Wally Hickel and Jay Hammond Go Two Great Rounds: Why You Should Buy A Ticket For The Ticket -

I admit, when I heard that Dick Reichman had written a play about a fictitious conversation between two of Alaska's most illustrious former governors, I had trouble imagining how that would play out.

But forces were moving me toward Cyrano's.   Cliff Groh at Nerd Nite on Wednesday, had highlighted the different visions of the Permanent Fund between Hickel and Hammond,  and I'm reading Hammond's Bush Rat Governor for my book club this month.  Seeing this play seemed inevitable.  The world premiere was Friday night and so we saw the second performance.

And it turned out to be a wonderful evening.  The dialogue is a quick and witty serving of non-stop delicious  bonbons* about Alaska politics, about public service, about ego, about growing old, and about friendship, to name a few.   The enjoyment of the play comes from the conversation between the two characters, played by Outside William S. Murphy and Matt K. Miller.

The 'plot' is just a device for getting them together.  But if you want to see this play with no hints at all, skip the next  paragraph.  And the actors were superb, though it seemed to me a couple of times they almost lost control of a couple of the words, but they did it so seamlessly I can't be sure.

The play begins with Hammond arriving at Hickel Captain Cook Hotel office.  He's been summoned by Hickel, who's not at all sure Hammond will show. Republican  Hickel tells him he's going to run as an Alaska Independent, against the Republican nominee Arliss Sturgulewski,  for another term as governor and that Jack Coghill is going to be his running mate.  Unless . . .


You can start reading again here

This is a terrific Alaskan play. I added Alaskan there because it was written by an Alaskan about Alaskan figures, but it's really a universal play that happens to have Alaska as its setting.  Even if you know nothing about Alaska politics or about Hickel and Hammond, it's an interesting political flirtation between two men who have feuded in the past, approach the world very differently, yet ultimately have an unexpected affection for each other.   One of the characters is self aware and comfortable with himself, while the other needs a late run for governor to 'keep in the game.'  There's a lot of bluster and affection as they learn about each other and themselves.   It's serious, good theater.

But for Alaskans, there's the added factor that these are two former governors and most of the issues they discuss are still current today, 26 years after this imagined conversation.

Adding to the juiciness was the after theater discussion with someone who knew them both.  Last night's discussant was Sen. Johnny Ellis.  Ellis was the valedictorian  at his Bartlett High graduation when he first met Hammond who was the other speaker, which led to Ellis working on Hammond's reelection a year or two later.

If I understood it correctly, there will be guests after each performance, including Arliss Sturgulewski, whom Hickel stole the gubernatorial election from in that 1990 election.

There were also some luminaries in the audience including former Anchorage Mayor Jack Roderick and former Alaska attorney general John Havelock.

So, yes, this is a strong endorsement for everyone in or around Anchorage this month to get tickets for a lively and entertaining evening.

*Bonbons might imply light and insubstantial and perhaps appetizers might be a better word to use there because it would imply warming you up for something more filling.  It's an entertaining play, not deep history.  But Reichman (and Paul Brown who helped with this and was there last night) offer us the broader themes that usually get missed in the contemporary reporting of events.  So, feel free to substitute appetizer, and after you see the play, you can read more about these two fascinating men.  You can even watch Brown's movie on Hickel which is available

Articles of Interest - ISIS Recruits, Genes, Bias, Map Artist

There's way too much information for anyone to keep up with.  Here are some ideas worth considering.


Danes choose love over punishment to fight terrorists with some apparent success.

". . . France shut down mosques it suspected of harboring radicals. The U.K. declared citizens who had gone to help ISIS enemies of the state. . . But the Danish police officers took a different approach: They made it clear to citizens of Denmark who had traveled to Syria that they were welcome to come home, and when they did, they would receive help with going back to school, finding an apartment, meeting with a psychiatrist or a mentor, or whatever they needed to fully integrate back into society."

When a Person Is Neither XX nor XY: A Q&A with Geneticist Eric Vilain

People argue that the use of computers, human bias can be eliminated, but this piece shows that human bias can still be reflected in the programs they write.

"That has important applications. Any bias contained in word embeddings like those from Word2vec is automatically passed on in any application that exploits it. One example is the work using embeddings to improve Web search results. If the phrase “computer programmer” is more closely associated with men than women, then a search for the term “computer programmer CVs” might rank men more highly than women. “Word embeddings not only reflect stereotypes but can also amplify them,” say Bolukbasi and co."

