According to Google’s AI Overiew, one of the strangest years in global history was 1518 when “hundreds of people in Strasbourg, France, danced uncontrollably for days in what is known as the ‘Dancing Plague.’” On a national level the U.S. presidential election had enough historic strangeness to ensnare all political types in its undertow.
By those standards things weren’t all that bizarre in Juneau in 2024, although people living in the hundreds of flood-affected homes and adjusting to the newly consolidated schools are certainly among those with legitimate cause to disagree. However, those weren’t merely instances of the ways we were weird, but major events that had immediate and potentially permanent impacts on the entire community — and as such will be included in the Juneau Empire’s top 10 stories of 2024 published next week.
Meanwhile, from the other news covered by the Empire, these are the 10 strangest stories of 2024 in no particular order. Strange doesn’t automatically mean the same as funny, since some involved misfortunes. And while communitywide awareness and impacts were a consideration, peculiarity played a primary part.
President Donald Trump and Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy pose for a photo aboard Air Force One during a stopover at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage in 2019. (Sheila Craighead / White House photo)
Gov. Mike Dunleavy comes up short in Trump job audition
The big guy in Alaska said he was “not rolling over like a rainbow trout,” but D.C.’s returning heavyweight didn’t take the bait. Dunleavy had many people scratching their heads during the first half of the year with press conferences and public statements — such as that one and referring to “the holy grail, the dilithium crystals of education” when talking about state funding — seemingly intended as auditions for a job with Donald Trump if he won the November election. Trump did indeed prevail and the intrigue reached a peak when Dunleavy a week after the election posted social media messages at about 8:40 p.m. that he and Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahltrom would be making a joint announcement shortly — which came a day after media reports that he was discussing a Cabinet job with Trump transition officials. However, it all came to nothing when Dunleavy canceled the announcement about 90 minutes later, with no explanation. About a month later he said the joint announcement was going to be about the outcome of Alaska’s U.S. House race, but results remained too close to call. While a longtime retired political journalist called the explanation “a very strange thing,” he also noted “it might even be true.”
KINY’s misadventures with AI news
For a while earlier this year certain stories with oddly vague and glib wording at KINY’s website were getting flagged by an AI detector as having 98% or so of the content generated by artificial intelligence. Management continues to deny any such thing happened and the stories highlighted by the Empire in a June 19 story as examples are gone from the website (but live on in the Internet Archive), yet such stories also stopped appearing almost immediately after the story was published. The increase occurred at roughly the same time the station fired its two veteran full-time news employees (one of whom now reports for the Empire). A check of other Alaska media by the Empire found no other similar such use, although some journalism experts said the technology has potential uses — especially when its technology and reliability improve.
• Bill Thomas drops out of local legislative race to go fishing
Thomas has been a commercial fisherman for 55 years and active in politics for nearly 50. But he decided there wasn’t enough time for both this summer when he abandoned his candidacy for the Alaska Legislature’s District 3 seat spanning the northern half of Juneau, as well as surrounding communities such as Skagway and his hometown of Haines. “I’ve got major engine problems and I should have been fishing my halibut quota,” he said by way of explanation in a June 14 phone call, noting he’d been spending the week trying to deal with engine trouble on his boat and he didn’t have time to be thinking about showing up for campaign events. Thomas, a Republican who served four terms in the House between 2005 and 2013, would have challenged Democratic Rep. Andi Story, who instead was elected unopposed to a fourth term.
House Minority Leader Calvin Schrage (center), an Anchorage independent, talks with Reps. CJ McCormick, a Bethel Democrat, Neal Foster, a Nome Democrat, and Bryce Edgmon, a Dillingham independent, as a clock shows the midnight May 16 deadline for the 33rd Alaska Legislature to adjourn passed more than an hour earlier. (Mark Sabbatini / Juneau Empire file photo)
Final daze of the legislative session includes transgender filibuster, illegal adjournment
With key items like the budget unresolved with the clock running out, this was the scene: “As legislators took action on 88 amendments such as allowing transgender girls to participate in girls’ chess teams and appointing an official state gender inspector to resolve complaints, the kickoff at a local girls’ soccer game was by a senior with a broken arm who kicked it to a senior teammate with a torn anterior cruciate ligament before they both came off the field to applause.” Lawmakers definitely weren’t in the mood to play nice with each other as phrases such as “that is absolutely insane” and “full of hate” were uttered – and sometimes shouted — in the House chambers about a bill banning transgender girls from participating on girls’ school sports teams. The bill — which had no chance of survival in the Senate — got three long days of debate during the final six days of the sessions while other business was pushed to the sidelines. Ultimately the House would get to the budget and other high-priority legislation, but much of the latter was passed after the adjournment deadline May 16 and was subsequently vetoed by Gov. Mike Dunleavy, which thwarted a possible legal challenge to the items.
