Crazy Neighborhood

In Alaska, we like our sunsets, northern lights, formal wear and domeciles the same way - as colorful as possible.

These houses, both of which recieved these paint jobs in the last year, are about 100 yards apart on my street.

Crazy Fishing II

Went fishing last weekend in Seward. In two days of trolling around the Kenai peninsula, I caught....


Alaska's smallest halibut (not to be confused with this halibut)...

...And...

Alaska's ugliest fish.

If you can't see the bulging eyes, orange and yellow scales and the huge mouth (it's a kind of bass), then take my word for it: it's ugly.

Crazy Lawn Care

Got the bikes out last night and went for a quick ride through the
neighborhood- near 60s, bright sun 9pm (post-Hacienda's, so speed was
not the goal).

One guy was mowing his lawn, odd since everybody's grass is dead.
Another guy within a block, was snowblower-ing his lawn - odd because
all the snow is gone. except i guess at his house.

matt

ps - got our 'favorite' waitress at Hacienda's. Had to ask for a knife
3 times and soda 4. Then when we paid with 2 credit cards (party of
4), she took one to the register, said she'd come back for the other.
she did - 10 minutes later. by that time she was giving us the
stink-eye for taking her table.

Crazy Dots II

Well, look who suddenly seems squeemish on ANOTHER high-profile, too-close to call, power-for-power's-sake Senate vote?

First the rules of democracy, now the fate of the UN. James Bond, call your office - the Native Corps got ya beat.

Crazy Bears

If Soldotna is the Capital of Crazy, Kaktovic is the extension office.

Rising Tide of Crazy

Here we go.

Crazy Dots

Hmmmm..... let's play Connect the Crazy Dots.

Let's see. Dot 1: the US Senate is currently considering the "nuclear option," yanking the filibuster out its rulebook for votes on federal judge confirmations (an horrific idea regardless of your ideology, but that's not what this post is about. not at all).
One of the key votes the rule-changing Republicans need to pass that rule change is none other than the otherwise inconsequential junior Senator from Alaska, Lisa Murkowski. Senator Murkowski's highly Crazy road to her current post has been well chronicled here and elsewhere.
Senator Murkowski, who if she does anything well, it's vote as she's told, has a superb record as being an automatic vote for whatever the Establishment Republican Leadership wants (keep in mind, her "boss," as she's publicly called him, Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, is very much a heavy-hitter in that Leadership).
Why, then, this week is she acting so coy on this highly-charged, hyper-high profile vote?

Meanwhile, in what we can all safely assume is utterly unrelated government lawmaking minuteau (sp?), reps from other states are starting to ask a question that Alaskans have comfortably not asked themselves for many years: Just what in the hell is going on with all these Alaskan Indian companies?
And that is VERY bad news for Alaska's well-documented federal pork habit and, nominally, for Alaskan Natives.
Dot #2.
Here's a Mother Jones article that nails it completely, but very briefly, thanks to Ted Steven's legal acumen, Alaska native tribes (DON'T call them Eskimos... (read to "Mascot")) can set up corporations that are utterly exempt from government contracting laws - they get special access to no-bid projects, and the projects have no legal size limit. They can also sign up to do these contracts with "partners."
This is true, in all of Federal contracting law, ONLY for Alaska Native Corps.
On the upside, it beats forcing natives into the casino game (which would likely be doomed in, say, Nome).
On the downside, it puts Halliburton and similiarly sized (and connected) firms, through the 'partners' loophole, bypass nearly every line of defense between them and the Republic's Treasury.

Alaska is still the great untamed land in nearly every resepct, as I hope this blog chronicles - and it certainly is true for politcal gouging.

So now let's draw our line....
A couple of relatively tough reps from state's not lucky enough to have licences to steal start poking around Alaska's and Ted Steven's Golden Rule.
And, out of nowhere, the unknown, powerless junior Senator from deeply-red Alaska appears to get a case of the vapors at the notion of playing hardball.

Crazy Bridge and OCB

They had a a public hearing - a PUBLIC HEARING!!!! - on the Bridge to CrazyTown!
Man, if i'da known they were gonna
let the Crazy People come talk about the Crazy Bridge, you couldn't
have kept me away. damn.

this story is pretty straight. No mention of the woman, reported on local NPR, who wanted the funds diverted to a subway to Kenia. As the Rabbi Says, "Buy me a token. I'm on the Subway to Dairy Queen!"

