Wingnut of the Day

Came across an alarming (yet somehow funny) article over at Preemptive Karma the other day, showcasing the latest, and looniest, entry in the Iraq blame game. A while back, Shelby Steele was arguing that the demise of "white supremacy" was to blame for the Iraq war going badly. Now we hear from one David R. Usher, described as "Legislative Analyst for the American Coalition for Fathers and Children, Missouri Coalition, And is a co-founder and past Secretary of the American Coalition for Fathers and Children", who explains that the Iraq war would be going great if it wasn't for those awful feminists:

Shelby’s theory is wrong. The collapse of white moral authority is not the problem. The replacement of male authority with feminism is. To Steele’s credit -- he was gazing in the general right direction – but missed the real target. In America, there is one place where white supremacy and radical feminism existed: The Ku Klux Klan.
...
Liberal feminists believe that all violence is bad (unless it happens to be committed by a woman). Tralfamadore is a pain-free, hypersexual village of serial polyandry, where sustenance and protection comes from government, somebody else raises your children, and men get charged for it all even if they weren’t the father.

As I said when writing about Steele, the right-wingers have finally realized things aren't going so hot in Iraq, and they're Desperately Seeking Scapegoats. I find it really curious how one wingnut after another is coming forward, each having discovered that the whole Iraq debacle is the fault of precisely the same group he'd made a career out of hating well before the war ever started. What a truly amazing series of coincidences! It's uncanny, I tell you. Before it's all over, we'll learn that the quagmire is the fault of absolutely everyone except conservative white males, who are absolutely blameless, of course. Even though the whole thing was their idea in the first place, and they planned and executed the thing. Because, you know, when you make a terrible, stupid mistake, it's all the fault of the people who tried to warn you from Day 1. Not because the critics were right, of course, because no Real Man ever admits he's screwed up, but because the critics weren't being supportive enough, and didn't get on board to be part of the disaster.

Usher's central thesis, so far as I'm able to discern it, is that feminism is preventing this country from unleashing the full force of our red-blooded manly-man savagery against the Iraqis. He's outraged, furious, even, that feminists seem to oppose society glorifying war and death above all other things. Well, I would certainly hope that was true.

If you're morbidly curious, here are a few of his other columns, defending Michael Jackson, and the Duke lacrosse team, and bashing Amnesty International (Apparently they're contributing to an extremely-well-hidden epidemic of women beating up men. Jeepers!) And then there's a piece that I think is supposed to be about Valentine's Day, although it's so hysterical it's hard to tell -- it's titled V-DAY: LATTER-DAY FEMINIST PROPHET OF BAAL SPEAK if that gives you any idea. And he argues that the decline in military enlistments is because greedy military wives get their kicks by divorcing their overseas husbands and sticking them with huge child support bills, repeating the process as necessarry. Naturally he doesn't identify a single instance where this actually happened. It's just one of those things he knows is true, because it feels true to him. It has a feel of truthiness about it. Usher also hates gay people, of course.

I was about to make a cheap shot about his personal appearance, and how he's just upset that no woman will have anything to do with an ugly, scrawny little guy with an unconvincing combover and a bad attitude. But then I came across this FindLaw page about his ugly divorce and custody battles. Divorced in 1988, still fighting as of 2000. Oh, and here's a page from the Missouri Supreme Court about the case as well. From that page:

The trial court decided properly because no sufficient change in the circumstances of Mother or the children required it to award custody to Father to protect the best interests of the children.(FN20) It found the children suffered significant medical and psychological problems that were not caused by Mother's parenting and that Mother successfully addressed these problems. Mother secured counseling and drug treatment, enrolled M.U. in a residential treatment facility, and even moved closer to school to help M.U. attend. The evidence showed these efforts improved the psychological and academic well being of the children. The trial court also found Father was more insensitive to the fact that M.U.'s problems were medical and viewed them as predominately disciplinary in nature. It also found he did not adequately respond to Mother's request for help caring for the needs of the children by failing to attend school conferences and pay his share of medical expenses. It also concluded the children's best interests were better served by Mother because of the poor relationship between the children and their stepmother, Father's current wife.
...
The order requiring Father to pay the GAL and Mother's attorney fees is justified under both parts of section 452.355. Under 452.355.1, the trial court considered Father's statement of income and expenses and found he was financially able to pay the fees. It also chastised Father's motion to modify as "entirely without merit" and merely a retort to Mother's request for Father to assist her in addressing the educational problems of M.U. The order of the trial court was also justified under section 452.355.2 because Father owed Mother back payments for medical and hospitalization costs she incurred on behalf of the children.
This Court will reverse an award of GAL and attorney fees only for abuse of discretion, and Father does not show abuse.(FN21) For instance, he does not contest he owed back payments for support or that he was financially able to pay Mother's fees. Father merely restates his arguments that the overall judgment of the trial court was erroneous and his motion to modify custody should have been granted.

Yep, folks, we have a real winner here. The state supreme court wouldn't step in to soothe his fragile male ego, but maybe the military can do the job, and slaughter us a bunch of Iraqis, just to show the womenfolk who's the real boss around these parts. Sure, untold thousands of people have to die in the process, but that's a small price to pay for repairing one angry wingnut's damaged self-esteem, after all. (What, you don't agree? Why do you hate freedom!?)

tags: iraq war feminism david r. usher shelby steele

Two Roses

Two roses on SW 12th, downtown Portland.



tags: portland roses.

Shooting the Sidewalk

Couple of sidewalk photos I took today. The above image is part of the sidewalk around 3rd and Yamhill or so, also known as "Street Wise", a public art piece by Katherine Dunn and Bill Will. It's a block's worth of amusing, offbeat, and just plain weird quotes set randomly into the sidewalk. I always forget where it's at, and keep stumbling across it when I least expect to. If I have time, I stop and read a couple. Seeing things like "the end of life as we know it" in the sidewalk is good for a smile or two. Here's a blog entry I came across with a few more photos of the piece.

Actually there's bound to be a mystical way of using Street Wise to tell the future, by seeing which quotation either you, a friend, or some object, ends up closest to. Whichever one it is, that's your fortune for the day. You could throw spare change down the block and see where the pennies land. That would be simple enough. Or you could maybe get drunk, or spin around and get dizzy, and then see which quote you fall closest to. And if you happen to stumble off the curb out into the busy street, hey, that's your future right there.

---

The next photo is a closeup of one of the many small round metal plates in the sidewalk we ended up with after the city removed all our old-style parking meters and replaced them with green Euro-licious solar-powered kiosks. This particular one is at the corner of SW 3rd and Pine St., next to the Embassy Suites hotel, in case anybody wants to make a pilgrimage or whatever. Note the web address on the plate. Someday archeologists of the future will be able to date all sorts of objects based on whether they have internet addresses on 'em or not. Supposing that detailed domain registration records survive into the distant future, they may be able to take that Kozmo.com polo shirt and narrow things down to the exact year or two Kozmo was in business. Heck, they may even be able to get DNA off of it, and grow themselves a shiny new dot-com geek in a test tube. But that's all in the distant future, of course.

