Jim Tweto, the patriarch of a family aviation business in Alaska whose fame endured a decade after his somewhat reluctant star turn on television, died June 16 when the Cessna 180 he was flying failed to gain altitude after takeoff. — aopa.org “At least he died doing what he loved.” “He loved crashing planes?” Read more →
EppsNet Archive: Alaska
West Coast Tsunami Warning
Those of us who live on the west coast, including Alaska and Hawaii, got a tsunami warning yesterday morning, following a 7.9 earthquake in Alaska. My first thought was “This is going to make me look like a genius for not getting my car washed last weekend.” Read more →
Doomsday Cometh
Credit: Paula Wirth I saw my brother for the first time in years this past weekend. He’s been living in Utah but he’s now on his way to Alaska to escape the coming Armageddon. Canada and Mexico will be invading the United States from the top and bottom . . . I’ve forgotten the details, but it’s going to be bad. I don’t know why he was informed about this and I wasn’t. I’m not moving to Alaska though. I’m not a cold-weather person. They can kill me right here in a pair of shorts . . . Read more →
Sarah Palin
As Warner Baxter said to Ruby Keeler in 42nd Street: You’re going out there a youngster, but you’ve got to come back a star! Finally, a breath of fresh Alaskan air! Not yet another Ivy League lawyer, yet another warmed-over political hack, yet another condescending, posturing, preening, pandering, pontificating blowhard who’s lost sight of the fact that politicians are employees. We hire them, we pay them, we give them trillions of dollars to spend any way they want to . . . if we didn’t hold them to such ridiculously low standards of accountability, it might be easier to remember who works for whom. And hockey moms are hot! Why? Because hockey’s an expensive sport, so hockey dads have to knock down a pretty good income, which in our materialistic society allows them to be more selective in the spouse department. My wife is sort of a hockey mom, in… Read more →
It Seems Obvious in Retrospect . . .
. . . but something I just learned is that area codes were originally assigned according to the population density of the city or region, with the lowest numbers going to the most populous areas. Keeping in mind that phones in those days had rotary dials, and higher numbers therefore took longer to dial, the thinking was that areas with the most people should be the easiest to call. That’s why New York City got area code 212, Chicago got 312, Los Angeles got 213, etc. (Zero actually counts as a high number — a 10, essentially — because it takes the longest to dial.) Conversely, the area code for the entire state of Alaska was (and still is) 907. Read more →