My very rough count near the flag poles was 150 - 200 bikers. They said the previous ride - in 1971 - had 300 riders. But in 1971 there were a lot fewer competing events in Anchorage. But also a lot fewer people overall. People kept coming.
The point, according to the organizers, was to increase awareness of the need for better accommodation of bikes and other non-car vehicles and pedestrians in Anchorage. I rode near the front of the pack. Here we were waiting for the light to turn left from 36th onto Denali.
It was a little sketchy at some intersections. Volunteers blocked traffic at some points, but it all looked pretty loose. Fortunately, drivers seemed patient and many waved and honked (short taps, not long angry ones).
Here's looking back on Northern Lights, waiting for the light at Arctic, I think. The lights did break up the long train of bikes a bit.
Almost back at our starting point.
It could hardly have been a nicer day - sunny and in the low 60s - but there was a strong south wind. As we got back to Loussac people peeled out of the crowd of bikes.
With vaccinations people are feeling more secure that COVID won't kill them. I see fewer masks indoors these days.
The State went from daily reporting to weekday reporting to Monday, Wednesday, Friday, reporting to once a week reporting.
But people are still dying of COVID, right here in Alaska. 28 new deaths were reported this week. (Although there's a new report each week, deaths seem to get accumulated over a period of time and then are reported in bulk. These were the first deaths reported since August 24, 2022)
I'm still reporting these every week, but not in the main part of the blog. They're reported in the Alaska Daily COVID-19 Count 3 tab just below the blog header.
Here's my latest report from that page:
Wednesday, September 14, 2022 - I'm getting this up on Thursday. People are treating COVID as though it were gone. To the extent that I even forgot to update this yesterday. But the numbers are a reminder that this isn't over. And that people are still dying of COVID, even here in Alaska.
25 new deaths were reported this week. These are the first deaths reported in three weeks because, I'm assuming, it takes a while to gather these numbers. It would be truly shocking if these were all in the last week. It would be useful to know what the vaccination status of those dying was. They may report that somewhere, but I'm not digging deeper than the main dashboards now.
21 more people were hospitalized in the last week. Actual number of COVID patients in the hospital reported as 66, up four from last week. Number of vents is down two to zero.
Number of ICU beds available statewide is 21 (down from 34 last week) and one in Anchorage (down from two.) I believe this is not a COVID specific number, but includes all ICU beds in the state regardless of illness.
Even new resident cases are up - 980/950 compared to last week's 879/902. Ditto for non-resident new cases: 544 new cases, up from 519 last week. A regular warning on these last numbers - many, if not most, tests are self tests which tend not to be reported, so the reported numbers don't tell the whole story.
A little ways down it has a list of many different products for home testing. Each has a link to see the updated expiration dates. That's where you'll find the details.
Biking yesterday, Campbell Creek was definitely higher than about a week ago. I'm not sure it's obvious in these two pictures,
September 5, 2022
September 13, 2022
There were lots of areas along the trail with standing water - the ground too saturated apparently to absorb more water.
And the leaves are starting to turn.
Meanwhile, whoever mowed the lawn near the Waldron Homestead Park left an awful lot of cut grass on the bike trail. This is where the bike trail comes into Shelikof Street. Does the Muni do this or is it contracted out?
That was mostly yesterday. Today, when I tried to take a bike break at the Alaska Botanical Garden, I discovered they have new fall hours. Saturdays and Sundays, though they're going to also be open Mondays. Though in the smaller print it says the "Bootanical Garden" will be open Mondays from September 24 through October 24.
So it's been ten years since I've had a contest. This one requires more work. Here's an intro:
The Supreme Court's majority has made a lot of noise about strictly following the original text of the US Constitution. So I pulled up an online version of the Constitution and searched it for some key words.
Reviewing the Constitution this way, it's clear that all USians should read the Constitution at least every six months, if not more frequently. [I saw someone use that term and I'm trying it out as a substitute for Americans when I only mean people in the US and not all of North, South, and Central America. I've been using US residents, but USians is so much easier]
So to encourage you, here's the CONTEST.
Make a copy [take a screen shot or a photo] of the chart below and fill it out. You can just guess. Or you can go to an online copy of the Constitution and search the terms. There will be prizes for the top three submissions.* You can email your answers my email address: whatdoino (at) alaska (dot) net. You can try this link but I can't make it work in my draft - Email me.
In Constittuion?
How often?
