Pluto / Plutonium

The New Horizons probe is now on its way to Pluto. But don't hold your breath. The flyby isn't until July 14, 2015. Hey, Pluto is really, really far, ok? So mark your calendars, and it's never too early to start planning a party. Extra points awarded for creative Pluto+Bastille Day combo parties, since I don't know how one would make the two things go together. But then, I've never been much of a party planner, myself. I know that if you're having people over, and you'll be watching a sporting event on TV, you should always buy more beer than you think you'll need, because you'll need it. But theme parties are beyond my area of expertise, I'm afraid.

Anyway, I admit I have mixed feelings about the whole plutonium RTG thing. On one hand, I'm a total space geek, so I think getting a close look at Pluto is worth doing, and it's clear there's no other way to power the thing that far from the sun. On the other, I'm not exactly a big fan of nuclear power or nuclear weapons. It's hard to reconcile the two things. I'm far from alone in being nervous about the whole thing, although a lot of the criticism seems to be people reacting on a purely emotional level. On the other side, vocal nuclear proponents really give me the creeps. These are the same guys who in 1958 were telling us the atom was Our Friend, and like all friends, Mr. Atom was absolutely safe in all respects, and would solve all of our problems for us, leading to a perfect atomic utopia. Eventually we'd all be flying nuclear jetpacks to work, even vacuum cleaners would have cute lil' reactors built in, and there was absolutely no possible downside to the whole enterprise. It's not like they've got a stellar track record. These are not people whose reassurances are very reassuring. It's also noteworthy that producing RTGs is an occasional side hobby for the country's nuclear weapons labs, when they're not busy making bombs.

So I don't have any easy answers, and I doubt there are any. One way out of the dilemma is to say that it's ok because RTGs don't involve a huge amount of plutonium, which is true, but in the end this is something of a cop out. Where do you draw the line, exactly? Putting actual reactors in space rather than RTGs? Possibly. If we're going to split hairs, that may be the right place to do it, but we'd still be splitting hairs.

Another line of reasoning would be to say "whew, no accident this time", and forget about the whole thing until next time around, which I think is going to be the Mars Science Laboratory rover scheduled to launch in 2009. Again, this is just a way to avoid the issue, not to address it.

I guess what I'm looking for is a way to rationalize a narrow category of things I personally think are worthwhile, without altering up my general aversion to the stuff. Consistency is great, when you can get it, but human beings are always bundles of conflicting impulses, so perhaps all I can do is shrug my shoulders, admit the two things don't (and won't) fit together any more than Pluto and Bastille Day do, and just accept it.

On a more frivolous note...

Ok, it's time for a post with no politics, cultural criticism, or anything serious like that. Sure, politics is important and all, but sometimes you need to take a breather from all the nastiness and just look at some cute little kittens, and then some more kittens. If you're a truly jaded internet user, and still images just don't do it for you anymore, the Oregon Humane Society's live kitten cam may be more your speed. If you don't like kittens, you're obviously going straight to hell, although in the meantime you can look forward to a lucrative job as a talk radio host, or a neocon think tank apparatchik. Oh, wait, I promised no politics. I hate it when the real world keeps intruding.

Anyway, if you ever get tired of kittens, I'd just like to point out that cows are often cute too. Not as cute as kittens, of course, but they do have the advantage of being delicious, something that's not true of kittens so far as I know. If you're feeling masochistic, here's a collection of horrible poetry about cows. You still won't be able to say you've seen everything, but at least you can check one more thing off the list, I guess.

It's not known whether cows think other cows are delicious, but in recent years we've insisted on feeding them to each other anyway, which (understandably) makes some cows rather mad. Adopting less unnatural animal feeding practices would cost money, and the lobbyists are against that, so instead we're going to a fancy RFID-based tracking system known as NAIS. This may turn out to be more expensive than it would be to feed cows a normal vegetarian diet, and we all ultimately foot the bill either way, but this way we're footing the bill as taxpayers rather than as consumers, which is much better, apparently. This way we can go on enjoying low, low (=subsidized) prices at the grocery store, and turn around and resent Uncle Sam for all those horrible taxes we have to pay. I guess it was a foregone conclusion actually; with the current administration, universal surveillance is always the answer, whatever the problem happens to be.

Interestingly, the program's getting a bit of opposition, not from the usual tofu-chomping vegan hippie crowd, but from rather hysterical religious folks who see RFID as the Mark of the Beast. I'll be the first to say there are legitimate civil liberties concerns with RFID, but these people are just making all RFID skeptics seem like wingnuts and whack jobs. I wish they'd shut up and go back to their Y2K shelters, already.

Oops, more politics again. I guess I just can't help it sometimes. Sorry! Honest! :)

PS Karl Rove is a total scumbag.

Bush Before Bush

Tuesday's Oregonian newspaper carried a guest editorial comparing GWB to William McKinley, with an impressive laundry list of similarities: Karl Rove is the new Mark Hanna, Iraq, pre-"Mission Accomplished", is the new Spanish-American War, and now we're into the new Philippine conflict. And then, as now, as the war drug on it became increasingly unpopular. Both presidents' economic polices are "pro-business", meaning they generally favor large and politically well-connected businesses, with an extra soft spot for predatory monopolists. Which is clearly not the same thing as being pro-market. Cronyism ran rampant back then, and utter mediocrity was the order of the day. Sound familiar yet?

The McKinley analogy pops up a lot because Karl Rove himself is a dedicated McKinley fan. Not everyone sees this as a good thing, of course. I've long thought that McKinley was one of our most evil presidents. Others were far more incompetent, but he outdid most of the field in the evil department. I'm pleased to see I'm not the only person who feels this way; in the right city, like Arcata, California, even a mere statue of the guy can be hugely controversial. I'm sure the current controversy is happening at least in part because people are making the historical analogy the other direction, and using it as a proxy for Bush. Since we aren't yet at the point where every city and town has its own colossal statue of our Glorious Leader, the McKinley one will have to do for now, I guess.

The newspaper editorial then went on to make a common and dangerous mistake, that of using historical analogies to predict the future. Since McKinley was followed by Theodore Roosevelt, the argument goes, we're due for a new TR once George leaves the scene. The author even goes so far as to suggest John McCain as a possible TR. I'm starting to think that every history book should be required to carry a warning label, sort of like cigarettes: WARNING: All historical analogies are inexact. Contents of this book should not be used for divination. Publisher offers no warranty that the events described herein will recur at any future date.

In that spirit, several other historical figures suggest themselves as proto-Bushes. Some look at Bush's foreign policy and see him as the new Woodrow Wilson, at least in the sense that George's clearly very determined to change the world. Whether he's trying to change it for the better remains to be seen. Andrew Jackson is another apt analogy, in that he saw himself primarily as commander-in-chief, and exploited the anti-democratic aspects of the role beyond anything George has probably ever dreamed about. He was quite happy to just order the army to go do his bidding, and dare the Supreme Court to try to do anything about it. He seemed to feel that he was in charge because of the deep emotional bonds between himself and the "common man", so his job was to pander to their every whim and prejudice, and little details like the "rule of law" didn't matter all that much.

The Jackson and Wilson analogies are often offered by Bush fans, and they're intended as positive analogies. The Jackson analogy I think is the more apt of the two, and definitely not in a good way. But I'll spare you the full anti-Jackson rant this time around. Wilson has been the subject of a great deal of historical revisionism, so that of late he's been transformed into a sort of patron saint of the neocon movement. They conveniently forget that Wilson did everything he could to keep the country out of World War I, and he nearly succeeded against all the odds. While he was certainly an idealist, that didn't extend to imposing "democracy" on other countries at gunpoint. I can't imagine him favoring our current overseas adventure.

As an aside, I have to wonder whether Rove, Rummy, and friends are making the same mistake as that editorial, using the Philippine conflict as "proof" that we'll eventually succeed in Iraq. The Philippine conflict eventually petered out after a bit over a decade of fighting, and in the end we "won", so if we just stay long enough, we'll "win" this time as well, sooner or later. Ok, in real life the conflict petered out after a newly-elected Woodrow Wilson promised the Philippines eventual independence, which the US government hadn't initially intended to do. McKinley certainly had it in his head that we'd just grab the islands and keep them forever as a colony, while never extending any basic liberties to the place.

