Alaska ingenuity

To begin with, the Matanuska-Susitna Borough in Alaska is huge -- 25,260 Square miles. That's bigger than a few states. It stretches from Anchorage in the South, almost to Glenallen in the north, west almost to Mount McKinley and east almost to Prince William Sound. A few more than 90,000 souls live in that expanse of sub-Arctic Alaska.

Downflow and vibration from the helicopter help clear wires.

Most of those people demand the usual amenities of polite society.  Most, because there is considerable wilderness in that acreage and there are still a few solid folks who live out there, including myself at one time in my life, where in one way or another they provide for themselves.

For the rest, people want running water, and indoor plumbing and things like electricity and telephone. Try to picture how much wire it takes to bring electricity and telephone service to an area that big.  The responsibility of providing that electricity belongs to a cooperative utility called the Matanuska Electric Association.

Then try to picture all those above-ground wires coated in a sometimes six-inch thick layer of heavy, wet snow frozen to them. That's what happened when a heavy overnight snow froze to the wires earlier this week. Power went out everywhere. Trees unable to hold the snow load fell and took down wires with them.  In other places just the weight of snow on the wires took them down.  Here and there across the wide winter wonderland power went out, not general outages as might be caused by a transformer, but isolated ones, caused by a line going to a subdivision, or along a single road, or one neighborhood.  It could have been compared to a fire, not a huge wildfire over thousands of acres but hundreds of little fires of as few as a couple of acres scattered here and there across 25,000 square miles.

Crews would repair one outage and be told there were seven new ones, all of those repairs made in sub-zero temperatures and often deep snow.

MEA kept members informed with a consistent flow of updates on the utility’s Facebook and Twitter pages. Here's a typical Facebook post:

Matanuska Electric Association December 22 via mobile

Eagle River, the Butte, Peters Creek, Big Lake, Long Lake, Willow, and Talkeetna are experiencing small outages at this time. Approximately 300 people total are currently affected.

Crews are out there working to get the lights back on as soon as possible.

If you're without power, please report it at...

To give you an idea of the expanse, it's more than 100 miles from Eagle River, an Anchorage suburb, to Talkeetna.

The crews were faced with two phases of the job, No. 1 of course was to repair the damage and restore the flow of electricity. No. 2 was to clear snow off the lines that hadn't broken yet. Nothing says how they were doing it at the beginning of the job, but it became obvious from the start that simply shaking thousands of miles of wire to knock the snow off wasn't going to work.

But, Alaskans are nothing if not creative and resourceful. Here's a Facebook post explaining the plan:

Matanuska Electric Association December 23 via mobile

Update:

The Willow/Hatcher Pass' lines still have a large portion of ice/snow on them and are proving very time consuming to shake off.

We are planning to shut down that line (affecting about 240 members, with 100 of these folks still without power at this time) from 11:30 a.m. until about 3:30 p.m.

We will be bringing in a helicopter to fly low over the lines and hopefully shake some of the snow and ice off, in hopes of getting everyone back on as soon as possible.

We will keep you updated as we learn more. Thank you for your patience.

The utility hired a helicopter which flew low along the wires, the downward air flow and vibration effectively knocking off the snow.

Post by Matanuska Electric Association.

Matanuska Electric Association Our helicopter plan knocked off the snow and ice from the lines in the Willow/Hatcher Pass area and although it didn't 100% resolve the issue, it's allowed us to isolate the trouble areas and we have contract clearing crews out there now. Hang tight Willow and Hatchers pass. You're all next!

December 23 at 3:47pm · Like · 1

Helicopter time is pretty expensive, but so is sending crews along every foot of line to knock the snow off, plus the helo saves a lot of time as well.

Overall, within about 24 hours the utility had everyone's power restored and for the most part had lines cleared to prevent any future outages. It was a huge undertaking when you think about it and MEA met the challenge and kept up their end of the deal to provide power to residents across that wide area of responsibility and applied some good old-fashioned Alaska resourcefulness in the process.

Someone over there also deserves a lot of credit for keeping people updated on Facebook and Twitter. In the past as far as notification and the possibility and timing of repairs, we were left pretty much in the dark.

MEA Twitter feed.

Tasteless Christmas 2013 : ding dongs, wrecking balls and a tequila salut

Ding dongs.

This year there appeared to be fewer distasteful uses of Christmas and traditional Christmas carols in advertising than usual. For one, finally Pampers did not sell any diapers to the tune of "Silent Night." That's a step in the right direction itself.

And while I didn't notice as many offensive items as usual some of the ones I did spot rank right up there with the all-time greats.

Take that picture across the top, it's pulled from a K-Mart commercial for boxer shorts.  This link takes you to the full commercial. I didn't want anyone to have to watch it if you don't want to. 