ParkingZone.com describes itself as "The Parkingzone - Parking Supplies for over 15 years". I have a real weakness for industry websites, trade magazines, and the like. Every time you come across one, it's a chance to learn a thing or two about the parts of our world that we all take for granted. I always end up browsing through 'em for hours on end. I didn't realize just how much equipment it takes to run a parking operation, but once you go through the catalog you go, yes, I've seen them using that, and that, and one of those. I suppose you could even sign up and buy your very own, if you were so inclined. Looking at the catalog, it appears that what we're looking at here is a "gorilla post mounting plate". A gorilla post is the technical term for a temporary post that mounts in the sidewalk (in the aforementioned mounting plate, obviously). So I suppose our city can now easily blanket a large area with temporary "No Parking" signs if need be. The ParkingZone catalog also notes that the mounting plates are only 3/16" thick, so that they meet ADA requirements about not presenting a tripping hazard for disabled people. And despite all that engineering, one of these bad boys will only set you back a mere $9.50 a pop. Which is about the same as a fancy mixed drink in a trendy downtown bar, and those actualy make you more likely to trip, not less. The world can be just so confusing sometimes...

tags: portland sidewalk public art parking gorilla post

Portland Park Oddities

A panorama of Oregonian Printing Press Park, in downtown Portland right at the west end of the Morrison Bridge. In fact it occupies a triangular scrap of unused land next to one of the eastbound bridge ramps. It's vastly larger than our world-famous Mill Ends Park, but it's still really tiny, and pretty obscure, too. You won't find it on the Portland Parks department's site, for the simple reason that it's one of the area's rare county parks. I imagine this is because Multnomah County owns the Morrison Bridge. The county doesn't actually have a proper parks department, so that the park is maintained by their bureau of Facilities and Property Management. Apparently they handed nearly all of their park responsibilities off to Metro's Regional Parks & Greenspaces Department some years ago, but they seem to have missed at least one. Which I guess is understandable, considering the size of the thing.

[Updated: More about Printing Press Park in a March '07 post on Portland Metblogs. Which got linkage at Welcome to Blog. Meanwhile, this page includes a poem about the place. The piece you're reading now appears to be the very last item about the park, by Google's mysterious reckoning. Since writing this post, I've learned it helps to include the name of a place in a post's title. That's likely to be much of the problem right there.




There's a similar parcel to the north, adjacent to the westbound Morrison Bridge ramps, but for some reason it doesn't merit a sign or name of its own.



Likewise, there's a much larger chunk of land around 1st and Madison next to the Hawthorne Bridge ramps, but nobody seems to want to claim it either. Even though it's got a very nice old tree growing there and everything.

---

These next 3 photos are of another odd little area I ran across recently. The Naito Parkway overpass over I-405 is significantly wider than the actual road, and there's a strip of greenery the width of a couple of traffic lanes right there on the overpass. This actually continues north beyond the overpass for a couple of blocks. At one time this area was the interchange between Naito (then called Front Avenue), and the old Harbor Drive freeway that ran along the waterfront. If you stand on the east side of Naito and look downhill toward the river, you can still see the old freeway roadbed sloping downhill toward what's now the Riverplace area. When they tore out the old freeway, everything right on the river became part of Waterfront Park, but between there and the old Front interchange they basically just tore out the asphalt and abandoned everything, and even today the area remains more-or-less unchanged since the early 1970's. Naito Parkway south of the old interchange down to where it merges with Barbur actually is the last remaining vestige of the old freeway. Ever since I-5 was constructed, it doesn't actually get enough traffic anymore to justify being laid out as a freeway, and it's a massive barrier dividing the Lair Hill neighborhood in half, but leaving it as-is was (and still is) the cheapest option, so that's what ODOT (the Oregon Dept. of Transportation) went with.



If you look closely among all the weeds, you'll notice that they're growing in what appears to be a series of raised planter beds. I imagine these had to have gone in after the interchange was removed, presumably with the idea that someone would be maintaining flowers in these beds on an ongoing basis. Clearly this hasn't happened for years, if not decades. I seem to recall reading that the green strip of land to the north belongs to ODOT, and presumably the overpass does as well, so we can probably blame the state for falling down on the job. I mean, clearly they have higher priorities, and rightly so -- this isn't exactly their core mission -- but if they can't afford to maintain it, why not hand it off to someone else? (See also ODOT's multiple vacant, weedy plazas under the Fremont Bridge approach, right near the Pearl District.) I'm not usually a big booster of the Portland Development Commission, but they've got their own designs on the area, and they'd at least make sure the grass gets mowed on occasion. Although you do have to admit these wildflowers aren't bad either.

---

I've already written several times about the infamous sculpture Leland One, a.k.a. "Rusting Chunks No. 5". At the time, I'd tried to figure out just who owns the little plaza where it's located: The city, or the surrounding condo towers. With no success. I've since come across two documents referring to this area as "Portland Center Park", but the city parks website makes no mention of such a place. Ok, that's not strictly true. This map attaches the name to a different, nearby parcel of land -- one that appears to lie directly beneath a recent apartment complex, in fact. So the mystery continues.

It wouldn't be surprising if the city's just forgotten about it. I recall a story from the late 80's or early 90's where the city sent someone out to check on a park it thought it owned on the east bank of the river somewhere up in North Portland. The worker was astonished to discover that there was no actual park there, and there hadn't been for a long time, if it had ever really existed at all. But it still showed up on the city's property rolls, and it even showed up on published maps of the city. And no concerned citizens had complained, which to me is the oddest part of all.

Come to think of it, Washington County had a similar thing happen a few years ago, whien it discovered it owned a undeveloped parcel of land out near the Coast Range that was acquired as a park, given a name (which I've forgotten, but IIRC I think it included the word "Rippling"), and then promptly forgotten about. The county didn't have any money to run another park on top of the two it already has, so I think the plan was to fence it off and await a better budgetary climate in the distant future. In other words, it's been forgotten all over again. Updated: I came across a state legislative bill referring to it in passing as Rippling River Park [PDF]. The county's Parks Services website doesn't mention it, though.

Updated 9/23/08: It turns out the state had the name all wrong. It's actually Rippling Waters Park. And here are the two Oregonian stories about the place, from April 1999. Seems the county decided it had no money to maintain the park and elected to close it to the public, but then a few community groups stepped forward and volunteered to care for the place. That must've worked out ok, because a search on the right name brings up a few mentions of the place. Mostly habitat restoration and assorted environmental events, but I also saw a mention of a CD release party, which said something about a "secret Prohibition-era dance hall". I even found a couple of addresses, so you can apparently find the place at 3865 and/or 3761 NW. Gales Creek Road. So either one, or both, of neither of those may be the right address. This may bear further investigation.

Updated II: Metro's MetroMap GIS system identifies the place as tax lot 1N421D000600, and lists its RNO (whatever that is) as R770909. The street addresses I ran across are somewhat SE of where the GIS system shows the park at. Google Maps seems to agree with the GIS system; if you check the street view at this location, you'll see what looks like it might be the "main entrance". So now we know, maybe. I still think this bears further investigation.

Updated III: Ok, I found the park. I've been there. Didn't do a lot of exploring thanks to all the very serious No Trespassing signs, but I did take some photos & I put a post together for your enjoyment, or at least for mine: "Rippling Waters Park expedition".

---

The city intermittently gets concerned about undesirable people hanging around in its parks, and last year the mayor imposed a curfew in several downtown parks, including several well-known ones, and one referred to in the media simply as "an unnamed park at Southwest 14th Avenue and Hall Street". I've been there, and it's a nice little place, although it sits next to I-405 and (as usual) it could use a little TLC. Like the Rusting Chunks plaza, there's no city park sign out front, and it's not mentioned anywhere on the city parks website. The website's set up so you can find a park by name, but this place doesn't have a name, therefore it doesn't appear on the list. Hmm. Makes sense, I guess, sort of, in a way.

tags: portland oregon multnomah parks

Meta Meta Matamata

This post is actually about a couple of metablog tidbits, but that's not a topic that generates a lot of images, and I haven't done any cute animal stuff for a while, so first let's do a bit of that. Allow me to present the matamata (Chelus fimbriatus), a very unusual turtle from South America. Ok, you could probably argue I still haven't done any cute animal stuff for a while. But it's a turtle, and turtles are great. Ok, most turtles. I'm not so sure about alligator snapping turtles. They scare me a little.

