Giant Blob of Goo

Don't worry, our shores are fairly safe up here in Southeast Alaska, unless the giant blob of goo starts to come thru the Bering Strait, passes by Unimak Island in the Aleutian chain, hangs a big left and takes the same trackline as all those cruise ships that come up in the summer. It may not look like algae, but that's what it is. Not as photogenic as the seaweed salad I love to get with my sushi, but algae nonetheless.

Here is a cool video that a local search and rescue plane first took of the blob.

http://storyballoon.wordpress.com/2009/07/16/video-blob-of-bio-goo-floating-around-the-artic-sea/

(somebody hasn't learned how to spell Arctic yet; it actually took me a while too....)

I'm going to change gears here a bit, and type about something that is even more frightening to me than a big glob of algae that is trying to impersonate an oil spill.

Now that our governor has decided that she has better things to do than finish our her term, I feel a little bit better about the threat from within as well. Of course the governor didn't live here in Juneau after the first year of her term anyway, so I guess the threat was always as far away as Anchorage (or Wasilla, or the campaign trail) anyway, but there were plenty of her minions down here in the panhandle as well.

I didn't vote for her, but even though I had only been a resident for a few months, I welcomed a change from a Murkowski administration that seemed to be a bit misguided. I actually listened to her entire inauguration speech, and liked how she joked about the fact that her family cleaned up very well when they had to wear something other than Carhartts (a Michigan clothing company that makes jeans/coveralls/outerwear that are very popular here in AK). Then she started making decisions that were not quite to my liking.

I don't think that the new governor will be more to my democratic liking, but at least he won't be a complete publicity hog like the one who will give up the reins of the 49th state in five days.