Thanks, Alaska

Strange occurrences and aberrant behavior are a two-edged sword for journalists.

Swung one way, they make for some pretty interesting reading. Swung the other, they reflect poorly on the place you live.

For quite some time now, Floridians have had to duck as that sword has swung back. From the 2000 presidential election to legislative efforts to revive the brain-dead Terry Schiavo to all manner of stupid acts -- criminal and otherwise -- the Sunshine State has been a gold mine for late-night comedians.

So it is with both relief and amusement that Floridians now look diagonally across the country to their brethren in Alaska and say, "Your turn."

Sarah Palin and Ted Stevens were a good start, but now we have Eileen Goode, who hailed from Massachusetts but who hit the big time in a small town in the Northwest. As Kyle Hopkins reported Monday in the Anchorage Daily News, Goode lost her job as news director at KDLG, a school-district-owned public-radio station in Dillingham.

It wasn't what the 28-year-old said over the airwaves but rather what she wrote in Chilly Hell, her blog about life in her adopted home town, that cooled her employer to her promise as a journalist. Some examples:

• She wrote, "I love living in a place where I can be treated as a respectable personage simply by dint of being sober, employed and totally uninterested in having sex with relatives or children."
• She described Dillingham as home to "passing drunk women around like poorly rolled joints."
• She discussed the death of a woman who was found outside, freezing and wondered, "Is it too much to ask for people to die tragically?"

That may have earned her a cold shoulder from Alaskans, but she took a lot of heat off Floridians.