Also, there are exactly two towns on the planet named Matamata. It so happens that the Matamata in New Zealand was the site of Hobbiton in the LOTR films (something the tourists just go nuts for), while the Tunisian Matamata is where a lot of the Tatooine footage in the Star Wars movies was filmed. If you'd like to attract a successful major film production to your fair city, your best bet is to rename the place "Matamata". They're 2 for 2 so far, after all.

And now, after that brief foray into the real world, we come to the "Meta Meta" stuff, by which I mean blogging about blogging. So you can stop here if you don't care about that sort of navel-gazing. I mean, assuming you've even gotten this far. (FWIW I promise to at least not post any candid photos of navel lint. Because that would be wrong.)

• You might have noticed that the contents of the right sidebar have evolved over time, with more links appearing under various headings, and a variety of odds and ends accumulating under "Blogospherica". The latest bit of Blogospherica is a link to Bloglines. I'd had several people show up here as a result of Bloglines searches, so I figured I'd go check it out. Besides the RSS reading stuff, Bloglines also gives you a freebie, bare-bones "blog", which doesn't even support user comments. I don't see myself doing a lot with it, since I've already got this ultra-featureful Blogger blog here, but the other blog lives at cyclotram2, in case you care, and I doubt you do. The blog page also has links to a variety of other feeds I have a hand in generating: Flickr spits out RSS for your photos, and YouTube spits out another for videos. And then del.icio.us exports your bookmarks as RSS too. I doubt any of these are worth subscribing to, but tinkering with RSS is mildly entertaining for the moment, so I'm doing it.
  
• Actually the Bloglines thing is why this blog's Sitemeter (you know, this thing: ) is cranking like mad today. And sadly, it's not because I'm getting a lot of "genuine" visitors. No such luck. I wanted to see if anyone was ever visiting cyclotram2, and it seemed that the logical, well, only place to put the meter was in the blog description, since you don't get an editable template or anything over there. Little did I realize that c2 would show up today on Bloglines' "New Blogs" page, description line and all. So I'm getting "hits" from everyone who visits that page, which is not at all what I had in mind. I've pulled the thing back out of the blog description, but I think Bloglines is using a cached copy or something, because the hits just keep on coming. So I think I'm in for 24 hours or so of this. Gaaaaah!!!!
  
• My web dev skills are vastly out of date, and I'm trying to catch up. Quite a few years ago I decided I wanted to deal in compiled, "real" code for a living, and tuned out the world of HTML. I figured that if I knew too much about it, sooner or later I'd get roped into doing it, and I really wanted to avoid that. That strategy actually worked pretty well, but now I feel like a real old-timer. So I bought a book today to help figure out this newfangled world of cascading style sheets and whatnot. Observant Gentle Reader(s) may have noticed that items in this list are denoted with squares instead of circles. Behold the majesty of CSS, puny mortal.
  
• You might've also noticed I've been slowly tweaking the template for this blog. Most recently the background went black, and some parts of the blog lost their rounded corners. The black is because I liked it better, while the square corners are because the base template I'm using relies on a fixed-size image file to do those. I shrank the margins a few weeks back, and that threw the rounded corners off. It was easier to just get rid of them than it would've been to create a rounded-corner graphic matching my preferred page width. So now you know.
  
• My Javascript isn't what it could be, either. I learned a little of it early on, and then learned a bit of VBScript later on, but I haven't messed with it in years. When I did that recent (and remarkably popular) post about ponies, I tried to set up a button or buttons to toggle the page's background color between black and pink, but I couldn't figure it out. I might not have cared much before, but I hate being thwarted by a seemingly-simple coding problem. I'm quite willing to accept that it simply isn't possible, but if that's the case, I'd like to at least know why.
  
• My first real foray into web tinkering was also one of my first-ever C programs. This was back in the day of Netscape 0.9x, and support for bookmarks was still broken at the time. I'd gotten into the habit of cutting and pasting urls into an open Notepad window, and I eventualy wrote a little command line program to convert these text files into html. It seemed so complicated at the time. I even did a bunch of work to support the supposedly upcoming HTML 3.0 standard, which would include a ton of new tags for formatting mathematical expressions and so forth. I remember thinking they were really going to the mat to support a fairly esoteric set of new features, and I guess people must've realized I was right, because 3.0 never made it past the draft stage. That sort of took the wind out of my sails, because I'd done a fair bit of work (I thought) to support the new standard, and combined with the debut of functioning Netscape bookmarks, this spelled the end of my cheesy little program.
  
• My main complaint right now is that I don't want to have to re-edit my blog template every time I want to add or remove a link to something. Surely there's got to be a way to host my links sections somewhere, and just pull them in when the page loads, like my list of recent del.iciou.us postings. Surely there's got to be a simple, and probably RSS-based, way to do this, though it seems like everyone's only interested in getting items in chronological order, not pre-categorized or structured as a tree or whatever. I mean, I'm not actually losing sleep over it, but it'd be nice, so I'll get around to it sooner or later.
  

Trojan Imploded

I woke up early yesterday morning and watched the big Trojan cooling tower implosion on TV. Yay!

A striking thing about the media coverage was how the everyone (including interviewees) tip-toed around whether the plant was a good or a bad thing. Instead they all just talked about how cool the implosion was, and referred to it simply as a generic "historic event", the "end of a local landmark", and so forth. Which isn't that surprising, I guess, and you have to admit it was a really cool implosion. There's no doubt about that. But it's also obvious that -- however you feel about nuclear power in general -- this particular plant was a complete economic debacle, and a millstone around the necks of PGE ratepayers. The thing hasn't operated in 13 years, and it's still costing us piles of money. But it isn't nice to talk about the huge price tag we're still saddled with, apparently, so nobody does.

I'm surprised that I've only seen a handful of international stories about the implosion, like this one from Australia's Adelaide Advertiser. And nobody outside the region seems to have picked up on the (supposed) Homer Simpson angle. I would've thought at least the BBC would've made a big deal about that. Oh, well. No biggie.

The Washington Post's article calls the implosion "ironic", since supposedly this country's going to get a fresh crop of shiny, new and improved nuclear reactors, Real Soon Now. The reactor industry's been saying this for the last couple of decades, and as yet the promised Atomic Wonderland hasn't materialized. They keep telling us that these hypothetical new reactors would be absolutely, positively safe and clean, and even economical, and maybe that's all true. But in the past the nuclear power lobby has earned itself a poor reputation, and a well-deserved one. They've always overpromised and underdelivered, and lied about it, and covered up their mistakes, and tried to intimidate their critics, and I'm not prepared to ignore their bad rep just because they now insist they've changed their ways. And they still don't have anywhere to put their nuclear waste, let's not forget that inconvenient little detail.

However, the big question right now is how long until we get cheesy TV movies exploiting the implosion footage. I bet we'll see this on the SciFi Channel before too long. I can see it now: Despite all the assurances to the contrary, the implosion releases radiation into the nearby forests, causing a banana slug to mutate and grow to enormous size. Then of course it slimes its way to Portland and attacks the city, until our heroes do it in with the one local product slugs love more than anything: Beer!

Mmm... Beer....

tags: trojan nuclear reactor implosion homer simpson simpsons movie slugs beer

Trojan Implosion

In just a few short hours, Oregon's late, unlamented Trojan Nuclear Plant will be history. Well, ok, technically they're just imploding the cooling tower tomorrow. The actual reactor building won't be gone for another year or two, and the spent fuel rods will be onsite for a long time, possibly decades. And the construction bonds aren't paid off yet, either, come to think of it. But at least in a symbolic sense, the plant will be gone. When you drive I-5 to Seattle, or US30 to Astoria, you won't be confronted by that huge horrible grey concrete monstrosity anymore, and that's got to count for something.

