2666: A Mildly Belated Milestone

So I'd like to bid a hearty welcome to visitor #2666, who arrived here a mere 3 days too late for the big 6/6/06 festivities. I think I forgot to mention that I was trying to run through the Seven Deadly Sins on the 6th, trying to complete the set within 24 hours. Quite an oversight; it was probably the Sloth part acting up. Sloth was pretty easy, really. As for the others:

Gluttony

Well, for lunch I wandered up the the Rogue brewpub and had a large Kobe beef burger smothered in bleu cheese and bacon, with fries, and a couple of beers. I could have picked out something even more expensive, but a Rogue burger was exactly what I wanted at the time, so that's what I did. As a bonus, there was no small amount of Sloth afterwards. And if we're going to read the Old Testament literally -- which is official government policy these days, so we'd better if we know what's good for us -- I seem to recall some prohibitions on eating pork, and on serving meat with dairy products. So I get a little extra credit for that, since I'm the one awarding the points here.

Envy

While I was walking to work in the morning, I couldn't help but notice a beautiful white Porsche 356 parked by the curb, and almost blundered out into traffic while I was staring at it. I wasn't feeing especially resentful towards the car's owner the way I would've if it'd been any other sort of Porsche. You know, slimy lawyer, trophy wife, coke habit, bad combover, etcetera. But there was still that lingering feeling that someone had lucked out, and it wasn't me, and the universe was terribly unfair. I didn't vandalize the car, and I didn't hang around the vehicle until the owner returned and lecture him (or her) about global warming, the way some Portlanders would. But I think this still probably counts as envy, of a sort.

Greed

On my 6/6 post, I did mention something about buying a pile of heavy metal CDs for the occasion, even though I'm not the world's hugest metal fan. I didn't originally plan to buy five CDs, but the "aww, just one more" impulse kept kicking in, which is textbook greed for ya. In this day and age, it seems decadent to buy music on physical media, and buying a whole CD when you haven't heard all the songs on it now seems risky and extravagant. I mention this part because it seems to me that it's somehow more "sinful" to be greedy like this over an idle impulse buy than it is over something you know you'll treasure forever. Maybe this is gluttony, not greed, I dunno. I was never 100% clear on the distinction here. But either way, I get extra points here too, because of the heavy metal and all.

Wrath

I'm not an especially wrathful person most of the time, but there was a little incident on the 6th that let me check this one off. It may have been a pure coincidence, but on that day this humble blog got a visitor from SCO's UK office. I mean, it can't possibly be a day devoted to ultimate evil unless SCO's involved somehow. This person must've read a post of mine over at the Yahoo! SCOX board, clicked on my profile to try to learn more about me, and found the link to this blog from there. That kind of pissed me off, so I immediately posted to the SCOX board again, reporting the incident and saying I was thinking about posting some porn here in hopes of getting this person fired for visiting that sort of website on company time. I didn't actually do it, because this is not that sort of website, but it was fun to think about. And it was certainly fun to imagine scaring the snot out of one of Darl McBride's lesser minions.

Lust

Did I mention this is not that sort of website? Well, it isn't. Because I said so. Also, there's such a thing as too much sharing, despite what the kids on MySpace might lead you to believe. Especially when the flaming eye of Ft. Meade is watching.

Pride

Well, duh, I mean, anybody with a personal blog is guilty of this to some extent. Unless you think your random notions deserve a global audience, why bother? In one 6/6 post on the aforementioned Y! board, I encouraged people to visit here so I could hit 2666 visitors on the 6th. That would've been kind of cool, no doubt about that, but there's also an obvious element of vanity and neediness. I mean, there's no reason to really care about that kind of thing, one way or the other, is there? But it's really hard not to. I freely admit that. And when I finally did hit the magic number, the hit came from a newly added link to this blog. So there. Ha. I still win. Yay for me. Oh, and I just got my first visitor from Luxembourg (that I know of), which is something. So I guess you can either feel bad about feeling good, or you can embrace it. Maybe it's time someone founded a "pride pride" movement, slogan "I'm proud, and I'm proud".

