Icewind's Ramblings

Here is a fun video showing you what happens to boiling water at 20 below zero when thrown into the air.   Pretty wild! I invite you to come up to Alaska during the winter time where you can find things to do with a little creativity.   Peeing at forty below is something else if you can find it . . . freezes before it hits the ground. We’re having our winter time blues and wishing for the calm winds of the Caribbean or Mexico about now. Ice

I made my trip up north to Selawik on Tuesday morning leaving the house at 4 am making my way to the airport for my Alaska Air flight to Kotzebue.   We took off into the clear cold night sky leaving the sparkling lights of Anchorage below as we turned northwest for the one hour forty five minute flight.   I thought about grabbing a nap since this would be a long day returning to Anchorage around midnight but chose to instead listen to my music on the iPod and enjoy the coffee and Danish the flight attendant had given me.   I sat next to the window but many of these early morning trips I do not spend time looking out the windows since in the darkness it is like looking into a black hole in space.   Tonight was different as there was almost a full moon to the west a couple hours away from setting casting its silvery bluish glow on the landscape below. As we made our way at flight level 340 (34,000’) and had just crossed over the Yukon River below with its ribbon li...

It is hard to believe that it has been 20 years since the start of Desert Storm in the Gulf War to rid Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, Iraq still owes its smaller neighbor billions in reparations and more than 1,000 people are still missing. Saddam is long gone . . . many of us only remember his statute falling at one of his palaces and the excellent “war” coverage by CNN. It was in August 1990 that Iraq invaded, declaring that Kuwait was its 19th province.  The United States led a counteroffensive starting January 16, 1991. War came to television in real time with the CNN broadcast by Peter Arnett, Bernard Shaw, and John Holliman who gave us continuous coverage from Baghdad for the first 16 intense hours from their room in the Al-Rashid Hotel.  January 17, 1991 the world’s new organizations and everyone on the planet was captivated by what was happening. Wolf Blitzer and Nic Robertson (the sound man during that broadcast) look back at the start of the war and it is i...