Anchorage Any good suggestions for things to do with my lady?

HA! I'll be in Anchorage on the 1st... so if you hear someone messing around out there, don't be too worried. I promise I'll be careful!

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Fireweed theatre
downtown Anchorage
middle of winter
in line with my dad
large popcorn with crisco butter
Goobers.

saw her live in Anchorage, she was quite excellent

This is huge news obviously here, these guys are going down 1 by 1, they are going for > 10 year sentence for Kott, and things are getting nasty. The worst part is the low prices these guys sold out for, like $7500, or $15 grand. Now they go to jail. Anchorage Daily News is a great place to watch it unfold www.adn.com

The first song I heard from Nickel Creek was "When You Come Back Down" and the Alison Krauss force was SO strong in it I knew immediately she had something to do with it. Have you listened to Alison Krauss & Union Station album "So Long So Wrong"? (a masterpiece) That Nickel Creek song I mention is definitely a blood relative to the songs on there. I saw AK&US live in the Anchorage Performing Arts Center and OMG are they good live. Plus she is so beautiful.. : ) I'm going to go post an AK video right now.

I took the time to write to my old friend
I walked across that burning bridge
I mailed my letter off to Dallas but
Her reply came from Anchorage, Alaska

She said Hey girl its about time you wrote
Its been over two years now my old friend
Take me back to the days of the foreign telegrams
And the all night rock'n rollin' hey Chel
We was wild then

Hey Chel you know its kinda funny
Texas always seems so big
But you know youre in the largest State in the Union
When youre anchored down in Anchorage

Hey girl I think the last time I saw you
Was on me and Leroys wedding day
What was the name of that
Love song you played

I forgot how it goes
I dont recall how it goes

Leroy got a better job so we moved
Kevin lost a tooth, hes starting school
I got a brand new eight month old baby girl
I sound like a housewife
I think I'm a housewife

Hey girl whats it like to be in New York
New York City imagine that
Whats it like to be a skateboard punk rocker
Leroy says send a picture
Leroy says hello
Leroy says keep on rocking girl
Yeh keep on rocking

I was in Seward and Anchorage in 92....got to enjoy the snow in July....from volcanic ash dumping on Anchorage about 8pm....nasty next day.....much free-silica inhalation....I love AK, so many nicefolks.....and bars, jeez never seen so many freeekin hole in the walls!!

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Yeah, the reunion was just me and DC in an old school house out in the woods. Quite a party.

Seriously, there was about 150 people at the reunion - we went to a big school. About half of them are anchored down in Anchorage.

I remember dialing into the "Pirates of Puget Sound" and downloading warez. It was long distance so I made friends with the sysop and he was kind enough to mail be a real physical box of 5 and 1/4's, that was cool. I remember hanging out at dags house and he was dialed into some place on the USA east coast that had FORTY MEGABYTES OF SOFTWARE for download. I think the transfer program was called "?Apple Express? AE2?" something like that, it rocked the socks off the Commodore 64 trading software. I remember fighting for an hour to get a 28kb program transferred across town in the early days.

I remember a cool BBS in Anchorage where everyone was awarded the privilege of some "Dragon" type, like "Platinum Dragon" meant you had access to all the forums and "Red Dragon" meant you could only get to about half of them.

I remember a super-cool BBS call "Pyroto Mountain" where you had to answer trivia to work your way up the mountain.

DAG and I had the fortune of having our city in Alaska selected for both the "Love at First Sting" tour in 1984, and then the "World Wide Live" tour of 1985. I think that some of the Scorps 1985 release "World Wide Live" was recorded in Anchorage. As I recall the scorps picked their best/wildest/rockingist towns from the LAFS tour for WWL. We got to see the Scorps two Summers in a row, at the time when there was nothing cooler than the Scorps!! (I mean come on, Love at First Sting was incredible.) The thing I remember about the LAFS concert was one of our local drunk teenagers (NOT DAG ; he was in the loo ) got on stage to dance with Klause and discovered that it's DISCOURAGED to 1) be on stage and 2) put your arms around Klause while he is performing. Large employees threw him down off the stage and broke his arm in a couple places. He was driving a brand new street rod Camaro by the 2nd half of that following school year.

Meeting some Italian descent Argentinians in Alaska 2 years ago, who had ridden their bicycles all the way from Patagonia to Anchorage, made me aware of the diverse culture that exists in Argentina.
If you listen to his speech, you'll notice the Italian cadence, even though he's speaking Spanish.

