Signs Of Fires From San Francisco

We left LA by car yesterday for a chance to see all three grandkids and their parents in San Francisco.  This had been planned well before fires broke out.  It was great to have a road trip with a stopover on the way.  (I'll share some pictures later.)

While we'd seen signs of smoke, it wasn't until  we hit San Jose today the sky was very smoky and it was down pretty low.  Here are a couple of pictures of the smoke-screened sun in San Francisco.

Here's the SF City Hall Dome below the sun.

The sun a little later.

I'll leave the rest of the media to tell you what's going on and how climate change's effects are involved.  This is as close as I've gotten to this tragedy.  Off to see some grandkids now.

Often Foreigners See Us More Clearly Than We See Ourselves

Sometimes I think that many, if not most, Americans think of people living outside of the US as not as smart, not living as good a life, just somehow less than Americans.   But I suspect that non-American see us much more clearly and objectively than we see them or ourselves.

Most educated folks outside the US tend to speak and read and understand English at a level that few Americans (other than immigrants) can match with other languages.  They can read understand our newspapers and listen to and understand our television news.   How is it that someone who only speaks American English thinks he's smarter and knows better than people in other countries who speak their own language plus ours, and sometimes a few more?

They know way more about us than most of us know about them.

For example,  this Dutch TV host seems to see our gun problem much more clearly than many Americans.  How many Americans even know who heads the government of Holland, or even what his or her title is?






OK, to be fair to Americans, because we have been the West's most powerful nation and have great influence on the rest of the world,  we are the country that others are most interested in knowing about.  Or at least have had the most reason to keep track of what we do.  And because English is the lingua franca of most of the world, it's much easier for English speakers to travel the world using English.  The people of Holland cannot expect too many people, when they travel outside of Holland, to speak or understand Dutch.  So they have a greater incentive to learn at least enough English to get by with.

While that explains why it's easier for us to just get by with English, it doesn't change the fact that that means the rest of the world knows a lot more about us than we know about them.  And that gives them a leg up on us that we should be more humble about than we are.

Intro To Anchorage Cannabis Market 2: Alaska Fireweed

A few days ago I posted part 1 of what might turn out to be a series of posts on cannabis shops in Anchorage.  That first post will probably be the most detailed, since it was the first and I won't have to repeat all the explanations of what different terms mean and how things are done.  At the second shop I visited, also downtown, a few blocks from the first one on 4th Avenue in the most touristy part of town, my stay was shorter, since a lot of my more generic questions had already been answered.




So, here's Alaska Fireweed.

It used to be a skate and ski board shop.  If you read the Anchorage Press, Will Ingram, who writes the weekly column on weed, is, according to his LinkedIn page, the general manager of Alaska Fireweed.  That column will tell you far more than I ever can about cannabis in Alaska.


On walking in to this store, there's a separation from the rest of the store, but it doesn't have a separate lobby.  It's more like walking into someplace where you have to give your ticket (or in this case show your id) before you get fully in.

This is Jason at the door.  Note I've merged two different pictures here and in doing that I had to cut out the divider that keeps you from wandering into the store on the left before getting id'd.

Jason handed me over to salesperson Mark who was happy to answer my questions.  Unlike Great Northern Cannabis, where they said they grow all their own cannabis in South Anchorage, Alaska Fireweed gets theirs from a variety of growers.  Mark mentioned there were places  on the Kenai Peninsula and the Matsu valley particularly.

When I asked my Big Mac question (a not very successful attempt to find out what was the most popular product) he people come in and buy a couple of grams, they buy pre-rolls, and edibles. It's like a liquor store now, and people stop by on the way home from work and buy cannabis they way they buy a bottle of wine.   And they're hoping that before long there will be room in the back where people can consume on the premises.

I asked whether this was a good job and he enthusiastically said it was.  Wages?  He said $12-15/hour.  But he also sells real estate.  This is just one job and it's lots of fun.  You meet all kinds of people.

Here your product comes in a plastic packet like this one.  Everything is labeled, there's more information, I think, on the back about testing.

