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Saturday, October 30, 2010
JetBlue has decided to chill out. (In Alaska, that is.)
The low-cost carrier has just announced that it will be adding Anchorage to its list of routes in North America, making it the 65th city on their list.
But don’t get your snowshoes just yet – flights aren’t actually taking off until May 26, 2011.
Once service starts, there will be a daily nonstop flight from Los Angeles’ Long Beach Airport. If you’re ready to book this far in advance, take advantage of its introductory fares (good until midnight tonight, Oct. 29) at $119 each way.
Flights from Los Angeles to Anchorage can range from $400-500 roundtrip, so a deal less than $300 both ways is a steal.
Reportedly, Delta Air Lines and Alaska Airlines have already started matching JetBlue’s fare, so that may mean that consumers will have easier access to the continental US’s chilly kin in the very near future.
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ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — Radio transmissions released by the Federal Aviation Administration show snippets of the frantic rescue efforts that unfolded after a floatplane slammed into a remote mountainside in southwest Alaska, killing former U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens and four others.
At one point, a pilot surveying the wreckage urged an FAA flight operator to get a rescue helicopter to the steep slope "immediately, immediately, fast." Another pilot said survivors would be exceedingly difficult to reach by foot because a private helicopter had to land 500 feet above the crash site in the rugged terrain.
"I don't know that they're going to able to get anybody up the hill if they're seriously injured. We really need a really real search-and-rescue helicopter out here with medical personnel if there's any way we can do that a-sap," he said.
The three hours of recorded transmissions were obtained by The Associated Press through a records request regarding the Aug. 9 crash north of Dillingham.
Conversations were redacted in some places, so there are gaps in the chain of events that culminated in the rescue of four survivors, including former NASA chief Sean O'Keefe and his 19-year-old son, Kevin O'Keefe.
Moments into the recording, the worried manager of a corporate lodge hosting the 86-year-old Stevens and other guests called the Dillingham flight operator, Carl Lang, to report the 1957 DeHavilland DHC-3 Otter plane had failed to show up at a remote fishing camp. At the time of the call, the single-engine Otter was almost four hours overdue.
The lodge manager, David Roseman, said he would make one more call and get back to Lang shortly. By the time he called back about 15 minutes later, Lang had begun asking local pilots to check the half-hour route between the lodge and camp.
"I wonder if, ah, if we could go ahead and put a search and rescue into effect," Roseman said.
For almost an hour, local pilots found no sign of the aircraft. Then the lines crackled with the first concrete news.
"Yes, I've got coordinates on the downed aircraft," said the pilot of a plane registered to Ron Duncan, president of General Communication Inc., the phone and Internet company that owned the lodge and the Otter. In the plane with Duncan was his wife, Anchorage-based pediatrician Dani Bowman, who wanted to reach the site herself to tend to the injured survivors.
"The helicopter has the wreckage in sight, says there's at least one survivor waving at them," Duncan radioed 10 minutes later. "Any update on what's happening with search and rescue?"
"I called 911. We're trying to get additional air service out there," Lang said.
Also joining in the effort were the Air Force Rescue Coordination Center and Alaska State Troopers.
O'Keefe said in interviews aired on NBC's "Today" show last week that Stevens — an Alaska icon and the longest serving Republican in Senate history — was already dead when O'Keefe regained consciousness after the crash. Survivors waited among the dead for hours as bad weather prevented rescuers from reaching the wreckage until early the next morning, he said.
The others killed in the crash were pilot Theron Smith, GCI executive Dana Tindall and her 16-year-old daughter, Corey Tindall, and lobbyist William "Bill" Phillips Sr., whose 13-year-old son, Willy Phillips, survived. The other survivor is lobbyist Jim Morhard.
read more.Tapes recount drama of crash response
Especially near urban centers, welcoming visitors is becoming increasingly lucrative while raising crops and livestock are becoming less so.
Autumn is a particularly popular time for farm tourism. This weekend's Halloween celebration of all things scary draws visitors to scenic farms around Washington, DC, to pick pumpkins to carve into jack-o-lanterns.
Pumpkin picking fun
On a recent weekend afternoon, a steady stream of people takes the tractor ride out to the pumpkin patch at Brookfield Pumpkins in Thurmont, MD.
Laine Cliber is here with her brother, sister and parents. She says she is looking for "a tall, orange pumpkin with a long handle." She ends up with a squat, green one with a short handle. But she seems happy with it anyway. The family has a good time in the afternoon sun. They spend more than 70 dollars on four large pumpkins and some smaller gourds.
read more:Halloween Pumpkins are Serious Farm Business
The idea was an offshoot of the more than two-month strike that idled baseball in 1981. With no baseball to fill the sports pages, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram decided to create the "Strangers." Stories and notes columns ran about the fictional team, peopled with odd characters -- many based on real players -- spewing baseball clichés.
