A balmy -12 on Gilmore Trail. Man and dog took a good long stroll and stayed up there for a while basking in it. Now we’re back in the Valley and it’s -35.

🦜🦜🦜🦜 Happy Fourth Day of Christmas to all who celebrate 🐔🐔🐔 🕊️🕊️ 🍐

"It was Christmas week: we took to no settled employment, but spent it in a sort of merry domestic dissipation." --Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

My favorite quote from today's reading references two of my many fave topics: Foucault and Punk. "Before punk we'd wait around, say, for Foucault's next book, to see what he said before we did anything.... Punk said, 'Do it yourself, anyone can. It doesn't have to be perfect.'"

Friend: *sharing deeply vulnerable details about their life* Me: *waiting to talk about which actresses I think wear wigs*

This is a crazy, riveting story. SCOTUSblog is such a treasure and so it was jarring to read about the cofounder's misadventures. (Free article)

💀

LeMonde said, not on our watch

West Ridge. UAF campus. 4:23 pm. 12/27/25. -32F.

Television used to be great.

CHATGPT: wow George you’re absolutely right. $8,000 is a lot of money. Mary would be better off without you.

Rejoice! It’s the first #Caturday of Christmas.

HAPPINESS is such a delight. Stumbled on it yesterday and am hooked. Playing (free) on the PBS app. It's a New Zealand comedy about friendships and relationships (and Fate!) set amid a local community theater that is putting on an original musical, The Trojan Horse.

Merry Third Day of Christmas to all who celebrate 🥳 🐔🐔🐔 🕊️🕊️ 🍐

It's funny how obsessed dog people are with breeds and cat people are just like "idk...orange?"

We start losing daylight in 176 days.

"Did you see what Mark Cuban posted? Oh did you see the clapb—" You shake yourself awake in the cold North Atlantic water. You are not online. It is July of 1858. You are a baleen whale, and you have changed your mind. The future most not come to pass. The telegraph cable must break.

The sound of high tide in winter. View from my cabin porch. #AlaskaSky #Alaska #Alaskan #winter #SoutheastAlaska

Well it can't be a poodle because too floofy. Can't be a Labrador because bras are girly. Can't be any type of spaniel, because spas are girly. Can't be a terrier, because that sounds like terry (her), which implies terry has a female gender identity. I'm out of ideas tbh.

Happy 2nd Day of Christmas to all who celebrate 💖🍐🕊️🕊️

Dying at this review of Richard Linklater's Slacker

The view from Klawock Hwy @ Control Lake, 📷 from 511.alaska.gov

One fun thing about the Japanese is we love the FUCK out of Christmas and have only the loosest concept of what is going on

Celebrate all day with special programming on Alaska Public Media Radio KSKA FM this Christmas Day🎄See the full list of programs at https://akpub.io/3AMXcC0/kskaholiday. Listen over the air (91.1 FM Anchorage, 91.9 FM Girdwood), on any streaming device or at https://akpub.io/3AMXcC0.

Christmas moose!

Happy First Day of Christmas to all who celebrate it 💖

It actually warmed up today! (For one day only, but still. 18 feels like a heat wave.)

My childhood: The Tomten protects our house and befriends the animals My child’s childhood: The Tomten fights fascism

Brian Eno: Before And After Christmas

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Brian Zick, for Paper Moon Graphics, 1980’s

Fine, whatever, this random cat is your new god of the winter solstice

With Christmas approaching, tourists and locals in the Interior have been paying a visit to Santa Claus in North Pole, Alaska 👉 https://tinyurl.com/krvc6auh 

Very fancy potato bear postcard from my collection, unsent and date unknown.

In Icelandic folklore Jólakötturinn, the Yule Cat, comes to eat those who do not wear their new clothes for Christmas. In this image, you can see somebody did not put on their new Christmas sweater. Or perhaps even more unfortunately, no one got them one! More ... 👇

The view from Alaska Highway @ Dot Lake MP 1355.2, 📷 from 511.alaska.gov

I put off filling the gas tank until tomorrow's projected balmy 5*F 🗻 (Actually, as long as I'm bundled up, I've learned there is not a discernable difference in how it physically feels once it's cold here... because then it's just plain COLD.)

Well played 🏅

Gotta find the laughs in the darkness!

It’s not Minnesota Nice anymore, it’s Minnesota NoICE! Art by me, please share, thx <3

Fellow Anchorage people, turn your damn car off when getting gas. That is the law in Anchorage. The law in Fairbanks is different. It is not -30F or -40F around here. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

If there’s one part of the Constitution and its Amendments that everyone in the US understands and holds sacred, it’s the First Amendment. Free speech may be the only value we all agree on. If you tell us something was censored, no matter what it is, we will trip over our feet running to see it.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect and the Streisand Effect, when merged, become the Bari Weiss Effect

Weird how The Free Press was able to publish all of these without comment from the Washigton University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children's Hospital.

Radical bearded cleric issues new fatwa -->

This is funny, but it’s also illustrative of the split between actual reporters, and people like Weiss and Goldberg who are pure commentators. They really don’t understand what journalists do.

Per NY Times’s Michael Grynbaum on X, this is Sharyn Alfonsi’s email to her “60 Minutes” colleagues in full:

So Bari Weiss’s first real editorial intervention at CBS is to repress coverage of American concentration camps.

Rachel Olynuk ~ Winter Solstice #WinterSolstice2025