Good, accurate booze advice from Ray Smuckles

Lying on the floor of my bedroom is a bottle of Jim Beam my cousin gave me for my 21st. I'm not a drinker of wide experience but it turns out I hate bourbon. I'm now 22 and short on funds for what I DO like (scotch, guinness.) So how do I get this damned bourbon down me as pleasantly as possible?
Anonymous, Internet

A-ha! You say you hate bourbon, but you do like Scotch! I think we have the keystone which will unravel this puzzle.

Jim Beam is a good bourbon which you can drink straight, along with the other name brand American whiskeys such as Jack Daniels, Knob Creek, Ancient Situation, etc. I’m guessing that if you like Scotch but don’t like bourbon you are turned off by its relative sweetness. Certain palates find the extra sugar in bourbon medicinal. Drinking it over ice reduces this sensation somewhat, but if you still find that you can’t stomach its extra sugar we’ll do something counter-intuitive and mix it with three parts of cola. I think you’ll find that anyone on earth can enjoy a nice, sweet bourbon and Coke.

I DEFINITELY helped you with this advice.

I used to be a big vodka martini man (Belvedere or Grey Goose [are] my preferred labels) but I've moved to another country where it's tough to get anything better than Absolut, which I personally find very over-rated. I like gin and tonics, and am considering a move over to gin martinis, i.e., with Bombay Sapphire or some other top-shelf brand. Is it possible - or wise - to make such a big switch? I love the whole martini experience, but won't do it without top-flight hooch.
-JM, Sydney

Dear JM,

You would be surprised to hear how many people scoff at such a question. Not me, though. It’s all about the sugar, and boy do I hate a big-bodied gin or vodka. Crisp is the name of the game, and I am ready to slap anybody who does not belong in the game, completely slap them on their faces and the sides of their heads/ears. I will slap them.

It sounds like you’ll need to move over to an extra-dry gin martini, and the down-low on gin is that the ~80 proof Plymouth or Gordon’s are the best ones going. Tanq and Bombay are way too strong at like 95 proof, tasting too harshly of alcohol. Either way, take these shaken with a twist in a chilled glass.

Note from your Editor: Ray's Place, a weekly advice column (or column about whatever he feels like writing about) appears every Wednesday on Achewood.

Adventures in Spell Checking

I have fans, dear reader, I have fans. Believe it or not! In fact, I have one special fan who never hesitates to point me to spelling and grammar errors and for this I am always grateful cuz i am too darm lazy to proof my own work sometimes. Well, tonight I decided to try out the spell checker on the blog-o-matic and much to my amusement found that artificial intelligence can really be funnier than the regular kind.
When the blog-o-matic got to the name of our good, if old and addled governor murkowski, it suggested, accurately I might add, the seldom used but delightfully thoughful "morasses."
Better still, when it encountered the name of the high priest of pissing contests, massa limbaugh it suggested, wistfully perhaps, the archaic medical phrase, "lumbago."

Frank's first can of worms. Hope he has some ketchup.

Troopers raid Native pulltab operation in Barrow

By RACHEL D'ORO, Associated Press Writer

ANCHORAGE (July 1, 5:15 p.m. ADT) - Authorities have raided a pulltab operation owned by the Native Village of Barrow, fueling a long-simmering dispute between the state and village leaders who say they have a federal right to conduct gambling without an Alaska gaming permit.

Alaska State Troopers and a gaming compliance investigator seized 2,500 pounds of pulltabs, a cash register, business records and other items Monday from the tiny wooden building housing the operation. Troopers said the state has received complaints about illegal gambling conducted by the Eskimo tribal group.

Village officials said Tuesday the shutdown is temporary.

"We plan to open right back up in a couple of weeks," said gaming manager Mabel Kaleak.

The raid followed a May 21 letter from Attorney General Gregg Renkes to the village that it stop the pulltab operations or face legal action. The investigation is continuing and no charges have been filed, said Richard Svobodny, senior assistant district attorney in Juneau.

The state contends the pulltab operation is illegal because the village has not had a state gaming permit since 1999. It pays no state gaming taxes or fees and it offers prizes exceeding the allowable limit.

Village officials said the issue is one of sovereignty.(more)

Who says Canada is a nation of automatonic Liberal lingually-confused technocrats who worhip political correctness? Not I, Sir!

Yukon employees protest porn investigation

The Associated Press

WHITEHORSE, Yukon - More than 200 demonstrators turned out Friday for a union rally protesting an inquiry into Yukon government employees who sent or received e-mails deemed pornographic.