The premise is, as men in formal coats and ties and K-Mart boxers shake their pelvises they are ringing a bell-like performance of "Jingle Bells," produced from inside their shorts, a reference that isn't too difficult to figure out. What crap. That ranks right up there with Pampers and assures that I will buy nothing from K-Mart in the future, not that I ever did anyway.

Miley Cyrus, add this beauty to your tree

And speaking of twerking, the next on this year's list isn't from an advertisement. As a matter of fact it was a post on Facebook which seemed to be poking fun at the whole idea. Still I bet somewhere in this country there's someone who cut out that image and put Miley Cyrus on a tree swinging from a wrecking ball to add to the decorations. For those unfamiliar with it, she did this virtually nude in the video for her new hit "Wrecking Ball." It was ugly on TV and it's doubly ugly on a Christmas tree.

Only a couple more. To set the record straight it's not so bad using the party songs of Christmas to sell stuff. "Silver Bells" doesn't matter and it's been written here before that I could care less who "Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus." But taking a deeply religious song and selling your crap with it, is about as distasteful as it gets. Imagine if somebody did that with a Muslim religious song.

OK, now the last two: Target used "Do You Hear What I Hear," in its commercials on TV which is bad enough but the next one is worse.

Just so loved hearing "What Child Is This? to sell Patron tequila. How do those two relate in any stretch of contrivance? What advertising genius thought a traditional Christian song would tempt anybody to try Mexican liquor, especially when it looks like an attempt to position it as a high-end brand. A friend of mine in advertising told me in that business you can expect to be fired at least once in your career. Hope this fellow got his and the people who approved it and for that matter the folks at Patron who, in their attempt to portray their tequila as the choice of the privileged, tried to sell it with the lowest imaginable class.

So, that's it for the year, except for one thing. There's the idiotic Fox News war on Christmas, a manufactured issue with no significance whatsoever except to spread the Fox message of fear and ignorance to the world. If someone wishes you well what does it matter how it fits into a specific context?

Also there seemed to be a lack of humor that would serve to stop that nonsense. I posted this on Facebook, "The thing that bothers me about this war on Christmas is that it starts earlier every year." I thought that was funny, but you couldn’t tell by the people who commented.  

Lighten up folks and have yourself a merry little Christmas.

The Bill of Rights: selective interpretation

There's no prejudice here about the redneck/hillbilly culture.  As a matter of fact I kind of envy the people who live that way. In a sense the Alaska Bush life isn't much different.

I can picture myself mudding in a big truck; actually I do it though not on purpose on a four-wheeler sometimes. Though a crime, the moonshine era is a sort of romantic one in US history.  It certainly isn't an expensive way to live, except maybe for the truck and you look at some of the sites about the culture, people seem to be happy in most of the pictures, though besides mud, the activity might involve serious amounts of beer.

photo from Boycott Duck Dynasty

All in all the backwoods country life appeals in many ways. The one part of it I wrestle with is the politics. At least in the stereotype, it involves Obama-hating, Bible thumping, racism intolerance, ignorance, reliving the Civil War with hopes for a different outcome, gun baiting, and voting straight-line republican ticket even though it is Republican policies that keep us all poor.

Also like many bullies, the minute something or somebody opposes these people, they try to hide behind god or the constitution or some other established authority. On one hand intrusion of government is evil and needs to be stopped, on the other if challenged, government is the defense. So it goes.

The latest culture clash is over a television show called "Duck Dynasty," a show that showcases a family of supposed backwoods people who make their living manufacturing duck calls, and now in reality television.

Recently the arguably most popular member of the family in an interview put out some gay-bashing and racist comments. Action was quick: the network took him off the show at least for the time being. The reaction was even stronger with people from all walks of life defending the character and hauling out the First Amendment right to free speech to support their case.

And that is where the frustration of ignorance applies itself.

No one at all is challenging his right to say anything he wants. We can all do that, say what we want when we want.

What these defenders don't seem to realize is that freedom of speech doesn't extend to the consequences from something you say freely. If you stand up in a bar and call the guy next to you stupid, expect to be punched.  Free speech -- consequences.

So if you speak loudly as a homophobe or racist, in modern society you should expect some consequence. In this case the consequence was losing his job. Others have suffered far worse consequences for speaking their minds, their precious Jesus, for one.

The whole uproar over this incident is historically inconsequential. We, including me as we can see, waste an awful lot of thought time on such incidents. At least this one has a constitutional lesson involved.

The lesson is simple: Say anything you want, but before you do, consider the consequences.

"Preacher man's talkin' on the TV,

he's puttin' down the rock and roll,

wants me to make a donation,

'cause he's worried about my soul.