He said most customers were smoking before it was legal and I asked why, since they knew how to buy it already, would they come to a shop where it costs more.

Several reasons, he said.

First, it's tested.  You know exactly what you're getting and how much.  That's a big deal.
Second, you have a lot more choices of products.  For example, he showed me an E*Blunt.

This is like an e-cigarette, but it has . . .  I realized as I was writing this that I didn't ask enough questions.  I could see that it had a USB port and I was puzzled.  That's to charge the battery he said.  You can see the little vial of cannabis oil.  I think it has a specific name, but I didn't write it down.  So I googled E*Blunt.  It turns out this is an Alaskan invention.  From the E*Blunt website:

"E * Blunt was developed in Alaska where the weather and elements don’t always allow for ease of smoking. Whether it was snow machining up the farthest peaks, skiing down an untouched mountain, fly fishing out of the back of the a boat or teeing off on the back nine, keeping a joint lit or even just dry was a constant battle. So with a lot of patience from my wife and many sleepless nights I set out to make a great tasting, discreet and easy way to smoke. With the help of some great people and a lot of good effort we are proud to present E * Blunt flavored vapes. The easy to use, great tasting, healthier way to consume. Enjoy responsibly in extreme places everywhere."

And about this particular product:

"E * Blunt Slims are rechargeable with a USB attachment, comes with a stylus tip and can be used with any exchangeable cartridges."

It comes in a lot of different flavors.  And it's not cheap.  Mark was selling it for $90.  Ah, I said, but it has a cartridge, so you can just buy that next time.  Well, it turns out, it's the oil that gets the price up.  A new cartridge is $80.  Mark said the lawyers buy these

Below are various items that were in the glass case.  I didn't ask questions.  That leaves lots of questions for the next couple of shops I visit.  And I haven't really looked at the edibles either.  

It might take a while to finish this series.  It's starting to be our travel season.  In the summer our granddaughter came to visit us.  And now it's our turn to visit her and her cousins.  So we'll be in and out of Alaska.  But I'll get this done eventually.

Termination Dust Showed Up Finally

October 7 is kind of late for the first termination dust. Last year I got a picture on Sept. 23. Someone did say there had been some dustings that quickly disappeared, but nothing I ever saw when the clouds cleared up.  The sky was perfectly clear when we got up yesterday, but by 1pm it was hazy clouds and by night it was raining again.

Meanwhile, back in town kids are still enjoying fall at the Cuddy Park playground.

I was at the Assembly special public hearing on SB91 yesterday and went past the playground on the long way home.  People were really angry about crime in Anchorage and the lack of apparent police responsiveness.  I've got lots of pictures and notes.   I'll do a post on that soon, but cleaning up the house for our housesitter as we prepare for a quick trip to see grandchildren.  If I get done early, I'll post later today.  Don't hold your breath though.

An Introduction To Anchorage's Cannabis Market Place - Great Northern Cannabis

Although some people think that going to college in the 1960s, attending the Monterey Pop Music festival,  teaching as a Peace Corps volunteer, and owning a VW camper certified me as a hippie, I really wasn't.  My drug use in those days was limited to occasional hits offered by friends.  I found marijuana preferable to alcohol, but neither were ever big parts of my life.  Furthermore, it was illegal and I am basically a law-abiding person. Generally if we don't like a law, we should change it, not break it.  Smoking pot was not important enough for me to consider civil disobedience.  Injustice?  Yes.  Pot?  No.

So, many years later, I find myself in a new world of legal cannabis here in Alaska.  I'm actively observing my brain's reorganization as old conditioned strictures get reshaped.  I never really thought that smoking an occasional joint was wrong.  I didn't  feel guilty when offered a puff.  But when I was in high school I never heard of anyone smoking pot.  It was still legally and mentally forbidden.  It was only during my college years that people I knew started experimenting.  And by the time I was married with kids and a job I liked, marijuana wasn't important enough to risk any of that.