Secrets are not a secret anymore if more than one person knows...

“A real secret is something which only one person knows.” ― Idries Shah, Reflections

There are no secrets that time does not reveal. Jean Racine If you reveal your secrets to the wind, you should not blame the wind for revealing them to the trees. Khalil Gibran

An argument against having backdoor keys to break into phones.



Rubric Memo  -  A spoof on academic memos and the use of rubrics.

"We refer to this rubric as Project 3.5.1, which you will recognize as a series of numbers. By entering data about your courses into this rubric, you help us to improve education for all our students, to whom we have also assigned numbers. We have also assigned you a number based on an Enigma-encrypted combination of the street address of your childhood home and your ATM PIN code, which we hacked (please see attachment 7)."

Map Maker Artist Perfectionist 

"These days, almost all the data cartographers use is provided by the government and is freely available in the public domain. Anybody can download databases of highways, airports, and cities, and then slap a crude map together with the aid of a plotter. What separates a great map from a terrible one is choosing which data to use and how best to present it."

It's All About Being At The Right Place At The Right Time

Was biking home last night to a huge rainbow that arced the sky, with a dazzling display just over Flat Top.   I only had my little Spotmatic to snap with, but you can get a sense of how vivid it was.

This morning, about 12 hours later I was back at the same spot I had gotten this picture.  But things were different.  

"Replumbing Permanent Fund doesn't create more water" or Nerd Nite Alaska Budget AND Facial v Verbal Portrait

I went to the Nerd Nite beer and budget meeting last night.  Before I get into that I'd like to offer you a 'how you know' things test.  Regular readers know I'm fascinated by how people come to 'know' things - like what's true, how the world works, how we draw conclusions about people, etc.  All the kinds of things that underlie everything we know and how we act on things.  If everyone were self-aware of all these things would, society would be radically different.  And as we watch this event known as a presidential election, it's clear that all of these things impact what voters take from media coverage, images, words, etc.

So let's do an experiment

I want you to look at the verbal portrait I've made of someone.  And as you read it, I want you to be aware of the images you have of this person.  I don't want you to work at imagining the person.  Rather I want the image(s) that your unconscious creates.  What do you see?  Is it one image?  Does it change as you read more?  At the end is there an image of this person - a face?  a stature?  a voice?
Again, don't think, just capture the image that your brain generates on its own.

Got your image?  OK.  Stash it away until later in the post.

The 49th State Brewing Company is in the old Snow Goose building, which was the Elks Club built in 1918.  (The chandelier in this room is adorned, still, with elk antlers.)   This was an evening of state budget policy with three speakers who have been intimately involved in the topics they took on.

You can see that the room was packed.  Probably 400 or more people to hear about:

1. the origins of the Permanent Fund Dividend (Cliff Groh)
2. the trade offs between cutting the budget and raising revenue (including dipping into the Permanent Fund, various taxes, and oil taxes and subsidies) (Larry Persily)
3. how the oil subsidies work (Dan Dickinson)

There was beer and snacks for sale as a standing room only crowd hung around for two plus hours of policy.  It was a mix of ages, but I would guess most were under 40 which is a different demographic than I've seen at talks on similar topics in Anchorage in the past.  Having beer instead of coffee probably helped.

Groh went back to the debates between the Hickel view (the owner state) and the Hammond view (the people as individuals having a share in the state's wealth) and other reasons for and against having the dividend.  Groh's position was more as a reporter than an advocate.

Persily didn't pretend to be neutral as he discussed the income options open to the state because cutting the budget alone simply won't balance the budget.  He favored taking a part of Permanent Fund earnings (cutting into the dividend), income taxes, changing the oil subsidies.  When an audience member pointed out that cutting the dividend was the most regressive option, Persily didn't disagree, but said including an income tax would balance this by getting the most from those with the largest earnings.  

After each speaker, there was a five minute beer break, so instead of leaving before the third speaker, the audience was fairly mellow.  