The CFI yelled at me about it, I'd done a few hundred landings by then and she thinks I pressed the right brake hard on landing?? Yeah thats what I did, the wheels touched down so I decided to smash the right brake to the floor. Puh-lease. My CFI's generally were pieces of crap, had to switch them every week or two because they kept leaving or generally flaking out. I came to the conclusion CFI must pay one notch up from fast food.

I wont forget the first instructor though who had > 5k hours and was superb in every sense. Except once he solo'd me (13 hrs in) he took off. I think he liked to solo people and then leave. He taught me a completely different method for crosswind landings though than every later instructor.

Most exciting flight school moment #2, a Piper cub crashing in front of me when it couldnt make it to the runway. Most exciting moment #3, a plane flying faster, under me, while I was on final approach and taking my runway. Most exciting moment #4, my CFI (probably the 5th!) following VOR radials with me under the opaque hood, and almost colliding with another plane (( from the SAME flight school )) at 2000 ft! Talk about a clusterfu*k company. (The 2nd flight school I went to.) Most exciting moment #5, grabbing the mixture knob instead of carb heat and killing my engine mid flight over the middle of Anchorage (no big deal but exciting having no motor running) . Most exciting moment #6, my first solo flight, and the tower comes on and starts giving me bizzare new pattern instructions I've never had before.

Great post!

I have friends who helped with their legal fight for return. The case really exposed a very nasty, cruel and uncaring side of the British government.

Paradise Cleansed by John Pilger 10/11/04 - 'The Guardian'

"There are times when one tragedy, one crime tells us how a whole system works behind its democratic facade and helps us to understand how much of the world is run for the benefit of the powerful and how governments lie. To understand the catastrophe of Iraq, and all the other Iraqs along imperial history's trail of blood and tears, one need look no further than Diego Garcia.

The story of Diego Garcia is shocking, almost incredible. A British colony lying midway between Africa and Asia in the Indian Ocean, the island is one of 64 unique coral islands that form the Chagos Archipelago, a phenomenon of natural beauty, and once of peace. Newsreaders refer to it in passing: "American B-52 and Stealth bombers last night took off from the uninhabited British island of Diego Garcia to bomb Iraq (or Afghanistan)." It is the word "uninhabited" that turns the key on the horror of what was done there. In the 1970s, the Ministry of Defense in London produced this epic lie: "There is nothing in our files about a population and an evacuation."

Diego Garcia was first settled in the late 18th century. At least 2,000 people lived there: a gentle creole nation with thriving villages, a school, a hospital, a church, a prison, a railway, docks, a copra plantation. Watching a film shot by missionaries in the 1960s, I can understand why every Chagos islander I have met calls it paradise; there is a grainy sequence where the islanders' beloved dogs are swimming in the sheltered, palm-fringed lagoon, catching fish.

All this began to end when an American rear-admiral stepped ashore in 1961 and Diego Garcia was marked as the site of what is today one of the biggest American bases in the world. There are now more than 2,000 troops, anchorage for 30 warships, a nuclear dump, a satellite spy station, shopping malls, bars and a golf course. "Camp Justice" the Americans call it.

During the 1960s, in high secrecy, the Labour government of Harold Wilson conspired with two American administrations to "sweep" and "sanitize" the islands: the words used in American documents. Files found in the National Archives in Washington and the Public Record Office in London provide an astonishing narrative of official lying all too familiar to those who have chronicled the lies over Iraq.

To get rid of the population, the Foreign Office invented the fiction that the islanders were merely transient contract workers who could be "returned" to Mauritius, 1,000 miles away. In fact, many islanders traced their ancestry back five generations, as their cemeteries bore witness. The aim, wrote a Foreign Office official in January 1966, "is to convert all the existing residents ... into short-term, temporary residents."

What the files also reveal is an imperious attitude of brutality. In August 1966, Sir Paul Gore-Booth, permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office, wrote: "We must surely be very tough about this. The object of the exercise was to get some rocks that will remain ours. There will be no indigenous population except seagulls." At the end of this is a handwritten note by DH Greenhill, later Baron Greenhill: "Along with the Birds go some Tarzans or Men Fridays ..." Under the heading, "Maintaining the fiction", another official urges his colleagues to reclassify the islanders as "a floating population" and to "make up the rules as we go along".

