Well, I'd Say SOMETHING Is Hollow Here

There are some people who would think it's in my wife's best interest NOT to be sent to the North Pole because she might fall in a giant hole that leads to the center of the earth. I hope you are not among them.

If you're a Hollow Earther, then you either haven't read or you reject as hogwash what Wikipedia calls "overwhelming observational evidence [such as, like, gravity], as well as [...] the modern understanding of planet formation" and the fact that "the scientific community has dismissed the notion since at least the late 18th century."

Or, you're just nuts.

In a world where you can be an ordinary citizen of Kansas who declares the elections of the previous five popes invalid in order to justify calling yourself Pope Michael, surely we'd be able to find someone who still believes in the hollow earth theory:

Yes. The earth is hollow. Of course it is. Skeptical? Well, check out this image from the site:

It all makes sense now. I shouldn't be so sarcastic. Perhaps all those things the website says about our hollow planet is true:

It is a terrestrial paradise,

...where the original Garden of Eden is located today

...where the Lost Tribes of Israel live
...where the Political Kingdom of God is located

...where the Lost Viking Colonies of Greenland migrated to
...where vanquished Germans migrated to after World War II

...where flying saucers come from

...where people live to be hundreds of years old in perfect health

...where peace and prosperity exists for everyone

...where Heaven is located (the inner sun)

But if it were true, Heaven aside, it sounds like a pretty crowded place to be, what with the Israelites and Vikings and Nazis and aliens and such. If you send Jenn to the North Pole — and you do that by voting for her — I'll have to make sure she avoids stepping into any large holes. There could be polar bears...or plenty of very old men who haven't seen a woman under the age of 150 in a very long time.

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If this convinces you that you should send my wife to the North Pole, please click this text which is in fact a link that will take you to her essay so you can vote for her so she'll have a chance to go to the North Pole. Thank you.

In a North Pole State of Mind; or, Other North Poles, Part 3

Hello! Have you voted to send my wife to the North Pole? Please do so! The North Pole in question is the real North Pole, not the Faux Poles in Alaska or Idaho that I've discussed previously.

I'd like to discuss yet another town that bills itself as "North Pole," which is accurate if you meant north of Albany:

Who knew that Santa was a New Yorker? North Pole, New York, is slightly west of I-87, that stretch of barren nothingness that delivers you from the state capital to Plattsburgh and Canada by plowing through the Adirondack Mountains. We made the trip to Plattsburgh last summer for my wife's brother's wedding, and I can tell you that driving on that part of I-87 is like being in a Hanna-Barbera cartoon with the wraparound background with the same pattern of tree-rock-sign-car looping every 10 seconds.

Consider that North Pole is 25 miles west of I-87, and the fact that driving in the mountains takes about three times longer than if you drove the same distance in the suburbs, and you'll conclude that the New York North Pole is probably more remote than the real North Pole.

It should come as no surprise that the New York North Pole tries to lure tourists with the Santa's Workshop theme. I suppose if the kids buy into the idea, and they're not so precocious that they carry a globe or a compass or a sextant, it beats going to the real deal, unless you're me and there's a chance you can send my wife there.

Lest you think the village was created by cynical modern marketers, it actually pre-dates the Disney parks, having been built in 1949. Do you have anything to add, Wikipedia?

Originally built on the road to Whiteface Mountain by a Lake Placid businessman whose daughter had desperately wanted to see Santa's house...

I don't mean to cut you off, Wikipedia, but if it were 1949 and my daughter wanted to see Santa's house (if it were this year, I would just fire up a photo of any large house on the Internet and say, "Look! Santa's house!"), I would have made some excuse like:

• "Santa's house is so secret that if you see it, you'll never get any presents."
• "Santa lives way, way at the North Pole, and the Boeing 747 required to make the trip won't be invented for another 20 years."

This guy builds her a town. That must have made all the other dads pretty happy. After that, my kid would have demanded to find out whether the moon is made of cheese, and I'd have to buy a million-pound ball of Swiss.