Dickinson discussed how the oil and gas credits worked.  Some are related to production, some are intended as incentives to investment in exploration.  They can give companies a huge return - combining can lead to a maximum of 85% return on investment.  But the graphs he had of revenue show a steady decline since these credits have gone into place.  But he pointed out, in response to a question about why we keep funding companies that go bankrupt instead of producing, that usually a new company takes over what the last company did and they keep production going.  He also pointed out that now when companies submit for their credits, instead of taking the money themselves, they often assign it to the financial institutions that gave them their initial loans.  

A key bit of information I learned was that the law doesn't actually guarantee the state will pay the credits.  There's a clause that says something like "if the legislature appropriates funds."  So, he said, if the state didn't pay the credits because there was no money allocated for them, the state wouldn't be violating any laws.  And, in fact, he said by the end of the year forecasters predicted companies would be submitting for about $1 billion in credits.  The legislature allocated about $460 million (not exactly certain of the number) and the governor vetoed all but $30 million of that.  

All three of the speakers, as I said, worked for the state on the issues they discussed.  They knew their stuff cold and their presentations were lively and interesting.  A good way to get this stuff.

Now, back to the verbal image above.  Which of the images below comes closest to the image your head conjured up?

#1	Image Source #2	#3
#4	Image Source #5	Image Source #6

Be honest with yourself.  Which is closest to your image?

What's the point of all this?  When I got home and looked at the picture I had taken, I realized the visual just didn't convey the depth of work and experience I had learned this person had.  It made me realize how much I still - despite my efforts not to - make assumptions about people based on what they look like.  Despite my admonition to myself to treat people I meet as though they will be the president of the US in 15 or 20 years, but no one knows it yet.  Or as though they have won a Nobel Prize or in some other way are highly distinguished and interesting.

For non-Alaskans and for non-political Alaskans, these are the six certified candidates listed in the US Senate race today at the Alaska Division of Elections.  #1 is Joe Miller who recently replaced the Libertarian candidate who withdrew.  #2 is Breck Craig.  #3 is Margaret Stock.  #4 is Lisa Murkowski.  #5 is Ted Gianoutsos.  #6 is Ray Metcalfe.  The one whose bio is briefly summarized in the top image is #3 Margaret Stock.  The info comes from her campaign website.  I met her for the first time last night at Nerd Nite.

Note The Nerds' Numerical Aesthetics

Did you catch it?  The meeting is September 7at 7 pm.  And it's at 49th State Brewing Company.   Pretty nifty, eh?

And the topic is compelling too - if you care about the future of Alaska and the Alaska Permanent Fund.  They left out the address, but I guess they didn't want to mess with beauty of the numbers already on the poster.  But for those who might want to attend:

717 W 3^rd Ave     It's tonight, by the way.  

France's Most Celebrated Immigrant

Apropos the earlier discussion of the Museum of Immigration in Paris as well as the current immigration issues in Europe, I thought I'd add these pictures of Napoleon's Tomb.

There are three main levels at Napoleon's Tomb - street level, down one where the tomb is, and up one to the chapel under the large church dome.

The bottom picture of the tomb was taken from the street level.

The Dome From Outside

The middle picture is from the bottom level.  It shows the tomb from below and up to the chapel, which has orange glass windows that color the setting sun's light an orange glow.

The top picture looks up to the dome.

Napoleon was buried in 1815 on the island of St. Helena where he was exiled.  His ashes were exhumed and brought to Paris in 1840.  But it wasn't until 1861 that the tomb was completed and ready for his ashes.


And here's a map to put some of the Paris posts into perspective.

A = the Eiffel Tower
B =  Napoleon's Tomb
C =  Rodin Museum and Garden
D = Pont Alexander III
E = Quai Branley Museum (coming)

All of these are close enough to walk if you're reasonably fit.

[History and map from Historvius]

[Some might legitimately question whether Napoleon was an immigrant.  See #1 at History.com for more on this.]

Is Climate Denial Really Republican Plot to Regain National Dominance?

In NY Times story by Justin Gillis printed in yesterday's Alaska Dispatch News about how climate change is now causing regular flooding of coastal area in Virginia and other states, and talks about local expenditures to protect communities being inadequate.  It talks about how the military has made protecting bases against climate change threats, but that Congress' gridlock keeps money from being appropriated.  Gillis writes that

"A Republican congressman from Colorado, Ken Buck, recently called one military proposal part of a 'radical climate change agenda..”

"Radical climate change agenda."  This guy seems to have a pretty narrow circle of friends if he uses trigger words like 'radical' and 'agenda' to enclose climate change.

