Royal Alaska Mail rates to Amerikastan too high

You win, you eBay ignorami and mail order morons — I’m ready to admit Alaska is an island.

After years of fruitless fights with shippers who do not distinguish between “contiguous” and “continental,” I figure it’s probably just easier to cut a canal along the border with the Yukon and let British Columbia annex the Panhandle.

I’m sure you’ve all been there. You find that Howdy Doody lunchbox your uncle always wanted, or try to order a chromed exhaust for your sister-in-law’s Harley. The instructions say the rate applies only for shipping within the continental U.S., and then they bill you an extra twenty bucks for Alaska. You write back explaining that Alaska is continental, sharing North America — however uneasily — with such real American states as Alabama and Chicago, and if the shipper had meant to exclude Alaska, they should have said “contiguous.” Then the shipper writes back saying everyone knows what they meant and anyway it costs them too much to send stuff here. So you write back pointing out how that’s their problem and if they were content to waste their years of schooling by not learning some basic vocabulary so they spend the rest of their lives as illiterate savages, they could at least have the integrity to admit a mistake and pony up the difference, even though the dollar has really tanked against the gruening lately.

At this point, the dialogue and transaction usually end, and the Harley rider gets a gift card worth a few days of double-shot creme de menthe lattes.

Maybe it’s a little disingenuous to make this argument from Kodiak, which has never been either contiguous or continental, but there’s a principle involved — the long established right of Alaska to federal subsidization of a lifestyle utterly unsuited to our location. Maybe we’re not contiguous, and they don’t know we’re continental, but we can at least be contentious.

Hawaii, you’re on your own.