If you go to the official website of North Pole, New York, you'll notice there's not much going on, now that Christmas is over. There is a link on the site for employment but, sadly, it returns a "Sorry, the page you’re looking for can’t be found" page. Looks like hard times for everyone. Maybe the new Governor Cuomo can turn things around.

I also learned from the website that Maurices (no apostrophe), a clothing chain I've never heard of but which looks like a small-town Kohl's, had a little photoshoot at North Pole, and I found a link to a video. I expected to get a better look at the town, but instead I got this:

Would I send my wife to the New York North Pole? Probably not. She'd be bored pretty quickly, and it's only a six-hour drive, so she'd come home pretty quickly. Too quickly. Unless she had to share a room with the model in the video above and then they got snowed in and the heat went out and they had to stay warm by...

...where was I? Oh yeah. So, no New York North Pole for my wife. Send her to the real deal.

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If this convinces you that you should send my wife to the North Pole, please click this text which is in fact a link that will take you to her essay so you can vote for her so she'll have a chance to go to the North Pole. Thank you.

What's Nunavut With You?

Here's what I know about Canada: it has territories, which are like our states only they're called territories, not states. The ones that border our northern border are all around the same height. Above that is an enormous, seemingly unpopulated land mass called "The Northwest Territories," which were apparently so important that no one ever gave them a proper name.

Because I don't follow any news out of Canada except when the Yankees are playing the Blue Jays, I had no idea that these Northwest Territories — which is actually one territory, even though it's plural (that's Canada for you, I suppose) — were split into two territories in 1999.

One territory is still called Northwest Territories (plural), but the other, which runs closest to the North Pole, is called Nunavut.

Okay, you're probably thinking, other than finding an excuse to blog in order to convince me to send your wife to the North Pole, why should I give a Molson Golden about this stretch of Canada?

Well, friend, here's why:

That is the Coat of Arms of Nunavut, and it is the most-badass thing I've seen in a long time. You've got a reindeer and a fucking narwhal holding some sort of crazy shield that has a bowl of chili and a smushed sword of some sort, and on top of the shield is an igloo with a crown and a porch light. Beneath the reindeer and the narwhal — which are both standing up, mind you — there's the most awesome-looking language this side of Klingon.

Clearly, they consulted the territory's most imaginative 12-year-old to create this thing. I want to wear a T-shirt with this coat of arms just to see how long people will stare at it to try to figure out what the hell is going on.

(The language is Inuktitut, the language of the Inuit, by the way. Stop by the official website of the government of Nunavut to download some Inuit fonts, and use them in your business correspondence!)

And the awesomeness doesn't stop there. Who wouldn't want to have this license plate attached to their SUV:

Yes. It's shaped like a polar bear.

Here's the flag:

Not quite as badass. It turns out that that image is not a mashed-up sword or a snowman with a giant sombrero, but an inukshuk, a kind of Inuit marker. Still, it's actually a controversial flag in the eyes of flag-watchers, according to the Wikipedia page:

"Following its adoption, the flag has been criticized for vexillological reasons. Specifically, it has been criticized for having too many colours, the placement of the star at the end of the flag, the use of gold and white as the background field, and the use of a black outline around the inukshuk."

Can you just taste the controversy?

Anyway, Nunavut is home to the northernmost permanently inhabited place in the world, appropriately called Alert, a mere 508 miles from the North Pole. "Permanently inhabited" means five people, according to the 2006 census, not counting the transients who pop in and out of Alert throughout the year to man the weather station and other government facilities.

If you send my wife to the North Pole, which you should, she won't be going through Alert; the trip will send her first to Norway or Lapland or someplace like that. But if she doesn't win that trip to the North Pole, I can always suggest she try to increase the population of that five-person city of Alert by 20 percent.

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If this convinces you that you should send my wife to the North Pole, please click this text which is in fact a link that will take you to her essay so you can vote for her so she'll have a chance to go to the North Pole. Thank you.

