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A so far unpublished letter I sent to our daily rag:

UPDATE: Until today that is, here.

Hi. Say an average human pedaling an average bicycle together weigh two hundred pounds. And say our average speed on a roadway is somewhere between ten and twenty mph. We are no match for two tons of glass and steel moving at 40-60 mph. The other thing is, when you’re bicycling, it can be very difficult to hear and understand what people are saying, even when they’re right behind you. Much less someone in a truck with their window down speeding by at 55 mph. So please save your breath, as we cannot understand what I presume are the invectives some of you shout at us, that we get off the $%#@%^ road. Please familiarize yourself with the relevant laws in Anchorage governing bicycles on the roadway (AMC 9.38.020(a)), where I will remind you we are legally permitted to ride our bikes, even when — yes even when — there is an adjacent path. It’s a very clearly worded law. We thank you in advance for sharing the road, and seeing bicyclists.

Like the first time, this is the second time in one year I’ve wanted to throttle Bill Maher.

Happy Wife welcomes the arrival of summer with a Sangria (or two). The first day over seventy in what has so far been a record setting cool July. While the rest of America swelters. Lending credence to my hypothesis that hot summer air is a zero sum game, it can’t be everywhere at once, there’s only so much to go around, and this year so far it’s all been in America. Until Tuesday.

Wednesday I arrived at the bank of the Kenai River at 8:30 am and waited for my nettin’ buddies, Mike & Greg, to arrive with the boat. Looking out on the day I was reminded as I so often am why I live here. Mt Redoubt looms on the horizon. She blew her lid the year I moved to Alaska, 1989. Covered my driveway and filled my gutters with ash.

I want to see a larger version of this picture.

Mike selected the inflatable boat (Achilles) for this trip. The strategy was to have Greg and I net from either side of the boat while Mike kept us positioned or moving slowly with the motor, depending on the direction and strength of the tide. Tide swings in this part of the world fluctuate from 14-22 feet. It can be tricky, especially in the company of hundreds of other boats filled with eager netters. I’ve never seen anything like it this year.

Before we even got underway we discovered the bow of the Achilles was flaccid. Hole or bad valve? A Viagra joke was uttered. Either way, unfortunately the pump had been left behind, so Greg and I stayed with the boat riverside and chatted while Mike went to fetch the pump. About an hour later we were underway with a firm bow. Only to watch it go flaccid again within fifteen minutes. Oh well, other than annoyance of having to repeat over and over again to other boaters — “Yes, we’re aware it’s flaccid” — it was no big deal, being it is unnecessary for flotation.

Expectations were high when the tide finally turned, and water started pushing back into the river. Typically, this is when the salmon make their run into fresh water. We’d only landed one Sockeye before the tide turned, but a really nice one, a male, probably 12 lbs or better. The Kenai River is known for big Sockeye. On the day we came away with about a dozen fish, well short of what we expected (>25). Nobody else appeared to be doing much better. But what a fantastic day on the water it was.

From the killing fields into the coolers they went. The three of us cleaned and filleted ’em riverside.

Later, today, at home, I vacuum sealed my take and introduced them to our freezer. Save one fillet, which I will grill tonight. Life is good.

Sockeye are hammering into the Kenai River, like NOW.

>12K by sonar yesterday. I’ll be on the river tomorrow, dip netting.

Some nice photographs taken at the Tour de France.

As a Libertarian I am sometimes criticized, or envied — most often the former — for having a political philosophy that allows me to criticize the Left and the Right. I concede it does confer a certain flexibility at cocktail parties, where party goers often segregate into cliques along political ideology. I’m welcomed in all of them, especially when the dialog turns to carping about the policies of the Other Side. Carping comes easy to libertarians, mostly because government policies continue to provide us such a fertile substrate for our complaints.

Anyhoo, this morning I’d like to add my voice to the complaint concerning the oft-heard shibboleth from the Right, namely, “Obama is a socialist.”

As the director of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest reminds us, you think Obama is a socialist? You ain’t seen real socialism dude, like, for instance, twentieth century Czechoslovakia.

It’s like people who point to real bad poverty in the Ozarks, and you want to ask these people if they’ve ever been to, say, the slums of Guatemala City. Or the hills outside Port-au-Prince. I admit no familiarity with the former, though a friend of mine has multiple times gone to lend his assistance rebuilding the latter, and confirms the deprivation there.