Pro-life flag at governor’s mansion
Ever since January a flag with colors of white, blue and pink — the same colors as the transgender pride flag — has been hanging along with the U.S. flag and Alaska State Flag outside the front entrance of the Governor’s Residence. But unlike the striped pride flag generally associated with liberal activism, the governor’s flag featuring one blue and one pink baby footprint is a “pro-life” flag championed by conservatives in the wake of abortion rights being restricted when Roe. v. Wade was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court. The political stance was nothing new for Gov. Mike Dunleavy, who in his 2023 State of the State address declared he wanted Alaska to be “the most pro-life state in the entire country.” Nonetheless, the flag upset about 50 pro-choice demonstrators who on June 22 — the second anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, which overturned the national right to an abortion — marched to the governor’s mansion demanding futilely the flag be taken down.
State screws up federal transportation plan
Alaska was unique among states with the rejection of its $5.6 billion four-year transportation improvement plan by the federal government in February due to a multitude of flaws. While a modified plan would be mostly approved in March, the state got the smallest reallocation of unused federal transportation funding in August — with errors again being a significant factor in rejecting most of what the state asked for. This would easily make the top 10 story list if more Juneau-related projects were affected, but most of the major projects were further to the north. The rejection was part of a trend of Alaska struggling to comply with federal regulations, including ongoing problems with food stamps and other public assistance programs, as well as properly distributing education funding among school districts.
Alaska Permanent Fund Corp. board members including Gabrielle Rubenstein (wearing white) meet with staff and advisors on Oct. 30, 2023, to discuss a proposal to raise the fund’s rate of return by making riskier investments. The idea stalled when advisors suggested the strategy and timing are ill-advised. (Mark Sabbatini / Juneau Empire file photo)
The people in charge of Alaska’s $82 billion Permanent Fund got into a “Did not! Did too!” fight after a leak of emails in April alleging Board of Trustees Vice-Chair Gabrielle Rubenstein was improperly arranging meetings between Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation staff and her own business associates, including her billionaire father David Rubenstein. That led to defiant denials by her and a vow by some members to conduct a hasty investigation — with the focus being on the source of the leak rather than the allegations. Ultimately Rubenstein would resign from the board after she was voted out of her vice chair position during the trustees’ meeting in July. At the same meeting Ethan Schutt — who according to the leaked emails was being targeted by Gov. Mike Dunleavy for removal— was ousted as the board’s chair, although he remains on the board.
Michael Franti concert has to move, promoter dials response up to 11
Multi-genre musician Michael Franti wasn’t part of Pitchfork magazine’s “64 Most Anticipated Tours of 2024” or Billboard’s top-100 tours for the year, but he was among the most notable names making a stop in Juneau with a gig in August. However, the show originally planned at Centennial Hall was canceled due to what the head of the local arts council called impossible-to-meet staging demands by officials representing the artist, resulting in the concert taking place at Juneau-Douglas High School: Yadaa.at Kale — a venue with 970 fixed seats versus the 1,000 that would have been allowed into Centennial Hall’s main ballroom. Cheri Snook, head of Cabin Door Productions which brought the show to Juneau, didn’t take it well. In a lengthy August letter to Centennial Hall officials, she stated the cancellation has “damaged Juneau’s reputation as a viable destination for high-profile events” and “Centennial Hall has lost its sense of humanity.” In an email to the Empire asking if she intended to file a lawsuit or take other legal action, Snook declared Franti “a humanitarian of our century and to be treated less than was appalling and to have the entire community of Juneau be at risk and all the people.”
A profile of a South African model is seen on the surface of Sandy Beach on Nov 18. (Photo by Elliot Welch shared by Juneau Parks and Recreation)
Stony faces spend weeks nonstop on Southeast Alaska shores after artist’s visit
To some people walking by on Sandy Beach, it may have simply looked like an odd grouping of rocks. It took drone photos and videos circulating on social media to give folks a full appreciation of the work by artist Blake Byers, who spent about 10 days during the first half of November recreating the face of a South African model using nearby rocks. The profile about 25 feet in diameter was one of multiple faces of models and other people he created on shores in Southeast Alaska and elsewhere — including some in remote places like an uninhabited island near Kake where few if any people were likely to set foot. “The draw for me in doing something like that is maybe hopefully inspiring people to think outside the box and enjoy a principle that is not normal or orthodox in a way,” he said. Byers also crafted one of his faces on a snow surface in Oregon using a garden sprayer, a technique Byers said he may use when he returns to Southeast Alaska during the winter.
Callers pretending to be police scam residents out of thousands of dollars
This wasn’t funny for anyone scammed of money — or simply scared out of their wits by the threat of imminent arrest — but the magnitude and ongoing length of the scam was indeed among Juneau’s strangest crimes this year. Callers “spoofing” real numbers from the Juneau Police Department or other agencies such as the Anchorage Federal Court system — and using real names of officials at the agencies — threatened people with arrest unless they paid thousands of dollars in fines for missing jury duty or for other reasons. Examples provided by JPD of people swindled included one person scammed out of $10,000 (with two payments of $5,000 each) and another scammed out of $4,550 within a two-day period in July. Warnings issued by officials advised first and foremost to “hang up the phone” on such calls, but questions about receiving them were still circulating on local social media pages months later.
• Contact Mark Sabbatini at mark.sabbatini@juneauempire.com or (907) 957-2306.