If Alaska has an answer to hip hop's late, great Ol' Dirty Bastard (ODB - RIP), it has to be Frank. And just like ODB, the OCB says: Gimme My Money!

Watershed Crazy

A Banner Week For Crazy. Nay, a Watershed in Crazy History. This week, Crazy chokes the air of the 49th state, vibrating through the atmosphere like the Northern Lights after one of those 100-million-mile long solar flares gets loose.
Crazywise, we are off the charts.

Let me start personal, than blow it up to the full Crazy scope.

I’m in Fairbanks this week for one of the capstones of Crazy Air Force training, the Arctic Survival school aka Cool School. In practice, the concept is crazier (Camping in Alaska! In February! Without tents!) than the reality (teens and 20s this week), but classes with 4 hours of daylight per day and ambient temps of negative 50 are not unheard of.
Anyhoo, that’s where I am, which perhaps has been the karmic trigger for the Crazy eruptions, but who can say? I made the roadie up here, driving the 400 miles from Anchorage to Fairbanks, a trip on which I figured I might be able to hunt down some crazy but no – I only had to keep gas in the car. It found me.
Gas station #1 – Just north of anchorage in the Palmer/Wasilla area, which are two suburbs. Only, apparently, there’s a sweet spot on the map between them – so 100 yards east of my gas station was Wasilla sales taxes. 100 West was Palmer sales taxes. Mine was no sales taxes.
A little weak, but just the opening act.
Gas station #2 – in a strip mall in North Pole (Fairbanks suburb, 10 miles from the Cool school and – as the highway sign now says – 2004 State Football Champions), next to a barber’s shop. Big sign on the barber’s window, handpainted – “I Will Be Closed For Surgery” (Dammit! Now we have to go all the way into Fairbanks for Surgery! - Thankee!!!!)

And now, the three damndest things. First, the Big One.
Or, rather, the No Longer Big One.
Destined to be a national story. Just remember's whose Crazy it is.


‘No Problem With Appeal’
As he asked his girlfriend: “I don't Believe it. Do you?” Let me answer for all of us: If it was anywhere else, no. But...


North To Alabama
Call me a screamin' liberal, but you show me a petition to ban King Salmon fishing in Alabama, I’ll sign it.
Let me give this story just a bit more serious discussion than it deserves: I like PETA in the same sense I like the NRA and Jerry Falwell and grooved pavement on freeways. Without them you might just drive straight off into the abyss before you knew you were out of the lines. PETA is nothing if not a group of moral absolutist blind to the holes in their morality, but isn't that the best part of being morally absolut? (as The Enemies List might put it "No Grey Areas, Only Enemies!") So I am never offended or shocked by PETA's antics and I’m often amused.
But I am offended by this story strictly as a consumer of liberal social movements.
I fall pretty firmly in the same corner as (to name a few of my most-abused favorites) the ACLU, the Sierra Club, the NAACP, Greenpeace, even the sorry-ass Democratic National Committee. And here's PETA - not so much 'one of us' but with a long list of common enemies - wasting everybody's time (and money) without even managing to show a clear grasp of the difference between Alaska and Alabama.
PETA picks up some first downs with most people when they stick to industrial cattle farms, animal lab testing and the lunacies of the fur-wearing world. And then they trot out something like this.
I’m fully aware that this is a publicity stunt and nothing more. Indeed, pub stunts are often what many groups on 'my' side are reduced to. But since these things are our only real weapons, I'd appreaciate it if PETA didn't waste one. Because this whole deal is gruesomely ill-concieved, likely only to alienate friends and set back real debate. Is that the goal?
There. I had my say.

If I had to pick a favorite, it would be the skydiver. Genital mutilation and PETA-attacks are good, but for pure Alaska Crazy, you can't beat a paranoid skydiving wack-job defending himself in open court. Except when he's surpised by the verdict.

Like I said, the sky is positively aglow up here.

Matt

Crazy Motto

Everything you need to know about life in Alaska

Lost in Crazy

A downtown, relatively famous bar in Anchorage apparently has one of its t-shirts featured on ABC's Lost.

I've never missed an episode of lost, from the debut on. And as for Humpy's the halibut tacos are definetly in Anchorage's top 10 best meals.

