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I'm looking at my calendar and as usual, it's pretty full. Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's Day, Dr. MLK Day and all the festivities, events and activities which accompany these special days have come and gone. Here we are in February, and of course, the obvious special day sticks out like a sore thumb: Valentine's Day. I am very "special day" driven. I confess, I love holidays (some more than others) and all that they bring. I love celebrating. As I look at this month of February, yes I think of Valentine's Day and I do look forward to celebrating it. But most of all, I look forward to celebrating the very rich culture of Black Americans. February is Black History Month.

Among the various supply shortages plaguing the fishing fleet in the season of 1945, as World War II wound down, was Copenhagen "snoose." Undoubtedly all of the Southeast halibut fishermen felt the effects of the shortage, but it was Petersburg's fishermen who complained the loudest. That city's newspaper said that Petersburg probably consumed a larger tonnage of snoose per capita than any town in the western hemisphere. The fleet was due to sail May 1 for the annual "halibut-snatching" that lasted 60 to 70 days, but the fishermen discovered that the manufacturers, mostly located in Chicago, had been put under a 10-day embargo: this meant that snoose was not being shipped.

You are 32 years old. You never went to school; your parents couldn't afford it. You can sign your name, but not read the contract. No one will hire you due to your illiteracy, and as a result, you have no income, no home, no car and probably not enough money to buy all the groceries you need for you and your family. All this came because you were never given the chance to learn to read adequately. The current number of illiterate adults dances around 32 million, one in seven people. The illiteracy rate in the U.S is too high, and we need more learning programs to help it drop.

"I wish I could say it came from my own garden. Sometimes it's from Mexico, sometimes it's from Washington, sometimes it's from Chile."

Last week the makers of the movie "Not Evil, Just Wrong" visited Juneau to show their movie and take questions. The movie is primarily a criticism of "An Inconvenient Truth" by Al Gore, and suggests that the evidence for human-driven climate change is weak, and that Gore's movie was "not science." They conclude that emissions restrictions in developing countries would do more damage to people there than any protection from climate change those restrictions might provide. The idea they propose, that human-driven climate change is based on a consensus of opinion, is simply incorrect. Human-driven climate change is supported by a consensus of evidence. The evidence is not based on tree-rings from a single tree in Siberia, but based on large bodies of repeated, independently collected data from around the world including ancient ocean sediments and deep core samples from glaciers, corals, and continental rock. The CO2 content of our oceans is climbing, leading to acidification and the breakdown of the shells of marine organisms-including the microscopic ones that produce the oxygen we breathe.