On-line Opinion Magazine…OK, it's a blog

The race preliminaries started at Noon CST [10AM PST] with a field of 21. While they are Quest rookies, Jessie Royer and Ed Stielstra are Iditarod veterans. The members of the field planning on competing in the Iditarod should leave the bulk of their equipment in Fairbanks, because there is a lack of snow in the Alaska Range and the racing will probably use the 2015 trail.

The racing begin at 1PM.

Beyond Whitehorse
1 Jessie Royer (1)^R
2 Yuka Honda (2)
3 Ben Good (3)^R
4 Rob Cooke (4)
5 Sébastien Dos Santos Borges (5)^R
6 Jason Campeau (6)
7 Paige Drobny (7)
8 Allen Moore (8)
9 Hugh Neff (9)
10 Gaetan Pierrard (10)
11 Laura Neese (11)
12 Ed Stielstra (12)^R
13 Dave Dalton (13)
14 Brent Sass (14)
15 Ryne Olson (15)
16 Brian Wilmshurst (16)
17 Hank DeBruin (17)
18 Ed Hopkins (18)
19 Katherine Keith (19)^R
20 Matt Hall (20)
21 Torsten Kohnert (21)

These are the official standings. That means they are official, not that they are correct. Things jump around a lot as people decide to update the standings. This problem is especially bad in the back of the pack, as no one bothers to update those standings when the lead is changing.

The Mushers in bold are former winners of the Yukon Quest, the numbers in parentheses are their Bib numbers, and the small “R” indicates a rookie.

Note: This post will be updated during the day, and the map changed on all posts to reflect the current situation.

All posts on the Yukon Quest can be seen by clicking on the sled dog or selecting “Yukon Quest” from the Category box on the right sidebar.

The race starts this Saturday, February 4^th, in Whitehorse.

Whitehorse 2089 feet [637 meters] Start
Braeburn 2326 feet [709 meters] 100 miles [161 km]
Carmacks 1722 feet [525 meters] 77 miles [124 km]
Pelly Crossing 1558 feet [475 meters] 73 miles [117 km]
King Solomon’s Dome 4002 feet [1220 meters]
Dawson 1050 feet [320 meters] 202 miles [325 km] 24 Hour Stop
American Summit 3920 feet [1195 meters]
Eagle 880 feet [268 meters] 147 miles [237 km] 6 Hour Stop
Circle 597 feet [182 meters] 159 miles [256 km]
Central 435 feet [133 meters] 74 miles [119 km]
Eagle Summit 3685 feet [1123 meters]
Mile 101 2250 feet [686 meters] 33 miles [53 km]
Rosebud Summit 3640 feet [1109 meters]
Two Rivers 750 feet [229 meters] 42 miles [68 km] 8 Hour Stop
Fairbanks 440 feet [134 meters] 45 miles[72 km] Finish

[Read more →]

My first azalea blooms of the year.

It’s Groundhog Day and some of the militant marmots object to being disturbed.

The CBC offers the most complete coverage and tell us that Shubenacadie Sam in Nova Scotia and Wiarton Willie in Ontario think winter is over, but Punxsutawney Phil from Pennsylvania predicts six more weeks.

FYI: this is approximately the midpoint between the Winter Solstice and the Vernal Equinox. It is called Imbolc among the Celts, which is why people are interested.

Budweiser Super Bowl ads almost always include Clydesdales, and lately have included puppies, but this year’s version is going to raise some eyebrows.

First off you need to understand that because of the expense, the ads for the Super Bowl are usually started in the Spring of the preceding year, May of 2016 in this case, so it shouldn’t be viewed as having any relationship to the Presidential campaign. The company decided to tell the ‘all American story” of the two immigrants, Eberhard Anheuser & Adolphus Busch, who came to the United States and founded a brewery in St. Louis, Missouri in 1852.

The Drumpfkins will probably call for a boycott…

In a move that not even cats bought, Hrumpfy Drumpfy declared his inauguration day to be a National Day of Patriotic Devotion. The North Koreans may sue for copyright infringement.