Other Bush analogies go further afield, one comparing GWB to a combo of Robespierre and Napoleon, which is an interesting notion, if a bit breathless. European history does offer us a number of people with whom you can draw useful parallels, and you can even do so without ever invoking Godwin's Law. It can be argued that GWB's ideology is similar to that of Charles de Gaulle; people in this country have been scratching their heads over the newly-minted term "big government conservative", seeing it as a confusing paradox. In our short history in this country, we've really only seen centralizing, statist impulses coming from the left side of the spectrum, but that hasn't been the case elsewhere. We're only just now eeing statist conservatism for the first time (more or less), which is why we're having such a hard time giving a name to the phenomenon. If you think of Bush and friends as Gaullists, it all makes a lot more sense, which is the whole point of any useful historical analogy. Some key Gaullist tenets are: Overarching nationalism, social conservatism, a strongly imperial presidency, and a globalist foreign policy leaning towards unilateralism. The Gaullist doctrine of the majestic, all-knowing, all-wise state extends to the economic sphere as well, a policy known as dirigisme. Now, there's no chance that GWB & Co. would ever overtly adopt the language of central planning, but they do appear to favor other elements of the doctrine. In particular, there's been a wholesale adoption of the notion that the economy works best when it's dominated by a handful of giant corporations, which exist in a close, symbiotic relationship with the government, a la Halliburton.

In the end, though, all analogies break down, and it's important to not carry them too far, which leads to seeing the whole world through a simplistic and highly misleading lens. Ever since 1945, there's been a constant, neverending stream of "new Hitlers", Saddam and Milosevic being notable recent examples. Sometimes the comparison is patently silly, like when Manuel Noriega was briefly given the label. And once you've given someone that label, the matter can only be settled through total warfare, as any other option is utterly disgraceful, a "new Munich", practically treasonous to even think about.

Oh, great, now I've gone and triggered Godwin's Law. Sorry about that. Anyway, my point was that GWB is not precisely the new anybody, a trait he shares with the rest of humanity. But that's not likely to stop anyone from playing the history game. A century from now, assuming there's no Rapture or mass extinction between now and then, it wouldn't be surprising if some ruthless, yet dimwitted politician gets labelled as the "GWB of the 22nd century". I'd be willing to bet money that when it happens, it won't be meant as a compliment.

Mmmmm.... Beeeeeer.....

Ok, the New York Times just realized we've got good beer in these parts. They even mentioned Tugboat. Now the place will be crawling with clueless camcorder-wielding tourists in Bermuda shorts, looking over the beer menu and then brusquely demanding a Bud Lite.

Our beer also gets a mention in this Guardian article from 2003. They mention the beer as well, and also repeat the old chestnut about how we tore out a freeway and put in a park. But I've already covered that topic.

Here's another old article, this time a Sydney Morning Herald piece from 2004, which wrings its hands over a then-Australian-themed restaurant down in Wilsonville named Wankers Corner. Now, the name actually comes from the surname of an early settler, but it's got rather impolite connotations in much of the world, including Australia, hence the kitschy Aussie theme. Something tells me the owners watched Crocodile Dundee a few too many times.

Popculturama USA

Rereading that last post, it occurs to me that there's a larger phenomenon at work here. Over the last half-century or so, American pop culture has achieved a great deal of commercial success around the world. The bitter irony here is that the things that make the most money also tend to reflect very badly on us as a country. Take Hollywood action movies, for instance. Action movies cross cultural boundaries much more readily than comedies or dramas do, but imperfectly. A steady diet of action movies is going to give the viewer a warped idea of what life is really like where the movies are set. Imagine, if you will, what life in Hong Kong is like. Unless you actually live there, your mental image is probably derived in large part from the many movies that come out of there. I suspect that in real life, there are far fewer machine gun battles between warring Triad gangs than the movies would lead you to believe.

The same thing happens with our movies as well. When the latest big, dumb summer movie comes out, we think nothing of it. Some of us roll our eyes if we're feeling elitist, or if the movie's worse than usual, while others love the thing and see it a dozen times, but nobody considers it an important cultural document. When it goes overseas, it's another matter entirely. While your average European on the street surely understands intellectually that Hollywood movies aren't documentaries, a steady diet of nothing but Michael Bay movies and Big Macs (or teriyaki steaks at Trader Vic's) is going to give people certain odd notions about the US. So the next time you're in Paris, just remember that when the locals spit on you, they're really spitting on Sylvester Stallone. Which is not much comfort, I admit.

In the past we've tended not to care about this phenomenon, because there's a lot of money to be made in pandering to the global lowest common denominator. The rest of the world may think we're an ultraviolent cultural wasteland, but so long as they keep paying us handsomely for the privilege of thinking that, we're apparently OK with it. On the flip side, we import very little pop culture from elsewhere, so we have no definite ideas about much of the rest of the world. If their movies aren't playing at the local multiplex, we aren't 100% convinced they really exist. When a rare exception comes along, we form a shiny new stereotype, like the whole Crocodile Dundee thing in the 80's, or the current notion that New Zealand == Middle Earth.

Since I get a regular stream of non-US visitors here, I'd like to take this opportunity to correct a few misconceptions people may have gotten about us. Just a few off the top of my head:

• Neither I, nor anyone I know, has ever shot anyone, or been shot, or even been a bystander while third parties were shooting each other. Spectacular gunbattles are quite uncommon here, and huge explosions are even more rare.
  
• Many of us are actually quite strong swimmers, and don't constantly need rescuing, which is good because our lifeguards are generally nowhere near as attractive as you've been led to believe.
  
• Southerners in real life are no dumber, fatter, crazier, or more corrupt than the rest of humanity.
  
• The West is not cowboys-and-indians territory. I live in a western state, but I haven't the faintest clue how to herd cattle or lasso anything. There are neither cows nor pistol duels in our streets. BTW, for overseas readers, you should be aware that the word "cowboy" is not generally considered an insult here. If you try to use it as one, it just leaves us scratching our heads as to what you're getting at.
  
• The mafia is not glamorous, and is far less powerful and widespread than you think. If you meet an American with an Italian surname, do not ask them if they know Tony Soprano. That is considered a serious insult.
  
• Americans do not actually subsist on a diet of nothing but Big Macs, hot dogs, and soda. I haven't had a Big Mac in many, many years. Even if you just want a hamburger, there are far better options.
  
• Likewise, it's untrue that all American beer is fizzy, yellow, weak, and tasteless. The big national brands you encounter overseas certainly are, but there's no shortage of better choices here.
  

Trader Vic's @ Beirut

While I was doing my, ah, research for that last post, I discovered that Beirut, Lebanon has its very own Trader Vic's outlet. We're told that, there by the shores of the beautiful Mediterranean, every Wednesday is Waikiki night. Which begs the obvious question: Is anything real anymore? I mean, it's great and kitschy and ultra-postmodern and all, but how far should we really go in celebrating the tastes of timid western business travellers? I guess it'd briefly be kind of fun doing karaoke in front of a crowd of nervous Texans who've never been outside their own county before, and who eat pineapple-slathered "teriyaki steak" because they're afraid to try that crazy foreign "falafel" stuff. On second thought, no, that wouldn't be any fun at all. I certainly wouldn't take audience requests, anyway. I don't know any Toby Keith, and if I accidentally learned any, I would surely die.

What makes me mildly sad is that Beirut, and Bangkok, and Bahrain, and Taipei, and London can all support a Trader Vic's outlet, and Dubai has two of 'em, but the chain's Portland outlet closed years ago. It's now the swanky El Gaucho steakhouse at the Benson hotel, although if you look at the part of the building facing SW Stark St., you can still see a display of "authentic" Polynesian cinder blocks. Someday, an architectural historian will get tenure writing about this, explaining how we ended up with a block of pseudo-Pacific decor right here in the least Polynesian corner of the entire universe.

Perhaps you've noticed that this post is even less logically organized than most, and most sentences don't follow logically from the previous sentences. For this creative blessing, I'd like to thank the nice folks at Fish Tale Brewing, and I'd like to wish them a happy 10th anniversary. Cheers!