So now we have a dozen or so cannabis shops in town and I decided as part of my cultural reeducation I should blog about legal pot in Anchorage.  J and I did look into one shop a month or so ago.  It was right next door to a new restaurant we were trying out and so on our way back to the car, we looked into Enlightenment.  It was surprisingly clean and the guy who checked our ID's was very friendly and was eager to gently and respectfully (dare I use this word?) enlighten us.

Click to enlarge and focus

Last week I finally went on line and made a list of all the cannabis shops in town - at least that I could find online.  And yesterday I started my field work.  After a lunch meeting down town I walked over to Great Northern Cannabis and Alaska Fireweed.

Great Northern Cannabis

It sits downtown on 4th Ave right in the heart of tourist Anchorage.  The visitor center log cabin is right across the street.

It opens into a lobby where you get your ID checked and they sell non-cannabis products - pipes, bongs, t-shirts, etc.

I told Kelly I was a blogger and wanted to report on marijuana shops and she couldn't have been nicer or more patient with my questions.

I really didn't have many prepared questions.  The main one was:  "What is the Big Mac of pot shops?"  She wasn't sure what I was asking so I had to explain I wanted to know what the most popular product was.

"Deals," she said.  We have regular deals and people want them because they're cheaper.
"Next - the highest THC percentage."

OK, so there isn't one thing.  Rather it's price and high.

Kelly told me they're open from 10am to midnight (well, they start shutting down about 11:50pm) seven days a week.   There were a number of glass pipes under glass in the counter and I asked about glass blowers.  (I broke the stem of an old wine glass from my mom and I've been looking to see if a glass blower can fix it.)  She said, yes, there are a lot of glass blowers.

She suggested I go on in to the main part of the store, where I met Olivia.  She couldn't have been more helpful.

All the concentrates and flowers in the shop is grown at their shop in South Anchorage.  Edibles come from Frozen Buds in Fairbanks.  They are starting to get stuff from Momo's Bakery as well

Then she started showing me the products.  You can see in the picture some clear plastic containers.  From left to right are two with 3.5 grams (1/8 ounce).  Then there is one with coffee.  My notebook and pen.  Then there's what looks like a little white pill vial.  That's what you take your pot home in.  The vial isn't in any of the other pictures, so I wanted to point that out now.

Here's a closer look of  the left side. She'd pulled White Widow and Pineapple Chunk out for me to check.

On the right is the coffee that you use to "cleanse your palate" between sniffings.

I've heard about cleansing a palate between tasting different wines, but isn't that in your mouth?  Can you do that for fragrance too?  The Roasterie explains the use of coffee at fragrance counters to 'cleanse the nasal palate."  So I guess it works for noses too.

Now let's look at this container a little closer.

There's this pickle shaped part with lots of holes.  In the pictures above, this part is protected with a black rubbery cover.  Here's where you can smell the terpenes - the part that gives the smell, Olivia explained.  Olivia had me sniff a few samples to compare those with a lemony scent from the others.  I have a pretty good nose, but it was hard to get the lemon scent.  The lemon scent indicates a product that will decrease hunger she said.  (Another medical benefit of pot - lose weight - I thought, but pot's supposed to make you hungry.)

The Pineapple Chunk will make you light headed.  She said more about some making you relaxed and feeling good, but not necessarily high.  But my notes didn't catch all the details.

The labels tell us the THC percentage and the OBD percentage.

THC (from Leafly):

"tetrahydrocannabinol, is the chemical compound in cannabis responsible for a euphoric high."

Olivia explained that CBD is the part of marijuana that has the medical benefits.  At home I got a little more information from a different Leafly page:

"Cannabidiol (CBD) is one of many cannabinoid molecules produced by Cannabis, second only to THC in abundance. These plant-derived cannabinoids, or phytocannabinoids (phyto = plant in Greek), are characterized by their ability to act on the cannabinoid receptors that are part of our endocannabinoid system. While THC is the principal psychoactive component of Cannabis and has certain medical uses, CBD stands out because it is both non-psychoactive and displays a broad range of potential medical applications. These properties make it especially attractive as a therapeutic agent."