Reading that caused me to think.  OK, this guy is in Colorado.  His district is the eastern 1/3 or so of the state.  So he's probably about 800-900 miles from the Gulf of Mexico and maybe 1200 miles from according to Net State:
the Pacific Ocean.  Furthermore,

"Colorado's low point, 3,315 feet above sea level at the Arikaree River in Yuma County, is the highest low point in the nation and is higher than 18 state high points."

So, Colorado will be the last state where the population feels the effects of rising oceans.  Though the ski industry is concerned about how climate change will affect them, but it looks like those areas aren't in his district.



But then it hit me.  The Republicans see their party imploding.  Demographics are against them (at least in their current mode) and their presidential candidate seems to be using his nomination as a branding exercise for his businesses rather than a serious run for the White House.

But.  But.  If rising seas take out liberal strongholds on the east and west coasts, that would leave the more inland and more conservative states.  Yeah, I know this sounds far fetched, but I'm adding it to my list of possible reasons people oppose climate change legislation like a carbon fee with dividend.

OK, I've used this (to me) unknown legislator's comment to make a rather light-hearted post.  And I am concerned that I not, out of ignorance, disparage someone who's doing a decent job and who's been taken out of context.  Actually, I don't think I have disparaged him, I just used his comment as a jumping off point, but I thought I should find out more about him.  We all should understand more about the people who are quoted regularly in the news - otherwise how do we know how to take the person's comment in the larger context?

So here's what I found out about him.

Buck had enough going for him that got into and graduated from Princeton, though on Wikipedia he is quoted as saying, he went there to please his father.  He moved west and got a law degree at the University of Wyoming.  (Still Wikipedia:)

In 1986, he was hired by Congressman Dick Cheney to work on the Iran-Contra investigation. Following that assignment, he worked as a prosecutor with the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington D.C.[5] In 1990 Buck joined the United States Attorney's Office for the District of Colorado where he became Chief of the Criminal Division. Buck was formally reprimanded and required to take ethics classes in 2001 for a meeting he had with defense attorneys about a felony case he thought should not be pursued.[3][6] Only one of the three men initially indicted on felony charges was convicted, for a misdemeanor offense.[6] Buck said he is "not proud" of the incident that effectively ended his career with the Justice Department,[6] but says he felt it was "unethical" to prosecute such a "weak" case against the three men.[7] One of the three men donated $700 to Buck's 2010 Senate campaign.[6]

The Denver Post tells us more about the case.  It involved illegal gun sales.

Then there's the case where he chose not to prosecute a rapist, even though the victim had a tape where the rapist acknowledges that what he did was rape.  He told her that she had 'buyer's remorse" and there was an allegation by the rapist that she'd had an abortion in the past.  Buck is against abortion, even in cases of rape and incest.  And he once said that homosexuality is a choice though it might be influenced by birth, like alcoholism.

 He introduced a bill this year to make attacking a police officer a hate crime.


This is one the men who helps pass (or obstruct) laws in Congress.  What do you know about the other 434 Members of Congress?

"Look, if African Americans voted overwhelmingly Republican, they would have kept early voting right where it was,” Wrenn said. “It wasn’t about discriminating against African Americans. They just ended up in the middle of it because they vote Democrat.'”

The point of this post relates to comments by a North Carolina Republican consultant about whether the changes in North Carolina voting rules were racist or not.  That's down near the bottom.  First is background to the quote.

Background of the Quote

A long Washington Post article by William Wan documents how the North Carolina Republican majority in the state legislature passed new voting laws that set up significant barriers to voting, mainly by African-Americans.  They changed what voter id could be used, shortened early voting including a Sunday when African-American churches helped their members vote early.  The reduced the hours polls would be open, even specifically saying that polls could not accommodate people who had waited in long lines prior to closing time.  At the same time the reduced the number of polling places in African-American neighborhoods, assuring that there would be long lines of people shut out when it was closing time.

The bill had been much more modest when it was passed by the state house and sat in the senate until a few days before the legislature adjourned.  The magic date was June 23, 2013 when the US Supreme Court in Shelby v. Holder ruled that Chapter 5 of the Voting Rights Act no longer was valid.  This act required that some identified states (including Alaska) were no longer required to have their redistricting plans and changes in the voting laws pre-approved by the Department of Justice.  I remember that well, because I was blogging the Alaska Redistricting Board and it was a big deal for them.