It wasn't as though the Rangers, in their first decade in Texas, hadn't already provided plenty of fodder for such an undertaking. By that time such on-field characters as Billy Martin, Mickey Rivers and Dock Ellis had worn a Rangers uniform and even owners like Brad Corbett and Eddie Chiles were bigger-than-life personalities, making headlines at every turn.
[+] EnlargeAl Messerschmidt/Getty Images
Ever the personality, Dock Ellis' pink hair curlers may have been responsible for Eddie Stanky's one-game tenure as Rangers manager.A despondent Corbett once called his players "dogs, on the field and off." Eddie Stanky took the manager's job in 1977 and left after one game. Some speculated that the sight of Ellis in pink hair curlers in the clubhouse was more than the old-school Stanky could bear.
Chiles once put armed guards at every entrance to old Arlington Stadium to keep the media at bay on an off-day while the players, coaches and manager Don Zimmer, who couldn't help rolling his eyes, went through a day-long management seminar, stressing personal and team goals.
A former Rangers beat man, Mike Shropshire, penned a book about the Rangers' dismal early years and dubbed it "Seasons in Hell." He even 'fessed up to bringing a grocery sack full of weed to camp one spring, becoming the team's unofficial dope supplier.
"Strangers" indeed.
The Star-Telegram parody was done so cleverly -- staffers actually posed as players, wearing baseball uniforms -- the series, which continued for many weeks, garnered attention on national newscasts.
The Rangers were such a sad-sack franchise back then, fans and readers didn't know whether to get mad at the not-quite-gentle ribbing of the home team or simply chuckle along with the rest of the country. It was, after all, an amazingly witty concept.
Now, almost 30 years later, the Rangers stand on the threshold of a world championship, four victories away from the game's highest pinnacle. If they haven't already done it, four more wins should bury the memory of the scruffy "Texas Strangers" once and for all, making it simply another dubious and faded chapter in their colorful history.
The "Strangers" may still live somewhere deep in the hearts of longtime fans, but the new Rangers are on the verge of becoming world champions and changing the perception of this franchise forever.
"If we can win, I think it will put us on the radar screen on how the Rangers are perceived throughout baseball," owner/president Nolan Ryan said. "It could help us by attracting the attention of potential free agents who might not otherwise have taken us seriously."
This is the Rangers' fourth American League West Division championship, but they were previously dismissed from the playoffs so easily and completely by the New York Yankees, going 1-9 in those first three best-of-five playoff series in 1996, '98 and '99, that they gained little credibility from those brief postseason appearances.
Read more:Texas sheds 'Strangers' perception
Never mind winning a World Series right now. Just try to win a game.
But that would be ignoring who these Rangers are and how they got here in the first place. The absolute last thing they need to do at this point is to start an identity search.
Scott Rovak/US Presswire
A game of inches, which included a drive by Ian Kinsler that bounced off the top of the fence, quickly got away from the Rangers.
So as mortifying as Thursday night's 9-0 Game 2 loss to the San Francisco Giants may have been, as devastating as it may seem to be flying back to Texas down two games to none in the 106th Fall Classic, putting this nightmare in the rearview mirror and inundating themselves in a sea of red come Game 3 on Saturday night at Rangers Ballpark in Arlington is exactly what this team needs.
Never mind that the Rangers have still never won a ballgame in Telephone Company Park and have now put themselves in the position of having to do that at least once if they can force a return here for a Game 6. First, they have to earn that right.
The kind thing would be to say that only inches separated the Rangers from flying home with the best-of-seven World Series tied at a game apiece.
For reasons that are obvious, I'm not feeling that kind, and it wouldn't be close to the truth anyway.
Obviously, the difference wasn't nearly that subtle. Sure, another few inches and maybe Ian Kinsler's drive leading off the fifth inning doesn't bounce off the top of the fence but clears it, and the Rangers break through first in Game 2.
Maybe that changes everything.
Maybe.
But subsequent events, especially that embarrassing seven-run eighth-inning implosion by the bullpen, proved that's just wishful thinking.
"It was a game of inches," Rangers general manager Jon Daniels said as he lingered alone in manager Ron Washington's office after the game, "and then it got ugly."
Very, very ugly.
Only moments after the Rangers had stranded Kinsler at second following his double, the Giants got a no-doubt-about-it jack from Edgar Renteria, who turned on C.J. Wilson's high fastball and planted it in the left-field seats in the bottom of the same inning to break the scoreless tie.
With Cain inducing a weak assortment of popups and routine ground-ball outs from the Rangers' dormant offense, the Giants tacked on an insurance run in the seventh, then reveled in a complete collapse by the Texas bullpen in the eighth.
When the dust and the gore had settled, the Giants had gouged out seven more runs, turned a tight pitcher's duel into a humiliating 9-0 rout and ignited a monumental celebration among more than 43,000 black-and-orange-clad Giants fans.
"We got it handed to us tonight," said Rangers owner/president Nolan Ryan, shaking his head. "We came apart at the seams.