Turns out, everybody got some Crazy

told ya i wasn't alone up there (see next post).

also, a friend in Austin emailed to say an east-coast friend of his was also up there.

Crazy.

Mt. Washington, NH: Surprisingly UnCrazy

The best food on earth - and arguments will not be entertained - is the foil-wrapped, room-temperature, two-day-old leftovers that you thought were in your backpack on top of the mountain that are actually waiting in the car when you get back down.

Right there on the passenger seat where you left it.

It's the first painless, comfortable sensation since you left the car
that morning, the get-well dose on a gaping calorie deficit, an unplanned reward for the climb, and it comes with that little victory of knowing you didn't drop it along the way for some lousy, unappreciate squirrel.

I was reminded of this Law Of The Human Digestive System today when I
got back to my car late this afternoon and found the last three -
THREE!!! - slices of a spinach-roni stomboli from a place that knew how
to make it. Three full, soft, warm, lustily flavorful slices.

A perfect way to cap a climb up New Hampshire's - ney, New
England's - tallest, meanest, nastiest hill, Mt. Washington.

Now, let me tell you a little about Mt. Washington, how it vaguely fits
into the Alaska Crazy profile, and how my climb today was Crazy, even
by our high standards in the 49th state.

Mt. Washington, over 6K ft, sits at the three-way intersection of three
weather corridors. Weather comes down from Canada and the great lakes,
in the from the Atlantic and up from the south, and hits right on top
of Mt. Washington's bare shoulders.
The highest windspeed ever recorded on earth - 230 MPH, or some such
lunacy - was on Mt. Washington. 100MPH winds - sustained - can happen
any day, any season. Gusts way past that.
One of the well-built buildings on top of the mountain is literally
chained to the ground, with three iron, maritime-anchor-looking chains
going all the way up and over the roof, like the building was going to
make a break for it.
In fact, in the climbing world, it's a truism that Mt. Washington is
the only place in the Lower 48 that can, reliably, simulate the
conditions that ambitious climbers are likely to find on extended trips
in - wait for it! - Alaska.

In short, no matter who you are or where you are from - even if it's
Alaska - Mt. Washington can kick your ass.

And, like the rest of New England in winter, Mt. Washington's
angriest month, on average, is February.

Which is why I must report that as I stood on the summit today, the wind whipped itself up to a howling, sustained, 3 MPH. Gusts were way past that - like, 6.
Temps in the high-30s - in the shade. Out in the sun, i'd put it at
mid-50s. And 'out in the sun' was pretty much everywhere, since it
was, as the pilots like to say, 'severe clear' tO every point of the
compass.


Now, all over the mountain were, i'd like to think, some of the
upper-crust of New England's climbing community, at least 100 other
climbers. Each of them, without exception, was dragging full-sized
packs full of what i'm sure was survival gear of the highest order.
Absolutely everyone had the sturdiest of deep-cold hiking boots, many
of the plastic kind, and much more than half had on crampons, some as
early in the trip as the parking lot.
It was a mountain of people who were, in a word, scared.
I had plastic boots and crampons, too. Right there strapped to my
backpack. Same place as my mountain axe. Nobody was going to tell me i didn't know what to
bring.
But I don't think i was imagining the just-plain resentment in
the faces of absolutely everybody i passed when they looked down and
saw I was doing the whole thing in running shoes. And a tshirt.

So to my fellow Alaskans on this list considering whether or not
they want to take on the mighty pride of east coast mountaineering, the
bruiser from New Hampshire, the meanest square mile of real estate this side of Tibet, Mt. "Worse Weather Than Alaska" Washington - deep in the heart of
February, no less - my advice to you is do NOT underestimate the Beast:
Bring LOTS of sunscreen. And maybe a kite - in case the wind ever
does actually blow.

Oh! And get the Stomboli from Delancy's the night before,
matt

Crazy Disclosure

Okay. Just so the record is set, here's the Mt. Washington Weather observatory's page for Feb 6, 2005, the day of my climb discussed above. Note the weather report is from 5am that day, and it obviously got much warmer by the time i got to the summit about 1pm.