Participants at the Yukon Employees Union held up signs such as "Welcome to Salem" and other witch-hunt references.

"The government should realize the effects that this has caused people," said Brenda Hansen, an 18-year government employee.

The government has investigated employees whose names have appeared as either senders or receivers of e-mails it has discovered with pornographic pictures. The computers of the people have then been checked for explicit materials.

The government has sent letters to employees being investigated.

The first meeting is an initial interview. If the government decides the person should be punished, there is a disciplinary meeting.

Hansen she's been affected even though she has not received a letter or suspension.

"Morale is totally down. The fear, the apprehension is so high that it gets to the point where you don't even know whether to say 'Good morning' to someone for fear that they're going to fall apart to tears."(more)

Here are a few things worth looking at

I may not have been blogging, but I have been browsing.
Here's a guy who is the closest thing to Hemingway our times may have, yet. I found his recent piece in the New York Times magazine about the terrorist prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba compelling. Better still is his first person reportage from inside the walls of Sing Sing.

And one of my all time favorites (from when I was a kid and he was writing in the NatLamp), P.J. O'Rourke takes a good, hard look at "Hillary's" new book in the Weekly Standard.

Let see if we can get some traffic back to this sucker

It's nearing Fourth of July weekend, and that can mean only one thing- the elites fishing in the shadow of the oil rigs off Kenai. Lisa Murkowski and Commerce Secretary Don Evans are planning to interrupt their river trip to dedicate a Home Depot store in Kenai. I couldn't be prouder to be an American.

ADN Letter of the Day

Governor's rural police cutbacks are not merely staffing decisions

Last October you opined editorially that courts were not the place to decide "staffing levels" of rural police protection, applauding a trial judge's rejection of an Alaska Native suit charging that both the structure and delivery of police protection to off-road Native villages were racially discriminatory. The state funds and deploys para-police, not troopers (or other credentialed and empowered officers), to Alaska's Bush.

Village public safety officers (VPSOs), used nearly exclusively in rural villages, are products of an Alaska version of Canada's long-abandoned "native constable" program. Canadians now prepare Native applicants (like non-Native) to be full-fledged police, capable of deterring and handling all crime, whether urban or rural. Alaska persists in offering less deterrence to the same alcohol-related violence that you once documented in the Pulitzer-winning series "A People in Peril."

Gov. Murkowski has just cut 25 percent of VPSOs, adding no troopers, for 15 villages (13 Native). Do you still view rural police cutbacks as merely "staffing" decisions, inappropriate for court scrutiny for signs of race discrimination in the very different structure and delivery of police service to village Alaska?

-- Steve Conn

Seward

Senator Ulmer?

A few of us cronys were sitting around the cracker barrel, sippin' scotch and smokin' seegars when one of us, I forget which, piped up "Screw Tony Knowles," to whcih we all offered a hearty "Hear, hear," and waited for the next political profundity to emit.
"I thnk I know who can beat him AND Lisa Whats-her name," he went on.
Another round was poured, smoke puffed and we sat back to listen.
'"Lookit. Knowles is turning into Tom Daschle's puppydog and if Mark Begich hired David Ramseur to work for HIM, imagine the crew Knowles would bring to Washington if by some stroke of fate or disfavor of the gods he won election to the United States Senate..."
We all nodded our kjnowing assent to this scenario.
"And Lisa whatshername doesn't stand any more chance of re-election than her aged and clearly disoriented father does. Talk about name recognition. P.U.," the pundit continued.
This was making sense, if we weren't quite sure where it was going.
"Who can be an instant national Demo fundraiser, and we wouldn't begrudge it a bit," he asked. "Who can take on Knowles, with impunity, and play him like the pike he is?"
OK, we all said, "WHO?"
"Fran," he replied simply.
We all looked around, pulled on our scotches and pondered. "Hmmmmmmmm," we all hmmmmmm'd.
Fran indeed.
Instant national party credibility. Instant access to the same resources that put other notable women into the US Senate. No political loyalty, on the face of it to Tony Knowles (he Clintoned her in the election, right?) and certainly no reason to NOT take him on in the primary. Broad statewide support and far higher name recognition and credibility than the "incumbent" appointee.
Best of all, it by no means obviates another run for Governor in whatever glacially long wait we have until the aged and clearly disoriented incumbent's term is over.

So Where to Start.......Frank Murkowski or Eminem?