Above the sniffing holes is a magnifying glass to allow you a closer look at the nugget, the flower,  as Olivia explained, or 'the bug.'  Here's my camera's look through the magnifying glass.

Again, I'm finding my notes didn't capture everything, but I believe Olivia told me that at Great Northern Cannabis, since the grow all their own marijuana, they also don't include any trimmings with their nuggets, just pure flowers.  The magnifying glass helps you see that, I guess.  If you know what you're looking for.

Now for a closer look at the other side of my notebook in the picture above with Olivia.

By this time Sara had joined Olivia explaining things to me.  Here are the two of them.




The White Widow and Pineapple Chunk shown in a previous picture contained 3.5 grams or 1/8 of an ounce.  The legal limit you can buy at one time is one ounce.  In this picture below we have 1 gram of Bubble Gummer and a one gram roll.  I also heard it called 'rolled.'  What I know as a joint.

Then we got to the deals, what Kelly had said are the biggest sellers.  The have a different $10 gram items on different days.  They also have PFD* deals (what merchant doesn't?).  Here's an example of some of the current deals one of their signs in the shop.

You can see this bigger and clearer if you click on the picture.  But even then you can't see the headings in the dark purple above the prices.  The one on the left is for 3.5 grams.  Next comes 1 gram.  On the right is "1 gram pre rolled."

You can also sign up for "Splango" by leaving a phone number of email.  After 10 purchases, you get a 20% discount coupon sent to your device.  She said they send announcements of deals, but not many.  

I also asked if this was a good job and a good place to work.  Both bud tenders, as they are called, enthusiastically assured me it was.  Good wages and discounts and tips.  They didn't get specific about wages, though said it was above minimum wage ($9.80/hour in Alaska as of January 1, 2017).
I asked about tips.  Olivia said $1 is good, sometimes someone puts in a five.  So it's not 20% like for a waiter, I asked.  No, she's pleased someone appreciates her enough to leave a dollar.

And what does it take to become a bud tender.  Here's where Sara took over as Olivia helped a customer.  WELL, first you need a marijuana handlers card.  You take a test online for $65 plus tax, she said, to get certified.  Then you have to take a $50 certified check (no personal checks or cash) downtown on Wednesdays from 9am-12pm to get your card.  On the right is Sara's.  (I smudged out her last name, birthdate, and MHP#.)

But that's not all.  You also need to get a food handler's card, but that's only $10.  You take that test online too.  They have to be renewed every three years.

Olivia said she got her job here because she knew someone who said to put in an application.  All the positions were now filled.


I went to two places yesterday.  The other one, Alaska Fireweed is a couple blocks down the street.  I'll do that soon. [UPDATE Oct 8:  It's up here now.]   I think this is more than enough for one post.  I really got a lot of information here and I probably won't have to get into so much detail at the other places, except to see if their reports are consistent with what I learned here.  And yes, both places, said sure to my requests to take pictures.

There was one more thing:  Checking ID's.  Olivia and Sara said you need a photo id with your birthdate and an expiration date.  A drivers license or a passport is good.  Student ID's aren't because they don't have birthdate.  I thought the reason they wanted to see a drivers license was to check if someone was barred from purchasing alcohol.  No, they said, that doesn't apply to marijuana.  If not, then someone like me who came of age 50 years ago really shouldn't have to show my ID.  It's clear I'm old enough.  But they've passed their marijuana handler permit test, so I'm sure they're right.

I didn't take a shot of the whole shop.  I did want to note that it's not in any way like the seedy head shops used to be.  And they had two ATM machines inside.

*for non-Alaskans, PFD = Permanent Fund Dividends, the checks Alaskans get in the Fall as the dividend on their share of the Permanent Fund where some of our oil revenue is saved.  The PFD disbursements began yesterday. (I couldn't find a link to the specific news item, so over time this link won't get to the disbursement announcement.)

Still Life With Steller Jay (And PhotoShop Filters)

When I came upstairs, J, with calm urgency, asked me to get it out.  I had no idea what she was talking about until she pointed at a Steller Jay in our living room.  This was a different experience than when we had the black capped chickadee earlier this summer.  It was struggling to fly against the windows.  When I lowered the shades and opened the sliding glass door, it found its way out quickly.