Even More Sloth

Ok, for the sake of completeness, I probably could've worked harder at the office than I did, and I could've gotten to work a bit earlier, and answered emails more promptly. I mean, if I'd wanted to. But it wasn't my fault -- the Man was making me work on a holiday, after all.

For a better treatment of the subject, you might enjoy Dan Savage's book Skipping Towards Gomorrah, in which he sets out to, yes, commit all seven deadly sins, with an entire chapter devoted to each. Chock full of fundie-bashing, highly entertaining, and highly recommended.

If you really want to see serious wrath and envy in action, you can't go wrong with the blog Merche The Reject, which I stumbled across as yet another of those "Next Blog" Blogspot referrer pages. The whole blog is devoted to bashing a Portuguese celebrity named Merche Romero. I have no idea what Ms. Romero did to incur this kind of anger, but clearly either she, or the blog's author, has a lot to answer for, and I'm not sure which of the two it is. It's also clear that by comparison I'm a total 3rd-rate piker in the wrath and envy department, which is fine, really.

Some Flowers, Etc.

A user comment (below) asserts this is a Rose of Sharon, I think specifically the Hypericum calycinum variety. Whatever it is, there are quite a few of them growing wild, or semi-wild, in Portland's Washington Park, down near the lower reservoir.




Meyer lemon blossoms.




A vinca (a.k.a. periwinkle). I actually didn't realize they were the same thing until just now. This one is from somewhere along SW Lincoln, I think.




A yellow iris at the corner of one of the Plaza Blocks, downtown.

Ok, so I'm trying to recreate a post Blogger ate yesterday. Seems like when I get a rare bit of free time to write anything here, Blogger goes down for "maintenance" yet again. I've actually got a whole list of topics written down, but I'd like to get this one out of the way first. I'm just stubborn that way.

Outage Outrage

Ok, this is the second day in a row that Blogger's been flaking out with technical difficulties. Snarl! This time it lost a very nice post I was working on, with flowers and everything. Not good, guys.

But my purpose here isn't to complain. Honest. It's to see if posting by email works any better than normal posting right now. So if you don't see this post, let me know and I'll complain to Management about it.

<B>updated:</B> ok, this message has bounced twice now. Blogspot withdrawal! Angry fist!!!
Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless handheld

Today's Template Tweakage

I've tweaked the blog template so that sections within the Links sidebar now expand and collapse, using some bits of CSS and JavaScript based on stuff I scrounged up from somewhere on the net. It's called code reuse. It's a great, time-honored engineering practice, dammit.

Unfortunately you still have to edit the whole blog damn template whenever you want to add or remove anything from the links section, which is tres silly. That may be tougher to solve. We'll see...

666: Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia

C'mon, you didn't really think I'd get through today without posting about today's date, didja? With a nym like mine, it just wouldn't be right to neglect the, uh, blessed occasion. Even if the nym's origins were sort of pseudorandom at first (see the link on my profile if you care.)

The fun word in this post's title is simply the fear of the number 666, as noted here. And some people really are afraid of it. If you take all that Revelations crap literally, it's just supposed to be the number of the beast, which is the number of a man, or something. It's not 100% clear what this means, since we're reading some random person's 2000 year old, multiply (and poorly) translated, fictional, bipolar blatherings. But the verse in question didn't say anything about the date being accursed, or tell believers to panic if something rings up as $6.66 at the grocery store. But people do anyway, because they're superstitious, poorly educated, ignorant, gullible, and stupid.

One possibility that's occurred to me is that the number just refers to the Romans generally. Roman numerals would've seemed weird and alien to the locals in Judaea at the time, so using them to represent the Romans themselves isn't a big stretch, sort of like how the French sometimes call the English "rosbifs" (roast beefs) due to their, um, distinctive eating habits. 666 in Roman numerals is DCLXVI, which uses each numeral symbol once, other than M. I've never seen this discussed anywhere, probably because it's a bit on the mundane side, and there's no fancy math to play around with. On the other hand, here I explain how to derive the number 666 from the string "George Walker Bush".

A few more 666 links

• Seeing the Forest has a piece about the wingnuts going nuts. Actually today it's mostly not them freaking out, it's us making fun of them. Which is ok, of course, because fundies are evil and they deserve it.
  
