The Flogger

Today's adventure takes us up to industrial Northwest Portland, to a parking lot at NW 25th & Vaughn, near the big ESCO steel mill. The statue shown here is The Flogger, by Frederic Littman (who also created "Joy (Pioneer Woman)" and "Farewell to Orpheus", among other works). In the past I've generally said that his style is not really my cup of tea. I think I've used the word "lumpy" before. But this one actually works. Here the style seems to convey power and motion and determination. So it's possible that it's not the style that I don't care for, it's that the style and subject matter often don't mesh like they do here.

The company's website has a photo of the statue on their 'about' page. An Oregonian article profiles the company, and interviews one executive who started out at the company as a flogger. At this point you're probably wondering what a flogger is. In the steel industry, I mean. It seems that when you mold molten steel into a form, you often end up with extra steel stuck to your new metal part. A flogger uses a sledgehammer to break the extra metal off of the molded part. whereas a grinder does basically the same thing, except with a grinding machine. I'm going to go ahead and guess that "grinder" is the next step up on the career ladder if you start as a flogger. It's fortunate that a career ladder exists, at least; outside of the steel industry, the word "flogger" on a resume could prove to be a hindrance. I mean, unless you're interviewing for a professional S&M gig or a job with the CIA, not that there's much of a difference between the two anymore.

This post is a bit of an experiment in that these are camera phone photos. I'm not sure I've used phone photos here before except as a novelty, DSLR snob that I am. But these seemed to turn out OK, and uploading to Flickr instead of Twitpic seems to result in better image quality. The 40D is still obviously the high quality option, but it would be nice not to have to lug a big camera around quite so much. I say this as someone who turned mumble-mumble years old in December and whose lower back tried to seize up this morning as he jogged across the street to avoid traffic, while lugging -- you guessed it -- a big hefty camera bag.