Here is the comments from the weather intern who lives up there:

Sunday saw some of the most extreme weather on Mount Washington in years. That's right, good weather on the summit can be considered extreme. At 42F we smashed the old record high of 33F set in 1938. Just one degree shy of the all-time monthly record. Monday's record high has also been exceeded. Daily records are broken quite regularly though, often several times a year. The extreme event happened around 9am when the winds became completely calm. Even the slightest breath of air could not be found on the summit. If you visit the top of Mount Washington in the winter you are more likely to experience 130mph gusts than calm winds.

With all the nice weather in the mountains there was a flood of activity on the Rockpile this weekend. Scores of people reached the summit on both Saturday and Sunday. At times the Observation Deck was as crowded as a summer afternoon, and the summit crew could be seen playing baseball. In the late afternoon I found corn snow skiing the east snowfields. What a weekend!

For perspective, here are the archived pages of Mt. Washington weather from the same day in recent years:
Feb. 6, 2002
2003
2004.

Semester At Crazy

Damn Coasties get all the good ones.

"I'm Tech Sgt. White. I'm here to rescue you, you, you, not you, and
you."

State Champs of Crazy

Ladies and Gentlemen, your 2004 Alaska State Football Champions...

The Patriots of North Pole High School.

them Elves'll Hitchee.

And by the way, the Pats are just the second non-Anchorage team to ever win State.

InFlight Emergency Crazy

an international airliner from Tokyo to Houston (and
seriously - you can KEEP that flight) diverted to Cold
Bay, Alaska - scroll down to find it.
(and here's a Cold Bay-meets-airplane link that defies description - throwing snow into the engine?)
My favorite bit is that the locals had to ferry the
passengers to the local gyms in their own cars and the town's only two school buses.

Now...not ONLY is this the second
Tokyo-to-a-Major-US-City flight to land here in 3
years, making the state's #2 destination for
international flights...

And not ONLY could the entire population of the
town (80) fit on the plane, probably, four times
over...

And not ONLY did most of the passengers not speak
English...

But they landed there because Cold Bay, Alaska
evidently has a Cold War (could there be another
kind?) runway built for bombers.
Which gives the town, by my math, 125ft of runway
per resident.

I'm gonna just close the nominations right now and
declare Cold Bay the undisputed World
Runway-Length-Per-Capita Champion.

Shakin it like Crazy

Yesterday an anchorage study of it's disaster readiness concluded the city is vastly underprepared for a major earthquake. In 1964 a quake literally destroyed most of the city, the rebuilding of which Danny, Mandy and I all agree accounts for the Soviet-level of ugly achitecture that now litters the town).
They said some sections of the city could expect to be without power for a month.
That's a rather stark claim for a city that spends 4 or more months hovering around 0. But here was the part that leaped out at me: Of the 15 largest earthquakes ever recorded on the planet, 10 were in alaska.

POST-TSUNAMI UPDATE!!!! Make that 10 of the last 16.

Be Crazy To Your School

We've got snow on the caps of the mountains out the
back door this morning. We had a light coat a week or
so ago, but it was hard to take that seriously when
the temps were back up in the 60s the following day,
sending locals running for their cars to bump up the
air condition.

And that reminds me of the mid-July moment when
I stood outside an auto repair shop, up drove the
shop's shuttle van, and out hopped an old timer,
having just dropped off somebody's car. He walked
inside the store and announced, "Whew! Man, you don't
realize how hot it is outside when you've got the A/C
on until you open that door. It just hits you like a
blast." It was about 72 with a nice breeze.

So there's that.


But this time the snow looks a little more determined and
its cold enough outside to get your fingers chilly, so
I think it's got a chance to stay.

To the Crazy update:
We're closing in on the State Football Playoffs in the
football season, with only two regular season games
left. Last week, as you might have heard, local
sports factory Service High went to Montana for a
game. And got beat 86-0.

But Service isn't my favorite team. I think my
favorite high school team just became the tiny 1A
fishing village of Aniak. Aniak is one of those
native villages which is also home to year-round
population of white fishermen.

And their kids take the field under the monicker of
the Aniak Halfbreeds.

When somebody told me that last week, I flat didn't
believe them. Google it yourself, it you like.

And here's another one, as promised in this
newsletter's charter, about dog mushing. And, in this
case, how much lots of people hate it.

Ya know, all i can say on this is that these people
are fighting the wrong fight. You don't have to learn
much about dog sledding to realize it isn't cruel at
all (though it's certainly Crazy), except to any
sensable nose. From personal experience, I can tell
you that if you get yourself passed on a ski trail by
a dog team, you're in for several minutes of
unbearable stink that wind doesn't help.
And per that article, it's particularly hard to
take seriously the anti-mushing efforts of anybody in
Florida.

and just for the heck of it, hockey players behaving
badly.

Crazy on DVD

Some more on the DVD marauder:


And proud to say Mandy and I spotted these a month ago on a walk back on these trails. (and don't miss the part where the guy calls Anchorage a 'metropolis')"

Crazy Fish

bigfish
Originally uploaded by pjmatt05.

- Mandy and I went Halibut fishing a few weeks ago and
she caught a 70 pounder. That was good, best on our
boat. It took her 30 minutes and a week's worth of
sore arm to drag it aboard.

Not near impressive as this woman.

Quick Crazy

A few quick Crazy eruptions:

- We're keeping our elephant. Phew.
I will most DEFINITELY let you know when the
world's first elephant treadmill arrives.

With wrist-snapping force are we pushing back the
walls of legal history in the 48th state.
we just tried, and acquited, the first murder case
in the entire nation where the defendent was charged
with murder for causing a fatal traffic wreck because
he was watching a DVD in his car.
A guy in Kenai - right next to Soldotna, home to the
patriotic water-thrower - did some bad driving and
killed a couple of old people. And he did have a DVD
in his car, which COULD be viewed from the drivers
seat.
By the way, none of that, including the act of
watching TV while driving, is illegal in the 49th
State.
So the prosecutor wrung him up for Murder.
Apparently, the DA failed to present any evidence
that he was actually watching the TV.
So he walked.
Now, i see that logic, but i kinda have to squint
because... he absolutely killed those people. Not a
contested fact.
But he killed them while NOT watching TV, so it's
not murder. hmmm....
Pay special attention to the parts about the
winking cops.

Crazy Crazy

So It's 1pm and I just woke up for the very reasonable
reason, i think, that I flew all last night on a
distinctly Alaskan rescue mission. We found our way
out towards Glenallen, for those of you who speak
Alaska-WhereAboots, at 3am.
We (where "we" = 20 members of the national guard and
two of our airplanes) were sent out there to recover
a guy who managed to crash his truck in a corner of
Alaska 400 miles from a hospital (ie, most of Alaska).
He was good and beat up - broken-ish back,
broken-for-sure-ribs, etc. Defintely got his money's
worth out of the crash. But nothing that you wouldn't
see twice a night on an ambulance in any fair-sized
city.
But what makes for a 20 minute,
don't-bother-with-the-sirens EMS run in Charlotte, in
Alaska is literally the starting bell to call out the
National Guard.
My cell phone started hopping off the kitchen
counter at 11:40 last night. We landed back home just
after 5am.
Most fun, though, was, due to the late hour and the
late date in summer, the flight was the very first for
every single member of both crews in darkness since
April. There simply is no darkness to fly through in
Alaska during summer months until - well, until right
about last night, actually.
That made for a keystone-cops episode of medical
work in the back. If you had emptied the contents of
a hospital's dumpster into the back of our Blackhawk,
there wouldn't have been more junk (on the other hand,
if you've never stuck an IV by the light of a mini-mag
flashlight held in your teeth, then, fancy degree or
no, you don't really practice medicine. there, I said
it). But far more important, it made for a whole lot
of 'Is that the ground?'-kind of talk from the pilots
(yes, they had night vision goggles, and no, that's no
guarantee).
They spent most of the flight comparing it to
flying in Afghanistan, which is a little like a rock
critic comparing an album to Hall and Oates.
Our crew and our friend the bad driver arrived at
our Anchorage area hospital at 5am, give or take. He
was given a breathalizer test. The accident had
happened prior to 10pm the night before.
That's, minimum, 7 hours to dry up.
He blew a 0.08.

Doing the Crazy Chicken

Talking to a native Alaskan about the Fairbanks-area town of Fox, which led to animal-named Alaska towns, which led to the infamous Chicken (if you've missed it, a huge forest fire from the summer came to be known as the Chicken fire for its proximity to the town)

'You know why they named their town Chicken?' he asked.
'Why?'
'Because they got tired of not being able to spell Ptarmigan.'

Man. I hope that's true.

Even the dead are Crazy

I, like everybody else who goes up there, camped right there. My understanding is, one of my friends who is up there now was on the dig-up team.