It's a rare occasion these days when pro-environment folks are able to gloat a little and point out that we were right all along.

It doesn't look like the story's getting a lot of play outside the immediate Columbia River region so far. The Eugene paper has a couple of stories about it, but IIRC the Eugene public power board owns/owned a minority stake in the plant, so it's sort of a local issue down there. I expect that once they blow the thing up tomorrow, every local TV affiliate across the country will use the video clip as a bit of filler, since everyone loves a big implosion. If overseas media pick up the story at all, they'll use the Homer Simpson angle to explain why the story is "important", althought a recent story in the Longview Daily News casts doubt on the notion that Trojan was the model for Homer's Springfield Nuclear Plant. (Longview's the closest large town to the Trojan site, and the local paper has been covering the implosion story extensively.) Or maybe nobody outside the area will care at all. It's hard to say.

The PSU Vanguard managed to get an exclusive, final interview with the condemned cooling tower. The tower seems rather bitter about the whole thing, which I guess is understandable under the circumstances.

Good riddance, so far as I'm concerned.

Lovejoy Fountain

View Larger Map

Three views of the Lovejoy Fountain, in downtown Portland.

[Updated 9/06: 3 more photos, plus one of a bumblebee in one of the plaza's many concrete planters.]

Updated 8/25/09: I added a Google map (above) so you can see what the fountain looks like from space. If you're more interested in where it's at than what it looks like, you can always click the zoom-out thingy (i.e. the minus-sign button) a couple of times.

Some other good pages about the fountain:

• A piece by Walt Lockley, mostly about the much better-known Ira Keller Fountain, which he prefers.
• The city parks department has a page about all the fountains it manages.
• CLIP, the Contemporary Landscape Inquiry Project, at the U. of Toronto.
• A student project at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences.

The abstract of a paper presented at the 2005 conference of the Social Science History Association (whoever they are). The article mentions in passing that the fountain was a big hangout for hippies back in the 60's. Hmm. That's the first I've heard about that, but it really wouldn't surprise me.
Incidentally, you often see the area referred to as "Lovejoy Square", and it turns out this is incorrect. The official name is Lovejoy Fountain Plaza, and the actual Lovejoy Square is a retail development in the Pearl District, way on the other side of downtown. So now we all know better. Yay!

---

My rather extensive Flickr photoset of the fountain is here. Enjoy...

WML FWIW

As you might have noticed in an earlier post, I've finally gotten one of them newfangled wireless doohickeys. I quickly noticed that this blog looks really terrible on said gadget. So I hunted around and came up with a solution that seems to work ok. I mean, I don't know why anyone else out there ought to care, exactly. Maybe if you're really bored or something, say, you're on the train to work and you forgot to bring a newspaper or whatever, I dunno. Anyway, the following link pulls in my RSS feed and transmogrifies it into WML, the native tongue of many mobile gizmos. Voila, le fromage

Enjoy! (Or not.)

---

Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless handheld

Science & Politics Tidbits for 5-18-06

The science tidbits come first, because politics is mostly depressing, and matters far less in the long run anyway. Also, this order is the opposite of what the MSM always does, when they cover science stories at all.

Science

• Remember how your PE teacher, cross country coach, and the whole rest of the world kept lecturing you about the horrors of lactic acid? Turns out they were completely, totally, spectacularly wrong. Lactic acid is your friend. Thus pointing out yet again the dangers of relying on received wisdom from authority figures, even when they claim science is on their side. Scientists are prone to this as much as the rest of us, and the guy behind the new research had a hell of a time getting it published. Everyone laughed at continental drift too, back in the day. No word yet on whether food and beverages high in lactic acid will help athletic performance. If they need a human guinea pig to knock back a lambic or geuze or two and then get on the treadmill, hey, sign me up. I'm your guy.
  
• The media's all over today's story about ancient humans and chimps interbreeding. I picked that particular story to link to because it comes with an amusing cartoon.
  
• While that story's kind of gross (which is why they're printing it, of course), I can also easily see it being true, especially if there are bonobos involved. They'll bonk anything, anytime, anywhere, which is why you don't see them in the zoo even in enlightened cities such as ours. That might be just a little too educational for most visitors' tastes.
  
• I can also see some people having more chimp DNA than others. Consider, for example, the strong evidence presented at BushOrChimp.com. They don't call him the Chimperor for nothing, you know.
  
• In other primate news, a newly discovered species of monkey, Rungwecebus kipunji, which the locals just call "kipunji". It turns out the kipunji is the sole representative of an entirely new genus, the first one discovered in 83 years. And as is usual these days, this newly discovered species seems to be critically endangered, with only 500 or so left in the wild.
  
• Also, some new research into the surprising linguistic abilities of Nigeria's putty-nosed monkey.
  
• And an overview of ongoing debate over Homo Florensiensis, better known as the ancient "hobbit" people from Indonesia.
  
• Switching to space news, here's the latest extrasolar planet research. The newly-discovered solar system has three planets about the size of Neptune. The story mentions in passing that two are close to the star and therefore probably solid objects "like Mercury" (but vastly larger). Not so long ago it was big exciting news to find a large solid planet around another star, but not anymore. That's how extrasolar planet research works. You find one of a given type, and it's front page news. You find a second one, and already you and everyone else are terribly jaded about it. It's really sort of remarkable how fast this happens.
  
• Speaking of Neptune, there may finally be an explanation for how the planet's moon Triton got into its peculiar orbit.
  
• There's also yet another Titan flyby coming up on the 20th. Even I'm starting to get just a little blasé about these.
  
• And here's a fresh new Silky Anteater item: Montclair State University in NJ has a page with some fun Silky-related games and activities for the kids. Kids these days, they just don't realize how lucky they are. Back in my day, we had no class materials about silky anteaters. Also, we trudged to school barefoot every day, seven days a week, five miles through the snow, uphill, both ways.
  

Politics

• Well, the voters of Oregon mostly didn't listen to me. At least Erik Sten was reelected, just barely avoiding a runoff against The Burdick in November, but everyone and everything else I, ahem, "endorsed" lost by a huge margin. Which is about what I expected, really, and I'm not losing any sleep over it. To put a positive spin on it, I'm pleased to know that about 5-10 percent of everyone in Portland and Multnomah County agreed with me.
  
• Admit it: Oregon politics are boring as hell. We collectively just don't have the same instinct for the jugular you see in more red-blooded parts of the country. Even our Republicans are less nasty than elsewhere. This is probably also why no Oregonian has ever been elected president, and also why we have only one Fortune 500 company based here. Even California is nastier than us, sometimes, as seen in this Wonkette piece titled "Best Piece of Direct Mail Ever", which indeed it is, in a morbid sort of way.
  
• In other California political news, the Wonkette folks have just announced their official endorsement for governor of the state. Not to spoil the suspense, but apparently she's a famous, um, "movie star", sort of like Aahhhnold, in a way. This sort of thing would never fly here in Oregon. There would be dowdy Columbia Wear involved, and probably a great deal of shivering, and the whole effect would be ruined.
  
• Two bits about Tom Friedman,everyone'ss favorite globalizin' windbag. His latest column rips into GWB over cronyism and bungling. But his own hands are far from clean, as seen in his ever-changing analysis of the situation in Iraq. It's just one decisive moment after another for this guy.
  
• Following up on a story I was covering earlier, the EU's frozen the assets of top leaders of Belarus, following Lukashenko's reelection farce, and the subsequent arrest of opposition leaders.
  
• Singapore had a somewhat farcical election recently, as well. The ruling party lost seats this time, but not enough to make any difference.
  