AP Photo/David J. Phillip
The Rangers have been beaten soundly in every phase by the Giants but can take solace in the fact that they're headed home.
"Now we have to put this out of our minds and realize that Saturday starts another series. The one positive is that at least we're going home."
Home, where they don't have to worry about never having won a game in 11 tries. They can only hope they get another chance because, as Ryan said, it may be a new series but it's one in which the Rangers now must win four times out of five games.
The danger in declaring that the Rangers simply haven't been themselves in this series is that statement could be misconstrued as a suggestion they have given away the first two games. That's simply not the case. The Giants are taking it, fair and square. They are beating the Rangers at every phase of the game.
If you thought Game 1 was demoralizing, Game 2 was downright humiliating, especially when things got out of hand during San Francisco's eighth-inning explosion. The Giants mauled Darren O'Day, Derek Holland (who walked three straight and forced in the first two runs of the inning), Mark Lowe and Michael Kirkman for four walks and four hits.
In his nervousness, Washington -- who clearly was caught flat-footed by Holland's ineffectiveness -- even ran out of sunflower seeds to munch.
By the time the inning was over, it was easy to forget that for the first seven innings of this game, Cain and Wilson were locked in a tight pitchers' duel.
The Rangers arrived at Game 2 after Wednesday night's brutal 11-7 whipping -- which wasn't really that close -- desperately needing something special from Wilson, and they got it. It just wasn't enough.
Wilson was superb before leaving with a recurring blister on his pitching hand after a leadoff walk to Cody Ross in the seventh. Ross would come around to score on a slow groundout and a looping single to right center by Juan Uribe off reliever Darren Oliver.
By then, the Rangers' failures at the plate were reaching epic proportions. Kinsler never left second after his leadoff double in the fifth, but that was nothing compared to the letdown that came an inning later, when singles by Michael Young and Josh Hamilton, along with a wild pitch, put runners at second and third with one out.
With cleanup hitter Nelson Cruz at the plate, the Giants elected to play their infielders back, effectively conceding the tying run on a routine ground ball. It was almost as if they knew Cruz was going to lift a weak foul pop to first baseman Aubrey Huff, and then Kinsler would follow suit with another popup to shallow right.
read more:Rangers head home to lick wounds
IGN published an interview with Community star (and Scream newcomer) Alison Brie yesterday. Here are the highlights as they pertain to Scream 4:
IGN: What can you say about your character in Scream 4? I know these movies are pretty top secret…
Brie: It is top secret! And my boss is standing right there! I play Rebecca. She works for Sidney Prescott and she's a little go-getter. She really admires Gale Weathers, I'll put it that way. She kind of has a little bit of Gale in her, I think. She'll really do anything to get ahead.
IGN: We talked before about what a huge fan you were of these movies. You told me that you were sort of a go-to on the set, as far as what happened in what Scream movie, right?
Brie: Which movie [something was from], it's true. But I tried to keep it under wraps. That was the problem. I wouldn't just come out and be like, "Bring all your Scream questions to me!" I would just sort of overhear people talk about it and I might lean in and be like, "Oh, that was in Scream 2!" "Oh, that was in 3. It was definitely 3!" I didn't want them to freak out too much and be like, "Why are you obsessed with us?" That's embarrassing!
IGN: I know when I heard you were cast in the film, I thought, "You know, it would be really cool if she were the killer." I'm obviously not going to ask you who the killer is, but when you were offered the role, did you think, "I wonder if I get to kill people!?"
read more:Scream 4 Update: Wes Craven, David Arquette & Alison Brie offer commentary on upcoming film
Friday, October 29, 2010
Tom kenny:Its an hideous ending that makes Kahne and RPM look terrible. NothingButNylon More impressive NBA. Thats why I like it. Nutzer verwenden Facebook
The comedian and voiceover artist talks about the weirdest place hes ever seen his cartoon alter ego SpongeBob SquarePants.
At an Adventure Time recording session at Cartoon Network in Burbank October 14 2010. Reactions Older Post Home. Thats why I like it. I know most of the drivers despise restrictor plate racing but as a fan. 25 2010Over 80 actors have worked on this project including Michael Fairman Karen Black Josh Robert Thompson Tom Kenny Charles Durning and Jim. Dont look now but we have some real drama in the Chase for the Sprint Cup Championship.
Facebook ist ein soziales Netzwerk das Menschen mit ihren Freunden Arbeitskollegen Kommilitonen und anderen Mitmenschen verbindet. Talladega is the huge unknown in the Chase.
By all accounts Tom Kenny was told by management that more was expected from him in 2011 but he too will be present next season.
Talladega is the Chase Wildcard. Talladega is the huge unknown in the Chase. NothingButNylon More impressive NBA performance tonight Miami Heat or Rajon Rondo Andrew Wamugi says October 30 2010 at 2.
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Tom kenny
Tom kenny
Tom kenny