They Don't Mutiny Like They Used To

Just about every well known thing with "Hudson" in its name is likely named for the explorer Henry Hudson. Here's one exception:

But anyway. You probably learned about Henry Hudson during a social studies class that rattled off a bunch of European explorers, and if not for notable bodies of water such as the Hudson River and Hudson Bay, you probably wouldn't be able to tell Henry Hudson — a guy who knew a few things about the frozen lands near the North Pole — from other explorers with a penchant for fancy facial hair and fancier neck accoutrements, such as Sir Walter Raleigh.

 

They also have very pointy chins.

The little you probably remember about these explorer folks is, well, the stuff they explored. But for many of them, more interesting isn't how they lived, but how they died. In Sir Walter's case, he was imprisoned then beheaded, and my mother smoked Raleigh cigarettes for 20 years.

But Henry Hudson has all the other guys beat. His ship was stuck in ice in James Bay in Canada, forcing his crew to spend what was probably a winter more horrible than any of the winters I spent as a student at SUNY Buffalo. After the thaw, a large portion of the crew was looking forward to returning to their homes, but Henry said, "Hey, instead of going home, let's keep looking for that passage to Asia."

Take a look at the map below to where Hudson's ship was, and image how you'd react if you just spent the winter there and were then told you were going to Asia.

China's just around the corner!

Those who disagreed were like, screw that, so they did the reasonable thing: they set Hudson, his son, and his allies on a small boat before sailing home. Hudson and company were never seen again. The mutineers — those who made it back alive — were acquitted of murder.

But Henry Hudson, wherever he ended up, got the last laugh on those mutineers. No one outside of Wikipedia has ever heard of Abacuk Pricket, while Henry Hudson endures with noble landmarks like this:

Take THAT, Abacuk Pricket!

I'm asking you to send my wife to the North Pole, and I do this knowing that she's not the type of person to cause a mutiny. There are a lot of reasons I want to send her to the North Pole, but none of them want me to maroon her on a boat in the middle of Canada.

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If this convinces you that you should send my wife to the North Pole, please click this text which is in fact a link that will take you to her essay so you can vote for her so she'll have a chance to go to the North Pole. Thank you.

The North Pole-tato; or, Other North Poles, Part 2

As I'd mentioned yesterday, there are a few places that are called "North Pole" that are not the North Pole, the place I want you to send my wife (you can assist me by voting for her essay).

Yesterday's North Pole was located in Alaska, which is inaccurate in terms of geography, but at least Alaska is close to the North Pole. The others are not. Today's North Pole is arguably the strangest of all of them.

I think if an episode of Family Feud asked, "Name something that's famous about Idaho," the Survey Says answers would be:

1. Potatoes (90)
2. Skiing (5)
3. The funny shape of the state (4)
4. Hemingway killed himself there (1)

If you said, "The North Pole is there," you'd be greeted with an annoying buzzer, a red X-in-a-box will flash over your face, and if your brood survives to battle in another episode you'll be banished to the slot at the very end of your family line, where the doddering geriatrics or spaced-out aunts usually stand.

North Pole, Idaho, does have a Wikipedia page. I'm not even going to link to it, because I can quickly tell you what it says. Enjoy:

North Pole is an unincorporated community in Kootenai County, Idaho, United States. North Pole is 3.5 miles (6 km) southwest of Athol.

The end.

Granted, the "town" does tend to provide Christmas-themed activities during the holidays, though those take place 18 miles away on the lovely Lake Coeur D'Alene at the Coeur D'Alene Resort in Coeur D'Alene, Idaho.

Holding "North Pole" events at a fancy-schmancy resort and not North Pole proper can be a bit misleading. Here is a photo of the resort, which I swiped from its website:

Note: The words in the photo ("Come Stay...," etc.)

do not actually float in the air and on the water.

And here is a photo, from Google Maps, of what is estimated to be downtown North Pole, Idaho:

View Larger Map

Here's another view, in case you thought you'd turn around to see Santa's workshop bustling with elves.

View Larger Map

Anyway. The Idaho version of the North Pole is more than 2,600 miles from home, but it's still not far enough for my wife to be sent. Maybe while she's at the real North Pole, I'll sneak off and hit the Coeur D'Alene Resort...their spa packages are quite inviting.