I saw, in New York, in the following order, Eminem, Alan Coulter, Biff Henderson and David Letterman.
here's the report i started writing while I was there:

LIVE FROM NEW YORK




(HASBROUCK HEIGHTS, N.J.) It isn’t New York City, but I can see it from my room. You can tell a lot about a civilization by the signs it posts on the sides of buses. Take this one, for example- “Don’t Abandon Your Baby.”
The Empire State Building was lit up red, white and blue last evening. From the view out my sixth floor window I can see Manhattan, the uptown cluster which includes the Empire State Building and lots of others, then the lowlands of midtown down to Lower Manhattan which, of course, is missing something.
Anyone who thinks Anchorage international is messed up tight now with the ongoing construction should landing Newark and then say something. A line of what seemed like 200 people waiting to get to the Port Authority cab dispatcher. Three lanes of moving, stopping, lane cutting traffic in front of the terminal (shall I accurately say ONE of the terminals, for I really have no idea how many there are, but it is a big, busy center of sky commerce).
We knew a cab would be pricey so we called a car service. Within 10 minutes a 2001 Lincoln Town Car was pulling up among the motorized anarchists, the driver waving a sign with my name on it.
New Jersey is home to the radio stations of New York, the landscape outside of Newark, swampy and tidal is dotted with the directional antenna arrays that once beamed rock and roll up and down the coast but now force feed the unwary AM radio listener with the likes of OÂ’Rielly and Limbaugh.
Then, there are the conexes.
If ever nuclear war or plague wipes life from greater Newark, alien observers will still see mountains, literal mountains of 40 footers, TEUÂ’s as they are called in the trade. Millions of the long cans, just waiting to be adopted.
I bet you can see the stacks from the moon.
There are no sidewalks, it appears, in this part of the universe. There are, however, lots of “business jets” at nearby Teterboro Airport. The fine hotel at which your correspondent is lodged (more on that later) crawls with pilots from Net Jets and other corporate flying outfits.
ItÂ’s like 70-something outside, and much as I would love to sit and write, I really must explore a bit. A bus ride to the Manhattoes costs less than $3, not including the expected tip to the hotel shuttle driver.
There also appears to be a back street behind the hotel which may offer some pedestrian opportunity to enjoy the fine weather.

OK, so I haven’t explored yet, I just went and did my wimp act in the “health club.”
The hotel crawls with pilots and flight attendants (well, mostly pilots) from the exclusive outfits NetJets and Flight Options. When you spend 8 hours a day driving the super rich around in a Gulfstream or Citation, you need to unwind so itÂ’s off to the health club for a few miles on the treadmill or a harsh round on the weight machine.
As for me, my one and only appearance was too much of an embarrassment to elaborate upon. Suffice it to say that I really thought I could bench more than 40 pounds. Oh well.

The Eminem Show, or, “Where’s Obie?”
Tuesday afternoon I went to the Mall. The Garden State Mall, to be exact. Big place. Spread out. Crawling with people, especially nubile ones.
Spent a few bucks in the big name stores buying some tops for the girls. I wish I had been rich, hahaha.
We caught the hotel shuttle back, hoping to get here in time to catch the soirée for all the participants at the training. Imagine my surprise when we pulled up to find the front of the place crawling with what had to be 800-pound dudes, headsets and all.
“What is up with this,” I mused as I passed through the lobby.

Up, indeed. I wentenquired soirée and enquired of the bartender. Seems a certain Mr. Mathers was in 'da house. My girlss freaked out when I called them on the payphone to brag. "Get a picture, get his autograph," they commanded.
Well, after a couple of scotches I ain't afraid of no rap singer so I asked where the Presidential Suite was. Turns out it was one floor below, so down I went.
Ever hear someone called "Man Mountain?" Well, trust me, Massa Mathers had a whole Alaska Range with him. Imagine an 8-Ball about a million times bigger and you just begin to imagine how big these sucka's were. And he had a posse, alright.

Well, finally

After jetting around the countryside and then not being able to get into my Blog to write, I finally found a back door.
So, here goes.

Rumours of my demise have been greatly exagerated...

Hey, fans! I am still alive and kicking, been in NYC area for a week and will have a full trip report in a day or two. Stay tuned.

