Local businessmen Rudy Gavora and Craig Compeau, shivering on a recent -46F day (-43.3C) commissioned local sculptor Steve Dean to convert a 10,000 lb. (4545.45 k.) block of ice into an image of Nobel Prize winner and weather prophet Albert Gore.

8 other businesses chipped in on funding for the sculpture and an associated Global Freezing Contest in which participants get to estimate how much colder or warmer the winter of 08/09 will be than the winter of 47/48 (when the Prophet Albert was born).

Prizes include 300 gallons of heating oil, a heated car seat, and a Ski-doo jacket.

Fairbanks News-Miner story

If you lived in Homer, Alaska, like Gary and Teri Lyon, you could get up on Sunday morning and find a Kodiak Bear (Ursus arctos middendorffi) killing a moose in your driveway, too.

AP

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AP:

JUNEAU, Alaska: About 10,000 Juneau residents briefly lost power after a bald eagle lugging a deer head crashed into transmission lines.

“You have to live in Alaska to have this kind of outage scenario,” said Gayle Wood, an Alaska Electric Light & Power spokeswoman. “This is the story of the overly ambitious eagle who evidently found a deer head in the landfill.”

The bird, weighed down by the deer head, apparently failed to clear the transmission lines, she said. A repair crew found the eagle dead, the deer head nearby.

The power was out for less than 45 minutes Sunday.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

In a NYT Sunday Magazine feature on Howard Dean, Matt Bai laments:

There were more Democrats in Central Park for the Dave Matthews concert a few years back than there are in the entire state of Alaska — all 656,000 square miles of it.

Anchorage Daily News:

Leaders from four Western Alaska villages have rejected an offer of free heating oil from a Venezuelan- owned company because that nation’s president this month called President Bush “a devil” and made other inflammatory comments about the United States.

“Despite the critical need for fuel in our region, the Unangan (Aleut) people are Americans first, and we cannot support the political agenda attached to this donation,” read a statement from Aleutian Pribilof Islands Association released late Thursday.

Under a program from Texas-based refiner Citgo, which is owned by the Venezuelan government, that is giving cheap and free heating fuel to poor people across the country, more than 12,000 rural Alaska homes in about 150 villages are scheduled to receive 100 free gallons this winter.

Valued at about $5 million, the gift to Alaska is welcome by people in many poor, remote villages. Heating fuel exceeds $7 a gallon in the remotest villages.

Last year, 50,000 spongers in Massachusetts accepted more than 4 million gallons of discounted heating oil from the Venezuelan dictator’s program devised to score a public relations victory over the United States.