lovejoy fountain (2014 edition)

Lovejoy Fountain (Vine)

Here's the link to the original, if this doesn't play in your browser.

lovejoy fountain, july 2011

iris, lovejoy fountain

january fog

As seen yesterday near Lovejoy Fountain Plaza.

You've undoubtedly seen shots just like this in any number of movies, except here we've got students & office workers instead of ringwraiths or headless horsemen or vampires or Jack the Ripper or whatever. So, not so much in the freaky supernatural drama department here. On the bright side, these photos are costing you absolutely nothing to look at, so compared to the cost of a movie ticket, mega-sized popcorn, 128 oz. Coke, dubious-looking "hot dog", and a tub of Raisinets, it's really quite a good deal.

penstemon, lovejoy fountain

Fair-to-middling macro pics of penstemon flowers near Lovejoy Fountain. Before you rush to compliment me on my newfound botanical ID skillz, I should explain that I only know this because a commenter explained it to me on a previous post here. And now every time I post any penstemon flowers I need to go back and refer to the comment thing -- I've already done it once before here.

I realize me ragging on my own photos here gets kind of tiresome, and really they aren't so bad for handheld tripodless macro pics taken in rather low light on a windy day. I just don't think National Geographic would return my calls if I sent them a portfolio that contained these, that's all I'm saying.

squirrel, august 2010

As seen near Lovejoy Fountain Plaza. I haven't taken many photos of squirrels lately, but this one was glaring at me as I walked past its tree. It didn't run away and squawk at me, it just sat there glaring. This clearly went against the natural order of things, so I figured I'd show it who's the boss by taking its picture and putting it up on the interwebs. Take that, squirrel. Neener, neener, neener.

purple (lovejoy fountain)

bees, lovejoy fountain

pigeons, lovejoy fountain

I don't actually like pigeons very much, but I was walking through Lovejoy Fountain Plaza, camera in hand, and the little bastards mobbed me. So here are a few photos. It's possible they saw the camera bag and assumed it contained birdseed. That wouldn't be an unreasonable guess -- there's a strange guy who wanders around the neighborhood constantly feeding birds, and as I left the park I passed him going the other way. I suppose it was close to the usual feeding time, and the pigeons were getting hungry, because they usually don't mob people like that.



I don't know the guy's name. I've never been remotely inclined to talk to him, and I just think of him as the Bird Weirdo. He's not just about pigeons, you see; you can always tell he's coming before you see him by the flock of seagulls overhead. No, seriously, it's true, this actually happens. He tosses scraps of bread up to them as he makes his rounds, and they wheel around him overhead, screeching and squabbling, as if they were chasing a herring trawler.



I'm not opposed to the general notion of feeding birds, as you can tell from the preceding hummingbird post. And I realize that encountering a steady stream of eccentric characters and dubious persons is, we're told, one of the manifold joys of urban living, although I have my doubts. But the Bird Weirdo goes to all this trouble for the sake of birds which are, to be blunt, vermin. "Rats with wings", Woody Allen called them (although the description can't possibly have originated with him). If the Bird Weirdo walked the streets of Portland with a bucket of anchovies, badgered by a persistent mob of unruly penguins, that would be understandable. Smelly and noisy, but understandable. Or if he had a cage of feeder rats and walked about tossing them to the local owls... well, that would be a bit gross, but at least it'd be quiet, and it still might be understandable depending on how cute the owls are. And if he walked about with a box of Saltines, catering to a local flock of colorful macaws, all of whom had learned English from foulmouthed Cockney gangsters, well, that would be adorable.



In short, there are many variations on bird feeding that could be considered a valuable public service, or at least a charmingly eccentric hobby. But the Bird Weirdo does none of those. No, it's pigeons and seagulls for him, and I don't see why he bothers. It doesn't even look like any fun. It's not like either bird is known for its brainpower or complex social behavior. If it was ravens, you could set up food puzzles for them, so they earn a twinkie or a chunk of roadkill by pecking a series of buttons in the right order, or beating you at chess, or whatever. Pigeons, not so much. Other than the homing pigeon thing (which I've never witnessed firsthand), as far as I can tell all they do is eat and make more pigeons at an alarming rate. Which leads to scenes like this.

wednesday photos: fountains

I'm going to risk it today, and ignore my growing backlog of things I intend to post about. I'm not even done with mini-roadtrip photos, if you can believe that, but today I felt like posting something with a bit less writing & research to it. So here are a few more photos of fountains in downtown Portland.

Above: two pics of the tiny Chimney Fountain, near SW Lincoln St, downtown Portland. Below: three of Lovejoy Fountain, an old standby here.







And finally, one from Tanner Springs, home of the world's most fragile (and unattractive) artificial ecosystem. Note the cigarette and pervasive algae.

Snowday!!! W00t!!!

One great thing about living downtown is not having to drive anywhere when it snows. So far I'm enjoying this snowstorm (ok, snowstorm by Portland standards) much more than the last one, 2 or 3 years ago. Back then I was stuck with trudging half a mile through the snow to get to the nearest MAX station. It really was uphill both ways, too. Seriously. Plus my driveway was solid ice and I couldn't drive anywhere for nearly a week, and the trains weren't always running either, something about ice building up on the wires. It was a total mess.