Back to the POTUS being a socialist, consider this from another (nominally libertarian) voice, Fred Reed:

Next, why do the cognitively challenged say that Obama is a socialist? The man is an arch-conservative. (I’m not sure what arches have to do with it, but never mind.) He bailed out Wall Street, the beating heart of predatory capitalism, and then carefully didn’t prosecute those who masterminded the sub-prime scan. Socialists hate Wall Street. Obama breast-feeds it. And he sends the military to bomb every country he has heard of, which is very conservative. He is ideally qualified to be president of Guatemala.

Seen while walking this morning with Lucy at Kincaid Park. A Devil’s Club bloom emerges.

And the reason its species name is O. Horridus

Many of our mountain bike trails here are lined with O. Horridus, an incentive to avoid falling if ever there was one.

Wait a minute, wasn’t it during the Clinton era that people — mainly Clinton supporters — claimed that the many accusations of marital infidelity Clinton was defending himself against, even if true (many turned out to be true), would be irrelevant to his capacity to be a good president? They said that was a “private matter” between him, Hillary and his family. So why is the Left now demanding that Mitt Romney fully disclose his private finances? How he chooses to manage his “private” portfolio should have little predictive value in how well he’ll perform as POTUS, right? Not that I’m a big Romney fan, just saying.

Actually, I might argue that cheating on your wife multiple times should raise more concern about your character (lack of it actually), and how it might carry over to your professional judgement, than multiple savings accounts in a Swiss bank.

Seen while cycling the Bird-to-Gird trail the other day: Sun (!), Eagles, Bears, Tourists, Taco’ed Wheel, and…

… a Happy Wife

Eagle sightings were abundant. The picture I took was of one that appeared to be an adult Golden perched high atop a tree. A minute earlier it was standing on the mud flats of Turnagain Arm, the tide going out, I’m guessing hunting for small fish, possibly hooligans. The picture didn’t turn out very good, looked more like a gay hock vulture. The bears? A black sow with (at least) two cubs. Here’s the picture — I maxed out the zoom on my Android.

As Happy Wife correctly pointed out to me, false positive sightings of black bears occur all the time. Someone will scan a broad mountain slope and say, “Look, see that black spot, I think that’s a bear.” But when you see a real black bear, you understand what it means to be black. There is no mistaking it. So if you’re not sure it’s a bear, it likely isn’t. Grizzlies? They’re (usually) brown, that’s different. And up here they’re a helluva lot bigger than a black bear. Adults anyway.

We saw other less notable wildlife too. In total it was enough that we both paused and remarked, “Look where we live.” And when we returned home and took a gander at a heat index map of America, redder than a bad sunburn, we felt like gloating a bit.

Oh, and that taco’ed wheel. Two chicks were riding abreast going into a tunnel as I was coming out (opposite direction). I avoided a collision and said something to the effect of Hey, single file please. Seconds later I heard “Ugh…oomph…crap…!” Crash. Thought one of them had plowed into Happy Wife who was behind me a few clicks at the time. But it was one of the chicks who crashed, and pretty badly judging from the condition of her bike, which was clearly unrideable. I asked if she was hurt, she said I don’t think so.

Why I do I press on here? Hearing Lileks question himself made me do the same. He has commenters, evidence of readership, a following. At the very least he’d be letting people down if he stopped blogging. People like me. I’ve been following Lileks on and off for years because…well, lots of reasons, not the least of which is he is maybe the only blogger who has ever caused my morning coffee to come suddenly shooting out of my nose. And the entertainment is free. His blog is always just a click away. No logging in. No pesky passwords. No repeated links to the PayPal donate button (if he even has one). But the biggest reason is the content. I admit to a fondness for a crafty story wrapped around the most quotidian things, the otherwise banal day-to-day things found in the backwash of our lives. But Lileks pays attention. For Lileks, it’s not just a box of cereal on the grocery store shelf; inside his prose the box and its colorful advert becomes a kind of cultural signpost. He doesn’t merely let his dog out in the back yard. There’s something important in the yard; something otherwise disregarded as mundane or pointless becomes worthy of our focus, occasionally via the dog’s point of view. Cataracts and all. It usually takes pages of good fiction to trigger my empathy; Lileks can pull it off in a single post.

Not everything he writes do I find entertaining or even interesting, but that’s not the height of my bar. Consistently good is good enough. The perfect can go pound salt.

Which brings me back to why I blog. For family and friends mostly. Living in Alaska we don’t get down to America too often and the blog is a way to stay in touch. And meager though it may be, I do have some readers. Not judging from the number of comments, but according to my site meter I do have visitors, some days a dozen or more, other days less, a few days many more. Could be web spiders or bots I suppose, can’t rule that out. Anyway, blogging is great way to think out loud, a way to link to things I find entertaining, scholarly, or neither. And it keeps me writing. So there’s something in it for me too.