Editorial 11.2, February 2009, by Deirdre Helfferich Parties, Stuff, and Nonsense Birthday Bash for the Decade The Ester Republic’s Birthday Bash will be held at the Golden Eagle Saloon, right in the center of the village, starting at 7 pm on Saturday night. I’ll provide beer, finger food, and a live band (music at 9), but I sure hope people will also bring the usual potluck (I know the yummy things my neighbors cook for potlucks, and I always look forward to eating them!). The Publisher’s Picks this year will be brief (I promise), but there will be a few extra prizes for the Decade’s Best. Come on out and party down! Librarypalooza The week before the Birthday Bash, on Sunday, March 1, the fifth annual blowout for the library will be held, as before, at the Annex. This one is pretty exciting for me because we are done paying off the land, and now the money raised will be going to savings so we can actually get our building constructed. It’s not going to be cheap. Rough estimates are around several hundred thousand dollars, so obviously the lallapalooza can’t be our only source of building funds. However, we can get a good chunk earned toward our foundation, and we do have a grantwriter who will help us get the big bucks kick-started. Our library right now is just too small—no couch, not enough space for all the books and movies, and no room for a group of friends to sit and talk together, much less have a desk for even one person to work at. It is hampered in its ability to do what libraries do best: offer knowledge and education freely, act as a meeting place between people and ideas, act as equalizers for information (no matter one’s income level), provide schoolkids a place to study, and so on. Our small room of books and movies and audiobooks does all those things, but not nearly as well as it could. The Ester area’s population has grown tremendously in the last ten years or so, and the people here deserve a local library that can adequately serve them. I’ve been working on the Ester library for almost as long as I have on the Republic, and to see it this close to an actual building—but not quite there—is driving me crazy. I so want to walk in that building, hang out on the couch, browse the stacks (with each shelf dedicated to someone special to the people who bought the plaque), and just smell the fragrance of all those books in a warm, welcoming, honest-to-god library! Just a little bit longer… The best thing, of course, is that for the past five years, we have been getting closer to this goal by having fun: the lallapalooza, the music festival, and the footrace. Here’s another opportunity, and I’m looking forward to it. See you there! Mass Transit for the Republic The thought of mass transit to and from Ester, with the implication that there are enough people to provide public transportation around here, is a bit unsettling. I lived in Seattle for a good six years, and thoroughly enjoyed the flexibility provided by a bus system that went everywhere I needed to go and only made me wait ten or so minutes between buses I’ve used bus and rail systems in Washington, DC, Seattle, Copenhagen, Paris, and between Los Angeles and Berkely—and, of course, Fairbanks. As bus systems go, the Fairbanks borough transit system isn’t bad, despite its half-hour to an hour wait time. (Every fifteen minutes would sure be nice, but you can’t have everything.) It goes to most of the well-trafficked places in town, has clean and well-lit vehicles, and the bus drivers are pretty cool. Unfortunately, it doesn’t go where I need to go: Ester. Tylan Martin, who runs the Publine, is hoping to change that. He’d like to contract with the borough to run a bus line from the university to Ester and back. I think it’s a feasible idea, and a welcome one. There are a fair number of people living out here nowadays, along Gold Hill Road and Cripple Creek Road, Old Nenana Highway and the Ester Lump. The area’s population, as I pointed out above, has mushroomed in the last years, and there’s a lot of car traffic along the Parks these days between Cripple Creek and town—enough so that we now get a heavy ice smog in the winter. I remember when that was a rare thing, and that wasn’t that long ago! Since the new bicycle path went in, summertime traffic includes a lot of bicycles, roller skaters, skateboarders, and roller-joring dog/human teams of all sorts. There even seem to be more pedestrians. But when winter hits, the path traffic drops dramatically, and it’s back into the automobiles. Martin needs to hear from people who would like to see an Ester bus line, and is collecting questionnaires that he’ll send in to the borough. You can obtain one from him at [email protected] or call him at 459-8888, or contact David Leone, transportation manager for the Fairbanks North Star Borough. Anonymity at the News-Miner Hoo, boy. The comments on the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner’s website are, well, not worth reading any more. Their authors far too frequently descend to depths of sliminess and irrationality that I suspect they wouldn’t if they actually had to stand out there on the internet with their real names attached to their comments. I’ve pretty much stopped reading or commenting on news stories there. (I’m estereditor, by the way, and feel I made an error by not using my real name.) Most of the more frequent and locquacious posters seem to be afflicted by serious lack of plain old courtesy. Anonymity seems to bring out the worst in these people, and it’s just not pleasant, illuminating, or otherwise worth the trouble to go through all the commentary to find the writers who do seem to have some sense and can converse politely. Ick. | ||
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