August 21, 2009

Talkeetna is an Alaskan town at the base of Mount Denali and is very busy in the summer with tourist traffic. In the winter though, this place, on the map since 1919, has around 900 people. One assumes the summer traffic did not decrease this year, although the The Moose Dropping Festival has been cancelled since August 21, 2009. The Moose Dropping Festival, until then an annual July event, was named after a lottery where participants bet on numbered, varnished pieces of moose feces, or "moose droppings" dropped from a helicopter onto a target. You could not disgust me with any description of the festival, once I realized my initial assumptions about it were thankfully, wrong.

We bring Talkeetna up because it has another claim to notoriety. The mayor of Talkeetna is a cat --a manx, described as part 'manx,' which phrase though ignores the fact all Manx are part-Manx since the gene is lethal. So "Mayor Stubbs," as the presiding power in Talkeetna is known, has no long tail to keep him warm in the winter. No doubt Nagley's General Store, where the Mayor hangs out, is plenty warm inside, even in the winter. And has been for the 15 years of the Mayor's reign.