Memorial Day

(BETHEL) It's rainy here today, so much for the holiday barbeques. But maybe it's fitting, dreary weather to remind us of the real meaning of this sacred day.
The Civil War, which left so much carnage on the green fields of America did achieve President Lincoln's goal of saving the Union, and as a result the war dead were remembered with a mixture of fondness and gratitude. And on the first days of summer, when the grass was turning green and leaves spreading, the people of America took to the cemetaries to decorate the graves of the fallen, Union and Confederate, Blue and Gray. The tradition of course took hold, and little children who had no conception of waar, save the stories told them by local veterans, took to the fields where the soldiers lay, and honored them with flowers and flags.

Northern fur fashion showcased!

Miss Canada to wear sealskin dress in Panama pageant

Outfit part of Arviat collection

KIRSTEN MURPHY

Nunavut's sealskin clothing is fit for a beauty queen.
Leanne Cecile, Miss Canada 2003 of Tecumseh, Ont., may wear a $15,000 white sealskin and fox fur dress at the upcoming Miss Universe pageant in Panama on June 3.
Cecile, 26, spotted the floor-length gown, designed by Kugluktuk's Dolorosa Nartok at the North American Fashion and Fur Exhibition (NAFFEM) in Montreal May 4 to 7.
The outfit, a wedding dress, is one of a dozen pieces from Arviat's Kiluk Ltd. displayed at the trade show. (more)

A matter of "Homeland Security"

Drug dealers face banishment
Lummi Tribe gets tough with new rules to fight narcotics

By PAUL SHUKOVSKY
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

LUMMI RESERVATION -- The next two years behind bars might seem easy to John Jefferson compared with what will follow.

When Jefferson emerges from federal prison, he faces the prospect of life as an exile -- banished from the Lummi reservation, stripped of membership in the tribe, separated from his people. For Jefferson -- whose world has always been defined by the boundaries of this rural reservation north of Bellingham -- nothing could be worse.
His crime: dealing dope to a tribe so ravaged by drugs that Lummi leaders have decided that putting dealers in prison is not punishment enough. So they've turned to banishment.
This isn't about tough love. It's about survival.
Last spring, after a dozen babies were born addicted to drugs in as many months, after a forlorn addict hanged himself from a tree, after a 14-month-old girl picked a narcotic pill from the floor like it was candy and died from an overdose, tribal Chairman Darrell Hillaire declared eradication of drugs to be a matter of homeland security and drug dealers to be the evil axis. And since that time, at least 12 people have been convicted on drug charges as a result of joint investigations by Lummi tribal police and the FBI.
John Jefferson is one of them. So is his fiancee, Cathy Lane, who was the brains behind the drug-dealing operation. Within the next few days, the Lummi council will consider whether to strip Jefferson and Lane from the tribal membership roster. If council members do that, the matter goes to tribal court for final consideration.(more)

"... youthful rebellion...inside a corrupted institution..." A different look at the Jayson Blair story

Jayson Blair Cracked the Code
The Young Plagiarizer Beat the New York Times at its Own Game

By Al Giordano
Narco News School of Authentic Journalism
May 12, 2003

The front page of the Sunday New York Times is a big deal for all journalists everywhere; we see one of the largest tips of an iceberg ever seen floating in the murky ocean of Commercial Media:
"Times Reporter Who Resigned Leaves Long Trail of Deception," is the headline, followed by 14, 290 navel-gazing words, including an "Editors' Note" (registration required) (the "note" doesn't say which of the editors penned it - the subtle placement of the apostrophe indicates the plural use of the noun - the Times editors are not sufficiently stand-up guys and gals that they would sign their names at a moment of crisis) and a long sidebar documenting glaring falsehoods published by the "newspaper of record" in the Big Apple.
"There will be no newsroom search for scapegoats," the newspaper cheesily announced. The scapegoat has already been found and slain upon the altar of 43rd Street: He is a 27-year-old ex-New York Times reporter, Jayson Blair, who resigned from his four-year Times career on May Day only after outside media alerted the Times of some, ahem, obvious problems with his reporting.
Jayson Blair should now write a manual: "Steal This Newspaper." He gave new meaning to the newsroom term "phoning it in." He would plagiarize material from other media, and sometimes claim, including to readers, that he was in Texas, or Maryland, or Ohio, when, it seems, he was, says the Times now, somewhere in Brooklyn. Sometimes his apparent invention of facts out of thin air harmed real people, like when he claimed that law enforcement sources had fingered the triggerman in the Washington DC sniper case (if that doesn't unfairly prejudice a defendant to a jury pool, what does?)
The Times has now characterized Blair with words normally reserved for serial killers: "a troubled young man veering toward professional self-destruction," who was both "prolific," and "pathological." The newspaper now marvels at the "audacity of the deceptions," and "his savviness and his ingenious ways of covering his tracks," his "hungry ambition and an unsettling interest in newsroom gossip," his "sloppy" physical appearance, and his penchant for "drinking scotch, smoking cigarettes and buying Cheez Doodles from the vending machines."
"The person who did this is Jayson Blair," the newspaper quotes its publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr., as saying. "Let's not begin to demonize our executives — either the desk editors or the executive editor or, dare I say, the publisher."
Oh, Mr. Sulzberger, please… Let's…(more)

Wheres the (BIG) fish?