Now I can just walk to work if I have to. This is doubly nice right now because the downtown transit situation is quite chaotic; they moved the downtown bus mall to 3rd & 4th avenues temporarily just a couple of days ago, and the new bus routes have switched over to their new snow routes, which even the drivers are unfamiliar with. Until today I'd never ridden on a bus #43 that drove into town from near the Goose Hollow MAX stop and then turned south on Broadway, but that's what it did today. The driver said he was going to Washington Square, and I wished him luck as I exited the bus. It sounded like he needed it.

So I had a big boring meeting all morning, and then the company told everyone to go home, which was my cue to wander around town taking photos. And, as usual, I'm posting a few that I thought turned out ok. The top photo is of Reservoir 3 up in Washington Park. The walkway around the reservoir wasn't open today, unfortunately, but I suppose that's understandable. The water bureau certainly has more important things to worry about right now.



SW Jefferson near Washington Park, with the Vista Bridge and a bit of downtown. The puffy bits that look like flowers are actually blobs of snow that collected on overhanging vines. I thought that looked kind of cool, so here's the photo.



Early morning, Lovejoy Fountain Plaza



Lovejoy Fountain Plaza again, early afternoon this time. With snowboarders. How cool is that?



Snow on the Columbia River Crystal sculpture on SW 2nd.



Snow on the Plaza Blocks, downtown Portland.

3 views of Lovejoy Fountain

Yet more photos of Lovejoy Fountain, in downtown Portland. The rest of this post has nothing to do with the fountain, so if you came here for that reason there's no real point to reading the rest of this post. I mean, unless you want to, it's not like I'm trying to discourage you or anything, I'm just trying to be fair and help you out if you're short on time. So anyway, I hope you like the photos. In the interest of full disclosure, the first came out really dark and I had to sic the GIMP on it a little, so the resulting colors are more "poetic" than "accurate". So if you ever visit the fountain at midnight and it doesn't look exactly as pictured, don't come complaining to me about it. That's all I'm saying.

You might have noticed a trend in my recent posts here. Call it light-n-fluffy if you like, or obsessively geeky, or simply irrelevant, or whatever you prefer. I feel like I really ought to be touching on the issues of the day, but really, what's there to say when the president and his minions start invoking Godwin's Law? The "Munich" boogeyman rides again, just in time for the elections in November. What a coincidence! You can tear your hair out, or you can laugh yourself silly over the whole thing, but responding seriously to that kind of talk is, well, it's a waste of time, and effort, and brainpower, and electricity if it's going on the net, or trees if it's going to the local paper. And consider the inevitable increase in the overall entropy of the universe. It just isn't worth it. Just roll your eyes and be sure to vote against the bastards in November, every last one of them. Every. Last. One.

I probably ought to say something about the Steve Irwin thing while I'm at it. I was never a fan, and I didn't care for his style. He built a career out of tempting fate, and people tuned in to watch for the same reason they watch NASCAR, i.e. just in case a terrible accident happened. And now it has, a weird, freakish accident, Dale Earnhart style. On the other hand, it looks like his zoo in Australia lets you pet an echidna. As longtime Gentle Reader(s) know, that counts for a lot with me. Ok, "pet" may not be the right word when you're talking about a spiny creature with sharp claws, but you can touch it, anyway, whatever you want to call it.

I also ought to say a few words about Pluto getting demoted. I thought it was a stupid idea. I'd have set the bar at the size of Pluto, at least for the time being, and said anything that big or bigger in orbit around the sun is a planet. So we'd have 10 now instead of 8. Ten is a reasonable number. If it looked like we were approaching 15-20 planets, then it would be worthwhile to set up a "dwarf planet" category and start demoting the runts of the litter. Although really (as I've argued elsewhere) there are exactly 4 major objects in the solar system, which make up the vast majority of its mass. The Earth is much bigger than Pluto or Ceres, to be sure, but it has much more in common with both than it does with Jupiter. If we lived on Jupiter, I expect that we wouldn't consider the Earth a planet, but merely the largest known asteroid, and the largest in the class of "terrestrial asteroids". From a non-anthropocentric standpoint, the right answer is 4 planets, not 8 or 12. That's my answer and I'm stickin' to it.

As some news stories have noted, there's a precedent for demoting planets. Ceres was considered a planet for a while, even after the first few other asteroids were discovered. There's a great article from the US Naval Observatory titled "When Did the Asteroids become Minor Planets", which discusses how the demotion occurred. It took a while, in part, because people had to wrap their minds around the notion of things orbiting the sun that weren't planets. It wasn't just a semantic debate like today; a whole new mental category of object had to be invented.

Of course, these days nobody imagines that every little rock in orbit around the sun is a planet on par with Saturn. That would be silly. As a result of the demotion, astronomers are free to give the little rocks all sorts of whimsical names. Here's a recent selection, with asteroids being named in honor of:

• J.K. Rowling
  
• The town of Charleville, Queensland
  
• Tony Hoffman, editor at PC Magazine.
  
• Arnie & Nancy Rosner, pioneers in remotely operated telescopes for the masses.
  
• Mark Thiemens, a science dean at UC San Diego.
  
• Paul Kurtz & CSICOP