Zippily Zesty

One of the lesser-known entertainments in the realm of "so bad it's good" are old cookbooks from the 60's and 70's, with their ghastly recipes and horrific food photography. So far as I can tell, people in those days subsisted on nothing but meatloaf, casseroles, and various mutant forms of Jello. Every man, woman, and child seems to have consumed roughly 4 lbs. of unseasoned, greasy ground beef per day, pure and untainted by subversive foreign matter like, oh, garlic, or chiles, or anything else that would give it flavor. They all ate like proper Calvinists, it seems. Oh, you would get the occasional patronizing "international" recipe: You could dump a can of pineapple on top of your meatloaf and call it Polynesian, or pile on some chow mein noodles and water chestnuts (optional) and call it "Oriental", or glop it with sour cream and call it Swedish. But be warned: If you read too many of these at one sitting, you'll get "It's a Small World After All" [*Not* a Disney link] stuck in your head, and it just won't go away. The only way to make the song leave your head is to hum it out loud in the presence of others, thereby passing the infection on to them, a la The Ring. But I digress.

Right now, at this very moment, I have before me Volume 3 of the 16 volume Family Circle Illustrated Library of Cooking, from 1972. One of the concoctions this immortal tome offers us is the ambrosia known as "Parisian Meat Loaf Stacks":

Ingredients:

2 lbs. meatloaf mixture ( ground beef, pork, and veal)
1 can (10.5 oz.) condensed onion soup
2 tbsp. flour
1/2 cup water
1 loaf French bread, cut diagonally into 8 thick slices and toasted
grated Parmesan cheese


Instructions (paraphrased):

1. Squish the meat into a 6 inch round, put it in a frying pan, pour 
the soup over it.  Heat it to a boil and cover it.
2. Simmer, repeatedly spooning the pan juices over your meat-wad 
so it doesn't dry out.  Do this for 90 minutes.  
3. Lift the meat out, and make a gravy out of the remaining juices.  
4. Put slices of bread on plates, with meatloaf slices on top, and gravy 
over the whole schmeer.  
5. Sprinkle each "generously" with Parmesan cheese, because they're 
really going to need it.

I cannot stress enough how crucial it is to remember the French bread, because it's what makes this meatloaf dish so authentically Parisian, or not. Forget the bread, and you've just got meatloaf with gravy & Parmesan, a.k.a. "meatloaf Italiano", an entirely different recipe. Sadly, I have no photos of either to share with you today.

The really sad and funny part is the giddy tone the books take when describing these drab dishes and their ingredients. The Family Circle books were really bad about this. Most sentences include at least one breathless adverb; "zippily" and "snappily" are two of their very favorites. And even without adverbs, the writing is pretty dire. To wit:

What's to do with ground meat? Meat loaves, to be sure. And burgers with dozens of flavor variations. And meat balls swimming in savory sauce or gravy. And flavorful casseroles with a foreign accent. And quick skillet dinners. And meat pies. And... the list is long and alluring as the following collection of recipes proves.

The key point to the cuisine of this era is that there were only something like 15 ingredients total, and a limited number of ways of preparing them. Writing a cookbook was not an excursion into the realm of the senses, but rather a cold exercise in advanced combinatorics. You certainly can't argue that hard-boiled eggs tasted any better after having been run through with toothpicks and dressed up as penguins. That's not cuisine. Nor is it art. It's not even a useful handicraft. It's just unnatural and wrong.

And it's very sad as well; a whole generation of women poured their hearts and considerable creative energies into these eggy little penguins and the like, without anyone else even noticing. It was all a nasty trick played on them by the (probably 100% male) cookbook mafia, just more busywork women were supposed to derive their whole identities from. Women were told this was the one and only road to true happiness, right up there with vacuuming in pearls, and it was all a big scam.

Fortunately (for you, the reader), the universe of evil cookbooks has already been explored by writers and web designers far more talented than I. I present to you James Lileks' insanely great Gallery of Regrettable Food, which is also available in dead tree format. Not only have people already written better books on the topic than I have, but other people have written better blog entries about said books than I'm currently doing. Have I mentioned yet that I'm very, very late to the blog party? Have I explained yet that everyone else has a huge head start on me? What, now you want to see original ideas? In 2006? In this day and age, I think it's fair to say that for every good idea, there's a so-so movie that tries and fails to explain it, and you can find said movie on Netflix. Please don't ask me to keep up with those geniuses in Hollywood. I only just got an iPod in December, and just figured out the whole podcast thing on Friday, and I still don't have a cellphone. So gimme a break already, ok? Sheesh....

Wizards of the Demon Sword

Trailer till Wizards of the Demon Sword från rstvideos trailerarkiv.


Before we get to tonight's movie, Spaceflight Now has a mission status page up for tonight's Stardust capsule return. The latest post indicates the return capsule has separated successfully, so everything's basically on autopilot between now and the landing, which will be just over an hour from now if all goes well. This is not as exciting as a landing somewhere else, to be sure, but I freely admit I'm a total geek over this kind of stuff, so I'm keeping tabs on it anyway. Also, they did one of those "send your name into space" things, storing the names on a chip in the return capsule. So my name's on board the thing, and I'd hate to see anything bad happen to it.

As you may have guessed from the title, tonight's movie is Wizards of the Demon Sword, yet another cheesy 80's(-ish) sword-n-sorcery flick. This one has all the staples: A damsel in distress, a roguish adventurer, a wisecracking sidekick, a wise and eccentric mystical old hermit, an evil wizard with a "brooding" castle that looks to have cost at least $1.98 to build. They're fighting over a cheap-looking magical object of incredible power (this time a small dagger with a clear plastic blade), which involves a lot of so-so swordplay, the hero and damsel riding around a lot on horses, a harem scene, some gratuitous nudity, bits of stock footage very obviously stolen from other movies with bigger budgets. This time the stock footage provides all the film's crowd scenes and all of its monsters -- stop-motion dinosaurs, no less. At one point, the hero and the damsel are riding along, discussing what they want to eat. Cut to footage of a small dinosaur walking around, doing its thing. Damsel points and says something like "let's eat that!". Hero whips out a very small dagger and flings it out of the frame. There's what I guess is a dinosaur screech, and we cut to the pair chatting after a hearty meal of "lizard bird", as they keep calling it. This is great stuff, I tell you.

The best S&S movies avoid taking themselves too seriously. This one knows it's covering all the cliches, and keeps its tongue firmly in cheek. The sillyk, stilted dialogue is sometimes funny, although it gets old after a while. Everyone has fabulous 80's hair, permed to perfection. Everyone except the wise hermit, who sports one of the silliest fright wigs you'll ever see, and a fake beard to match. The hermit also hails from far south of the Mason-Dixon line, saying things like "Foolproof plans ain't easy to come by, son!". Did I mention this is great stuff? I mean, you'll probably enjoy it more if you have a beer, or two, or three, but you have to admit that's true of most movies. I'm not saying it's a good movie, certainly. Oh, no, it's a very, very bad movie, but it's bad in a good way. It's no Deathstalker II, to be sure, but if you see it and don't like it, I promise to give back every cent you paid me for this advice.

Ok, now I need a bigger monitor.

For your viewing enjoyment, o Gentle Reader(s), here's the latest Hubble mosaic of the Orion Nebula. Well, a link to a story about the mosaic, with a vastly scaled down version of it. There's a couple of links to the full mosaic from there. The original's a whopping 18000 x 18000 pixels, so the Flash-based viewer may be your best option. That is, unless you refuse to use Flash, which is quite understandable.

I was hoping to work in a gratuitous Blade Runner reference here, you know, the whole "attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion" thing. Too bad the nebula's actually near Orion's belt. Since I don't exactly get a raging flood of visitors here, I could probably just make the movie reference and have it go unchallenged, but I would still know it's anatomically impossible, and it would bother me. This is probably an engineer thing.

So in place of that, let me briefly mention "Soldier", an obscure SF movie starring Kurt Russell that's loaded with Blade Runner and other movie references. A friend and coworker is firmly convinced this is the best movie ever made, and he even keeps a copy at his desk, to lend out to anyone who expresses an interest. So I'd be remiss if I didn't give it at least a passing mention.