YES
NO
MAN (MEN)
WOMAN (WOMEN)
CORPORATION
INDUSTRY
PERSON
CITIZEN
LIFE
LIBERTY
ECONOMY
CAPITAL
CAPITALISM
MARKET
MARRIAGE
DOMESTIC VIOLENCE
BUSINESS
TAX
VOTE
COMMERCE
BANKRUPTCY
SECURITIES
SEX
RELIGION
CHRISTIAN
WELFARE
THE PEOPLE
GOD
The more I've read about originalism or textualism, the more I'm convinced I was right from the beginning: It's basically no more, probably less, objective than living constitutional theories.
Meanwhile, you might want to read (or reread) my posts on Originalism:
*Since this contest requires some work, I'm not sure there will be that many submissions. So, the odds for those who do submit would seem pretty good. Prizes will be determined by interests of the winner and my imagination and geography. (Mail v. local pickup may affect size.)
I have no idea how many people will submit, if any. But I'll start with people who get the most correct answers. But since you can look these answers up, there's the possibility of more than three with the same correct answers. In that case, if someone chooses to write a few comments about what they learned from the exercise, I'll evaluate those comments. (And post them with your permission.) If it''s a draw and there are no comments, I'll choose randomly.
The news of Queen Elizabeth II's death comes as I'm reading Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. Calvino's book imagines the tales that Marco Polo told Kublai Khan about the cities Polo had visited, many in Khan's empire, many not.
Polo laments the impossibility of accurately describing these cities. He raises questions about how to merge the past and the present, the apparent and the invisible, the body and the soul of the cities he's visited. Nothing is as it seems, or at least nothing of importance is. His stories remind me of ethnographer Clifford Gertz' 'thick description". The stories would suggest caution taking too seriously the people explaining the meaning of Queen Elizabeth II's passing.
Let me give you an example. I also ask you to slow down. Calvino wasted no words. Read each word. Maybe even read the passage twice.
"In vain, great-hearted Kublai, shall I attempt to describe Zaira, city of high bastions. I could tell you how many steps up the streets rising like stairways, and the degree of the arcades' curves, and what kind of zinc scales cover the roofs; but I already know this would be the same as telling you nothing. The city does not consist of this, but of relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past: the height of a lamppost and the distance from the ground of a hanged usurper's swaying feet; the line strung from the lamppost to the railing opposite and the festoons that decorate the course of the queen's nuptial procession; the height of that railing and the leap of the adutererer who climbed over it at dawn; the tilt of the guttering and a cat's progress along it as he slips into the same window; the firing range of a gunboat which has suddenly appeared behind the cape and the bomb that destroys the guttering; the rips in the fish net and the three old men seated on the dock mending nets and telling each other for the hundredth time the story of the gunboat of the usurper, who some say was the queen's illegitimate son, abandoned in his swaddling clothes there on the dock.
As this wave from memories flows in, the city soaks it up like a sponge and expands. A description of Zaira as it is today should contain all Zaira's past. The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the blisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls."
Queen Elizabeth is like a Calvino city. Her death is not simply the death of one human being. It's a death in a monarchy that goes back more than a millennium. It's the death of the heir to an empire that ruled much of the world, claiming the riches and labor of the people who were subjects of that ruling royal family. While Queen Elizabeth II reigned longer than any other monarch in her family, she also reigned over the sharp decline of the empire and of the family's power and scope.
"Queen Elizabeth II is the Church of England chief, officially known as the Supreme Governor, and sits at the helm of a centuries-old British institution established by the monarchy. Its founder was Tudor monarch King Henry VIII, one of the country's most infamous leaders, who created the breakaway institution after turning his back on Catholicism. Centuries later, the Queen has emerged as another landmark ruler who continues to honour the former King's religious practices. But people have questioned whether the two figures who share a throne also share blood.. .
While there is no direct line between the two, the modern royals have a distant connection to the Tudors.
They owe their existence to Queen Margaret of Scotland, grandmother of Mary Queen of Scots, and King Henry VIII's sister." (From Express)
Henry VIII lived from 1491 - 1547.
What is real and what is imagination? What is real, but incomplete? How many Queen Elizabeth IIs are there? The one seen by her father King George VI? Her's sister's Elizabeth. Her husband's. The views of her children and grandchildren. There's Gandhi's Queen Elizabeth. Nelson Mandela's? John F. Kennedy's? Churchill's? Marilyn Monroe's or Elton John's? And every British subject has their own version of the Queen.
Where lies the true Elizabeth II? Nowhere and everywhere would be Calvino's Marco Polo's answer.
Invisible Cities also includes descriptions of conversations between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo. In this excerpt I'm only using Kublai Khan's thoughts. For perspective, Khan lived from 1215 - 1294. Calvino wrote about him in the 20th Century.