Study reveals plunge in big fish numbers

By Lidia Wasowicz
UPI Senior Science Writer
From the Science & Technology Desk
Published 5/14/2003 1:05 PM

A global survey spanning nearly half a century reveals a 90 percent plunge in the population of large ocean fish, from tuna to cod, since commercial fishing vessels took to the high seas, Canadian researchers reported Wednesday.
With their numbers decreasing by as much as 80 percent in 15 years, the depleted communities could crash delicately balanced ecosystems, with unknown worldwide consequences, the surveyors of pelagic creatures warned.
"More than 90 percent of the fish we like to eat are gone," said Jeremy Jackson, a renowned marine ecologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif., who was not involved in the study.
The statistics -- which some industry scientists questioned -- emerged from a 10-year analysis of trawler surveys and U.S. and Japanese long-line fishing records compiled over 47 years for 62 predatory species.
"From giant blue marlin to mighty bluefin tuna and from tropical groupers to Antarctic cod, industrial fishing has scoured the global ocean," said lead study author Ransom Myers, Killam Chair in Ocean Studies at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. "There is no blue frontier left."
The sampling included fish inhabiting every ocean save the seas surrounding Earth's poles and those that dwell where continents submerge under the sea off the coasts of Newfoundland, Thailand and Antarctica.(more)

This is what I REALLY call a lead!

Teen survives brown bear mauling
TUSTUMENA LAKE: Cody Williams requires 38 staples to close head wound.

By LISA DEMER
Anchorage Daily News

(Published: May 14, 2003)

The pain wasn't registering yet, but Cody Williams could hear the damage as the bear clawed and chewed on him.(more)

Finally, some Patriotism in Juneau we can be proud of

House resolution seeks fix to Patriot Act

The Associated Press

JUNEAU (May 12, 6:15 p.m. ADT) - The state House is asking the federal government to fix parts of the USA Patriot Act that may infringe on civil liberties.
The resolution approved Monday also tells state agencies they should not help the federal government with investigations that could violate people's rights unless they have reason to suspect criminal activity.
"The resolution states the efforts to fight terrorism must not be waged at the expense of civil rights and liberties of the people of the state of Alaska and the United States," said Rep. David Guttenberg, D-Fairbanks.
"We're not trying to back off on the fight on terrorism," he added.
Guttenberg co-sponsored the measure with House Majority Leader John Coghill, R-North Pole.
House Joint Resolution 22 says the state supports the fight against terrorism that led to passage of the federal law in 2001. But it urges federal lawmakers to go back and fix parts of the law that infringe on civil liberties guaranteed in the Bill of Rights.
The measure also says state agencies may not participate in investigations unless there's reasonable suspicion of criminal activity.
That prohibition includes recording and sharing information on a person's library records, bookstore records, medical records and other personal data even if authorized by the federal law.
"We're just not comfortable with them collecting information, etcetera, on people that are law-abiding citizens," Coghill said.
The measure also says state agencies may not use state resources to enforce federal immigration laws and may not collect information about political, religious or social views of individuals or groups unless that directly relates to a criminal investigation. It also says the state may not engage in racial profiling.
The measure passed the House 32-1, with Rep. Bob Lynn, R-Anchorage, voting no. The measure now goes to the Senate.

And as for stuff thats BAD for your health,

remember those cool "Truth" ads on t.v. where they piled body bags up in front of a tobacco company office? Well, it seems the all-powerful Phillip Morris got that ad (and another one) pulled off because it "villified" tobacco companies. Well, duh. Read all about it here and here.

Grow up in the '60s?

There is an interesting essay on MSNBC titled Timothy Leary Revisited by Salon's John Horgan. And to go right along with it, if you are so inclined, here is a fascinating set of Documents on Al Hubbard, a chap know in some circles as "The Johnny Appleseed of LSD."