Elsewhere in the universe, we have a new record holder for the fastest known pulsar. The thing spins 716 times per second, is roughly 16km across, and it's incredibly dense, weighing in at perhaps twice the mass of the sun. Wow. Sadly, there's no truth to the rumor it'll be named in honor of Karl Rove, who it closely resembles. Closer to home, there's another Titan flyby tomorrow. It's almost become a mundane occurrence anymore, which is pretty amazing when you think about it. Also, the Stardust probe is going to drop off a capsule full of comet dust on Sunday. This is actually kind of a bad thing. Not because it's bringing back some sort of nasty comet plague or anything, at least not so far as I know. It's just that it's going to be flying (roughly) over my house tomorrow night, which absolutely guarantees 100% cloud cover and a miserable rainstorm. And I'm sick of the rain, already. I'm really sick of all the rain.

Quick! Backpedal!

Ok, so now Pat Robertson's offering an "apology" for his recent spewage about Ariel Sharon's stroke. As I suspected, his proposed fundie theme park in Israel is now on hold. Meanwhile, Rev. Pat and his minions still have enough money, and (in some quarters) credibility to buy themselves hour-long blocks of primetime TV to somehow counteract that new Book of Daniel TV show, which is important to do for some reason. Before you roll your eyes and chalk that story up as a Nashville thing, our local Fox affiliate here in Portland did precisely the same thing.

Here's an interesting opinion piece at the Jerusalem Post, showing that even solid Likud supporters are starting to get uneasy about so-called Christian Zionists. I suspect Robertson's comments caused a lot of Israelis to sit up and take a long-overdue look at these guys and realize what a weird and creepy bunch they are. So maybe some good can still come from the whole ugly debacle.

People who spend their days eagerly working to start apocalyptic global wars and bring about the end of the world are not people you really want in your corner, as it turns out. In the end, they don't really have your best interests at heart. And sooner or later, when they realize you aren't planning to convert and join their cult, er, church, they'll turn on you in a heartbeat.

Ultrareal nanoniblets

• As proof there's no justice in the world, look at the shabby way the Tampa Bay Lightning treated poor Dave Andreychuk. Maybe he really was too old and too slow for the "new NHL", but when team officials openly say that to the media, that's just the height of tackiness. Maybe I'm being oversensitive, having just had a 30-somethingth birthday myself. The guy's not that much older, so he can't possibly be old. I mean, we went to see a hockey game on that birthday, and when I went on a beer run, I got carded. On my birthday. Which proves, incontrovertibly, that I am Not Old, therefore anyone who's not that much older than me is also Not Old. Note that the "Not Old" property is not fully associative, so that someone who's, say, a mere 8 years older than the 42-year-old Andreychuk would still be a plausible candidate for oldness, even though Andreychuk himself is Not Old.
  
• The San Diego Zoo has a baby tapir. I don't find it all that appealing, actually, but if beady little eyes are your thing, enjoy!
  
• From the usually-sedate world of classical music comes this weird legal soap opera. One member of a quartet had been fired for "incompatibility", so he sued, and two of the remaining members nearly lost their instruments to help pay legal bills, until the inevitable anonymous donor stepped in at the last moment, as they always do. You'd expect classical musicians to be calm and mature about resolving their differences, but maybe that's just because the music itself tends to be on the sedate side, and is performed for an affluent, educated, "mature" audience. But take away the tuxes and evening wear, and they're just another bunch of crazy, emotional musicians. They should all count their lucky stars that there weren't any drive-by shootings, and nobody went all Salieri on their quartet-mates.
  
• It's official: Trees are bastards!!! In particular, they've been pumping out methane gas in far higher quantities than expected, and methane is a major greenhouse gas. The sneaky botanical malefactors have been doing this for years without anyone suspecting what was going on. Their motive is unclear as of yet, but they're obviously up to no good. Could Ronald Reagan have been right after all?
  
• I'm getting very, very sick of cold, dark, wet winter weather. All you can really do right now is sit indoors, drum your fingers on the wall, and wait impatiently for spring. Until that happens, here are some pics of crocuses. I've always liked crocuses, primarily because they come up early, before it seems like its really a wise idea, just because they're full of enthusiasm and are unable to hold back. Or maybe I'm anthropomorphizing. Note that at least some crocus species are highly inedible. Furthermore, a crocus of any species should not be confused with the unrelated Krokus, which is an 80's metal band from Switzerland. No foolin'. They're still together, and they're touring right now. It must be tough being a Swiss metal band. You can't shock people by wearing tight leather pants, for one thing, and your fans all want to grow up to be -- or by now they've already grown up to be -- bankers or pharmaceutical executives, or possibly midlevel UN bureaucrats. You can sing to them all you like about your uniquely deep and tortured soul, and how you're one wild-n-crazy rebellious outsider, and nobody will have the foggiest clue what you're talking about.
  
• A couple more fun names for peculiar types of numbers. I've come across a book with a brief treatment of ultrareal numbers, but I've only just skimmed the chapter and I can't say I understand what it's getting at so far. Meanwhile, here's a good article that mentions hypernatural numbers, which are a subset of the hyperreals (which are what the article's really about). There are a number of uses of the term "unreal number" [pdf] as well. The linked-to page uses the term as a synonym for p-adic numbers, and you have to admit "unreal" is a vastly more evocative name.
  

Emerald/Rose

If there's one thing we love in Portland, it's making fun of California, but if there are two things we love, making fun of Seattle comes a close second. Now, I was born in the Seattle area, lived there for several years as a child, and still have lots of relatives there, so I usually don't indulge in this particular guilty pleasure, although the plague of Seattle's Best Coffee outlets downtown is a bit grating. And of course Paul Allen is everyone's least favorite tubby billionaire man-child, although people here mostly hate him for mismanaging the Blazers, and I could care less about basketball. But the OS rivalry is another matter: They've got Microsoft, we've got OSDL. And so far as real sports go, it's a proven, scientific fact that both the Sounders (soccer) and the Thunderbirds (hockey) are the embodiment of pure evil. Strange, but true. It may have to do with the whole MSFT thing.

But I'm not here to make fun of their stupid hockey team today. Today we're making fun of the Emerald City's inability to sort out its yellow brick road situation. After all these years, they're still wringing their hands over what to do about the Alaskan Way viaduct. And their vestigial monorail system may have been totalled in that recent fender-bender. What it boils down to is that nobody can agree on what to do, and even if they could, all options are prohibitively expensive. Unless a miracle happens, the transit situation up north may be unfixable, and it'll just get worse over time as more people move to the area.

Here's a 2003 story from the Seattle Times, which argues that Seattle comes up short in the "urban vision" department, when compared against both Portland and Vancouver.

Ok, so that's good for a civic ego boost here, but in the interest of fairness I have to note that the article uncritically repeats a bit of our fair Rose City's own urban mythology. Everyone knows that in the early 70's, we ripped out the Harbor Drive freeway that went right along the downtown waterfront, and replaced it with a nice green park. Which is all true, so far as it goes, but people always neglect to mention that it was only possible to remove Harbor Drive because it was replaced by an even bigger freeway, I-405, which sits below grade and forms a deep moat around the downtown area. But at least it doesn't run right along the river, which is something, I guess. What's more, part of the crummy old "freeway" remains, in the stretch of Naito Parkway between Barbur and about SW Harrison. Ask someone who lives in the Corbett/Lair Hill area whether we've got our transportation situation all sorted out. Or better yet, visit the area from out of town, and try to figure out how to get onto the Ross Island Bridge from downtown, or from 405. Good luck! You'll need it!

Things Without Faces

I cheerfully admit to a bias towards "cute" land mammals, but they're certainly not the only, or even the most, interesting beasties out there.

Consider the humble and rather obscure siphonophore. They often look like fancy jellyfish, but technically they aren't. Unlike jellyfish, they're colonial organisms made of many small individual animals, referred to as zooids. It's not immediately obvious that this is the case, as individual zooids perform specialized functions within the colony: Propulsion, buoyancy, feeding, etc. They seem to be sort of an intermediate stage between undifferentiated colonial animals like corals, and fully integrated individuals like proper jellyfish, both of which are Cnidaria, and thus (distant) cousins of siphonophores. If it can ever be shown that they're truly intermediate in an evolutionary sense, we'd have on our hands one of those "intermediate forms" that creationists keep insisting don't exist. Not that this would help in the debate. They'd either ignore the fact (as usual), or claim the evidence was fabricated by the global liberal conspiracy, or something equally idiotic. But I digress.

