Chamblee54

This content was posted September 12, 2010. … This weekend is the start of the NFL season. At the first game, the players, from both teams, stood silently and held a finger in the air. The gesture meant that the players were united in the negotiations with the league for a new union contract. … During the game, an announcement was made. Tom Brady, a quarterback, signed a contract. Terms were not released, but the estimate was that he would be paid $18 million a year. This works out to a bit over a million dollars a game. … The New York Times had a story this week about stadium debt in New Jersey. It seems like the old Meadowlands Stadium, now a parking lot, has roughly $100 million dollars in debt remaining. The taxpayers of New Jersey, for some reason, are responsible for this. The Giants and Jets open a new stadium this weekend. Somebody paid $1.6 billion for the new facility.
Locally, the Falcons are clamoring for a new stadium. Twenty years ago, the team threatened to move, if a new stadium was not built. A hotel-motel tax was passed to pay for it. Today, the state is broke, and Atlanta is about to run out of water. Where will the money come from to pay for a new stadium for the Falcons? … America is in an economic mess. We are borrowing to pay for two wars, eight time zones away. The needs of education, health care, and infrastructure are immense. Can we afford to pay a quarterback a million dollars a game? Where does the madness end? Is football about to become the luxury our culture can no longer afford?
This content was posted September 16, 2010. … Two years ago, Sarah Palin was the hottest name in show business/politics. Today, her star has only dimmed a bit. I saw a performance by the mama grizzly, and was duly impressed with her star power. The fact that the candidate Mrs. Palin endorsed lost, to a crook, is not a problem. … During the glory days, an actress portrayed Mrs. Palin as saying that ” I can see Russia from my back porch”. This is the basis for the post below. Before we go there, the question arises, did Sarah Palin ever say she could see Russia from her back porch? Even at a slacker blog, fairness is good form.
The next step is Google. When you type in “Did Sarah Palin…”, some answers come up. They are “die, go to college, ban books, get breast implants.” ( When I saw her speak, they did look real.) When you add “say”, the answers are “drill baby drill, she could see Russia, refudiate, and I can see Russia”. … When you click on “did sarah palin say she could see russia”, you have the option of 273k results. While no mention of her back porch came up on the first google page, there is a link to an interview Mrs. Palin gave the LA Times. She says “They’re our next-door neighbors and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska — from an island in Alaska.”
There is an island called Little Diomede in the Bering Sea. A Russian island called Big Diomede is a few miles away. Little Diomede has less than 150 residents. No Alaska Governor (or ex Governor) has ever visited. Many of the residents do not have television, and do not know who Sarah Palin is. … So Sarah Palin (as played by Tina Fey) can see Russia from her back porch. The closeness of Alaska and Siberia is well known. When I started to look for information, he began with the Aleutian Islands. They string along for hundreds of miles, and cause a dent in the International Date Line. As for which is the last one, and when does Alaska turns into Russia, those are good questions.
So, another search angle was required. The Alaskan government supplied this: Alaska and Russia are less than 3 miles apart at their closest point in the Bering Strait where two islands, Russia’s Big Diomede Island and Alaska’s Little Diomede Island, are located. In winter it is possible to walk across the frozen Bering Strait border between these two islands. At its closest, the American mainland and the Russian mainland are 55 miles apart where Alaska’s Seward Peninsula and Russia’s Chukotka Peninsula reach out to each other.
Alaska is a big place. It has ten times the land mass of Georgia, with less population than Gwinnett County. There is a town on Little Diomede Island called Diomede. It checks in at 65°N 168°W. (For our purposes today, we are going to ignore minutes and seconds) Wasilla is the home of Sarah Palin. It can be found at 61°N 149°W . In other words, Diomede is four degrees north of Wasilla, and Nineteen degrees west. … Lets put this in local terms. Atlanta is 33°N 84°W . According to the atlas, 37°N 103°W is the point where New Mexico, Colorado, and Oklahoma come together. I cannot see that from his back porch. … Pictures today are by chamblee54. ©Luther Mckinnon 2025 · selah