"From the high balustrade of the palace the Great Khan watches his empire grow. First the line of the boundaries had expanded to embrace conquered territories, but the regiments' advance encountered half-deserted regions, scrubby villages of huts, marshes where the rice refused to sprout, emaciated peoples, dried rivers, reeds. "My empire has grown too far toward the outside. It is time," the Khan thought, "for it to grow within itself," and he dreamed of pomegranate groves, the fruit so ripe it burst its skin, zebus browning on the spit and dripping fat, veins of metal surfacing in landslips with glistening nuggets.
Now many seasons of abundance have filled the granaries. The rivers in flood have borne forests of beams to support the bronze roofs of temples and palaces. caravans of slaves have shifted mountains of serpentine marble across the continent. The Great Khan contemplates an empire covered with cities that weight upon the earth and upon mankind, crammed with wealth and traffic overladen with ornaments and offices, complicated with mechanisms and hierarchies, swollen, tense, ponderous.
"The empire is being crushed by its own weight," Kublai thinks, and in his dreams now cities light as kites appear, pierced cities like laces, cities transparent as mosquito netting, cities like leaves' veins, cities lined like a hand's palm, filigree cities to be seen through their opaque and fictitious thickness."
This summer's goal has been to bike from Istanbul to Cappadocia. By my initial calculation, that was 750 kilometers (466 miles). So that was my target until I found a site (Ride with gps) where people track their bike rides. I found someone who had made my trip. Ending up in Avanos. But he was taking a longer route - it looks like he tried to avoid the main highways that would have more traffic. His route was a total of 889 kilometers (552 miles.)
So yesterday I got up to 751.8 kms. Using the Ride with gps site, you can find exactly where that is. You can toggle between km and miles. You can see the distance (and other factors) by putting the cursor along the route. I can see I'm riding along a lake, but on the biking map there wasn't a specific place to look up. Had to go to Google maps to find Aksaray and some pictures. This seemed the nicest.
Of course, I'm doing this along the bike trails of Anchorage - anywhere from about 6km to 20km on any given day. To make it to Avanos, I've got about 140 kms left to go. Cappadacio is a region of Turkey where there are lots of caves. Here's a link to a site with a short video that gives you a sense of the other-worldly landscape of the area and some of the towns there.
But I only have pictures of the Anchorage bike trails, but they're pretty amazing too. So here are some from the last several days of biking mostly along Campbell Creek trails.
Campbell Creek near Lake Otis.
Going east from here, the creek winds back and forth, leading to a series of bridges along the trail.
Much further up the creek is this bridge near Campbell Airstrip. There is a mix of hiking, mountain biking, ski trails, and dog sled trails in this area.
This part of the creek, and the trail, is west of Lake Otis and goes south to Taku Lake and beyond.
Yesterday there were lots of people fishing at Taku Lake. I was taking a picture of three people fishing together (looked like a family) when this guy moved from the group. If you look closely you can see the fish he just pulled out of the lake.
“White bread in particular has no real nutritional value, so while birds may find it tasty, the danger is that they will fill up on it instead of other foods that could be more beneficial to them,” says a spokeswoman for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.
There's a lot more on the subject at the link above.
At University Lake near Alaska Pacific University, which has become a popular dog park, I found a warning for another hazard.
It's only recently that I've become aware of river otters in Anchorage. In August 2021 there was a report of river otters attack dogs in Anchorage. That story made it to The Guardian in UK as well as many other news outlets. The earliest report of aggressive river otters in Anchorage I found was 2019 which called the river otters "a new menace for Anchorage dogs." Sea otters, in the ocean, have been here for as long as I've been in Alaska.
Here's a picture of Taku Lake yesterday. The 2019 otter attack was here. I've never seen river otters in Anchorage, but I did see a beaver once at Taku.
On April 27, 2007, the first paragraph of my post was:
"The book was calling to me from the cabinet in the big open breakfast room of the Chiengmai bed and breakfast. I opened the glass door and started reading the book with my breakfast. “It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured. I realized, somehow, through the screaming in my mind, that even in that shackled, bloody helplessness, I was still free: free to hate the men who were torturing me, or to forgive them.” After reading a few pages, I was done with breakfast and put it back into the glassed cabinet."
After a couple more breakfasts reading Shantaram, there was no way I could just put the book back
in the cabinet and wait until I could find my own copy. I think I left another book in its place and then I wrote
"I’ve been living in parallel worlds - my ostensibly 'real' life and Roberts' India - almost a month now. [It's over 900 pages.] Flying back to the US from Thailand got me a long way into Roberts' world. By the time I reached LA, I needed to look it up on the internet. Was this fiction or autobiography? The morning after seeing Mira Nair’s The Namesake, I discovered Shantaram was loosely autobiographical fiction, soon to be a movie directed by Mira Nair starring Johnny Depp."