There is not a word of concern for their victims. Only one official appeared to worry about being caught, writing that it was "fairly unsatisfactory" that "we propose to certify the people, more or less fraudulently, as belonging somewhere else". The documents leave no doubt that the cover-up was approved by the prime minister and at least three cabinet ministers.

At first, the islanders were tricked and intimidated into leaving; those who had gone to Mauritius for urgent medical treatment were prevented from returning. As the Americans began to arrive and build the base, Sir Bruce Greatbatch, the governor of the Seychelles, who had been put in charge of the "sanitizing", ordered all the pet dogs on Diego Garcia to be killed. Almost 1,000 pets were rounded up and gassed, using the exhaust fumes from American military vehicles. "They put the dogs in a furnace where the people worked," says Lizette Tallatte, now in her 60s," ... and when their dogs were taken away in front of them, our children screamed and cried."

The islanders took this as a warning; and the remaining population were loaded on to ships, allowed to take only one suitcase. They left behind their homes and furniture, and their lives. On one journey in rough seas, the copra company's horses occupied the deck, while women and children were forced to sleep on a cargo of bird fertilizer. Arriving in the Seychelles, they were marched up the hill to a prison where they were held until they were transported to Mauritius. There, they were dumped on the docks.

In the first months of their exile, as they fought to survive, suicides and child deaths were common. Lizette lost two children. "The doctor said he cannot treat sadness," she recalls. Rita Bancoult, now 79, lost two daughters and a son; she told me that when her husband was told the family could never return home, he suffered a stroke and died. Unemployment, drugs and prostitution, all of which had been alien to their society, ravaged them. Only after more than a decade did they receive any compensation from the British government: less than £3,000 each, which did not cover their debts.

The behavior of the Blair government is, in many respects, the worst. In 2000, the islanders won a historic victory in the high court, which ruled their expulsion illegal. Within hours of the judgment, the Foreign Office announced that it would not be possible for them to return to Diego Garcia because of a "treaty" with Washington - in truth, a deal concealed from parliament and the US Congress. As for the other islands in the group, a "feasibility study" would determine whether these could be resettled. This has been described by Professor David Stoddart, a world authority on the Chagos, as "worthless" and "an elaborate charade". The "study" consulted not a single islander; it found that the islands were "sinking", which was news to the Americans who are building more and more base facilities; the US navy describes the living conditions as so outstanding that they are "unbelievable".

In 2003, in a now notorious follow-up high court case, the islanders were denied compensation, with government counsel allowed by the judge to attack and humiliate them in the witness box, and with Justice Ousley referring to "we" as if the court and the Foreign Office were on the same side. Last June, the government invoked the archaic royal prerogative in order to crush the 2000 judgment. A decree was issued that the islanders were banned forever from returning home. These were the same totalitarian powers used to expel them in secret 40 years ago; Blair used them to authorize his illegal attack on Iraq.

Led by a remarkable man, Olivier Bancoult, an electrician, and supported by a tenacious and valiant London lawyer, Richard Gifford, the islanders are going to the European court of human rights, and perhaps beyond. Article 7 of the statute of the international criminal court describes the "deportation or forcible transfer of population ... by expulsion or other coercive acts" as a crime against humanity. As Bush's bombers take off from their paradise, the Chagos islanders, says Bancoult, "will not let this great crime stand. The world is changing; we will win." "


Finally in 2006 Lord Justice Hooper and Mr Justice Cresswell ruled that orders made under the royal prerogative to prevent the return of the Chagos islanders to their homes were unlawful. They described as "repugnant" the action to exile the population of the islands. "The suggestion that a minister can, through the means of an order in council, exile a whole population from a British overseas territory and claim that he is doing so for the 'peace, order and good government' of the territory is, to us, repugnant," the judges said.

But the government are appealing (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/southern_counties/6333223.stm) and the right of return is still being denied!

(sorry for long post - but this one really gets to me!)

fake-poke: twas a recycled joke, from a fan of no-sports, cept for the making sport of sports....this recalls Philosopher's soccer with Python, and is classic as it comes...excellent post!

....never seen a pro football match m'self, looking forward to it...

did start Buford's "Among the Thugs", on a busride on the Al-can hwy(a Scot, had finnished it, and donated).....that lasted 1.2 hours(ride)...read the rest, in a tent, by torchlight..... Fan-fuckin' Tastic!

..got it geared up for the rest o' th' trip, (900 mi) hitchhikin' to Anchorage