Second of two parts

Room rates may be low at the Inlet Inn, a downtown crash pad for drug dealers, junkies and street alcoholics. But the place costs the public a lot of money.

The Inlet Inn, at the corner of 6th Avenue and H Street in downtown Anchorage, ranks near the top on the number of nuisance calls to police. (BILL ROTH / Anchorage Daily News)

First of two parts

Odors hit like breakers in the dim cinder-block hallways of the Inlet Inn. Filthy hair. Urine. Pot. Old alcohol oozing out of pores.

Jennifer Bass, left, talks with Megan Lutz. (MARC LESTER / Anchorage Daily News)

At Brooke Thompson's house on Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, the cars arrive mid-morning. Women come up the driveway balancing babies and bowls of fruit and pans of breakfast pastries. Older children buzz through the door and run upstairs.

Anchorage Police are holding these packaging samples as evidence of what they say is illegal synthetic marijuana. ( MARC LESTER / Anchorage Daily News)

I felt a lot of empathy last week when I read about the father and son ordered off an Alaska Airlines plane in Seattle because the son, a tantruming 3-year-old, wouldn't put on his seat belt.

It might be because our baby has totally been "that baby" on a plane.

Charles and Molly Tryck: (photo by Bill Roth)The details of Charles and Molly Tryck's wedding have gone fuzzy, but then the Trycks were married 70 years ago. The guests who attended their small Anchorage ceremony are mostly gone now. The little Episcopal church at Fifth Avenue and F Street disappeared too, as what was then a small town gave way to the city.

Blogger Bridget Rainey and one of her twins, Jackson. (Photo by Marc Lester)As evidence that we’re all just five-year-old boys on the inside, I’ll admit I fell for Bridget Rainey’s Anchorage-based blog while I was reading a post about Jackson, the more rascally of her five-year-old twins, who wouldn’t quit saying “butt cheeks.”

Fraternal Order of Eagles: Dennis Smith, left, smokes while Patricia Smith and Deborah Moody talk outside of the Peters Creek Eagles club. (Photos by MARC LESTER / Anchorage Daily News)

It's not easy for a politician to defend smoking but Eagle River Assemblyman Bill Starr will be doing just that next week.

Donna Henegar organizes items at Fuji Gifts on Wednesday. (MARC LESTER / Anchorage Daily News)
Can a man fall in love with 50 Japanese tea sets? Or a fleet of velvet owl paintings? Or 150 porcelain vases, with their voluptuous silhouettes, hand-painted with dragons and cherry blossoms and blushing damsels of the Orient?

Art Wallace did.

Sijo Smith: The Chugiak High student decorated Town Square Park with paper cranes to celebrate International Adoption Day. (Photos by BILL ROTH / Anchorage Daily News

If the story of a life could be told in folded paper, then Sijo Smith, who is 15, has been drafting hers for weeks, creasing fluorescent squares with exact points and angles, forming one origami crane and then another.

The lengths to which some people will go to avoid taking personal responsibility surprises me. Take, for example, steward of Alaska's great outdoors, the rocker/gun rights activist/reality star Ted Nugent.

Last week, he struck a humble tone before a federal judge as he pleaded guilty to illegally shooting and transporting a black bear in Southeast Alaska three years ago.

Overdue: photo by Erik Hill

So they came on amnesty day at Anchorage Public Libraries, the sheepish, the guilty and the shamed, into the sun-dappled lobby of the Loussac to make their confessions.

"Once upon a time, in the year of Our Lord 1996, I believe, my wife's sister checked these out," Kirk Dungan told me. He slid a copy of "Traditional Buildings of Britain," "At Home in Scotland," and a curious tome with medieval-looking illustrations titled "Love and Marriage," across the counter Wednesday morning.

(MARC LESTER / Anchorage Daily News)

Season of breakup, bathe me in your pothole water. Scent my world with the moldy perfume of a car that’s been frozen every day for six months and is finally thawed. Scatter gravel in my running shoes. Uncover for me a flower bed full of brown nubs and I will declare it beautiful.

CKA: Tammi Hackley checks her result as she and her CKA teammates compete in modified skeet at Birchwood Recreation and Shooting Park. Click on photo to view gallery of pictures. (Photos by ERIK HILL / Anchorage Daily News)

What goes through your mind when you've never fired a gun before and you find yourself at the shooting range with the stock of a 12-gauge shotgun pressed into your cheek and your finger on the trigger?

Leading up to the vote on Proposition 5, I’ve become very popular among the Christian anti-gay crowd. Call me the city’s first gay anti-gay poster girl.

Over at the Anchorage Baptist Temple, Jerry Prevo told his followers all about me two Sundays ago. He’s a gifted orator, but the sermon was a little off in the logic department.

State Rep. Alan Dick, Republican from Nenana, made himself a little bit famous this week on the Internet. Maybe not so much in a good way.

It began last Tuesday in a Juneau committee room. Wasilla Republican Rep. Wes Keller, chairman of the House Health and Social Services Committee, convened a meeting, not to discuss a bill, but rather to get information and air grievances about the fact that some state money goes to pay for abortions for poor women.

Josh Horner

Meet Josh Horner, city snow plow and dump truck operator. He's been busy.

I rode with him on Friday morning in a growly yellow dumper. Naturally, I would have preferred riding in his grader with its giant metal insect body and its headlight eyes. Horner would have, too. But, plowing is a solitary occupation. A snow plow has no shot-gun seat.

Supervisors suspected him for years but Anthony Rollins, a police officer now convicted of a string of sexual assaults, was allowed to stay on the streets, spending long, unsupervised stretches alone in his patrol car. Complaints about sexual misconduct piled up. Investigations were launched. But somehow, in an organization filled with people trained to spot predators, Rollins slipped by.

We should be looking at why.

Over the weekend, Sen. Lisa Murkowski learned the hard way not to get between women and birth control.

Back from Washington, D.C., for the start of the Iditarod Sled Dog Race, the senator kept running into female voters who wrote in her name in the last election -- moderate women who did not always vote Democrat or Republican. These women were coming unglued.

Terry Stahlman owns adult entertainment businesses in Anchorage and Fairbanks. He's offering The Showboat in Anchorage as a reward for information that leads to finding missing barista Samantha Koenig. (MARC LESTER / Anchorage Daily News)

Add to the $70,000 or so reward fund to help find missing barista Samantha Koenig one strip club business that could be worth as much as $250,000, courtesy of Terry Stahlman.