• Let's wrap up with today's Reliable Source at the WashPost, but not because of all that political crap. Scroll down the page, past some random country music guy, until you see the National Zoo's new baby kiwi. Awwwwww.... (Although silky anteaters are still much cuter, of course.)
  

and now, the mother of all tag farms: chimpanzee chimp bonobo
bush interbreeding monkey hobbit neptune mercury titan triton cassini belarus lukashenko singapore indonesia nigeria iraq thomas friedman lactic acid lambic geuze beer erik sten ginny burdick portland oregon multnomah election california wonkette arnold schwartzenegger mary carey kiwi silky anteater

Next Blog

Here's the latest batch of random blogs, mostly the referrer pages of people who ended up here, with a few choice "Next Blog" hits of my own added in. This time I've attempted to categorize things a little, sort of. And as usual, the ones I felt were especially worthwhile are in bold.

But first, here are two more Random Blog buttons I came across:
Next Blog for WordPress.
Phil Ringnalda's RandomFreshBlog for weblogs.com.

Also, before we get started, the Wikipedia article on Graph Theory may be worth a read. Technorati says my indegree is up to a semi-whopping 4 now, the latest from a weird site about Jello^TM recipes, of all things. This blog's also gotten a mention here, where it/I am described as "cyclotram who regularly writes about NOLA from Portland, OR.". Well, regularly may be pushing it a little, I think. But I feel honored anyone thinks my humble efforts are at all helpful towards rebuilding the city.

And now, on with our feature presentation:

---

Personal Blogs

• Swing Life Away...
  
• Public Emily
  
• Donners Bakery
  
• She Just Walks Around With It Well-written blog about the author's divorce.
  
• I like tomatoes, but not Tom H@nks
  
• Chai Expectations. The top post right now is titled "Captain Kirk's Lessons on Women For a Nice Jewish Boy". Free Orion slave girl pix here! :)
  
• Publisher's Diary (philippines)
  
• angel's song blog (malaysia)
  
• pandora's box (singapore)
  
• MEMORIES (china)
  
• Living on a Dime
  
• Songsaboutrainbows
  
• Mom's Cancer, by the author of the book of the same name.
  
• i nearly died, photoblog by an artist in Brooklyn
  
• JSI - Just Shoot It, another photoblog, good photos of SE Asia & Australia.
  
• The House of Our Dreams, photoblog of a house under construction.
  
• Lilie, with some nice photos of Venice.
  
• emily faye
  
• Groovy Girlfriends
  
• fictions
  
• Día de la Madre - Sábado 13 de Mayo. A photoblog about Mother's Day, in Spanish.
  
• ...by joon, interesting new blog from the uk.
  
• Family Jules
  
  

Politics

• Mad Cap Liberalism
  
• Skull / Bones, a political blog from pdx.
  
• Done with Mirrors
  

Misc

• Random Drift. About cats, with lots of cute photos. And the "fav blogs" column has links to even more blogs about cats. Awwwwwwww....
  
• J'ai Faim, a new food blog with some delicious-sounding recipes. The top item right now is a recipe for Twice Baked Potatoes with Gorgonzola and Rosemary. I admit to certain biases here. You could probably talk me into eating a bucket of rusty nails, so long as it came with enough gorgonzola. (Mmm... Cheesy rusty nails...) And I'm confident that potatoes in any form would be even better.
  
• Fast food poisoning blogs. New as of 5/19, not much there yet. But I do like the title, anyway.
  
• Stone Channel Showroom & Warehouse, an architectural stone dealer in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, showcasing samples of the various types of stone they sell. For some reason I really like this blog. Maybe it's all the abstract-looking stone samples against a black background. I'm not sure.
  
• 35 Days in Europe, a travel blog, as you might've guessed from the name.
  
• Studies and Opportunities Abroad for Eastern Europe
  
• OCASIÃO - Imóveis. Another blog from Portugal, this one about commercial real estate or architecture (I think). Lots of photos.
  
• Pics and Docs
  
• The Great Below. I don't entirely follow what this is about, but the top post at the moment concerns the number 666, so this one's getting the boldface treatment.
  
• Prabhupada Letters : Anthology
  
• Deutsch A1i. From Colombia. Mostly in German. Clearly, I'm missing something here.
  
• Playing Online Poker, in Russian (I think).
  
• ramas y raices, a bit of genealogy from Argentina.
  

Blogs In French

• Le Club des Sacoches
  
• Ca c'est chez Vinz
  
• Ghâshlog
  
• SMOSTAQBAL
  
• Maisons de Provence : Annonce Villa Barjols Not a blog; I'm not sure how someone got from there to here.
  

Not Safe For Work

• Naughty Little Housewife
  
• Lust, sex, and sodomy. Finland sounds... interesting.
  
• Mimi's Diary. Currently running for governor of Nevada.
  
• Thomas Kraemer: "History of technology and ethnographic study of people with a minority sexual orientation or gender identity"
  
• Viviane's Sex Carnival
  

Hello Moblog World

Let's see if this mobile blogging stuff really works...

Test test test
Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless handheld

Otter & Puffin Videos

Three video clips taken at the Seattle Aquarium a while back. Woohoo, lookit me, ma, I'm vlogging!



A couple of river otters having a frolic.




Sea otter feeding time. Sorry I filmed it sideways. I'm still new at this.




A puffin, doing its thing.


tags: otter puffin aquarium video vlog vlogging

Lupines!

Lupines near SW Harrison St. between Naito Parkway and Harbor Drive, in downtown Portland.



I'd be remiss in my blogging obligations if I didn't at least mention the old Monty Python "Dennis Moore" sketch. And now I've done it. FWIW, I think it's really great how merely adding an exclamation mark to the title of this post makes it an instant Python reference. It just doesn't get any easier.



If you're an MMF spammer, you may be eligible for a coveted Lupine Award (inspired by the Python sketch). Although if you want my opinion, MMF spammers really ought to set their sights higher, and try for Darwin Awards.

BTW, don't eat that lupine! They're poisonous.

tags: lupines spam monty python

War-Gods of the Deep

Today's weird little movie is War-Gods of the Deep, a.k.a. The City Under the Sea, a 1965 Gothic tale of mayhem under the sea. It's a Corman film with Vincent Price, allegedly based on the poem "The City in the Sea" by Edgar Allan Poe. And on top of that, it was directed by Jacques Tourneur, who's best known for his earlier film noir work. You'd think all this would add up to quite a fine film, but I have to say that this one's less than the sum of its parts. Which is not to say it isn't worth watching, but I'd have to call it a curiosity, not a classic.

We can get the plot out of the way pretty quickly. Generic heroine is kidnapped by the baddie (Sir Hugh, the Captain), and hauled off to his weird lair in a ruined ancient city deep beneath the sea. Generic hero isn't ok with this, and makes his way to the baddie's lair, accompanied by his very British comic-relief sidekick, who in turn is accompanied by a pet chicken. Thrilling adventures ensue, including a long "fight" sequence involving deep-sea diving gear and crossbows. A couple of "gill men" make repeated cameos. There are several long scenes full of our heroes talking to various locals who reveal bits of the backstory, and nothing of any great consequence happens for quite a long time. After much aimless milling about, they eventually they locate the heroine, and our dynamic trio attempt to defeat the baddie and escape to the surface. Eventually they do. Also, an undersea volcano erupts and finishes off the undersea city, so we get some nice satisfying explosions right at The End.

