They turned out the lights at Braeburn when Jerry Joinson left at around 4:30AM PST this morning with the Red Lantern. Eight hours will be added to Jerry’s finish time, so Jerry was pretty much assured of the Red Lantern if he finished.

Hank and the Siberians made it in at just before 8AM local with 11 puppies still pulling the sled, while Brian is making the final run with only 7 puppies still willing to haul the sled.

Mandy is leading the troika with 5 miles between the teams. She is running Brent Sass’s rookie team and doing a fine job bringing in 8 of the original 14 dogs. She is also the fourth of the five rookies who started the race to make it to the end – a good year for rookie mushers.

Mandy made it to the finish at about 2:40PM PST. It looks like Jerry will be next in, but after the 8-hour penalty he will end up with the Red Lantern.

Brian was the last finisher at about 3:45PM PST, but the penalty puts Jerry in last place. The race is over.

Standings at 5:50PM CST (3:50PM PST):

Finish
1 Allen Moore (8)
2 Hugh Neff (14)
3 Matt Hall (3)^R
4 Ken Anderson (6)
5 John Schandelmeier (17)
6 Torsten Kohnert (13)^R
7 Curt Perano (16)^R
8 Hank DeBruin (18)
9 Mandy Nauman (11)^R
10 Brian Wilmshurst (9)
11 Jerry Joinson (4) Φ

These are the official standings. That means they are official, not that they are correct. Things jump around a lot as people decide to update the standings. This problem is especially bad in the back of the pack, as no one bothers to update those standings when the lead is changing.

The Mushers in bold are former winners of the Yukon Quest, the numbers in parentheses are their Bib numbers, and the small “R” indicates a rookie.

Note: This post will be updated during the day, and the map changed on all posts to reflect the current situation.

All posts on the Yukon Quest can be seen by selecting “Yukon Quest” from the Category box on the right sidebar.

Why are you being hustled by street vendors to buy sad and drooping former roses, vegetative matter that missed the cut for bouquets, or were too late to the hospital?

Blame Esther A. Howland (1828 – 1904) of Worcester, Massachusetts. Her guilt is writ large by the Greeting Card Association’s Esther Howland Award for a Greeting Card Visionary. She imported the concept to the US from Britain to bolster her father’s stationery store in 1847.

Of course, it wasn’t long before the stationers had infiltrated school boards and imposed the now mandatory exchange in the classroom to push the low end product of Asian children and prisoners.

Seeing the success of the card merchants, the confectioners jumped on board to fill the lull between Christmas and Easter with the benefit that the bulk of purchases would be made by desperate men with less sense of taste than a golden retriever. If the box was red, heart-shaped, and said chocolate, a man would buy it.

There were at least three Saint Valentines and all were martyrs, as they should have been for the trouble they’ve caused. None are the reason for the “holiday”, only the excuse. They lived at a time when life and men were short and brutal, so the romantic aura of the holiday is pure piffle. At least one was reportedly part of a draft dodging scheme during the Roman Empire, marrying people so that men with “other priorities” could avoid being deployed to foreign wars, bachelors being preferred for catapult fodder.

It is to be hoped that the individual who first wrote: “Roses are red, violets are blue” was eaten by rabid wolverines, or had hemorrhoids.