• The Sydney Morning Herald also pokes fun at the fundies. Somebody has to do it, and it's safer if there's a huge ocean between you and them.
  
• The local paper in Austin, TX, also has a funny article about the date, which is pretty brave. Of course, people from the rest of the state already know everyone in Austin is going to hell, so this latest business won't come as much of a surprise.
  
• A fun little blog posting about the date.
  
• There's a lively discussion over at UltimateGuitar.com. If you decide to join in, it's wise to be aware that Cradle of Filth is black metal, not death metal. This has already tripped up at least one hapless poster, to his infinite sorrow.
  
• A nice rant over at Tholos of Athena titled Christian Psychopaths.
  
• There's a new "Left Behind" book out today, this one titled "The Rapture". And in another sign of the apocalypse, Ann Coulter's new book is out today as well. Yech.
  
• A columnist at the Palm Beach Post has an amusing post about the date as well, with lots of fun Photoshopped photos. Don't miss the comments thread while you're there.
  
• In other news from the infantile, superstitious end of the religious world (i.e. most of it), the woman who "discovered" an image of the Virgin Mary on her cheese sandwich has a new tattoo of the sandwich. I guess because it was her big 15 minutes, and because she sold the original to an online casino.
  
• SFGate's Culture Blog makes fun of the whole fad of seeing Jesus or Mary on unlikely objects. No surprise here. It's the culture blog in the San Francisco newspaper. You were expecting what, exactly? But they do link to a bunch of stories about instances of the fad. It really does happen, and people really are like that. Making fun of them is almost too easy. Anyway, now you can buy a pan so you can make pancakes, omelets, or whatever with Jesus images on 'em, as many as you like, whenever you want. I'd call that a real advance in technology.
  
• And a fascinating look at Ave Maria, the new theocratic village in Florida planned out by Tom Monaghan, the Domino's Pizza creepozoid. The author looks at the town plans from an urban design perspective, and the closer you look, the more hair-raising it gets.
  

I'm going to run by the local record shop later today and buy some offensive CDs. It seems appropriate. I'll either update this post later or compose a new one, whichever seems more likely to boost my sitemeter hits up to the 2666 mark today. :)

tags: 666 fundies antichrist rapture bush hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia

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Updated: Ok, I picked up a pile of heavy metal CDs, including Slayer's classic Reign of Blood, which I inexplicably did not own yet. I've actually never been a huge metal fan, but it just seemed appropriate today.

I've been informed that today is a huge event in Hell, Michigan. Which I guess is true considering the name and all. But it's the upper Midwest, so somehow they'll find a way to make the whole thing wholesome and family-friendly. I'm not sure they really get it. If there was, say, a Hell, Louisiana, then we might really be on to something.

I already mentioned Ann Coulter's new book. There's a great post about it over at Pharyngula:

Coulter: "Liberals subscribe to Darwinism not because it's science, which they hate, but out of some wishful thinking. Darwinism lets them off the hook morally."

Pharyngula: "Actually, I use the Nernst equation to justify my immoral behavior. I reserve Darwinism for those nights I need an excuse to go dancing."

Slightly off the beaten path, downtown

Here's one of Portland's (thankfully) rare pedestrian underpasses. This is how you're supposed to get across busy SW Arthur St. / Kelly Ave., next to the Naito Pkwy. overpass, and near the Ross Island Bridge.

I assume the similar portal on the other side of the street (which you can see in the background) connects directly to this one. But I don't actually know that from firsthand experience. I've never actually gone down there, and I think I can live a long and happy life without ever giving it a try. For all I know, it might be fabulous and exciting down there, a maze of twisty little passages all alike, full of treasure and magical delights. But I wouldn't bet on it. I've never seen a single other person use it, and descending into the dank recesses of the earth just to cross the freakin' street is not my idea of a good time. Darting through traffic, Frogger-style, is probably safer. [Legal disclaimer: Don't!]