The thumbnail picture above is of a Praya dubia. The original site, which the pic links to, contains what I think was a freudian slip, referring to it once as a "Praya dubya". Which is completely unfair. While it's true that, like GWB, siphonophores are venomous invertebrates that lack anything resembling a central nervous system, they also generally mind their own business, they don't try to impose their religion on anyone, they don't run up colossal budget deficits, they don't spy on anyone, and they couldn't smirk even if the wanted to. So the analogy is an insult to siphonophores everywhere, and someone owes 'em an apology. But I digress again.

One might argue that we still haven't left the realm of charismatic megafauna, since a creature that strongly resembles art glass has charisma of a sort, and anything that grows to over 30 meters long has to count as megafauna. So let's consider some even humbler organisms, the bryozoans, sometimes known as "moss animals". They're colonies of zooids, like (but unrelated to) siphonophores, but entirely lacking in propulsion and charisma. The first time I'd ever heard of these creatures was on a local nature show, in which the host fished one out of a local pond. I'd seen them before that without having any clue what they were, and I just figured they were random blobs of icky protoplasm. Freshwater bryozoans are the minority, however, and most are oceanic like the one pictured above (right).

And just below bryozans on the evolutionary scale are authors who fabricate imaginary sordid pasts in an attempt to sell more books. I realize publishing is a cruel and mercenary industry, and sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do, but this is venturing perilously close to Vanilla Ice territory. He was from the streets too, ya know.

Excelsior!

Today's fun word is "excelsior", which is a remarkably fancy and exotic name for wood shavings. The Dictionary.com entry mentions it was once a trademark, and a historical note from the American Excelsior Co. indicates the stuff dates back to the 1890's. Everything was so much more exciting and melodramatic back then. Even wood shavings.

The name's still a trademark for a font family, but odd and colorful font names are not unusual. Where the original trademark came from is info that doesn't seem to exist on the net so far as I can tell. Determining what, if anything, the word meant before the shaved-wood packing materials industry got their grubby hands on it would probably require a hardcopy investigation, meaning an expenditure of time, effort, and/or money. Hmm.

I understand that the word has a special meaning of some sort in the comic book world. I assume it relates back to wood shavings somehow. It does so far as I know, anyway.

I reluctantly admit to knowing there's also a Star Trek significance to the word.

Today's interest in the word stems from seeing it on an old opera or musical poster I saw recently, I think as the title. Not a lot of info available about this musical either. There's a brief reference to a musical production by that name, the first stage show to employ electric lighting. There's also an opera company in Schenectady, NY, and a hotel near the Garnier opera in Paris, but neither seems to be what I'm looking for. Hmm. One dead end after another.

So this is probably a good time to switch gears, even while sticking with a general theme of "weirdness relating to mundane items". And what could be more mundane than plain old seaweed? Assuming you don't live in Nebraska, or Mongolia, or somewhere, anyway. Well, it turns out that seaweed is no longer just for tripping over on the beach or holding together otherwise-flavorless wads of rice and raw fish. No, our friends across the pond in the Emerald Isle have figured out that you can make wine out of the stuff. Wine of a sort, anyway, although I doubt the French would approve. Here's another reference to a "wine" made partially with a sort of seaweed known as "bladderwrack", also known by its genus, "Fucus". Neither name sounds especially appetizing. I don't know where the word "bladderwrack" actually comes from, but just guessing it sounds like a rather serious diuretic. Seems there's also been some interest in the beverage in Taiwan as well.

Actually there are quite a few search hits that come up on the topic, but the vast majority are fictional references, mostly emerging from the SCA/D&D/fantasy novel/unicorn milieu. Imaginary people and magical beasts can't get enough of the stuff, it seems. This recipe involves bat guano, for some reason. Here's a vaguely Chinese-themed reference from some sort of RPG. A bottle of the stuff figures in this tale of a wayward goldfish. It's just one of many exotic fictional beverages on this list. And another fictional piece where kelp wine shows up. A longer story that mentions the stuff in passing. And another appearance, this time in a fan fiction story about the Monkees.

I had no idea the stuff was so popular, at least in its imaginary version. I'd have thought there'd be at least a few comments in homebrewing or home winemaking forums, either people saying they'd tried it and made a wonderful discovery, or perhaps relating their unfortunate experiences to discourage anyone else from trying such a putrid beverage.

I certainly don't want to harm anyone's rich fantasy life, so please note the following is pure speculation by someone who's never tried the stuff. If you really want to make some palatable oceanic hooch, there are a few problems you're going to need to solve. First, you need something to ferment. The easiest thing would be to do the longstanding "country wine" trick and add a bunch of sugar as your fermentable, with the seaweed basically just as flavoring. Some people regard that trick as "cheating", somehow. A more technically interesting thing would be to figure out how to ferment the seaweed itself. Kelp, for instance, contains a great deal of laminarin, a polysaccharide similar to starch or cellulose. Regular yeast won't know what to do with the stuff -- it's similar to the beta glucans that brewers wring their hands about -- so you'd need to add some enzymes, or find some other way of breaking it down to its component glucose molecules.

If you can resolve that hurdle, there's all that salt and iodine to worry about. Nobody wants to drink salty booze, and iodine is bad for yeast, so you may need to soak it for a while, changing the water a few times to let the salt diffuse out, like if you were getting ready to prepare a country ham, or other food preserved in salt.

And I can't begin to imagine what the stuff would taste like, if you managed to pull it off. Maybe it would help to nibble a bit of excelsior first, to cleanse the palate.

When technology attacks!

The predicted, long-awaited revolt of the robots has already begun. The latest victim is a Japanese manager at a factory in Malaysia. This sort of thing always starts with one or two victims here and there, so that the world becomes accustomed to a certain level of "random accidents", and is lulled into a false sense of security. Then the robots take over the world. I've seen all the movies. I know how this works. Trust me.

As we're faced with yet more evidence of our impending doom, it's mildly comforting to reflect on at least one interesting technology that hasn't taken over the world (yet). It's a bird? No. It's a plane? Not exactly, but close. A hovercraft, then? Also a good guess, but not quite. I present to you the Ekranoplane, a.k.a. wing-in-ground, or WIG craft. The second link goes to what's considered the definitive site on the subject, but if you have a short attention span and just want to look at pics, here are some of the Lun, the Orlyonok, and the KM. If I had to pick a favorite, I might have to go with the KM, but they all have an odd sort of appeal. None looks like it ought to be able to fly, even in a limited sense. They look like they ought to be hanging off of strings in bad sci-fi movies, pretending to fly, and failing to convince anyone. Combine their unlikely appearance with the clever idea behind them, and their sheer hugeness, and we have a winner. There's no way to know whether ekranoplanes were really a quirky technological dead end, or whether they were just ahead of their time, or a singular and remarkable combination of both, a la the Great Eastern.

Here's a company that claims to be offering somewhat smaller ekranoplanes for sale as flying yachts, because one gets oh, so terribly bored with regular yachts. Too bad I'm not evil enough to ever have that kind of money. But then again, not being evil is sort of its own reward, I guess. At least until the robots take over.

More megafauna, charismatic and otherwise...

Two surly political posts in a row are quite sufficient for the time being, I think. For a change of pace, O Gentle Reader(s), I present to you a couple of pics of baby porcupines.

But be warned! There's at least one widely distributed pic out there which claims to be of 3 baby porcupines, but which is actually of 3 baby hedgehogs. Which is fine, really, they're awfully cute as well and all, but they aren't porcupines.

Updated: Actually I think the pic on the left is a hedgehog as well. They're everywhere! It's a conspiracy, I tell ya.



But let's set aside all things cute-n-cuddly for a moment. On the far other end of the adorable organism spectrum are the fish of the deep ocean. Unluckily for them, being hideous and living deep in the ocean isn't much protection from the human world, because a.) they're edible, and b.) they reproduce very, very slowly, so they're being drastically overfished. This site has more info, also covering threats to the world's deep-ocean, cold-water corals. Yes, there is such a thing. I was surprised too.