Soon. I guess in movie making - especially big, sprawling films - 15 years is vaguely within the limits of 'soon.'
Because Sunday there was an article in the LA Times highlighting upcoming films and series. Shantaram was on the list.
[Coming] Oct. 14
‘Shantaram’
Hollywood has been trying to adapt “Shantaram,” Gregory David Roberts’ sprawling, quasi-autobiographical novel about a fugitive Australian bank robber on the lam in 1980s Mumbai, for nearly two decades. First there were scrapped film adaptations starting Johnny Depp and Joel Edgerton , then Apple revived the project for television. Now, after pandemic-related delays, a showrunner change and a production relocation, a 12-episode series with “Sons of Anarchy” star Charlie Hunnam in the lead is almost here. If the finished product is half as dramatic as the show’s backstory, viewers should be riveted. > Apple TV+
— Meredith Blake
So now I have to figure out how to watch an Apple TV series.
After the election results for Alaska's ranked choice voting election to fill the remainder of US Rep Don Young, Sarah Palin blamed her loss to Mary Peltola on Ranked Choice Voting.
“Ranked-choice voting was sold as the way to make elections better reflect the will of the people. As Alaska – and America – now sees, the exact opposite is true. The people of Alaska do not want the destructive democrat agenda to rule our land and our lives, but that’s what resulted from someone’s experiment with this new crazy, convoluted, confusing ranked-choice voting system. It’s effectively disenfranchised 60% of Alaska voters." [From her campaign website.]
The quick answer to the title question is "No".
Below (way below) is a video discussing this question. I don't know who these people are - it looks like it's a podcast from The Hill. (Biasly rates The Hill "moderate" with an ever so slight lean to the right.) But they do more or less reflect my sense of Ranked Choice Voting.
What they don't discuss is how getting rid of the closed Republican primary - having an open primary with all candidates and picking the top four to be in the final Ranked Choice general election.
A closed Republican primary would have probably led to a Palin victory and two major candidates - one Republican and one Democrat (Palin and Peltola) running in the general election, with some minor third party candidates.
Would Peltola have been able to defeat Palin in that sort of general election? We won't know. But we do know that half of Begich's second votes went to either Peltola or no one. Here's what it looked like on the Alaska Elections website:
click on images to enlarge
So it could well be that Peltola may have pulled out the victory under the old system. Lots of Alaska remember how Palin quit being governor after only finishing part of the term. Many also remember the issues with the Palin's oldest son over slashing school bus tires and opening his senior year in Michigan, and the giant brawl involving the Palin family and a Wasilla party.
The benefit of Ranked Choice Voting, as they say in the video, is that you can vote for candidates that aren't likely to win without throwing away your vote, because you pick the one you like the most and then the next one, and if you like, the ones after that. If you first choice loses, your second choice candidate (gets your vote instead.)
The Republicans - Begich and Palin - fought with each other in this campaign. Ranked Choice Voting with an open primary means you can't alienate too many voters and it, theoretically, eliminates the extreme candidates who would win in a closed primary.
There's also an interesting NYTimes article on this for those who can get past the paywall. It looks at how Alaska got ranked choice voting and highlights Katherine Gehl who has devoted herself to the idea. It mentions that an initiative in Missouri didn't get enough votes, but one in Nevada this year did. Also interesting the Marc Elias who has been fighting hard with lawsuits against GOP attempts to deny that Biden won the election, worked hard against the Ranked Choice Initiative in Nevada. Elias is a smart guy so I need to understand his opposition better.
Also, a reminder for non-Alaskans, August 16 was also the primary election for the actual (not just the remaining months of Young's seat) Alaska House race. Here's a list of the candidates, their vote tallies, and red marks the four top candidate who go on to the general election in November.
Tara Sweeney is both a Republican AND an Alaska Native Woman. She is more aligned with oil interests. I suspect that Alaska Natives will give Peltola their second vote if they vote first for Sweeney. Will the Republicans come up with a more cooperative strategy and direct their voters to cast their next votes for the other Republicans? Will it matter?
Peltola has now gotten much more name recognition and more people have seen her. She's so much more humble than the two candidates she beat in the Special Election, and unlike Palin, she speaks in whole sentences and in a calm tone. Unless someone gets 50% + one vote on the first ballot, we won't know for two weeks, when all the ballots are in. But if someone gets 48% in the first round and the others are much further back, that should be a good indicator too.