The jay was not as bold as it is when it visits us out on the deck.  It hid under the couch and side tables.  I tried to take pictures with my rebel, but the shutter jammed on all the different settings I tried.  So I had to use my little powershot.  This picture below was the best shot of the jay, but part of the picture was totally washed out and the rest a bit fuzzy.  So I cropped it and put it through different filters in Photo Shop.  Except for poster edges, the differences are very subtle (to my eye anyway.)  There is more or less light in different parts of the images from filter to filter.  Some parts are sharper than others.  So here they are:

Sparks

Busy around the house as fall moves in and trying to get things ready for winter.  Raking leaves, trimming back the perennials, mulching the flower beds.  Getting the moss of the roof.  Got someone painting the trim on the house and Jody came out to weld the railing back onto our front steps.

And that's the reason for the sparks.

Black Humor Alert

Sometimes sick humor is the only response to the news.  Here are some headlines I expect to see soon.


1.  Guinness Book of Records' New Category:  Most People Killed and Injured By A Mass Shooter

Sick, but the news I heard on NPR kept saying "the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history" which to some will be a challenge to set a new record.  There will be records for one person shootings, two person shootings, police shootings, military massacres, etc. And surely there is someone out there who wants to know about the deadliest mass shooting BEFORE modern U.S. history, so they can beat that too.  And Listverse has gone where Guinness has yet to go.

2.  NRA Establish 24 Hour Massacre News Channel  

As I listened to NPR (looks pretty close to NRA, doesn't it) switch to all day coverage of Las Vegas today, I realized it's only a matter of time before we need full time coverage of mass murders.  They'll fill in with other more mundane murders on slower days.  The more shootings, the more people will want more guns to compete for the Guinness records or to protect themselves.



The gun control people want to limit who gets guns and the kinds of guns they get.

The pro-gun people (chiefly sponsored by the gun and arms industry through the NRA) argue that people, not guns, kill people, so everyone (except Muslims probably) should have unlimited access (it seems since they seem to start lobbying if a member of Congress even thinks about gun control.)

It's clear that both people and guns together kill people.  A person with a knife can kill a small crowd, but not fifty, and not from a distance.  People can also use bombs and vehicles and other ways to kill more people at once.  But automatic weapons seem to be the most efficient and effective way to kill many people in a short time.

Then there's the people.  The president used the word 'evil' to describe the Las Vegas killer.  That's a word that is bandied about whenever there is a mass killing.  Evil is a word that makes the killer seem to be inherently bad through and through.  An agent of Satan.  (ISIS claimed credit for the Las Vegas killing, but I haven't heard about Satan's claim yet.)  Not someone you might know and say hi to every day.

The stats on deaths by guns around the world, make it clear that the easy access to weapons in the United States plays a role in the carnage here.  And as we learn about people involved in mass shootings, there's always some sort of long simmering resentment of people in general or some group of people.  Mostly based on personal issues of some sort.

There is currently a high level of anger among people in the United States.  Our current president claims that anger is what got him elected and he may be right.  But my point here is that people who commit mass murders often are people with a great deal of anger about something - loss of a job, loss of a spouse.  But underlying it all is loss of respect, probably most importantly self-respect.

We have a society that produces a lot of angry people with declining self-esteem.  I would argue that a number of social, political, and economic factors play a part.

Capitalism, which reduces everything to money and making it as efficiently as possible, plays a role, by squeezing more work out of employees for less money and using much of the employee share to enrich officers and shareholders.  That's the abstract part.  More concretely technology is making workers redundant.  Technology and foisting work onto the customer is now rampant.  It started, in my experience, with self-service gas stations.  Now travel agents are almost gone as people have to go online to book their own tickets.  Receptionists are gone as we spend a minute or more listening to simulated voices giving us choices of buttons to push until we finally get to what we need - and the companies seem to hope we won't need a human.  We have self service lines in the grocery.  Each of these changes cuts out jobs.  Businesses have been fighting unions forever.  With fewer employees represented by unions, workers rights and wages and benefits erode and erode.  Lots of people work long hours for less money.  A smaller number of workers get good wages and benefits.

