Friday Funny 09/01 (Oddness Alaska)

Cicely Alaska? Nope.

While we are away from Wrangell, even with our preparations, we'll have limited cell signal, and bandwidth. Our friends at Zak's, Katherine, and James lent us a small bag of dvds to fritter away our evening hours at anchor. One of  the sets they lent us, is the entire series of "Northern Exposure", a series that was supposedly about a small community in rural Alaska. It ran from 1990-1995. Back in the '90s, when the series was running, I couldn't stand to watch it. There were too many inaccuracies about Alaska, now, I'm just laughing at it's silliness.

FYI, if you watch ANY of the so-called "reality" shows about Alaska currently on TV, they are NOT real! I watched a season of "Deadliest Catch", and I did like "Flying Wild Alaska", but the drama that the producers create became annoying after awhile. Hopefully, not everything these people did in real life, was a life or death situation. My brother was a Sgt in the Anchorage Police Force, and he did an episode of "Cops". It was interesting to hear how it was filmed. 

Northern Exposure, was about Cicely, Alaska, a nonexistent town, but most say it was based on the small community of Talkeetna, Alaska. Talkeetna is just north of Anchorage, and has a population of about 800. Their latest newsworthy event was that their honorary mayor died. 

Stubbs, the Mayor of Talkeetna.

Beautiful sign?!?

When I googled Stubbs, the cat, I got articles about his death on CNN, ABC, People, Mashable, Smithsonian, Time, and Fox, apparently he was a very well liked mayor.

To film Cicely, the producers choose the locale of Roslyn, Washington, in the Cascade Mountains. The moose that wanders through town in the opening credits, was named Mork, and was part of a captive herd at Washington State University, they lured him around with food. Now you know just how "Alaskan" it was. I could list all of the incorrect Alaskan references in the show, but that would be boring.

The series is about Dr. Joel Fleischman, from New York, who has had his degree paid for by the state of Alaska, and in order to absolve him of the debt, he must practice in Alaska for a period of time. Alaska used to have a forgiveness clause in their student loan program, (not to that amount though), and it's no longer in existence. Joel thinks that he will be in the modern town of Anchorage, but they send him off to backwoods Cicely, and it's cast of odd characters.

That part of the series is true, Alaska has more than it's share of odd characters. I've lived in Alaska my whole life, and I've known, and could name a few, but I don't want to end up on the wrong side of a lawsuit.

This references the ratio of men to women.

There are several websites, and articles about the oddness that is in Alaska.

20 Extremely Weird Things That Only People in Alaska Do.

Abandoned Igloo Hotel - flickr Travis

1974, Sitka Alaska.

The Dr. Suess house, out in the woods.

I guess people like oddness coupled with Alaska. Northern Exposure received 57 award nominations, and won 27 of them.

Are you part of the oddness?  Have you been to odd places, do you live in an odd place? Have you seen Northern Exposure, and did you like it?

As always, we enjoy hearing from you, either here in comments or on our Facebook Denali Rose Sailboat page.