Fish+Barrel

What would we do without Pat Robertson? The guy's such an easy target, and he's always feeding us new material. Like today, he's now saying God gave Ariel Sharon a stroke as punishment for pulling out of Gaza. Really. You can't make up stuff like this.

Robertson's perhaps even more meanspirited and cruel than most fundies, if such a thing is possible, but his ideas place him firmly within the "mainstream" religious right. What really sets him apart is that he's quite open about how he feels. He's not polished, or media-friendly, or warm-n-fuzzy the way others like him try to be. He doesn't seem to buy into the common notion that there's some things you just don't say within earshot of the "liberal" media. He just doesn't care, and he comes right out and says what millions of nutty people like him are thinking. And always with the same calm, beatific smile on his face.

In the next couple of days we'll see the usual recriminations from more media-savvy right-wingers, people who often privately agreee with Pat but find his bluntness embarrassing. They'd have us think the problem is just that Pat's sometimes a little crazy, when the real problem is that the underlying idea is a lot crazy, and is what disgusts the world beyond the walls of their cozy little echo chamber. A terrible idea remains a terrible idea, no matter how many pollster-approved nuances you attach to it.

Interestingly, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran's answer to Pat Robertson, is saying much the same thing. Crazy religious fanatics are just so predictable.

These latest comments aren't likely to win Robertson any friends in Israel, which is likely to complicate his recently-announced plans to build an evangelical theme park near the Sea of Galilee. The article's not clear on whether it's supposed to be located on land taken from Syria in 1967, but I doubt Robertson would pass up the opportunity.

Ritual Cleansing

R's in DC and elsewhere are falling over each other in a mass stampede to rid themselves of dirty Abramoff cash. The thinking, apparently, is that if you give the bribes back, it's just like the whole thing never happened.

It's notable that the stampede didn't start until Abramoff cut a plea deal and agreed to name names. That got everyone's attention, so now we get the usual DC mass ritual cleansing. The sight of a mass of extremely powerful people all desperately scrambling for self-preservation is ugly and sickening, yet exquisitely funny. It's amazing how, suddenly, nobody ever knew the guy, the name Abramoff simply doesn't ring a bell, maybe they met him at a campaign event once, long ago, but it was just small talk about the weather, and there was certainly never a quid pro quo. Everyone's holding their own outraged news conference, putting out a self-righteous press statement, letting us know they're shocked, shocked that such things could ever occur in Our Nation's Capitol, among Our Public Servants.

You know things are getting out of hand in DC when Newt Gingrich comes across as a rare voice of reason. On this one issue, I mean.

Don't get me wrong, I'm certainly not arguing that D's in Congress are paragons of virtue. Remember last time they ran the show? Jim Wright, anyone? Quite a few D's took Jack's money too, but when you're part of a powerless minority party, you just don't attract the same level of cash as the guys who can actually do something useful for you in return. Bribing the powerless is a poor investment.

But enough with the bipartisan fairness. This scandal is just a lot of fun to watch. It's old-school DC all the way. The media hasn't identified the inevitable perky blonde just yet, but the scandal's still in its early days. The best part is seeing this happen to the party that's been lecturing us for years about they're so much more moral than everyone else, utterly without sin or blemish, sternly guarding our nation's virtue, and all that. I think that deep down, everyone across the country always knew that was a lie from day 1, but it's still great to see these hypocrites taken down a few notches, in the most public way possible.

Cute Prosimians

I figured it'd be a good idea to lighten up a little, and do at least one post that's nothing but cute wildlife pictures. No math, no GWB, no space, no griping about Windows, just cute animals. As usual, clicking on any image will take you to the original source of the image.

Today's theme is prosimians. Finding cute prosimians is easy, since most are nocturnal and have really big eyes. Above, you've got two pics of tarsiers, one slow loris (cute, but venomous. See here for more info), and a potto.

Enjoy!

Surcomplex

Today's cool word is "Surcomplex", as in "surcomplex number". Surcomplex numbers are to surreal numbers what plain-vanilla complex numbers are to real numbers. The name combines "surreal" and "complex", and I can think of lots of everyday situations where this word would be a perfect description.

As you may have noticed with the stubby little Wikipedia article referenced above, there's not a lot of info on the net about these babies. And I've seen nothing at all about "surreal-hypercomplex" numbers, which would seem to be a logical extension of the idea. With the use of something called the Cayley-Dickson construction, you can go on indefinitely, creating ever-more-hypercomplex (and ill-behaved) numbers. It's interesting to note that the number of dimensions of a number created this way is always going to be a power of 2, which suggests a sort of parallel with the binary-tree way that surreals are constructed. Well, it does to me, anyway, but then I'm a computer geek, not a mathematician, and besides, by no means are all mathematicians happy with Conway and his surreals (you'll want to read a few posts in the thread to get the gist of the argument). Anyway, a surreal-style tree that also gains dimensions on the way down is quite an interesting thing to comtemplate. At omega, assuming the analogy holds this far, you'd start encountering weird beasts like numbers with an infinite number of dimensions. Just try to imagine that for a moment. And each dimension a surreal number, possibly infinite or infinitesimal. Wheee!

I'd hope there'd be no way to use something as esoteric as a surcomplex number to design a new kind of bomb, but you never can tell. GH Hardy took a great deal of pride in the notion that his beloved number theory was of no practical use to anyone, not foreseeing the rise of math-intensive cryptography. Now, cryptography clearly isn't a bomb, and has lots of wholesome, nonmilitary applications, but in this day and age it's also safe to assume that numerous large numbers have been factored using the Cheney algorithm, which is to find someone who already knows the factors, and torture them until they cough 'em up.

Speaking of Cheney, here's another fun article about his (and Rummy's) longstanding love of surveillance and hatred of Constitutional government. Meanwhile, the talk radio / think tank / conservative blog echo chamber is full of the usual suspects, each trying to outdo the next in heaping scorn on outdated and subversive notions like search warrants, habeas corpus, the ban on cruel and unusual punishment, freedom of speech. We're told again and again that anyone who still believes in that old-fashioned stuff is a commie pinko liberal who hates America and loves the evildoers. I ask again, what's this country coming to, when to be considered a "true patriot" you're expected to abandon, and actively oppose, the entirety of the country's founding principles?

Well, actually today the wingnut universe has other, more immediate concerns, namely yesterday's UN-imposed ban on trade in wild caviar. Here's one example of the conservative hysteria this is evoking. This story's got everything. The UN, which they hate, and have all sorts of fun conspiracy notions about. The environment and endangered species, which they're also 100% against. Left-wing-inspired "persecution" of poor innocent rich folks who just want to enjoy their bland, salty fish eggs in peace.

Interestingly, we have a similar fishy situation here in Oregon, except with sea urchins instead of sturgeon. People are often surprised that sea urchins are commercially fished along the Pacific coast. It's not like you see them at the grocery store, or even in seafood markets on the coast. No, they're all exported to Japan, where sea urchin eggs are a delicacy. They only started catching the things here in the early 70's, and the sea urchin population seems to have been in a steady and ongoing decline ever since due to overfishing. What makes this even more fun is that the urchin population started out at an unnaturally inflated size, due to the prior local elimination of its main predator, the sea otter. And when the urchin population explodes, the little beasties mow down the coastal kelp forests that provide shelter to numerous species of fish, hurting those populations as well. So some might argue that overfishing of sea urchins is good news for kelp and fish. Well, until the population crashes, which is something fisheries of all types are prone to do, and then there aren't enough urchins around to keep the kelp in check. Then I suppose the answer to that problem will be some kind of anti-kelp herbicide, or an ongoing Federal kelp mitigation program at taxpayer expense.

Here's a pic of a sea otter eating a sea urchin.

Here's an even cuter sea otter picture. Awwwwww.....

Leland 1

"Leland 1" is the official name of the ugly sculpture I continue to think of as "Rusting Chunks No. 5". That link, and this one provide some additional info about the artists. Apparently other works by one of the artists have been stolen. And this one hasn't, probably just because it's so big. Still, you'd think that a few enterprising meth tweakers could make short work of it, score a fair amount of money for the scrap metal, and do society a big favor in the process. But no. Not so far, anyway.