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If this convinces you that you should send my wife to the North Pole, please click this text which is in fact a link that will take you to her essay so you can vote for her so she'll have a chance to go to the North Pole. Thank you.

Sarah Palin Can See This North Pole From Her Window; or, Other North Poles, Part 1

There are a few places that claim to be the North Pole that are actually not the North Pole. I want you to send my wife to the real North Pole, which you can do by voting for her essay, but a different North Pole — a city in Alaska — would be a decent fallback destination for my her.

"Here comes Santa Claus, here comes Santa Claus,

right down Santa Claus Lane Badger Road!"

The city, whose website boasts that it's the site where the spirit of Christmas lives year 'round, is about 14 miles southeast of Fairbanks. This means that you can actually be north of the "North Pole." This geographical paradox aside, the city looks like a charming place to visit if:

1. You enjoy cities entirely based on theme
2. You enjoy cities entirely based on the theme of Christmas
3. You don't cringe when you learn the address of city hall is "125 Snowman Lane"
4. You're not looking for a mosque or synagogue or Buddhist temple

I like Christmas as much as the next guy who says "yes" to #4, but I can think of a few other theme-based locales I'd prefer to spend time, like Hershey, Pennsylvania, or PlayStation3 Island.

Who wouldn't want to dine at Taco Bell...at the NORTH POLE?

Apparently it's a big deal to send your mail up to North Pole, Alaska, in order to have it mailed with a postmark like this:

Personally — and you can cry HUMBUG if you want — I don't care for it. To make it look like Santa lives within the United States (all right, it's only Alaska, but you know what I mean) adds all the unnecessary baggage I don't like to think about when I think about Mr. Kringle:

• Does Santa pay state income tax?
• Is Santa registered to vote?
• Is Santa an undocumented alien?

According to my good friend Wikipedia, 6.7% of North Pole's residents live below the poverty line. Are these elves? What's Santa doing for them?

After thinking it over and spending more time blogging about North Pole, Alaska, than one reasonably should, I'd rather you send my wife to the real North Pole, or at least not this particular faux Pole — there are at least two others, which will be the subjects of future posts — because she would likely get so bored after about two days that she'd cut short her trip and return home.

And we can't have that.

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If this convinces you that you should send my wife to the North Pole, please click this text which is in fact a link that will take you to her essay so you can vote for her so she'll have a chance to go to the North Pole. Thank you.

Please Send My Wife...to the Extreme!!!

My house is small. How small? If you sat in my living room as my wife and the kids and I went outside, you'd still feel crowded.

My house is so small that if my wife huddled in the laundry room, bitching about the lack of fabric softener sheets, I could still hear her even if I were on the roof blasting leaves out of the gutters with my leaf-blower.

This is one reason why I'd appreciate very much if you vote for my wife's essay and gave her a shot to get sent to the North Pole for a couple of weeks. They say couples need some space from time to time, and this house ain't providing any.

So why not send her to one of the most extreme places on Earth?

How extreme?

That extreme. As extreme as Vanilla Ice's chances of securing another #1 ranking on the Billboard chart.

How extreme? It would take More Than Words to describe how "Extreme":

But anyway. There is a geographical term called "pole of of inaccessibility" which, according to Wikipedia, "marks a location that is the most challenging to reach owing to its remoteness from geographical features which could provide access." Got that? It means EXTREME to the EXTREME!

The northern pole of inaccessibility — which, if I'm lucky, is where Jenn will spend most of her time — is located here:

After viewing this map, I have the urge to learn to speak Thai, so if Jenn wins — she will if you vote for her essay — and people ask me where she is, I can say, "She went to Cực bất khả tiếp cận Bắc!"

Ice, Ice, Baby!

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If this convinces you that you should send my wife to the North Pole, please click this text which is in fact a link that will take you to her essay so you can vote for her so she'll have a chance to go to the North Pole. Thank you.

Jenn-ook of the North

Have you been considering that thing I've been blogging about, the sending my wife to the North Pole thing? If you want to do me a solid, you should send her to the North Pole, because that means I'd be in my house without my wife, because she'd be at the North Pole and all.