The ABC offers A guide to the Geneva Convention for beginners, dummies and newly elected world leaders. Meanwhile Press Secretary Sean Spicer continues to display his drift into an alternate space/time continuum by using the Quebec mosque shooting to defend Trump’s travel ban. I guess they are saying that if Canada had banned Muslims, they wouldn’t have been there to get shot by a right-wing whacko.

This kind of thinking requires someone not tied to reality to interpret.

If you don’t agree with The Desolation of Drumpf’s alternate reality, you’re fired:

Donald Trump has fired the acting US attorney general, after she questioned the legality of his immigration ban.

Sally Yates, who had been appointed under Barack Obama, earlier ordered justice department lawyers not to enforce the president’s executive order.

In a statement, the White House said Ms Yates had “betrayed” the department.

Disagreeing with Hrumpfy Drumpfy is not allowed.

In reaction to the anti-Muslim ban a mosque was burned in Texas and six Muslim worshippers at a mosque in Quebec were murdered.

Drumpf has ordered the military to come up with a plan to defeat ISIS in 30 days. In 30 seconds: Treat Israel like every other nation in the Middle East and pull out the US military assets.

January 28, 1986

Commander:
Francis R. (Dick) Scobee, Lieutenant Colonel, USAF

Pilot:
Michael J. Smith, Commander, USN

Mission Specialist:
Judith A. Resnik
Ronald E. McNair
Ellison S. Onizuka, Lieutenant Colonel, USAF

Payload Specialist:
Gregory B. Jarvis
Sharon Christa McAuliffe

Year of the Fire Rooster

Chinese New Year
[Spring Festival]

While top US diplomats leave the State Department, Hrumpfy Drumpfy needs to prosecute all of his staff for using a private e-mail system, just like Hillary Clinton.

It isn’t just the State Department. A lot of career people are deciding to retire rather than deal with the new administration. They are taking with them the ‘institutional memory’ of their departments, as well as causing issues because of the hiring freeze.

The White House staff is using the Republican National Committee e-mail system rather than the official White House system for official business. Having pounded on Clinton for using a private system, it is standard Republican hypocrisy that his staff are doing the same thing.

January 27, 1967

Virgil “Gus” Ivan Grissom, Lieutenant Colonel, USAF

Edward Higgins White, II, Lieutenant Colonel, USAF

Roger Bruce Chaffee, Lieutenant Commander, USN

The anniversary of the landing of the First Fleet under Captain Arthur Phillip at Port Jackson in New South Wales on January 26^th, 1788.

Here’s the official site, and more information at Wikipedia.

This is the anniversary of the birth of Robert Burns in Ayr, Scotland. The Burns Night celebrations conducted by Scots all over the world with haggis, whisky¹, and poetry.

Wikipedia has a description of the standard celebration, but easy on the malt or you may end up with a William McGonagall morning.

In honor of the occasion a bit of Robby Burns for the GOP “leadership”:

The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men
Gang aft agley
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain
For promis’d joy!

To a Mouse

1. This is the correct spelling when referring to Scotland’s “water of life”.

The Desolation of Drumpf believes that, like Humpty Dumpty, a word “means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation reports that President Donald Trump’s inauguration actually didn’t have the biggest audience ever, and produces evidence to back their assertion.

The British Broadcasting Corporation notes Trump claims media ‘dishonest’ over crowd photos, and produces its own photos taken from the Washington Monument in both Obama’s 2009 inauguration and Trump’s 2017 inauguration, that obviously show that the attendance at Obama’s first inauguration was two or three times larger than Trump’s.

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reports that:

There were strong signs across the U.S. that the number of people who attended the Women’s March on Washington on Saturday topped those who gathered on Friday to watch U.S. President Donald Trump’s inauguration.

But as over a million people around the world protested in solidarity with events in Washington, both the president and his press secretary took aim Saturday at the media for “attempts to lessen the enthusiasm of the inauguration” and claimed a bigger turnout than the available data suggests.

Take note of “available data suggests”. The ‘available data” are hotel vacancies, transit ridership, photographs of the crowd, empty seats. The data say that the Women’s March was bigger than the Inauguration.

This is why Sean Spicer, the new press secretary introduced “Alternate Facts” [AKA LIES!] to justify his boss’s claims, and refused to take questions.