Pluralism is a political theory of governance that stems from the idea of separation of powers and the competition of interest groups to influence policy decisions.  The money spent by corporations to support candidates and ideas, to lobby legislators, and to spin truth to the public has gone up significantly.  So we have a majority party that wants to cut millions out of the health care programs and wants to cut taxes to the wealthy at the expense of the middle and lower economic classes.

Both capitalism and pluralism share the idea that the best outcome comes from the competition of self-interested players.  And while surely different interests keeping watch on each other is helpful, the theory doesn't account for things like altruism and community spirit.  Self-interest was the only thing most economists counted as 'rational' thinking for years.  It's all about competition.  And the balance falls apart when some groups gain much greater power to compete than others.  And that's what has happened over the last 60 years as we've moved from a country where the gaps between the richest and poorest in society, and the lowest and highest paid employee in a company, were much lower, to our current (and worsening) situation where the gaps are growing greater and greater.  And if the Republicans manage to pass the kind of tax reform our president is extolling, it will get worse.

I'd argue that it is this spreading sense of loss of economic and political power that plays a huge role in the anger Americans feel these days.  If we don't address that, we won't affect the people who not only are angry, but are also unhinged enough to commit suicide through spectacular mass murders which give them so sort of attention.  And as I mentioned in the previous post (not at all thinking about writing this post since Las Vegas hadn't yet happened), bad attention is better than no attention.

These shooter know that their lives will be the center of national, if not world, attention for at least several days if not more.  They will get their 'glory' for the way society has treated them.  I'm not saying their thinking is right, but I'm just trying to offer a possible explanation for behavior that seems unexplainable.  Because if we don't understand why people commit such acts, we have no hope for finding ways to prevent them.  Calling them 'evil' essentially puts all the blame on the shooter and doesn't allow for reflecting on how our society helps to create so many angry, bitter people with access to weapons that can kill fifty people in a few minutes.

As I listened to NPR this morning, I kept hearing the same stories over and over.  They simply do not have enough information to fill the time with meaningful new news.  It's as though they feel that to compete with social media, they have to report each tidbit of new information - whether confirmed or not - because otherwise people won't listen.  I'd argue that people would like to hear more reasoned thoughtful stories and can wait a few hours for serious updates on the current crisis.  Only people who might have a direct connection to the story - people whose friends and family might be involved - have a compelling reason to stay closely tuned in.  And they'd probably do better with social media outlets where they can set up two way communication.

But we all have a responsibility to let the media know we want more thoughtful coverage.  Instant news is less important than well-done news.  And it may well be that people like me are in the minority.  That we have become, as a nation, sensation junkies.  That news, for most people, serves the functions of entertainment and confirmation of our own biases.  If that's the case, democracy won't survive.

Too Much Media Is Addicted To Trump Tweets

Trump's tweets are just irresistible to way too many political reporters.  They just can't stay away, they just can't resist commenting.

There is a certain obligation to challenge his falsehoods and to give context to what he writes.  He is the president after all.  But I had a student once in a 6th grade class who really had no friends.  He wanted attention.  He didn't know how to get good attention;  bad attention was better than being ignored.  So he hit people, and worse.  I had a year to show him that he could get good attention.  It worked.

I challenge all political writers to ignore Trump's tweets for a week.  At least don't write about them, at all.  Turn off Twitter and only check your phone if it's a call from someone on a real, serious story.

Spend more time listening to the birds tweeting.    Make your own music.  Play with your kids.  The world won't collapse if you goof off a bit for a week.  Even if all of you do.  Enjoy visitors to your home, like I did with this hairy woodpecker the other day.  Look at how exquisite he is.  Even if he was tapping on my house.

Let your mind think about how the world works.  Like why don't woodpeckers get brain damage?  One of my favorite old posts.

British Virgin Islands After Irma

There's not much to add: