Far South of I-10

Well, I'm heading back home for turkey day. The office here very generously gave me and my coworker ULU knives with our names engraved in them. You can see ulus at ulu.com of course, they are used to shave blubber off of whales apparently, which should come in handy if the buffet line at Ryan's gets too long. I'm flying out in a few hours, trying to get my stuff together in such a way that it doesn't look like I dumped dirty clothes into a bag. If anyone ever sees me fold a shirt correctly I give you permission to shoot me, I've been replaced by an alien. Oh well, dump away. Taking a quick tour of the blogosphere in the few minutes I have left before I have to pay for another 24 hours of internet access. The Domestic Engineer has a funny/quaint/scary story about singing pants and conversations. If we were really in The Holy Grail, he'd shout back, "You're not fooling anybody, you know!" before hitting me over the head with a plank. But we...

Here's a photo looking to the west from my hotel. It's 2pm local time, you can see the long shadows of the buildings. The photo was taken with my new m:robe from Olympus, which is a safety award from the company I work for. Thanks! You can see there is a little blurring, that's because you have to tap the center of the LCD display to take a photo. I think it might have been cheaper and better to just put a "button", which is a technical innovation similar to a "laser". Oh well, as they say I shouldn't look a gift camera/music player in the lens. But since I had heard we were getting ipods, I had a friend rip a bunch of my cd's, and apparently he gave the music back to me in a fairly lossless format supported by an ipod but not by an m:robe. doh!

I'm clicking through channels while waiting to go to work and I came across a show on cspan2 interviewing Peter Schweizer " Do as I say not as I do: profiles in liberal hipocracy " This looks like a great book, I tried to take some notes on the question period: questions: School choice? the clintons sent chelsea to a private school, when the public schools she would have gone to were ones the clintons praised before they were elected. Hillary Clinton is pro children's rights, but she was a very strict parent and wouldn't allow Chelsea to get her ears pierced. But Hillary wants the rest of the country to allow teenagers to get abortions without notifying parents. .... Rich people and political affiliation - kennedys, clintons George soros are pro-taxes, but do their best to avoid inheritance and income taxes. The clintons bragged that they always pay the maximum in taxes, the author checked and it is ridiculous. They (liberals) are never called on their stat...

Here's a picture from yesterday as the snow fell. It was only about an inch of snow, but as I walked to the clients office yesterday, I felt like it was a blizzard. It might be cold as heck here in achorage, and not very sunny during the day, but they do have some pretty good seafood here. I had King Crab legs last night at a place called Sullivan's. We had to wait about 3 hours for a table so I joined the rest of the people in drinking knockouts, which is just vodka that has been marinating in a big jar with fresh pineapple. Then with dinner I switched to Grey Goose vodka over ice. Needless to say, my head feels like a gypsy family has been sleeping in it. Apparently if I had just stuck with Grey Goose I couldn't possibly get a hangover since it is so refined/expensive. Today the sun is out but the days are getting noticeably shorter about 10 minutes per day. Sunrise at around 8 am, sunset at 4:30 and it pretty much looks like 4 in the afternoon all day long.

Well I'm back up in Anchorage again. When I'm rich (come on Powerball) this will definitely be the location of a summer home. It's beautiful here in the summer, golfing 20 hours a day, good seafood. Etc. Not a winter destination though. I've been here 8 hours this time and I'm already depressed. The guy I'm working with just got a call saying he has to go up to the north slope for the project while I work back here in town. thankfully they didn't ask me to go, since they would have received a creative combination of "fuck" and "no". Or back in reality I would have meekly gone, mumbling darkly under my breath. By the time I don't work here, I'll only be capable of mumbling darkly.

The ever-sensible numberwatch points out that the number of the month is from the only 62 people that have died of the bird flu worldwide. Yet there is a raving hysteria being generated by the press: We can’t get away from bird flu. It has swamped the media. People have actually stopped eating chicken for fear of it. Yet the total number of human deaths so far is 62. That is half an hour’s worth of malaria deaths. One of these days, of course, the scaremongers are going to get it right and flu is a pretty good bet for them, with its remarkable mutability. Numberwatch makes some other great points this month especially about the UK wide smoking ban.

Daffyd app Hugh tells the thigh-slappingly funny tale of the iraqi wmd sites that were often found but never seen. It is well known that the staggering extent of Saddam Hussein's WMD programs was only discovered after he lost the Gulf War. Iraqi chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons by the tens of thousands were unearthed (often literally) and destroyed by the coalition. Afterward (we have known this for some time from defectors), Hussein decided that Iraq would take a new tack in its never-ending quest for WMD: from then on, all of Iraq's programs were designed to be "dual use": each would have an ostensibly civilian purpose (pesticides, medical research, nuclear power generation) but could quickly -- in some cases within minutes -- be converted to military use. Therefore, when looking for "stockpiles" of WMD, the Iraqi Survey Group (ISG) should have been looking, not for a warehouse full of shells pre-filled with sarin or mustard gas or anthra...