Let me tell you about another fella who was lucky enough to have his wife up at the North Pole, but unlucky enough to be up the there with her: Nanook.

Let's hope Jenn doesn't return
from the North Pole looking like this.

Nanook was an Inuit hunter who was the subject of the classic and influential documentary Nanook of the North, filmed by the so-called "father of the documentary," Robert J. Flaherty. One assumes that American folks in their warm theaters in June 1922 were enthralled by the life-and-death exploits of a lone man battling the harsh elements while hunting walrus and seal with a harpoon in order to feed his rather good-looking wife and child.

Just like Michael Moore some 80 years later, Flaherty was not the kind of documentarian to let facts get in the way of a forced point of view. Nanook's real name was Allakariallak (I guess Allakariallak of the Arctic wouldn't have been a catchy name), and the lady playing his wife was not really not-Nanook's wife, but rather (according to Wikipedia) the common-law wife of Flaherty!

Meet "Nyla," who was supposedly "Nanook's" wife
but was allegedly hooking up with the American
shooting the movie. Could you blame him?

(Oh, and not-Nanook actually did hunt with modern weapons, like guns, but Flaherty thought primitive tools would add more suspense to the hunting scenes — which it did, since the animals he hunted were no less ferocious than they were before!)

Even if you discount some of the staged-for-the-camera bits, it must have been a drag for a married couple to share a tiny igloo. Jenn burned the chicken cutlets the other night; could you imagine what she'd do to a slab of walrus blubber?

If Jenn wins the trip to the North Pole — and she will if you help vote for her essay — she'll be living in luxury compared to poor non-Nanook. Flaherty claimed that the Inuit fellow died of starvation two years after he was filmed, but he actually (supposedly) died of tuberculosis at home as peacefully as one could die of tuberculosis.

There is one thing that Nanook of the North and Jenn, My Wife, Goes to the North Pole would have in common: the former was a silent movie, and the latter would bring some silence to me for a couple of weeks! Maybe during her absence I'll be able to catch up on harpoon practice.

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If this convinces you that you should send my wife to the North Pole, please click this text which is in fact a link that will take you to her essay so you can vote for her so she'll have a chance to go to the North Pole. Thank you.

Could It Have Kilda to Pick a Place Even Further Away?

Imagine my disappointment when I realized that the North Pole would not be the furthest place on earth to send my wife. I don't know exactly where the voyage would take her, should she win the essay contest for which I'm asking you to vote, because there's no precise lump of land on which someone erected a giant peppermint stick.

So, using an online tool for plotting the distance between two points on a Google map, I ran a straight line from our town to the top of the map, and it generated a distance of just under 3,000 miles.

Three thousand miles. That's like flying to San Diego and then driving to San Francisco. In other words, it's not very far. Not very far at all, especially for a husband who's looking forward to having his wife far, far away for a couple of weeks.

Three thousand miles wouldn't even get her to Europe.

Hell, during her actual trip to Europe, Jenn was in Amsterdam (for only the museums, I've been assured), which is more than 3,500 miles away. But the North Pole has a lot fewer, uh, museums than Amsterdam, so I guess knowing she's in a remote part of the world is more important than how many miles she logs in order to get there.

I did find what seems to be a more remote place, a place where I'd like Jenn to visit sometime, that's also just 3,000 miles away: St. Kilda.

You've never heard of St. Kilda? Did you fail Obscure Geography 101? Behold:



It's the circled "A" on the map, just a bit northwest of England. Can't see it? Let me help:



I'll zoom in on the part with the thick black border.



Hmmm. Maybe we'll focus more on the blob of land.



Ah. Much better. To put it in perspective, this is the same size area in New York City, to the same scale:



Obviously, we're talking about a very remote piece of property. According to our friends at Wikipedia, "St Kilda (Scottish Gaelic: Hiort) is an isolated archipelago 64 kilometres (40 mi) west-northwest of North Uist in the North Atlantic Ocean. It contains the westernmost islands of the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. The largest island is Hirta, whose sea cliffs are the highest in the United Kingdom."

