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My new job as a K-12 principal is rather all-consuming. Hence the lack of posts since school began. Here is the link to my newest article from the ADN. Something I was able to squeeze in late one night.
Anchorage Daily News Article 9.23.07
I try rather diligently to avoid the rather vapid mass media fare. I confess that once last year I read an article about Britney Spears. It was an accident. Honest. Careless surfing. I've never read a thing about Paris Hilton or Anna Nicole on purpose. If it weren't for headlines, I'd know nothing about Rosie and Donald or Lindsey Lohan's shrinking waistline and growing stints in rehab. Sadly, despite the fact that I live on the edge of the continent, our "culture" still seeps in.
Over the nearly ten years I've lived in Alaska, I've owned a cable television subscription one year. To be honest, there are really only two things I miss about not having a television: Dave Letterman and The Simpsons. In anticipation of the upcoming Simpsons movie (and as a self-acknowledged shameless marketing ploy) you can be Simpsonized. This is me, Homer's Alaskan cousin. If you can't get the thing to work. Don't blame me. I'm not listening. I'm up at school working. 
Every once in a while, you see something online that, like the rubbernecking phenomenon on America's highways, you can only stare at and go, "Humph." You surf away from it and then later by some twisted sense of awe, you find you have to go back through your history files to find the page again and have a second look.
For that reason I am posting this link to a photo from the National Geographic website. That and also because recently a friend of mine just returned from a cruise through the Inside Passage. And currently my girlfriend and her family are cruising the Inside Passage in one of the many floating hotels that weave in and out of the fjords each summer.
Photo in the News: Dead Whale Found With Car-Size Tongue
The possibility that this whale death was caused by the collision with a cruise ship brought back to mind an earlier story that most likely missed people's attention.
Whale Carcass Docks in Seward
Nor does this kind of incident appear to be isolated:
Cruise Ship Impales Finback
I will keep my opinion to myself and let these articles stand for themselves.
This morning, the Anchorage Daily News published my newest article. I don't usually write for them during the summer, but they asked and when this strange craft paddled and sailed its way into shore ahead of the receding tide last Sunday night, I had to oblige. Here is the link to my article:
Morning broke as one of those rare days here where the sky is clear and the wind light. The hilltop behind my house was cloaked in a fog being created as the wind smacked into the rocky face and drifted inland.
I hiked into the fog and then climbed above it. The upper reaches of the hill were clear and as I crested the hill and headed inland myself, the village below me and shrouded in the finger of fog.
Four musk ox, two cows and two calves grazed below me. The fog dissipated and the wide valley opened to the nearly cloudless sky. The only mark on the blue above, the thin white line behind an intercontinental cargo flight to China.
All day long the wind blew off the ocean. The wind smacked into the twin hills that guard our shallow bay and kept the rocky peaks covered in clouds.
Midnight passed and the wind died as the sun dipped toward the horizon. Of course here in the north midnight does not mean sunset. Tununak lies at 60 degrees 35 minutes North roughly the same latitude as Anchorage at 61 degrees 13 minutes.
It took nearly a half an hour after midnight for the sun to complete it's daily circuit and pass into the ocean. And for a few short hours it will hide from view as the village fades to heliotrope hues. It is as if with the setting sun we were carried into the Belt of Venus.
(*See my comment on this post.)
