The Mudflats

Today, on the Shannyn Moore Show, I got to break the news on KUDO 1080am that right wing talk radio host Eddie Burke’s show on KBYR has gone dark. >poof!<  Lights out.  The man who put the “S” in Racist (see above) is on the air no more.   Burke says he resigned, others say it was the “you can’t fire me, I quit” scenario.

I noted that when his show was cut from 3 hours to 2 hours a day, he said the show was now in a “super drive time” slot.  As opposed to the regular 3-hour drive time, which somehow isn’t so super?  So, now by his own standards he’s hit the big time with the Super Dooper Drive time slot that goes from nowhere to … nowhen.

Will he show up elsewhere on the dial?  He’s already hopped around a bit, and he may resurface eventually, but for now…. let’s enjoy a moment of blissful radio silence.

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh……….

Yes, I know that they’re just going to fill up those two hours with some other godawful nonsense.  But at least it won’t be HIS godawful nonsense.

So what will become of our vile friend? Personally, I’d love to see him run for governor. Talk about giving us something to write about. We’ve listened for years to Eddie Burke talking about what he’d do, and how things ought to be run, and bla bla bla. And he’s run for office before, but now he has a ready-made band of followers.  And now that he has time, I think he ought to be Alaska’s very first Tea Party candidate.  Or he could take up macrame.  Or perhaps go on a spiritual retreat in some nice cave somewhere and come back a changed man, and get an in-your-face liberal talk show.  But I think running for office is the more likely of the three scenarios.   

Actually, I think he’d round out the non-Democratic field nicely. So any Teabaggers out there (and I only call you Teabaggers not Tea Partiers because your future candidate says DemocRAT Party), it’s time to draft your newly retired leader to run for the state’s top spot. He’s got nothing else to do, so why not? 

Eddie Burke actually called into the show to say that he had “resigned,” and that he didn’t think that the Tea Party was organized enough to endorse a candidate, or shouldn’t be organized, or something.  And then he started rambling on about socialists and France. 

 And I wanted to ask him if he’d ever heard of the Treaty of Paris, or if he ever thanked France for saving our asses during the American Revolution, and remind him that without France we’d all be subjects of the Queen and have socialized medicine, so as a patriot, he ought to be thanking France for the very existence of our country.  But one does not interrupt an on-air conversation between Shannyn Moore and Eddie Burke with a history lesson.  It was quite a moment in radio.  And you can still tune in to hear Shannyn for 15 hours a week.  Eddie Burke?  Not so much.

And this is what it looks like when a H8R leaves the building.

RE-ENTRY

By LoveMyDogs

Dedicated to all of my friends in the race but especially Colleen…

You are nearing Nome, running on the beach, straightening your racing bib that you picked up in Safety so you don’t look quite such a mess for the cameras as you feel.  You find yourself crying and thanking your dogs over and over.  You get off the sled and give them each a snack and a hug.  You can’t believe you are almost finished with this thing and know you couldn’t have done it without them. You love them to the depths of infinity and you are so proud of them.

You approach the finish line.  Everything is a blur.  There is a sense of relief, tinged with regret that you cannot just keep going.  You know that you will soon be enfolded in the arms and congratulations of the people you love.  You can take your first shower in days, eat hot food, sleep in a bed.  But it is the dogs, the dogs that you are bound to now and your loved ones, who rush you off to all of the above mentioned amenities, do not quite understand where you are mentally and emotionally right now.  Physically you limp off the runners, hunched forward, arms bent in by your sides and hands cramped in front of you-looking for all the world like some kind of giant squid- and accept their hugs.

People, relationships, work, the human world makes no sense.  For 9-12 days you have lived with your dogs and the wild world.  None of the rest of this makes sense and it is, at times, an unwelcome incursion on your sense of what you have experienced out there.  You have a far-off look in your eyes and trouble connecting with others.  You want silence.  You want peace.  You want time to rest and reconnect.  You don’t want to come back from the meditation, the pain, the highs and the lows and the beauty that you have just endured.  Everything around you seems trivial.  Sometimes you bark or snarl at the people you love.  You talk and tell trail stories but you don’t want to talk, because how can you ever describe it?

You are glad to stop but you want to go on…you can’t ever give this crazy thing up because, as Gary Paulsen says, “How could it be to live without the dogs?”

That’s right!  Tonight the Shannyn Moore Show is taping and it’s going to feature a citizen panel!  That means you could be one of Shannyn’s guests on the show that airs on KYES on Saturdays at 4pm.

All you have to do is send an email to mooreupnorth(at)gmail(dot)com and tell Shannyn and her producers why you’d be a great panelist.  Then come to Bernie’s Bungalow Lounge on D St. between 6th and 7th Ave. at 5:30 tonight to be part of the taping!

This is your chance to throw your 2 cents in about Sullygate, or KABATA, or ACES, or predator control, or whatever is on your mind.  Don’t miss out!

And don’t forget that today is Thursday, which also means “Thursdays in the Mud!”  I’ll be on Shannyn’s show the third hour from 1-2pm on KUDO1080 AM which you can stream HERE.

And the sleds keep gliding across the finish line in Nome…

Our teams are doing great, and we’ve got two across the line:

Aliy Zirkle came in at 16th place.  The top 10 still eludes her, but next year is just around the corner!

Michelle Phillips came in at 27th with those handsome lead dogs.

Colleen Robertia (whose dogs at home are being minded by our Voices from the Flats contributor LoveMyDogs) is holding steady in 36th place, and has left White Mountain.

Wattie McDonald, our intrepid Scotsman is in 45th, out of Koyuk

and Newton Marshall from Jamaica is in 47th out of Koyuk.  It’s just amazing to me that someone from a country with no snow is even in this race, nevermind doing so respectably. 

The first 27 teams are in at this writing, and you can check out who’s coming next on the Leader Board – HERE.

And now off to hit the hay…. Hope everyone had a happy and safe St. Patrick’s Day!