Saturday at the Anchorage Depot

This Saturday from 10-2, The Alaska Railroad will have a signing event for the 2016 print and yours truly will be on hand to sign anything you would like (keep it PG-13).  Last weekend in Houston went great, thanks to everyone who came out and braved to cool weather  and to the Houston High School "Go Hawks!" for hosting.   I met some nice folks who loved the print.  I'll be in Fairbanks on December 4th for the last event.


Why did I paint SD70MAC #4321?  Because it was there.

 

And a little history, today marks the 153rd Anniversary of one of the "greatest speeches of national purpose", a two minute speech given while the speaker was suffering from the precursors to smallpox.  A speech which is, among others, directly quoted in the constitution of France "gouvernement du peuple, par le peuple et pour le peuple" ("government of the people, by the people, and for the people").   In light of recent events, I thought it appropriate to remember the Gettysburg Address:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

 

Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, November 19th, 1863