Posted on 03/17/2005 3:11:24 AM PST by franksolich
Iditarod victory may be Sørlie's last
Robert Sørlie is a national hero after winning the famed Iditarod sled dog race in Alaska, but the victory may be his last.
Next year he plans to back his nephew Bjørnar Andersen, who made an impressive debut this time around.
Sørlie, who won after nine days, 18 hours and 39 minutes racing through the desolate Alaskan landscape, said he absolutely won't be a musher himself next year. "Team Norway" will instead concentrate on promoting Andersen, while Kjetil Backen, part of the team's support staff, will also participate in the race.
Sørlie isn't sure whether he'll be a musher when the next opportunity comes up. "I haven't decided whether I'll run in 2007," he told newspaper Romerikes Blad.
He also joked that he doesn't have a big enough yard at home to park many more vehicles like the Dodge he won just won.
Veteran winner
Sørlie, a 47-year-old firefighter from Hurdal, is the oldest person to ever have won the prestigious Iditarod, and he thinks this victory was even greater than his win in 2003.
"People said I won the last one because the course was so different," he said. "This year we were back to the original route, starting in Anchorage. The course from Fairbanks was much easier.
"It was just great to show the skeptics that I'm the best."
Lars Monsen, another well-known outdoorsman in Norway, said he's not sure people in Norway really understand what Sørlie has accomplished.
"This is bigger than big," Monsen told newspaper Aftenposten. "This is enormous. Just think, all his professional rivals knew this fireman from Norway was the man to beat, but they didn't manage to prevent him from winning."
Sørlie's 27-year-old nephew Andersen, meanwhile, made the best debut in the Iditarod for the past 29 years, finishing fourth. He said he was very happy but very tired and looked most forward to take off his long underwear. Then he would look forward to next year's race.
Does anyone know if it is based upon that famous race across Alaska, about 1920 or so, to deliver medicines to the diphtheria-stricken children of Nome?
It seems popular among DUmmies (members of the democraticunderground) to use the paper-clip as a symbol, and they allege it imitates the Norwegian habit.
Well, I have spent most of my adult life dealing with "records," some of them old, and it appears the now-ubiquitous paper-clip did not come into wide-spread use until the 1950s.
It seems to me that before then, documents were sewed together, tacked together, stapled together, pinned together.
The earliest paper-clips I have seen, pre-dating the 1950s, are square or rectangular, a little bit more decorative than the long oval ones in common use today.
Given the small size, and the isolation of, Norway, circa 1940-1945, it is difficult to imagine people in that country using the long oval paper-clips of today, the ones the DUmmies are using as a symbol.
Does anyone know
Yes, it is based on the Serum run.
www.iditarod.com has a great website. If you follow the link for general information, there are history links there. To answer your question, yes.
I checked it out; thank you!
The best book I ever read about Alaska was that by the pathological liar, Joel McGinnis, "Going to Extremes."
He was up there during the late 1970s, just as the "boom" was getting underway, and Alaska was being transformed from Alaska into just another state. A highly entertaining and illuminating book; I recommend it, if one can find it (it was published a long time ago).
Great picture!
Thanks for the ping, and the history lesson.
ping
Thank you, sir.
The DUmmies in DUmmieland are using the paper-clip as it is known today--the long oval--and surely this was not the paper-clip of 1940-1945.
My observation of such things is based upon examining old files of candidates for nursing and medical licenses in Nebraska, the congressional files of Clare Boothe Luce, immigration files being sent to the National Archives (because they were more than 75 years old), school records of students in Ukraine, the writings of my grandmother, &c., &c., &c.--all things which dated from the 1940s and before.
I do not recall, ever, seeing the paper-clip as it currently is, and as it currently is being touted by the DUmmies, on any of these documents. Most were simply stapled together, sewn together, clipped together, pinned together, or a hole poked through them, through which was put something made of brass, resembling a small stool with legs that could be bent (rats--I cannot recall the word in English for those things).
A few times I would encounter a "paper-clip," but it was nothing as the paper-clip of today; it was usually square or rectangular in shape.....and rare, as if these "paper-clips" were too expensive to use for ordinary things.
It appears that if the Norwegians opposed to the German occupation 1940-1945 did in fact wear paper-clips, those paper-clips were surely not the same thing as the paper-clips touted by the DUmmies in their expression of opposition to the occupation of America by the forces of Reason, Sanity, Common Sense, and Principles.
...when I was a kid and went along to my father's office I used to tangle his unused paper-clips into a long chain when I was bored...He always got upset over that 'cause it took ages to untangle them! Maybe we should do that to the DUmmies? Keep 'em busy for a while?
The DUmmies are too busy as it is, without getting tied in in chains of paper-clips.
It is fascinating watching the DUmmies in DUmmieland, as if a great big "ant farm," thousands and thousands of ants scurrying around, very busy, very occupied, very worried.
Free Republic has one of the best "ant farm" exhibitions in the DUmmie FUnnies, in which PJ-Comix so masterfully, so skillfully, so wittily, dissects the brain-feverish concerns of the DUmmies--if one wishes to know the "mind" of the opposition here in America, the DUmmie FUnnies are a great place to go.
Deprive the average human being of his life-lie, and you rob him of his happiness.
Well, I consider the cheese-slicer one of the most innovative, most useful, most fortunate, inventions in the history of mankind.
Nothing has ever come out of Nebraska but the invention of Kool-Aid, so Norway has one up on us.
The spray-can was also a norwegian invention by the way, Erik Rotheim patented his "aerosol-bottle" in 1931. But I agree that the cheese-slicer, patented in 1927 by carpenter Thor Bjørklund fra Lillehammer, is the finest invention known to mankind. What should I do without it? Use a knife on the Jarlsberg like the french? Yuch!
You know, despite their reputation as "chefs" and gourmands and connoisseurs, the French are lousy cooks, crummy cooks.
If one subtracts haggis and spotted dick and kidney-pie and mutton and fish from Scots and English culinary treats, the Scots and English cuisine is excellent.
And of course next to authentic Cheshire cheese, Danish cheese is the best--I've never tasted Norwegian cheese.
I did a search for Norwegian inventions, and I found a page where it is claimed that Norwegians invented both television and the jet engine...
http://www.cyberclip.com/Katrine/NorwayInfo/NorgeInv.html
I suppose they must have been drinking the Kool Aid :-)
Cheers.
Uh-huh, right there it is; the Norwegians invented television and jet engines, apparently both about 30 years before anyone anywhere else even imagined the ideas.
Now, I can understand the Norwegian inventions "explosive harpoon for whaling," "hydraulic low-pressure winches," and blank ammunition (made of plastic rather than wood), and perhaps might have a clue about "automated electrodes for smelting furnaces."
But I have no idea about the Norwegian inventions "serpent sediment sluicing" or "ski binding with iron lugs."
Uh-oh, and I have to leave for a couple of hours.
This, from a member of the Norway ping list, and if no one beats me to it, it will be the feature on the Norway ping list later this afternoon; apparently a Norwegian has invented a lawn-mower that also serves as an airplane.
Don't anybody else steal this "scoop"--although if somebody else does, there is nothing I could possibly do about it.
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