsewhere, but deputy chief Audi Holloway said, defending the department's decision, that moving it just puts officers in unnecessary danger.
"You never know what point an explosive device is at," he said. "If it is anything that may have explosives in it, that may cause damage to a person or property, we have to assume it will explode. We have to destroy it."
The bomb squad exploded the cannonball at the Anchorage Landfill, said Lt. Paul Honeman, but police won't say how for security reasons. Sgt. Jeff Morton confirmed that a secondary explosion occurred and said a different color of smoke blurted out, making it certain that the cannonball had volatile black powder.
Did the police destroy a potentially important historical artifact?
"We're not going to put a bomb technician's life in jeopardy over a cannonball or anything else," Jennings said. He called Metzger "an idiot" for bringing the bomb into town and for questioning the bomb squad's decision to destroy it.
Now Metzger wants the police to buy him another cannonball on eBay.
"I was going to make a doorstop out of it. They owe me a cannonball."