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That abomination should not be confused with an unrelated artwork that came up during a search on the phrase "leland 1". I rather like this painting. Its actual title is "1994 X", where X is the Roman numeral. Seems like quite a sensible naming convention to me. The "leland 1" connection is that the artist's last name is Leland, and this is the first of six images on his faculty bio at the University of Tennessee.

Meanwhile, the (again unrelated) leland.com simply offers a photo of a happy middle-aged couple, with the caption "Future home of leland.com". One could argue it's actually the current home of leland.com, technically, and it's just a very small home. But it's probably not worth arguing about. The Leland Report, once again unrelated, covers Leelanau County, a beautiful corner of the Michigan lakeshore, and a place that I'd never heard of and was entirely unfamilar with until just now. It's an oddly fitting place to end up, since outsiders often wrongly imagine that all of Michigan is a barren landscape of rusting chunks, which sort of brings us full circle, or something.

Updated: Linky from Edward Blank.

Updated 7/31/2010: Added a Google map and a Flickr slideshow, for added tasty modern interweb goodness. Sorry 'bout that, dialup users...

Updated 10/5/2020: Replaced that crufty old Flickr slideshow with a non-Flash one as Chrome is pulling the plug on Flash support at the end of the year. The replacement is not exactly tasty or modern, but at least it'll work next year. Also enlarged the map to fit the margins this humble blog has had for mumble-mumble years, since I was in the neighborhood anyway.

Rusting Chunks No. 5

Recently came across this blog about public art in Portland. Ok so far as it goes, and it highlights a number of obscure or forgotten works around town, but reading it you'd think we've got nothing but good art here in town. If only.

Updated 8/6/06: Actually this is an unfair characterization, and I was being snarky and unreasonable, as I often am. Sadly, this is my way. So by all means, go visit the Portland Public Art blog. I may not always agree 100%, but it's worth your time, and mine.

The problem I've noticed is that the PDX arts community is very, very small, so that it's unwise for anyone to burn their bridges with anyone else. It's like being in Congress: If you want to get along, you go along. Therefore, everyone pretends to like everyone else's work, no matter what it is.

We're also a small and insecure city, and we perceive that we're a tiny island of culture in a sea of primeval ignorance (i.e. loggers). We know "they" hate and fear all art, so we have to like all of it, just to show that we're different from them. It's assumed that if you criticize a supposedly "difficult" artwork, you must be an uneducated philistine, and probably a Thomas Kinkade fan. You've just voluntarily voted yourself off the island.

Luckily I'm not part of the tribe, and don't wish to join, so I've got nothing to lose. I've already listed a few of the ugliest buildings in town, although it's not a comprehensive list, certainly. Surely our inventory of bad public artworks deserves similar treatment. Here are a few off the top of my head. I reserve the right to add more art to the Hall of Shame, since I'm absolutely sure there's more bad art out there I haven't thought of yet.

• "Essential Forces", the fountain at the Rose Garden arena. One of those timed, computer-controlled fountains beloved by casinos and some (but by no means all) small children (and by them only on hot days). Actively anxiety-inducing, which is really remarkable for something made entirely of running water. And that's even without the "fire feature" running, which only happens before big sports events at the arena.
  
• A certain horrible sculpture in my general neighborhood. I've forgotten the official name, but I've taken to calling it "Rusting Chunks No. 5". A massive pile of rusting steel with a bit of burnt-orange enamel on the side, plonked down right in your way so you have to detour around it, a la Tilted Arc. It's really worse than I'm describing it. I'll post a picture if I can find one, or I can take one that really does it justice. [Updated: I did find some pics. Look here, if you dare.)] At least they had the sense to site it in a dead-end plaza where it only offends the residents of neighboring condo towers. If they'd put it in the middle of town, it'd have been melted down years ago. Certain artists love the idea of confrontational ugliness, art that inconveniences you, aggressively gets in your way, reminds you that the government (who paid for the thing) is huge and powerful and doesn't care whether you exist, much less care what you think. Resistance is futile! One hopeful sign: there used to be a "companion" piece in the area, a tall cylinder covered in ceramic tiles, all in the same burnt orange color. It was set in a small grassy plaza, with a long series of steps leading up to it as if it were some sort of edifying monumental work. A formal setting, but with mute, soul-crushing emptiness at the center: Instead of a winged Victory, there was a parking garage pillar, encrusted in tiles swiped from a groovy 70's-era public toilet. It's gone now, plaza and all, replaced by Portland State University's new CompSci building. I'd have to call that a real, quantifiable improvement. No word on what happened to the old "sculpture". Perhaps it was dynamited.
  
• "Untitled", at the ODS Tower, in which Judy Pfaff went all Abu Ghraib on a poor innocent tree. This is the best pic I could find. Most pics of the ODS Tower don't show the tree, and for good reason. Depressing and authoritarian as anything you've ever seen. Manages to surpass the "best" works of the most hardcore 60's brutalists, and gets extra brutalism points for incorporating an actual dead organism, instead of just working in grey concrete and rusting steel like in the old days. Someone should convince Dick Cheney to buy this thing and take it off our hands. It's right up his alley. On top of everything else, the artist couldn't even think of a name for the thing.
  
• South Waterfront Park. You guys really like walkways. You like the idea of people ambling around idly, enjoying nature, or whatever. We got it. Enough, already. The triangular garden part feels like the grounds of an expensive nursing home, except without any flowers. You can just imagine affluent oldsters scooting around the place with their walkers, with greedy, beady-eyed next-of-kin in tow, pretending to be all caring and attentive. You can practically see it with your own eyes. But the best part is the series of paths that angle down to the river. They just sort of angle down to the river and end up in the river. If you're bored on a summer afternoon, it's fun to grab a park bench and watch the bewildered tourists. They'll try one, figuring it goes somewhere. Maybe there's another path that continues closer to the river or something. That would be a reasonable guess, but no, not here. The paths just take you down to the river's edge, where you'll do... what? Nothing, probably. It's certainly not a boat launch, or a beach, or anything useful. Perhaps you're supposed to try to imagine what the landscape artist had in mind, if anything. This is a classic overdesigned control-freak Portland park, where your every move has been unsubtly shaped by the artistic Powers That Be.
  
• Oh, but it gets better, oh so much better. Take a peek at our shiny new Tanner Springs Park, where rule number one is "look, but don't touch". Our latest and conceptually greatest city park, the one that comes with an instruction booklet, in which you're basically scolded not to touch anything whatsoever, lest you upset the delicate (and completely artificial) ecological balance, with unimaginable consequences. At the very least, the ozone layer will collapse, or something. The park caters to the vanity of aging rich boomers, by letting them feel they're really making a difference just by not letting their precious pugs crap in the grass. The first park in the Pearl District was Jamison Square, which has a really fun fountain that's become a hit with the kids. It even attracts suburban kids and their parents. They ride the train into town, and then the streetcar up to the park, and have a great time splashing around in the water. It's great. The park's so popular it's even attracted its own hot dog stand during the summer. None of this was anticipated by the Powers That Be, and so to avoid a similar calamity with the next park, they designed the next one to be "contemplative", with an unattractive water feature full of dank, muddy water that no parent would ever let their kid wade in. Or even their dog, for that matter. Sure enough, walk past both parks on a summer's day, and one's full of people, and the other's nearly empty. Mission Accomplished! The most telling thing about the park is the east edge, which is marked by a high wall built out of rusting rails (the area used to be a railyard, in its formerly-useful days). You can tell this was a compromise; I expect that if they'd been given free rein, the design team would've surrounded the entire park with such a wall, so that only the elect few (professional architects, designers, "creative class" types) could gaze upon its ecological wonders. And to top it all off, this artificial bit of nature sits right next to actual nature. The WIllamette River is just a few blocks away, and Forest Park is a 10 minute bus ride away, where you'll find real streams, with plants that grew where they are on their own, with no human intervention. Many streams even have fish in them, fish that also got there on their own, with no human intervention. But without a human being to put a stamp on the thing, a la Duchamp, it's Nature, not Art, so it really doesn't count. In this case, Art is an cheesy imitation of Nature, sanitized for your protection, and with a big rulebook. If I was more extroverted, and had more of a performance art bent than I do, I'd build a makeshift raft, put on a Huck Finn outfit, and sail around that prissy little pond of theirs, asking all passersby if they know the way to the Mississippi and points west. I doubt anyone would get it, though. As a city, we're far less educated than we let on. Also, they'd arrest me for sure; I'm sure there's a rule against rafts, and probably the Huck Finn outfit would violate a dress code or constitute disorderly conduct, or something. And if I could convince anyone to play the part of Jim, he'd be arrested as well, for being black in a nice part of town.
  