That's basically it. There isn't much of a plot here. The poem isn't much help, either. It provides the setting, but the screenwriters then had to cook up the entire story, such as it is. The movie is a lesson in just how difficult it is to write Poe if you aren't Poe. I do give the filmmakers credit for some of the Gothic elements they dreamed up: The baddie and his henchmen have discovered the secret of perhaps-eternal life, but are condemned to remain forever in the city under the sea. Dry land is nearby, but the men can only go ashore for brief raiding parties, and then only at night. The bells that ring deep in the sea whenever Sir Hugh executes someone. The house perched on a cliff over the ocean, full of creepy guests and secret passages. The glowing undersea volcano and constant earthquakes, providing a constant sense of impending doom. A lot of the sets and visuals are pretty cool, including the main temple room (I'm guessing about the temple part) where Sir Hugh drowns his enemies. The water cascades down between the fingers of a gigantic hand, and of course the hand ends up falling on the bad guy at the end. Other nice visual bits include the matte of the undersea city and the super-cool deep sea diving helmets everyone was using. The US title of the movie is pretty great as well. As soon as I heard the title, I knew I absolutely had to rent the thing. And there's a short bit of Vincent Price reading Poe, which is never a bad thing.

Now for bad things about the movie. The worst, worst, worst thing about the movie is the interminable undersea "fight" sequence. Basically the filmmakers had a few people miling around aimlessly in diver helmets. They all have the same outfit on, and there's no dialogue, so you end up with no clue whatsoever about what's happening. The film tries to liven things up by splicing in some unconvincing reaction shots by our glorious triumvirate, and loud bombastic music to try to convince you something exciting is happening, all evidence to the contrary. This sequence goes on and on. I didn't time it, but I'd bet it ran at least 15 minutes. You keep thinking, surely they must be done now, but no. I don't know if they just needed filler material; or filming underwater was expensive, and they decided to get their money's worth by using every last minute of footage they filmed; or whether the public genuinely adored the novelty of this stuff back in 1965. But looking at it with 2006 eyes, there's just way too much boring undersea footage. And to top it all off, the undersea chase seems to be completely pointless, and our heroes end up back where they started after all that time. Although the pack of nefarious henchmen disappears from the story after this point, and we never find out what happened to them. Nobody bothers to say a simple "Whew, we lost them", or anything, so it's possible the scriptwriters just forgot about 'em after that. And those "gill-men"... Yes, they look like the Creature from the Black Lagoon, except made by an 8th grade art class. If you watch the fighting closely, you can see a number of gill-man scales and costume bits breaking off. To be fair, lots of movies ripped off the gill-man idea, such as Monster of Piedras Blancas and The Phantom from 10000 Leagues. But if there's a gill-man evolutionary tree, the guys from WGotD rank somewhere near the very bottom.

I should point out that the film won no awards for acting. Vincent Price (as nasty old Sir Hugh) is his usual entertaining self, but it's all downhill from there. Both ex-teen-heartthrob (and non-action-hero) Tab Hunter, and alleged love interest Susan Hart can barely read their lines, much less sell them to the audience. He was supposed to be a big star for some reason, which explains his presence in the movie. And she got the job because she was married to James Nicholson, one of the film's co-producers. The love angle just doesn't work -- the only indication we get that they have anything in common is in the very beginning, where she remarks that they are the only two Americans among the house's guests, and she thinks they ought to be friends. That's pretty much it. And after the first few minutes, she's the only woman in the movie. A better movie might have given Sir Hugh a daughter or neice, and set up a rivalry for the affections of dreamy Tab Hunter. A better movie might even deliver a proper catfight. But not this movie.

Meanwhile, David Tomlinson (playing the English twit) is just an insufferable ham. You've seen him in all those 60's Disney movies, and in those he didn't share screen time with a chicken. Ah, the chicken. The business with the chicken is slightly amusing, very slightly amusing, the first couple of times it's inflicted on the audience. And then it happens again, and again. When Vincent Price notices the bird, his eyes light up and he hungrily exclaims "Chicken!". I had my hopes up the chicken might be a goner. But no. One of the reviews linked to below says the studio made the filmmakers add the twit and his chicken. They must've had the movie pegged as a ripoff of 20000 Leagues Under the Sea, except without a submarine, or a giant squid, or any of the other things that made that movie so much fun.

So is it worth watching? Sure, so long as you don't expect a masterpiece. Or a film that makes sense, to be honest, so this may be a great movie to cook up a drinking game about. When you see the chicken, drink!

Other reviews of War Gods of the Deep:
Film Freak Central, RottenTomatoes, 1000 Misspent Hours, Eccentric-Cinema.com (with stills), Monsters at Play. DVD Drive-In, Imaginarium, and Bad Cinema Diary

tags: bad movies tourneur chicken gillmen war gods of the deep vincent price edgar allan poe

OMG PONIES!!! LOL!!!!

I was talking to a coworker the other day, complaining about something or other, and happened to say, jokingly, "Also, I want a pony." About ten minutes later, she dropped by my desk and delivered the object pictured above, so now I'm the proud owner of a genuine My Little Pony^TM (Official Hasbro site here, also see the Wikipedia article). I'm told that it lived in a fish tank for a while before I got it, so it's probably full of weird algae on the inside. But on the outside, it's all pony. YAY!

I have a small menagerie of animal toys at my desk, including a couple of turtles, fish, a wombat, aliens, robots, glowing skulls, and a few other items, so this is really not very weird by my usual standards. I'm deliberately cultivating an "eccentric streak", and I've deliberately picked something that's guaranteed to confuse and outrage insecure tech-geek fanboys -- which is even more fun than you might think. Yes, they really do get outraged. Jeezus. Check out this April Fool's Day spoof from Wizards of the Coast, announcing the brand new My Little Pony roleplaying game. It sounds like something kids would really enjoy, if it was for real, but it isn't. And a hearty laugh was had all across Nerdistan. You know, because unlike ponies, D&D is for real, and is a very serious matter, and not at all silly in any way. (*snort* *giggle*)

And who could forget Slashdot's immortal 4/1/06 antics? They started the "Ponies meme", and they've been aggressively marketing it from the very beginning. They're not stupid. They know the core /. audience is dweeby 15 year old boys who don't like their little sisters, and this is a sure way to win their undying devotion.

Updated: This post's actually attracting quite a few search engine hits for the phrase "omg ponies". I figure that at least some of these visitors come from the aforementioned (semi-)lucrative 15-year-old dweeb demographic. I'd so hate for anyone to leave here emptyhanded, so here's something you guys might enjoy (I think). I recently encountered a brand of high-quality graph paper called Rhodia. It's from France, and comes in A4 and several other Euro-licious metric sizes. For, you know, designing your ultimate D&D dungeon, or drawing anime characters in class, or, well, for doing actual work, if the teacher's watching or whatever. I bought a pad, because I'm an engineer and I just know I need graph paper. I don't know why I need it yet, but I just *do*. Simply having it makes me happy, even if it just sits on my desk, unused, giving off positive engineer vibes. If you're in Portland, Canoe carries it in several sizes.

Writing about ponies is way more fun than my usual topics -- war, politics, science, religion, heavy stuff like that. So here are some more contemporary MLP items:

• An account by a guy describing his anxiety over picking up My Little Pony DVDs for his kids at the video store. Seems they're the new male kryptonite, or something. He also freaks out over buying feminine hygeine products at the grocery store. It turns out that the potential opinions of random store clerks are wayyyy more important than I ever imagined. So, so sad.
  
• Curiously, My Little Pony figured in the recent Kaavya Viswanathan plagiarism scandal, with one character in her novel Opal Mehta threatening another with the immortal line "I'll tell everyone that in eighth grade you used to wear a My Little Pony sweatshirt to school every day."
  
• A San Francisco-based writer was moved to exclaim "Omigod, that's My Little Pony!" while visiting Iceland. Right around dinnertime, to be specific. And they eat puffins there, too. The bastards!
  
• You have to move quickly (like Seabiscuit!) if you want to cash in on ephemeral internet memes; somewhere, some poor schmoe is stuck with a whole warehouse of "All Your Base" coffee mugs, and he won't sell a single one until the inevitable wave of AYBABTU nostalgia hits about 15 years from now. Our friends at CafePress are on the ball, as usual, and they'll be happy to slap an "OMG!!! Ponies!!!" logo onto any of their usual articles of clothing.
  
