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Iditarod Update – Race Day 5 — Why Now?
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Iditarod Update – Race Day 5

Not a lot of change in the leader board:

1 Paul Gebhardt (69)
2 Hugh Neff (16)
3 Zack Steer (26)
4 Silvia Willis (40)
5 DeeDee Jonrowe (39)
6 Martin Buser (13)
7 Ed Iten (32)
8 Ken Anderson (9)
9 Aliy Zirkle (17)
10 Rohn Buser (37) [rookie]

The people on the board still have to take their mandatory 24-hour stops, while Kjetil Backen (42) [14th ], Lance Mackey (6) [18th], and Jeff King (11) [19th] just finished theirs. The first 14 teams are beyond Ophir on to the halfway point at Cripple.

Rachael Scdoris is currently in 71st place.

The weather is starting to cool down, but at 8AM CST it was 44° here on the northern Gulf Coast, while at Unalakleet at the eastern end of the Norton Sound it was 41°. The temperature has dropped even as the sun came up at Unalakleet, so the late Alaskan winter is making a comeback.

Some of the mushers are reporting a stomach virus affecting their teams. It passes in about 24 hours, but they obviously can’t work hard and you have to watch for dehydration. Over-exertion in the higher temperatures is a problem for some teams with a predominance of “southern dogs” – the dogs want to run, but the mushers don’t want them to wear themselves out. A few are resting at midday to reduce the effect of the higher temperatures.

6 comments

1 Frederick { 03.06.08 at 12:04 pm }

I’d probably be better off paying attention to a dog race than this horse race. I’m ’bout to blow a fuse.

2 Bryan { 03.06.08 at 12:55 pm }

Well, since I’m no longer part of the “horse race” and obviously know more about sled dogs than politics, according to the VSP, I’ll stay with races that tend not to be so nasty.

3 Steve Bates { 03.06.08 at 1:24 pm }

A “horse race” question, Bryan: if Florida and the DNC manage to arrange a do-over, will you vote again? I’m just curious. I have no idea what I would do in that circumstance; I could see going either way.

(OT, your domain name lookup is frequently failing again.)

4 Bryan { 03.06.08 at 3:42 pm }

I can’t, I’m no longer a registered Democrat, nor are a number of other local people. I wasn’t kidding – when they said go away, a lot of us did. The DNC doesn’t seem to get it – this really, truly, honestly pissed people off and we are stuck with a very bad tax change because of what they did. There are a lot of people who will take a long time to come back to the party, if they ever do. People outside of Florida, and party officials don’t seem to understand the anger of the Republicans setting us up and the Democrats pulling the trigger.

[OT: it just started yesterday, after a few weeks of normal. I can’t find anyone with an idea of what’s going on.]

5 Steve Bates { 03.06.08 at 4:53 pm }

“People outside of Florida, and party officials don’t seem to understand the anger of the Republicans setting us up and the Democrats pulling the trigger.” – Bryan

That’s the impression I got from Howard Dean, who today appeared to oppose a do-over. Your legitimate complaint is not a difficult concept; I am exasperated that Dean, Pelosi et al don’t seem to get it. At the very least, it’s short-sighted of them.

6 Bryan { 03.06.08 at 7:28 pm }

“All politics is local” and if you don’t look at the local issues you miss a lot.

Having Donna Brazile telling you that you don’t know how to run an election and voting to disenfranchise you, is like Bill Kristol getting to fire the Secretary of State for foreign policy errors – it doesn’t go down well.

Apparently Dr. Dean has said that the national party isn’t willing to pay for anything, so there will be nothing, because political money is taken out of the state by national candidates, it isn’t spent here.