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February 19, 2025

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No Time for Tuckerman -

Thursday, August 3, 2023

The Quitter Returns! -

Monday, March 21, 2022

Putting the goober in gubernatorial -

Friday, January 28, 2022

10 Reasons I Love Alaska Winters

It has been a long, snow-less autumn. As a landscape photographer, I hate the shoulder seasons. After the snow melts in the spring but before things get green, it’s an ugly, brown, muddy mess. The departing winter has revealed six months-worth of trash lying around.  It’s not a pretty time.  The same goes for the transition from autumn to winter.  Once the leaves drop, it’s just a bunch of dead brown lying around.  Well, here in Anchorage, the leaves dropped over a month ago.  We’ve had a record-setting warm October, and finally the temperatures are starting to drop. Now, as…

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The Muslims Are Coming – Road Trip Comic Enlightenment

“Oh the Muslims… you know they are a coming… they’re gentle and they’re friendly so open up your arms and give’m a hug…” -Opening Song from The Muslims Are Coming The Muslims Are Coming –  just released this month on video on demand sites like iTunes and Amazon.com is more than just your standard comedy tour film. Every once and a while a group of comedians with some vague thing in common (usually they have the same agent) get together and go on a tour – they hire a videographer to film the behind the scenes shenanigans that go on –…

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The Tea Party’s Favorite Painter

Have you ever flipped through cable channels while impaired, lingering on some freakishly weird Lawrence Welk Show dance moves for a few seconds of guilty pleasure? Looking at the works of right-wing Utah painter Jon McNaughton is kind of like that. If you haven’t exposed yourself to the visual splendor of his überpatriotic art, you’re so missing out. Stylistically, McNaughton cranks out the kind of representational schlock a Days Inn manager circa 1975 would have been too embarrassed to hang in one of his guest rooms. He makes Thomas Kinkade look like Damien Hirst. During his studies at Brigham Young University, McNaughton…

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Rock for the Salmon! – Music at Salmonstock

Salmonstock was several weeks ago – I know – but we just got so many awesome photos we’re finally ready to start posting them all. Please keep checking back for more photo-essays from our fun visit to Salmonstock… and start prepping for next year. Photos above by Zach Roberts A couple extras below by Jeanne Devon

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Open Thread – Banana Dragon

My kid made a dragon out of a banana using a toothpick. And now, I’m putting it on the internets. Because, Banana Dragon!  

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A Winter Alaskan’s First Summer

By Alex Stein I pull over to take yet another picture on the Seward Highway. “Unspeakably beautiful,” a man in a Grateful Dead t-shirt says. I nod. How can you argue with that? We talk for a long time about Alaska. Then we both stare out over the water at the snow-dotted peaks. Another car pulls in next to us and a woman gets out. She takes a few photos, says it was prettier the week before, and speeds off. I have a confession to make. On my first trip to Alaska, I drove a rented Toyota Tercel up the…

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The One – A Love Story

Hopeless romanticism plagued my childhood. On a random day I’d wonder if that day was my true love’s birthday. At Christmas I’d stare at the snow outside and wonder what my true love had found under his tree. I was convinced that a “great love” would be mine. The one. The ONE. Part of it came from watching my parents and hearing my grandmother talk about her deceased husband. He was the grandfather I never met. She never took off her ring, because she was still married. That was a love for all time. But really, I fault Mary Epperson….

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An Unorthodox Tribute to the Bard

It is Shakespeare’s birthday. Or pretty close. It’s also the day of his death in 1616. At this point, it’s probably all been said. Tributes quote his greatest works, praise his incredible abilities, note his human foibles. Conspiracy theorists wonder if Shakespeare really wrote his plays at all. They’ve been translated, dissected, studied, performed, and admired for hundreds of years, and in every major living language on Earth. So, in searching for some novel way to tip our feathered hat to the Bard, we came up with this video clip which seems especially poignant since the actual body of Richard…

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Stabenow’s Storyknife

  When I first started accepting advertising on The Mudflats, I felt a little guilty about it. It seemed strange. And then Dana Stabenow, Alaskan author of the wildly popular Kate Shugak mystery series, snapped me right out of it. She bought my first ad to promote her new book, and told me don’t I dare feel weird about it, and I was to charge her what I thought it was worth, and not a penny less. And that was final. She was the first person who really made me feel like what I did had value. Not just an…

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Beast It: A Film for Climate Science

By Paige Brown Tales of a little wonder of a film for climate science are popping up everywhere, from today’s feature story at Louisiana State University, to a recent Guardian blog post, to a Smithsonian story on the film’s stunning visual art. “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” a 2012 film directed by Benh Zeitlin and based on a play written by Lucy Alibar, is a film about loss, courage, climate changes and human perseverance in southern Louisiana. The fictional island in the film, the “Isle de Charles Doucet,” was inspired by real communities in Louisiana’s Terrebonne Parish such the rapidly…

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