• On the other hand, even though it's been nearly 2 full months since /. pulled its ponies stunt, omgonies.com is still just a bare-bones "Coming Soon" page, and omg-ponies.com is an empty WordPress blog. You snooze, you lose, that's all I'm sayin'. Wait much longer, and it'd be like putting up a new "Dancing Hamsters" fanboi page.
  
• Also, a brand new My Little Pony movie is on the way. I'll set a toy pony on my desk, but I think watching a movie about 'em would be just way too much pony, thank you very much.
  
• On a bit more of a tangent, this article is mostly about the weird fad of using live Madagascar hissing cockroaches as jewelry, another one of those 5-minutes-before-the-fall-of-Rome trends we're seeing a lot of lately.
  
  A quote from the article:
  

  
  ''It's encrusted in a pattern of multicolored jewels, and also comes with a silver chain you can clip on to this belt it has which acts like a leash. You pin it to yourself, and the critter can roam around your shoulders and chest unchecked. Hence, it's a roach brooch. . . . I'm still not sure what is to become of Hissy. I am in talks with a friend to give him to her daughter as a pet. Your first thought is: What would a 5-year-old girl want with a cockroach? But then you have to remember the jewelry angle -- it looks like a demented, post-apocalyptic My Little Pony."
  

  
  
• Here's a concise roundup of all things roach-brooch-related, and this very post makes a cameo appearance, down towards the bottom, for the moment, anyway. Hooray for me! Mission Accomplished!
  
• My obligatory conservation / biodiversity item: Here's a list of rare animal breeds indigenous to the UK, including several breeds of horses and ponies (real, live ones, not made of plastic). Among these are the Eriskay Pony and the Exmoor Pony.
  
• And this is 100% utterly unrelated: The latest voting scandal on American Idol. Quite honestly, I just wanted an excuse to stick the phrase "american idol" in here, since that generates lots of page hits and stuff. And I'm sorry, but this isn't exactly a surprise. If you let Rupert Murdoch run your elections, this sort of thing is inevitable.
  
• Updated: Actually I haven't had a single page hit from anyone searching for "american idol". Those people are smarter than I thought, or maybe they turn up their noses at anything that isn't on MySpace, I dunno.
  
• Two Flickr photosets of 100% pony pics.
  
  
• Stop the Presses!!! I just checked, and the pony's underbelly bears a non-Hasbro logo. It's not a real My Little Pony at all, but one of the "Pony Tales" line from Lanard Toys. Despite the big word "INTEGRITY" that flies around the screen at the start of their big Flash presentation, they seem to have gotten in trouble in the past over cloning other companies' products.
  
• Here's a page devoted to exposing Fakie Ponies, which is what I have on my hands here. A cheap made-in-China knockoff, as opposed to an expensive made-in-China original. I'd go complain to my not-to-be-named coworker, but they always say to never look a gift horse in the mouth. Which is impossible, incidentally, since its mouth doesn't open.
  
• But not all is lost: Although they'll never be real ponies, Lanard products do have their place in the overall pony ecosystem. Seems they make great organ donors, well, hair donors, if you're restoring or customizing your Real MLP Pony.
  
• Lanard ponies do have their fans, though, as evidenced by this forum thread. Things get a little testy as the discussion continues. Seriously.
  

You may not believe this, but this pony has a special voice that only I can hear, and on occasion it whispers softly to me. Unfortunately I seem to have acquired a mutant-clone insane neocon wingnut pony, and it's convinced me, in its cute cuddly-wuddly way, to pledge eternal warfare against the infidel Care Bear evildoers. So if I ever come across any, it's going to be all-out "Shock and Awe" time, for sure. And don't even get me started about the Axis of Weebles. tags: my little pony ponies

Greetings, NSA Spookbots!

I'd started writing an outraged post about the latest NSA spookiness, but didn't quite get it polished off before RL work intervened, and I had to go dink around with some Linux Itanium makefiles for the umpteenth time. Which as it turns out was a good thing; I reread what I'd written, and I clearly needed to chill out a little. Simply swearing at the bastards won't help, even if they are reading this -- and I have to assume they are. I don't mean an actual person reading this, of course -- I'm merely a multicellular microbe in the TTLB ecosystem, after all -- but rather a bot scraping the net for keywords. I'd hate for the poor little bot to go away without any keyword hits whatsoever, so here are a few, just off the top of my head:
Osama, Plutonium, Fallujah, 9/11, Anthrax, Zarqawi, Saddam, Hijacking, Kerry, Subway, Sarin, Reactor, Syria, WMD, Pipeline, Jihad, Ahmadinejad, Yellowcake, Bush, Cheney, Oil, Afghanistan, Jesus, Rapture, Chechnya, Armageddon, Sheehan, Baghdad

I'll structure this as one of my usual bullet-point lists. I find bullet-point lists to be oddly calming. If you can just set everything down in a tidy structured list, the world can't have gone completely off its nut. It's like aromatherapy for engineers, I guess. The Jameson is helping a little as well, but not nearly enough. Some links I came across, along with various points as they occur to me.

• We'll start out with the original USA Today story. I have to wonder how other big media types feel right now, having been scooped by USA Today? They also had a very good editorial accompanying the main article, which ended in the rather chilling line "The White House declined to provide an opposing view to this editorial.".
  
• One of the best stories I've seen about the reaction to the news, from the San Jose Mercury News. Looks like Dubya's just scared the living daylights out of everyone in Silicon Valley, especially since so many tech workers come from overseas and routinely make international calls, things that the NSA's data mining operation would be sure to zero in on.
  
• The liberal blogosphere is having a cow, of course. Here are some reactions at DailyKos, Unclaimed Territory, Firedoglake (also here). Not much at Wonkette that I can see. But as soon as one of the key figures wears something interesting, I'm sure they'll be right on it.
  
• A long piece at The Moderate Voice rounding up today's MSM hubbub.
  
• A good Seattle Times backgrounder on exactly what "social-networking analysis" is all about.
  
• One of the pieces mentioned in the last item is a great Eugene Robinson piece at the WaPo. He boils it down to a few very simple points, the biggest being that whether or not the program is technically legal, Bush flat out lied to us about it. Looked us in the eye, all sincere and everything, and lied to us.
  
• I'm proud to say I'm a Qwest customer. I never thought I'd say that. Their broadband offerings are a little behind the times compared to what Verizon offers (Verizon serves the 'burbs here in PDX), and their record on fixing things quickly and correctly isn't the best, although it's vastly improved over what it was 6-7 years ago. But I can still call up the in-laws and talk smack about Our Glorious Leader, and he won't ever know about it. Thank you, Qwest!
  
• As I've said before, it's inconceivable that this administration would give itself this kind of power, and accumulate this much information, and then not seek to abuse it for purely partisan ends. They insist all of their domestic spying (that we know about) is done strictly against "enemies" of the country, and I expect they genuinely believe that's what they're doing. I'm sure they feel they have the best of intentions. But then, conservative types are always lecturing us on how anyone who disagrees with the president is a freedom-hating evildoer. So we can assume the NSA and its Bushevik masters are using an extremely broad definition of "enemy".
  
• If the program really is constitutional, which they keep telling us it is, why aren't they sharing this info with law enforcement? Surely that would be a fantastic idea, one that nobody could possibly oppose. I mean, assuming the NSA program is legal.
  