Once the word came out that Justice Department approval was no longer necessary, according to the article,  the North Carolina senate added a bunch of new voting barriers to blacks, held 20 minutes of public hearings, passed the law, and sent it back to the house which also passed it in record time.

And then they were sued.   A Federal District Court judge upheld the law, but the three judge panel of the 4th Circuit US Court of Appeals overturned his decision,

"calling it “the most restrictive voting law North Carolina has seen since the era of Jim Crow.” Drawing from the emails and other evidence, the 83-page ruling charged that Republican lawmakers had targeted “African Americans with almost surgical precision.”  

(The District Court judge was a Republican, the panel were all Democrats.)

The governor asked the Supreme Court to reinstate the voting restrictions in the new law stating it was too close to the election to change things.  But last week the Scalia-less US Supreme Court was deadlocked four to four, thus letting stand the Appeal Court's ruling.

Throughout the article the reporter quotes Republican legislators as saying the changes were made to prevent voter fraud, despite emails that came out in court where legislators and their staff were asking for specific information on black voters - the kinds of id they used; how many voted early; how many were university students, etc.  And despite the fact that there were only two cases of in-person voter fraud referred to a district attorney from 40 million votes cast from 2000 to 2012.


The Quote

"Longtime Republican consultant Carter Wrenn, a fixture in North Carolina politics, said the GOP’s voter fraud argument is nothing more than an excuse. “'Of course it’s political. Why else would you do it?' he said, explaining that Republicans, like any political party, want to protect their majority. While GOP lawmakers might have passed the law to suppress some voters, Wrenn said, that does not mean it was racist. 'Look, if African Americans voted overwhelmingly Republican, they would have kept early voting right where it was,” Wrenn said. “It wasn’t about discriminating against African Americans. They just ended up in the middle of it because they vote Democrat.'”

My Response:

1. Democracy is about the will of the people.  Any voter suppression, whether it be of African-Americans or Democrats is wrong.  Winning elections by preventing people from voting violates the spirit of American democracy.  
1. So Wrenn's admission that it was political (and not about voter fraud) exposes the Republicans' lies.  
2. His admission that what they did was voter suppression of Democrats, not African Americans acknowledges the voter suppression.
3. It's possible that shifting it from suppression of Democrats rather than African-Americans may be a ploy to avoid problems with the Voting Rights Act which, as I understand it, is aimed at preventing suppression of minority voters, not parties.  
2. The majority opinion of the Supreme Court's Shelby v. Holder decision focused on the idea that the list of states required by the Voting Rights Act to submit changes for pre-approval was a relic of history and that conditions had changed.  The Court said, knowing it wouldn't happen given the deadlocks in the legislature, that Congress could pass new standards that better the states with the problems requiring pre-clearance of voting changes.    
1. North Carolina's action, taken days after the Shelby decision demonstrate that, at the very least, nothing really had changed in this area in North Carolina.  
3. The fact that changes were aimed at African-American districts, not white Democratic districts, also undermines Wrenn's comments.
1. According to FactCheck African-Americans were only 38% of the registered Democrats in 2006.  That left the rest, mostly white, with some Latinos.  
2. It may be that because of housing segregation, and economic conditions that make it harder for African-Americans to get off work to get proper ID and to vote during the day, that it was easier to target blacks.  But the result is the suppression of the black voice in North Carolina politics.  

I'd note that the Alaska Dispatch News has been posting a number of important investigative reports from national media.  And I'd guess, important as they are, most people find it easier to read about the latest Trump insults, than to tackle a longer story that requires some thinking.  Not my readers, of course.  

Reports in recent days have included:

How spy tech firms let governments see everything on a smartphone
Tobacco industry works to block federal rules on e-cigarettes   (NYTimes online headline different from ADN print headline)
Flawed missile system produces $2 billion in bonuses
Exxon ignores near-term glut to play liquefied gas long game

Colin Kaepernick and 'Political Correctness' Conservative Style - Part 1

Conservatives are quick to cry 'political correctness' when their racist comments are attacked.  But they fail to recognize attacking others who they disagree with has long been a conservative indulgence.