There's a crosswalk one block to the west at 1st Avenue, but I don't think you can walk along that side of Arthur very easily, what with all the eastbound bridge traffic turning right onto the Naito ramp. So if you don't want to spelunk, and you don't want to sprint for your life, your third bet, if you really, truly, sincerely need to get across the street here, is to take the crosswalk, go south a couple more blocks on 1st and then use the rickety pedestrian skybridge over Naito, and then cut north again once you're across. And voila, you've arrived, finally. Did I mention the place you've just arrived at is often called the Bermuda Triangle?

Suppose now you've wandered around the Triangle and seen and done everything there is to do there. Which is basically to glance at the handful of somewhat ramshackle Victorian houses, and wander the grounds of the Naturopathic College. (You think walking here was hard? See the college's valiant attempt at giving driving directions here. Getting back out of the Triangle is even harder.) If you look south, you'll see more gingerbread Victorians, not quite as run down, and you might want to go have a look, if that's your thing. But wandering over there is easier said than done, and it's not easily said. The right way to do it is to go back over the skybridge, go south on 1st again, and then take the scary pedestrian underpass under Naito. And voila, you're there, finally. Or you could just ride the #43 bus through the vehicle underpass. That would be easier. There's also a wrong way, involving SW Hood Avenue where it passes under the bridge ramps, but I'm not going to describe that in detail, just in case anyone's thinking about trying it. Just don't, ok?

In the near future you'll also be able to watch our shiny new aerial tram from your Triangle vantage point. But don't bother trying to walk to either end of it to get on board, because you won't be able to. Sure, there's talk of yet another pedestrian skybridge, this time over I-5, which you'd get to by crossing the first skybridge, taking the second underpass I mentioned, walking a couple of blocks, and dodging even more bridge traffic. They say they're building it to help the beleaguered residents of this area, so can they get to the lower tram terminal, and beyond it the $himmering tower$ of $outh Waterfrontland (a.k.a. the Shining City on a Floodplain). But I'll believe it when I see it. The thing was tossed in purely as a sop to the local neighborhood association when the powers that be were ramming the tram through the city council (ouch!), and I have this weird funny feeling the "value engineering" process will begin with the skybridge if the tram goes any further over budget. And to get to the uphill end of the tram line, your best bet would be to hop back on the bus, go downtown, and hop on a different bus that goes to OHSU. Or just call an ambulance. They'll even send the Life Flight helicopter if you're convincing enough. That tends to be kind of painful, so it's wise to be 100% sure ahead of time that you really do want to go up the hill that badly.

There used to be a similar underpass under Naito (then Front Ave.) right downtown many years ago. My mom would never let us go through it, no matter how much I begged, and then they put a grate over it and closed it, and now it's gone like it was never there. Now I don't even know where it was, exactly. I've looked, and there's no sign of it. They might have filled it in, but I bet they just bricked up the ends and left it for future archeologists to scratch their heads over, because that would be cheaper.



This next photo is of a funny parking sign on SW Baker St., between Water Ave. and Corbett Ave., a couple of blocks east of the last photo. The city sure does love its parking regulations. Does the city really send someone by every few hours to check that nobody's abusing these choice parking spots? Somehow that wouldn't surprise me.

You probably didn't realize downtown Portland has a Baker Street. It's the rutted little dirt road on the left side of the picture, and it runs for exactly one block, near where I-5 and I-405 meet up. This fair boulevard belongs to a part of the city's street grid where east-west streets are mostly named for Union generals from the Civil War, including Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, Hooker (giggle), and Meade. I don't think they sell a lot of houses to Southerners in this part of town. We also have Grant, Sherman, and Baker counties in this state, if that gives you any clue which side we were on back in 1861. Gen. Edward D. Baker was also the first US Senator from Oregon and a close friend of Abraham Lincoln, and died at Ball's Bluff early on in the war. I've read somewhere that he was the only sitting member of Congress ever to die in combat. That's something we'll surely never see ever again, now that the chickenhawks rule the roost. Actual warfare, the dangerous kind, is now an honor reserved strictly for the toiling classes. Our wise and noble leaders are exceedingly clear on this point. Letting a blood relative of anyone rich or powerful go into harm's way just wouldn't be natural. And besides, in 21st Century America, daydreaming about how fantastic the next couple of wars will be is a full time job, and somebody's got to do it.

