Veco Visuals

Here are a couple of visuals to go along with this morning's lead ADN story. Took these last night walking home from dinner. The building is at the corner of New Seward Highway and 36th Avenue.

FBI investigates science contracts awarded Veco

ARCTIC: $170 million in research contracts coincided with support for polar funding by Sen. Stevens.

By ERIKA BOLSTAD and GREG GORDON
McClatchy Newspapers

Published: August 16, 2007
Last Modified: August 16, 2007 at 10:03 AM

WASHINGTON -- The FBI is investigating the National Science Foundation's award of $170 million in contracts to the oil field services company that oversaw renovations on U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens' home.


The firm, Veco Corp., captured a lucrative five-year NSF contract in 1999 to provide logistics and support for polar research, although it had no previous experience in that field. During the same time period, Veco's top executive managed renovations that doubled the size of the longtime Republican senator's Girdwood home -- the scene of a July 30 FBI raid...

This picture was to show how fire weed can beautify even an ugly parking lot. Only just realized fire weed and a couple of spruce also can screen out a Veco Building almost.

Is Another World Possible? How Do We Know Reality?

It started this morning listening to "Another" radio station - KWMD, 104.5 or 87.7 on the Anchorage FM dial. Arlo Guthrie singing Alice's Restaurant leading into a story about another alternative radio station - KPFT Houston.

We’re also joined by Mary Thomas. She is the host of the weekly Zydeco music program on KPFT. The bullet that was fired into the station Monday morning narrowly missed her head.

This is coming from Amy Goodman's Democracy Now (Link to KPFT story here)

Then we hear Naomi Klein at the American Sociological Association last week

We did not lose the battles of ideas. We were not outsmarted and we were not out-argued. We lost because we were crushed. Sometimes we were crushed by army tanks, and sometimes we were crushed by think tanks. And by think tanks I mean the people who are paid to think by the makers of tanks."

In this piece she talks about how the radical capitalists have shut down each budding alternative. In 1989 when the Soviet Union fell

And it was in that moment of flux and disorientation that several very savvy people, many of them in this country, seized on that moment to declare victory not only against communism, but against all ideas but their own...
...if we look back at the past thirty-five years, we see this slamming of the door on alternatives just as they are emerging repeating again and again.

She identifies a list of situations when alternatives to the American model were either crushed outright (Allende's Chile) or perverted into capitalist copies (Solidarity in Poland).

Citing declassified conversations between Kissinger and Nixon,

Kissinger says very bluntly that the problem with Allende’s election is not what they were saying publicly, which was that he was aligned with the Soviets, that he was only pretending to be democratic, but that he was really going to impose a totalitarian system in Chile. That was the spin at the time. The example of a successful elected Marxist government in Chile would surely have an impact on -- and even precedent value for -- other parts of the world. . . The imitative spread of similar phenomena elsewhere would in turn significantly affect the world balance and our own position in it.

And then a little later on Fresh Air, we hear Eugene Hütz, the leader of Gypsy Punk Group Gogol Bordello. Hütz grew up in Kiev with Gypsy DNA whose family left when Chernobyl blew and eventually made their way to Vermont.

All these stories reinforce that there are possibilities other than the standard model we see on mainstream media. We can have better health care, we can have real citizen involvement in government, we don't have to live lives that that require going into financial debt to Visa to pay for all the necessities of life (that didn't even exist 30 years ago) and time debt to our sleep and families.

We can know the possibilities of better lives if we escape from the ways our ideas are shaped by the fear mongering politicians and corporate media. So go to the links and listen to these ways people are not accepting the status quo.

And Here's the Rain

Video shot about 24 hours after the picture in the previous post of the Ring. So at least this time it was true: "Ring Around the Sun Means Rain Coming Soon."

Ring Around the Sun Means Rain Coming Soon

When we walked out of the Bear Tooth last night at 8:15pm there was a ring around the sun. According to Meteorologist Jeff Haby

WEATHER FOLKLORE: "A ring around the sun or moon, means rain or snow coming soon"

APPLICABILITY: This lore most commonly works in the cool season and in the mid-latitudes. Mid-latitude storm systems and fronts are more common in the cool season. It is also applicable to tropical storms and hurricanes since there are thin high clouds around the periphery of the storm system.

ANALYSIS AND INTERPRETATION: As an upper level disturbance approaches or warm front approaches the clouds tend to start off as high clouds. Over time the clouds gradually lower and thicken. Near the source of the greatest synoptic lifting is where precipitation and thick clouds are most likely. The sun or moon will no longer be visible once the clouds thicken too much.

The ring around the sun or moon is caused by ice crystals within thin cirrus clouds. The refraction causes light to shine into a ring. Cirrus clouds are generally the first layer of clouds that are seen as a storm system approaches.

PITFALLS: a. Cirrus clouds not associated with a storm system will produce the ring also. In these cases precipitation may not occur.

I'd say he's hedging his bets a bit there, and even though this isn't the cool season or mid-latitude, this morning's sky does look like there might be some rain.

Ikiru v. Comedy of Power

Comedy of Power at the Museum last night was disappointing. Here's an excerpt from the blurb:

COMEDY OF POWER is inspired by the real-life story of examining magistrate Eva Joly, whose seven-year investigation into charges of fraud and bribery at the French oil company Elf Aquitaine was described by The Guardian as "the biggest and most scandalous fraud inquiry in Europe since the Second World War.