Well, Jesus walked on the water,

and I know that it's true,

but sometimes I think that preacher man

would like to do a little walkin' too.

Now I ain't askin' nobody for nothin'

if I can't get it on my own.

If you don't like the way I'm livin'

just leave this long-haired country boy alone."

-- "Long-haired Country Boy," Charlie Daniels Band

A very Walter Christmas

I've never been one for cute pet pictures at Christmas, but because I have this rather photogenic hound I thought I would get a picture of the two of us in front of our tree.  This is what I came up with:

Note the addition of the leash.

MERRY @#%&##@ CHRISTMAS

A dangerous undertaking, defining Alaska state pride

Protecting the privacy of the home, is "consonant with the character of life in Alaska. Our territory and now state has traditionally been the home of people who prize their individuality and who have chosen to settle or to continue living here in order to achieve a measure of control over their own lifestyles which is now virtually unattainable in many of our sister states." – opinion written by Chief Justice Jay Rabinowitz in the 1975 Alaska Supreme Court decision to allow residents to possess a small amount of marijuana for personal use.

A question of Alaska pride came up the other day. To begin with there was a post on Facebook from Weather.com about the snowiest places in America. It's been noted on this blog before, and here is the proof:  Valdez, Alaska, is the snowiest city in the United States, beating second place by more than 90 inches a year.

I shared it on my own Facebook page and that led to several comments one of which came from another former resident who said she missed the people but not the snow. I suggested she would probably admit to a sort of perverse pride in having lived there and she admitted she did, but still preferred where she lives now which involves a lot less snow shoveling.

It's official: Alaska and Montana have the most state pride.

Later in the day I was chatting with another person from snow country and the subject turned to my recent surgery. I mentioned that I had a nice new scar on the side of my neck. She said it would probably shrink to almost nothing and my response was, "darn, we Alaskans are proud of our scars."

Affordable health care by any other name is still Obamacare

A couple of years ago I used Obamacare in a headline. The editor of the paper rejected that saying the term was derogatory. I didn't think so or at least I didn't want it to be; that certainly wasn't how I meant it, but at the time I had to admit he was probably right and it wasn't worth fighting over.

Here we are a few years later and the term is used by friends and foes alike. Pretty much the term for affordable health care is Obamacare.

Now, here's the irony. The term began as derogatory by the tea baggers and Republicans who vowed to stop anything Obama stood for. But these days Obamacare is the general word for it, used by proponents and opponents alike. As the initial difficulties are ironed out, more and more people gain health insurance and enjoy the benefits of the Affordable Care Act, it will most likely go into history and forever be known favorably as Obamacare, an eternal slap in the faces of these people who blindly oppose it and who likely will not be remembered at all.

Anthems and carols

"The Little Drummer Boy" like you've never heard it before.

Some songs just shouldn't be messed with. The “Star-Spangled Banner" comes to mind immediately. Every time one of these hip-hop bee-bop rapper types opens a football game with it, I cringe. The little curlicues and flutters they are compelled to add at the ends of phrases do nothing to enhance the presentation, just satisfy the singer's ego that he or she can make this song better. They can't. And they shouldn't try. It should be sung the regular way every time. That song belongs to all of us. Every single citizen of the United States has a stake in that song and these pretenders should just leave it alone. That 12-year-old girl who sings it at the beginning of Miami Heat games could show them how.

Covers of some songs are all right.  Most of them aren't as good as the originals and are hardly worth a second listen and some you have to approach as if they were completely different songs from the originals to find any appreciation for them at all. Only once in a while does someone really nail a cover.

Another whole group of songs that individuals should leave alone is the religious songs of Christmas. 

They can do anything they want to what I like to call the party songs of Christmas. I don't really care how anybody sings "I saw mommy kissing Santa Claus." But the traditional and even the new religious carols should be sung they way they were intended, and not how some rock and roller thinks they should sound as a dance number or something.There many attempts and many failures, but every once in a while a new rendition of a carol comes along and knocks me over. The video at the top of this is one of those.

It's by a group called Pentatonix which looks to be a mixed ethnic group of four men and a woman and they appear to be singing on a hill outside Los Angeles. They add their own a cappella touch to the performance but they don't take away from the original in doing it. The woman's voice is so clear and at the end so powerful. It sent that warm shiver through me that a song hitting home emotionally  can do and I bought that one and and two others.  They do a credible version of "O Holy Night," too.

It is December 2, now, so to my mind it is all right to do Christmas songs.  This was the one that opened that door for me when I heard it earlier today.

I remember years ago talking with a woman friend about Christmas and how I am not really a believer but there is one part I love. She knew exactly what I was talking about and responded, "Yeah, we have the best music."

So true.

Julia Dale sings "The Star-Spangled Banner."