The  disapproval expressed by many football fans and others of San Francisco football player Colin Kaepernick is very much in the vein of conservative 'political correctness.'  By their standards, he must stand up when the national anthem is played.  To sit is offensive because it is seen as unpatriotic and disrespectful to what they hold dear..  Just as using racist, sexist, and homophobic epithets is offensive to many liberals because they see it as perpetuating discrimination against different groups of (generally less powerful) Americans.

At its simplest, 'political correctness' today means to conservatives 'when liberals tell us what we can't say or do."

Simple may be easy, but it glosses over a much more complicated set of realities that underly the idea of political correctness.

I've written about this before - as in this piece on political correctness and Thanksgiving.

My most succinct take on this is:

When white, male, Protestants had most of the power in the US (probably they still do hold more wealth and positions of power than any other single group), they could say and do as they pleased.  Their prejudices and narratives were enforced by churches, schools, and the law.  Blacks had to tolerate the socially humiliating and economically devastating deprivations of slavery and then Jim Crow and the culturally embedded racism of US institutions.  The values of the dominant class were imposed on them.  And on non-Protestants.  A key impetus for the creation of Catholic schools, for example, was to escape the prejudice against Catholics and indoctrination to Protestantism in public schools.

The dominant culture, quite naturally, saw their beliefs as the only true view of the how the world is.  I say naturally because those in the dominant culture experienced their world view both at home and in the institutions outside the home.  Blacks, people of other religions,  experienced that dominant societal world view outside the home, but at home they had a second  world view.  The idea that there are more than one social realities is easier to grasp for people who grow up with two or more realities.  The dominant culture also had the power to impose their values  on everyone else.  And those who opposed them - whether women, or Indians, or communists, or atheist, or the poor - were censored or worse for opposing the power structure of the dominant world view.  

It's only been since those outsider groups gained greater strength and ability to stand up and protest policies and practices that make them second class citizens, that the defenders of the status quo borrowed the term 'political correctness' from left wing academic circles, and used 'political correctness' to label those actions which challenged their own belief system and power to enforce it on others.

That bubble of power - where your own beliefs are backed up by the economic, social, and political systems - coincides roughly with what Peggy McIntosh coined 'white privilege.'   Before the women's suffrage and civil rights movements was a time when white Americans, particularly male, straight, Protestants, could say and do what they wanted, because what they wanted to say was backed by the society of the US.  So what they said and did seemed to be obviously 'true.'

Women shared the white part, but had to put up with being second class citizens to males,  forbidden to vote and subservient in many ways to their husbands.  And looked down on if they didn't have husbands.  Atheists and homosexuals, if they identified themselves as such, could lose their jobs and face violence.

The civil rights, women's rights, and gay rights movements all worked to break down that privilege to  be able to abuse 'outsiders.'  The Jim Crow South is the most obvious example of that privilege, but it existed and still exists in many less visible ways.

White males usually haven't seen this as a loss of their privilege to compete for jobs without competition from women and people of color, or to make sexually or racially demeaning comments, and to be treated preferentially by banks, employers,  and universities.  They saw it rather as a loss of rights, since they'd always taken them for granted.  The other groups, according to the myth of self-made man simply were inferior to white males and thus didn't do as well.

"Political Correctness' is the term they began using when people called them on their privilege.  When the others demanded to be treated equally.


This is more than I intended to say about this, but it's a topic that I've spent time examining.  As I was writing this I came up with more dimensions for thinking about it and the conflicts raised with, say, free speech rights.  But I need more time to clarify those thoughts.

So for now, I'd just say that much of the conflict over political correctness really could be handled by Miss Manners and a few good kindergarten teachers helping their wards learn common courtesy.  But there are also more complex aspects.  I hope to look at those aspects in a follow-up post.

Check That Suspicious Link

I had a bizarre comment on my latest post.  It was a url.  It was enough to get me to call my email provider and ask some questions that got me to the security folks.  We think it was harmless, but I changed passwords.  But it did lead to him pointing out a website that checks suspicious url's for malware, viruses, etc.

I thought that was a cool thing to know, so here it is:  https://virustotal.com.

Yeah, you have to think about checking that link I just gave you, don't you.  But you have to go there to check it.  Such dilemmas.  But I've got you covered.  I already did it and here's what it said:

I am working on Part 2 of The Uncanny Valley and Paris Museums post, but it's by warm and sunny in Anchorage and it's complicated, so this is a break.  In fact I may leave it for a couple of days before I get it up.