Tonight we went to the Bear Tooth and had no idea what we were going to see, only that it was Monday night Foreign/Art film night. After the first minute I realized we'd seen this 1952 Akira Kurosawa classic on DVD at home.

The black and white Ikiru showed us a bureaucrat who spent 30 years of his life stamping documents and as a cog in the system who maintains his job by doing nothing. When he learns he has up to six months to live, he realizes he hasn't lived, and with the help of a few strangers, figures out what he needs to do. In 2 1/2 hours we go through questions about the meaning of life, an analysis of the post War Japanese bureaucracy, come to understand this man who as his last act, fights the bureaucracy he's been part of to help some neighborhood women build a park.

Comedy of Power in contrast squandered its two hours leaving us wondering how did this investigator manage to pull off whatever it was she pulled off (it was never quite clear what got accomplished.) We really didn't learn much about any of the characters or what was going on. How could a one woman office with an assistant who we learn at the end was a spy do all the work needed to bring down giant corporate executives working closely with politicians - including her boss? After spending a week at the Anderson trial here, I know that just that relative small case took a lot of people to gather and organize all the data.


But Ikiru I highly recommend. Its story about human beings is timeless and one everyone should read now and then.

604

According to a very reliable source, Room 604 of the Baranof Hotel in Juneau will get a name change. When one of the hotel managers found out a group wanted to use the Veco corruption suite for a fund raiser a while back, he said no. The group was offered a different, more public room, but the infamous suite wasn't going to have 100 or more people squeezed in disturbing people on the floor at a time when the hotel was full. The hotel management doesn't want to promote the room's notoriety. There's no interest in cashing in on Alaska's most famous hotel room, in fact they are even planning on renumbering rooms soon.

Broadway Under the Stars Sun

The MacBook I got about three weeks ago has iMovie 6, which I spent most of today learning to put together this video of last night's outdoor concert. Christian Heppinstall and Theatre Artists United put on the show with help from various other folks. And now that I've got down the basics of iMovie 6, iMovie 7 came out this past week, and Ben from the Apple Store at CompUSA says it is completely different. Oh well, another obsolete skill.





I continue to be pleased with Viddler. The problems with the video can all be put on me. But considering this is all recorded with my digital camera, it's not too bad. Stabilizing would be helpful in a few places. A second camera would be really helpful. But it was a fun evening, with a big crowd out in the beautiful weather.

Blogger's New Browse Profile Feature

Wow! Quite some time back I had thought this was built in and so when I went to click on Alaska on my profile hoping to see all the other Alaska Bloggers, I was very disappointed you couldn't do this. But today you can. Now I've been gathering links for Alaska blogs hoping at some point to make a map of the types of blogs that are out there. The two blog rolls on the right side are part of that effort. I'd found about 250 Alaskan blogs. But when I clicked on Alaska in the Browse Profile feature, just now, it said there were over 6000! There's no way I'm going to map all those.

But then I went back to my profile and clicked on my first listing under favorite music, Keith Jarrett. Only 305. Out of all the millions of Blogspot bloggers, only 305 listed Keith Jarrett among their favorite musicians.

The first one I clicked on was Leighton. His banner is spectacular - at least to my taste. And the first post up was the YouTube of Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee which I immediately posted (below this one.) The photos on his site are also fine. And another video further down - the Secret - by Mark Day was also worth watching.

Obviously, there's something special about people who list Keith Jarrett in their favorite music. I make this claim based on a sample of one. Never mind that Leighton may find my site boring. For now, Keith Jarrett rocks. [I just picked the first Jarrett YouTube that came up. I'd never seen him perform before and I think perhaps the music is more enjoyable if you just listen. In any case the one I'd most recommend is the Koln [don't know how to do an umlaut here] concert CD.] I'll check out more of these Keith Jarrett fans later and give you a report. Meanwhile I'm going to try to put together a video/slideshow of last night's (now) "Broadway Under the Stars" at Town Square. Of course the sun doesn't go down til 10:30pm in early August, but there was a good crowd on this beautiful evening and the music was very good.

Not All Democratic Congresspeople Caved

Thank you Representative Lee for saying what needs to be said.

Short Hike Toward the BallField with Three Young Friends

We picked up S, M, and H, for a hike from the Glen Alps parking lot. We started at the steps to Flattop, but but took the upper trail towards Powerline Pass.

We stopped to play in the stunted forest. We're close to tree line here and the trees are kid sized.
























The kids decided on this warm day, they needed to rearrange the rocks in the creek under the bridge















Someone stole my camera while I was snoozing.
























M has a book on Alaska wildflowers and was excited to find the monkshood blooming everywhere she looked. But she told me the color was wrong in the book. It was blue, but these were more purple.




S decided to give H a piggy back ride.







They didn't get far.















Here we're getting back to the trail after the girls played in the tall grasses.
































We had to make another detour off the trail. This time to leave enough room for the moose and her calf. But she was taking the trail traffic in stride - and there was a lot of hikers and their dogs.















Finally back to the parking lot. As you can see it was full. At five bucks a car (free for those of us who buy annual day passes to the state park) it probably was a good idea just to maintain the parking lot and the trail heads. I wonder how many don't pay, and of that group, how many get fined, and how much of that is collected.

Anyway, it was a great day and the girls did a lot of walking and no complaining.