Sounds fun, right? Jenn would be on Hirta, where she could chill out with the sheep and look for Viking burial grounds while I run out and buy a PS3 with the money we were saving for the family vacation. I'd bet the cellphone reception is better at the North Pole.

Of course, if the Scottish weather isn't agreeable for her, I'd suggest she try the other St. Kilda that exists in the world: the suburb just south of Melbourne in southern Australia, a mere 10,410 miles away.

If this convinces you that you should send my wife to the North Pole, please click this text which is in fact a link that will take you to her essay so you can vote for her so she'll have a chance to go to the North Pole. Thank you.

Why You Should Send My Wife to the North Pole, Not the South Pole

Penguins.
Let's be honest. Who, besides the occasional fad blogger, doesn't think penguins are cute?

Well, they are. They're built to be cute. Even cuter in cartoon form.



Nature made them that way.



Cartoon penguins are cute in any language.



Here's the problem, my friend: You go to the South Pole, you see a penguin, and you do what anyone would want to do — hug the penguin. Don't say that you wouldn't, because it's built into our DNA. We have to hug penguins. Why do you think they put bars up around the penguin patch at the zoos?

Because — and I shouldn't have to tell you this but penguin-cuteness blinds you to this fact — penguins stink. They're like half-bird and half-fish, and they smell like the worst of both species.

Sure, they look all cute in their little feather-tuxedos, but imagine your hairy uncle Ned wearing a tux to your cousin's wedding, getting drunk like he usually does, falling asleep in the cab and waking up in a fetid puddle outside a Canal Street market that hangs strangled ducks in the windows as a lure to attract customers.

That's what Chilly Willy smells like.

So we can't have the wife going to the South Pole, because despite the smell she might want to bring back one of these beaked little bastards, and we can't have that. Send her to the North Pole instead, and she'll satisfy her visit-one-of-the-ends-of-the-earth jones up there.

If this convinces you that you should send my wife to the North Pole, please click this text which is in fact a link that will take you to her essay so you can vote for her so she'll have a chance to go to the North Pole. Thank you.

Why You Should Send My Wife to the North Pole

Let's look at it from her point of view. For starters, she really wants to go. I'd call Jenn an "armchair adventurer," but she has in fact had a number of adventures beyond being married to me for a number of years I forget how many right now but I can look it up.

One of the most adventurous adventures she ventured was backpacking with her friend Laura through Europe. She'd asked me to go but I heard "backpacking" and "hostels" and "find a place to stay on the day we arrive in a country in which we do not speak the native language" so I declined.

We'd already been married for about a year, so this wasn't some lark undertaken by a lithe college student but a premeditated whim by a well-past-graduation-and-now-holding-a-white-collar-job working woman. Jenn was always in good shape, mind you, but she wasn't a hit-the-gym-at-5am or climb-a-mountain-every-other-weekend type of gal, either, so it was impressive that she was able to burst though her comfort zone to achieve something she had always wanted to attempt.

She and Laura had a lot of, well, adventures on that trip, and during her absence I survived a not-quite-near-death experience with a bowl of pasta (more about that in a later post). She's been dying to get on a show like The Amazing Race in order to see the world, but how much of the Taj Mahal can you take in while you're running as fast as you can to find a checkpoint so you can solve a puzzle in order to haggle with a cab driver to whisk you away to yet another checkpoint?

The trip to the North Pole is something she'd appreciate more: definitely outside her comfort zone — you should see how she shivers pathetically when we take the kids sledding — but a thrilling adventure she would relish.

If this convinces you that you should send my wife to the North Pole, please vote for her so she'll have a chance to go to the North Pole. Thank you.

Wouldn't You Want Your Wife Sent to the North Pole?

I mean, she'd eventually return, so let's get that part out of the way. I'm not looking with her to become stranded on an ice floe or run off with a Yeti. Spouses can use a break from each other every now and then, so why not have one of them go to one of the ends of the earth?

And what does that Yeti have that I don't have? Can he make her a Western omelet as good as mine?

I Want You to Send My Wife to the North Pole

I mean, really, please.