• A piece from the 9th, just before the latest story broke, speculating that the Hayden nomination was Karl Rove's idea. The piece argues that Karl and friends think domestic surveillance is a great wedge issue to use against Democrats in November, and Hayden was nominated to get the issue back on the front burner again. Possibly they're rethinking that now. Or possibly not. I really have no idea how this is going to play in Peoria. I no longer pretend to have even the foggiest clue about how those people think. Maybe they'll absolutely love it, and Dubya's numbers will be back over 50 the next time they run a poll. They voted for the guy twice, so I'm not sure there's any limit to the amount of BS they're willing to believe.
  
• Some people have even speculated that Bush & Co. deliberately leaked the story, for the reasons given in the last item. I don't know what to think about that, but I certainly wouldn't put it past them.
  
• I also doubt the latest news will change the minds of any of the 31-percenters out there. They drank the Kool-Aid^TM a long time ago. Patiently telling them about the latest outrage won't help matters; they love the guy precisely because they assume he is doing this sort of thing, and they wish he'd do a lot more of it.
  
• I'd like to go out on a limb and offer a prediction: By this time next week, they'll trot Cheney out to do his usual routine, questioning the loyalty and patriotism of anyone who isn't thrilled about being spied on. I'm betting he'll surface on one of the weekend talking head shows, or if not that, a staged photo op in front of cheering soldiers.
  
• I have to say this is a bad time to be a pessimist, which I am, because every time I think I'm finally pessimistic enough, something else bad happens. But here's my pessimistic view of how this is going to play out. Of course nothing will change as a result of the latest disclosure. Congress won't provide any meaningful oversight. Hayden will be confirmed, in a grotesque rerun of the Alito charade. (Surely he has a photogenic wife who's willing to burst into tears at key moments in the hearings.) We're seeing a few quotes from Congressfolk indicating they're feeling a tad more riled than usual, but nothing will come of it. In the end, they'll just end up legalizing whatever Bush is up to, anyway. The D's will run away from the issue at top speed, like they did with the last wiretapping scandal, and Feingold's censure motion, and all the other issues that have come down the pipe in the last 5 years.
  
• Updated: Well, we have our answer, at least our initial answer, on the public reaction to the latest NSA news. They absolutely love it. Or at least that's what they say when asked about it over the phone. I was afraid this was going to happen. People just don't care about their basic civil liberties anymore. The bastards. The Bill of Rights would never pass in this country if we put it up for a vote.
  

You know, I'm not actually feeling any better. But at least the solution is obvious, as hard as it may be to achieve. ITMFA!

tags: nsa surveillance spying bush cheney hayden impeachment itmfa

Mmmm... Ortolans... (Mmmm!?)

In the previous post, I made a rather rash comment to the effect that I'd be willing to eat just about anything, if I thought it might taste good. Let me qualify that, please: I do firmly draw the line at chowing down on endangered species, in case you were wondering, or getting ready to picket me, or something.

I mention this because while I was rifling through some old cookbooks full of (mostly) icky food while writing that last post, I came across a real gem. This recipe comes from an old, fussy 1972 cookbook of mine, "Great Classic Recipes of Europe", which combines two of this blog's continuing fixations: Weird food, and cute wildlife. I am referring, of course, to "Ballotine de Faisan Villeneuvoise Flanquee d'Ortolans" (the book omitted any vowel accent marks in the name -- it's not my fault!) , which the book translates as "Pheasant Presented in Sausage Form, Flanked with Game Birds", proving again that everything sounds tastier in French. But the English translation is inaccurate, in that not just any old "game birds" will suffice. No, this recipe calls for ortolans, small birds which are both a legendary French delicacy, and a highly endangered species. A footnote in the recipe explains that ortolans are "Tiny birds (buntings) much prized as delicacies in Europe. Gourmet stores sometimes carry the small birds canned, or halves of very small Cornish game hens could be used as a substitute". So I think the authors were sort of aware the birds were scarce even in 1972, but failed to grasp the environmental implications of that fact. I'm not going to reproduce the recipe in full here, because it's exceedingly complex, and 95% of it concerns the tedious preparation of the pheasant ballotine, which doesn't really concern us right now. Among the 36(!) ingredients, we require 6 ortolans, and 6 pastry shells. The relevant instructions are simply: "Braise ortolans 5 minutes in fat. Salt and arrange them in individual flaky pastry tart shells".

That cookbook isn't the only book I've got that mentions ortolans. They also appear in a fascinating 1834 natural history volume titled System of Natural History (although later editions are known as The Naturalist's Library, and the book's more commonly known by that name), compiled by one Augustus Addison Gould. The University of Michigan has a searchable online version of the book here, with images of the original text's pages. Here's what the book has to say about ortolans:

THE ORTOLAN ²
Is somewhat less than the yellow-hammer. The plumage on the upper parts is brownish chestnut, mixed with black; the under parts are pale rufous. These birds are common in France and Italy, but are not found in England. They are caught in numbers to fatten for the table. This is done by including them in a dark room, and feeding them with oats and millet. By this process they become so fat that they would die from that cause alone, were they not killed for sale. In this state they will sometimes weigh three ounces, and are accounted the most luxurious repast of the epicure, being, as it were, one lump of exquisite fat.

² Emberiza hortulana, LIN.

A few more E. hortulana items:

• In case you missed it in the Wikipedia article I linked to above, ortolans were served in the traditional style as part of Francois Mitterand's last meal.
  
• Photos of ortolans in the wild, taken by a birder in the UK.
  
• A page (in French) with instructions on how to capture ortolans in the wild and fatten them up for the table.
  
• An allegedly Italian recipe in Japanese for "risotto dell ortolan". If the photo is correct, I don't see an actual bird in the dish, but maybe it's under the rice or something.
  
• A project on ortolan conservation in Norway.
  
• And a paper by Finnish researchers noting a crash in the ortolan population [PDF] in southern Finland, due to agricultural development and the resulting loss of habitat. You'd think you'd see the habitat loss argument being advanced as an excuse by militant ortolan devotees, but they just don't even bother trying to explain themselves.
  
• Recipe-For.com has several recipes for ortolans, beginning with Broiled Ortolans in Papers. Click the "Fried Ortolans" link to go on to the next one, a tasty sounding concoction with bacon and a white wine sauce. And so on.
  

Like I said, I'm not actually in favor of eating these poor little creatures, even if I'm providing recipes. They're strictly for you to marvel at, ok? Eating ortolans is one of those things people indulge in when they have far too much money and not a clue about how to enjoy life. Sort of like caviar, Havana cigars, and luxury SUVs. Blech. But the ortolan phenomenon is still fascinating to me. It's a mystery how, of all the species of tiny birds out there, this one gets singled out as an ultra-high-end delicacy. And it's amazing how, once something like this gets going, it feeds on itself, and continues unchanged for centuries. It doesn't translate into afficionados switching to other tiny helpless songbirds when the ortolan becomes scarce. Passing laws against the practice has no effect, since ortolanophagy is typically restricted to the rich and powerful, people who can and regularly do ignore the law with impunity (which is why the bird's probably doomed in the long term). No doubt that's the real thrill for a lot of ortolan-munchers. And even if the birds weren't being captured from the wild, and they weren't endangered, the traditional force-feeding process would still be unbearably cruel. And on top of everything else, the Mitterand link (above) notes that many first time ortolan diners are overcome with nausea, which suggests people don't eat the birds for the taste. It's just one fresh horror after another here. This is true decadence in the Roman style, and not in a good way. No, this is 5-minutes-before-the-fall-of-the-Empire, profoundly pessimistic, joyless decadence. The nihilist's last meal, sucking the last bitter juice out of the world, leaving nothing behind but an empty husk, and not caring a whit about it. A cullinary "Après moi, le déluge".

Compared to that, grinding up rhino horns as an aphrodisiac seems almost civilized. Almost.

Linkage: "Ortolan Buntings, Qatar" at 10,000 Birds

tags: ortolans environment nature food