• David Manuel's "The Promise Land" (yes, it's "promise", not "promised"), that pioneer family in Chapman Square. This was surprisingly controversial when the artist first offered it to the city. It was criticized as patriarchal, racist (as in anti-Indian), and reflecting an exclusive white male perspective, etc. I think the criticism was basically justified, although it was phrased so that nobody except graduate students could understand it, or take it seriously at the time. The arts community hated the statues for not being Real Art, since the sculptor has a studio off in Eastern Oregon and sells a lot of his work directly to tourists passing through the area. And again, they had a point. The statues are inferior from a purely technical standpoint, on top of whatever fussy political objections one might have. It's like a Thomas Kinkade painting in bronze. While I have to roll my eyes at people who honestly think it's the end of the world every time somebody buys a Kinkade "painting", it's also intuitively obvious that all things Kinkade, and Manuel for that matter, are kitschy crap. If we're going to do kitschy crap, I'd rather have my tax dollars go for the world's largest velvet Elvis. That, at least, would be something we could brag about to out-of-towners. IIRC we got stuck with the world's ugliest pioneers due to a feud between the city and the county. The city didn't want it, if memory serves, but the county stuck it in a city park anyway, with Mr. Dead White Male Pioneer pointing an accusing finger right at city hall, no less. All just so the county could show the city who's the real boss around these parts.
  
• "MLK & Friends" statue at the Oregon Convention Center. It's extra hard to criticize public art when it's made with high-minded noble intentions, but this grouping of statues is poorly executed, looks cheap, and feels "educational" in the classic Soviet style -- although the Soviets did it much better, to be honest. I've never heard anyone else criticize this thing. I guess we all cut it some extra slack for PC reasons. The real irony here is that the convention center sits roughly where the heart of Portland's black community used to be, until it was all bulldozed in the 60's in the name of "urban renewal". The city's quite happy to rename a street MLK Blvd. set up a third-rate statue next to it, anything except come to grips with an actual injustice it perpetrated within living memory.
  
  

Ten Lords a-Leaping. Or Not.

A few days ago, as part of my holiday-related blathering, I was going to propose that if the religious right really wanted to do some good for once, they ought to start a campaign to make all 12 days of Christmas legal holidays. It might focus people's attention on the supposed "real" reason for the holiday, for people who care about that sort of thing. Or at least it'd give everyone 12 days off in a row. The general public could really get behind a campaign like that, even unchurched heathens like myself.

On the other hand, we're on day 10, it still feels like it's the holiday season, and said season is really starting to overstay its welcome. The Monday legal observances for Christmas and New Year's Day just drag whole thing out. We were out around town yesterday, and people are still in a frantic holiday shopping mood. All those after-Christmas fire sales, I imagine. Enough, already. Get back to work.

On a not-very-related note, if you're not already feeling overfed after the recent month of mandatory mirth and merriment, there's now an RSS-friendly feed for Cyclotram. As usual during this time of year, some assembly was required. Well, not actual assembly, not yet, anyway, but creating it required me to sign up with a third party, since the default feed you get with Blogger is Atom-only, and then there's some cut-n-paste html to deal with.

Speaking of overfeeding, here's an article titled in part "Bush Pigs Out". Sadly, it's not the Bush that I care about, although I understand this guy is an excellent football player.

Speaking of Bush, here are a couple more fun articles I've come across about GWB and your civil liberties: "The Bush Family Coup", and one about GWB and the 4th Amendment. The second article points out that there's already a Supreme Court precedent about no-warrant surveillance in the name of "national security", and in that 1972 case, the Court plainly said ixnay on the iretapsway. To be sure, this was in relation to purely domestic surveillance, which the Glorious Leader promises up and down he isn't engaging in. Just like he promised us Iraq was full of WMDs.

It's very simple, really. Nothing happens in this White House without going through Karl Rove and the whole political operation. Is it even remotely conceivable that GWB & Co. would award themselves absolute power, and then not seek to abuse it for partisan advantage? In their worldview, anyone who doesn't buy the whole party line without question is actively helping the evildoers. They've defined "enemy" as broadly as possible, and so they see enemies everywhere. Further, when it's decided someone's an enemy, the administration feels it's entitled to do as it pleases against them. They can spy on anyone, detain them indefinitely, have them tortured or executed, entirely at their discretion, with no checks and balances whatsoever. We're supposed to accept vague promises to use this power "wisely", made by habitual liars, as a substitute for the constitutional protections we've enjoyed for over two centuries.

On a somewhat lighter note: I present to you the Lesser Bushbaby. (Awwwww...) You might think I'm still talking about GWB now, but I'm not. Honest. I mean, look at the picture. Look at those ears. It obviously spends a lot of its time listening, unlike certain people I'm not talking about right now.

Animated Minions, Unite!

It's interesting, and rather depressing, to occasionally do a Google News search for the word "philosophy" (although the results are far less depressing than a search on the word "kitten").

At the moment, the top, er, philosophy article is from our very own Oregonian, which discusses the coach of the local NBA team, and his coaching philosophy. I'm not a big basketball fan, but there's apparently some debate about who gets to start at point guard, or something.

Another top article comes to us from the Khaleej Times of Dubai, luridly wringing its hands about Hindu extremists in India.

There's a piece titled My Philosophy, from The Stranger, an alternative paper out of Seattle. You know for sure that the author's not totally shallow, because hurricanes and tsunamis get a brief mention in his list of regrets, sandwiched in between Hunter S. Thompson offing himself, and all the indie rock and hip hop albums that sucked this year.

This looks more interesting: A French mention of a British book titled Monsters and Philosophy. A nicely eclectic list of source materials and topics: Aristotle, conjoined twins, unicorns, Hegel, creationism, and so forth. Although I suspect that the original essays are far less interesting than the titles would suggest. Academic writing has an odd way of being simultaneously tedious and silly. You'll have a few hundred pages of dense, impenetrable prose, all to prove the thesis that that the Revolution is right around the corner now, and after it comes, the world will be run by an anarcho-syndicalist commune of unicorn-riding conjoined twins. Or something. Anyway, the book's sure to sell lots of copies in France, given their surprising penchant for the odd and grotesque, e.g. Grand Guignol, or I guess Cirque du Soleil for that matter, or their longstanding fascination with Edgar Allan Poe.

Speaking of odd and grotesque, I recently came into posession of a ghastly book of eldritch incantations, a black grimoire of unspeakable things mortal man was not meant to know, a vile tome of instruction in the dark arts. I speak, of course, of "Developing for Microsoft Agent", subitled "Microsoft ActiveX Technology for Interactive Animated Characters". In layperson's terms, it's the Clippy Construction Kit. Yes, you too can build your own horrific, unkillable animated minions, and send them forth across the net to offer "friendly advice" and otherwise torment and bedevil the world of the living. I think it might make for a fun, geekish practical joke, but I have to wonder if that itself is part of a sneaky ploy by the Beast of Redmond. No doubt they've realized you can get GenX types to do just about anything, if you can just make them think doing it is ironic. So maybe it's all a ghastly trap laid to ensnare unwary developers. I didn't pay a cent for the book, and I haven't broken the seal on the CD yet (apparently the previous owner never got around to that... or didn't survive long enough...). So the CD remains there in its clear envelope, all silvery and shiny and beautiful, beckoning to me, calling to me....

Oh, uh, anyway, I also picked up a book about BeOS at the same time. When you touch the two books together, unearthly green sparks shoot around the room, your hair stands on end, and clocks start to run backwards. I'm still trying to figure out the exact mechanism here, but it may be a promising source of energy if I can figure out how to harness it. My biggest concern is that BeOS books are almost certainly a limited, nonrenewable, and dwindling resource. Maybe we need to start a federal Strategic BeOS Reserve, sort of like what we did with helium.