Updated: I'm reliably informed by Snyder's "Portland Names and Neighborhoods" that Baker St. is actually named after William W. Baker & Sons, an obscure local magazine publishing firm of the mid-1880's. Various Baker family members lived in the area of what's now Baker St. Baker County, however, is named after the general I was just going on about. So apparently this city does an even worse job at memorials than I thought.




Couple of additional pictures of the area. The first is of the old Greyhound bus garage down in the gully at Corbett Ave. & Sheridan St. There's a sign on the building saying it's going to be the home of a shiny new electrical substation. Well, sort of new -- I gather it'll replace the existing substation down near RiverPlace, which is inconveniently located on some rather valuable real estate. The current substation is maybe 20 years old, tops, as it replaced the original substation that dated back to when the area was a PGE electrical & steam plant. Someday someone will want to build fancy condos where the Greyhound building is now, and then the substation will have to move again. Anyway, I call dibs on the cool wheel design bits on either side of the Greyhound logo.



The other photo is looking north & downhill from the corner of Arthur St. and Water Avenue. You can see the roof of the Greyhound building down the hill, a tiny bit of Baker St., some I-5 ramps, and the rising towers of the Strand condos in the distance, just across the street from the existing substation.

Ishaqi

The first I heard about the Ishaqi incident was the media informing us the soldiers involved had been cleared of any wrongdoing, therefore it's completely unlike what went on in Haditha. The spin we're getting is basically: Sure, a bunch of civilians died, but the soldiers were playing by the rules of engagement, so everything's totally ok. Apparently it's fine to kill all the civilians you like, so long as you do it strictly by the book.

Funny how the Iraqis, including the new government, don't see things quite the same way. This seems to perplex a lot of people here in the States. Suppose you asked them how they would feel if a powerful foreign army occupied this country. Suppose none of that army's soldiers even spoke our language, much less knew anything about our culture, they had zero respect for us, thought we all looked alike, treated us like cattle, and they were given absolute free rein to kill US citizens according to whatever rulebook they felt like obeying that day. Anyone, any time, anywhere. Chances are that people wouldn't be exactly thrilled about the whole situation. And yet people can't seem to form any kind of clear idea about how the Iraqis might see us when we behave -- or even just appear to behave -- that way.

We will, no doubt, hear the standard "war is hell" argument about this incident. They'll tell us that it was unavoidable, and any further efforts to avoid harming civilians would amount to tying the troops' hands behind their backs, like "the politicians" supposedly did in Vietnam. In a way, there's a point here: You can't sanitize war. Attempting to do so may even be counterproductive. If the public thinks modern warfare is just a big videogame, like after the original Gulf War and Kosovo, and they're fed antiseptic phrases like "collateral damage", and never shown photos of what that actually means in real life, they're not going to have the same mental barrier to rushing into war as a nation that expects an inconclusive bloodbath. They won't, for instance, demand really conclusive proof about WMDs before diving into a war, and won't ask tough questions about postwar plans or exit strategies.

Another bit of spin we'll hear a lot in the near future is conservatives insisting (as they always do) that liberals are happy every time bad Iraq news comes out. Which is a vile accusation, and really bizarre if you think about it. I'm a card-carrying liberal, so I think I can speak with some authority here: I'm alarmed and disgusted, and not at all happy. That should just be common sense. Why is that so hard to understand? The wingnuts don't, because they don't want to understand. They've built up an elaborate fantasyland of stereotypes and crazy notions over the years, and that's all they want to hear about. When a story like Ishaqi pops up, I always hope it turns out not to be true. But over the last few years, somehow things always keep turning out to be true, things I never would have imagined this country would sink to. And I have a feeling we haven't hit bottom just yet, either.

tags: iraq ishaqi haditha

This blog has wings!

This is a picture of this humble blog, created with a tool called "Websites as Graphs", which I learned about here via ORblogs+Bloglines. (Bloglines is neat-o-riffic.)

The chunk on the upper right-hand side is obviously the head, with a neck and a body to the left, and a pair of very obvious wings. Clearly this blog is either a sleek migratory bird, or a star cruiser. Either one would be fine. Savor the image -- it's about the only time you'll encounter anything on this blog heading off to the right.

More images of other websites can be found on this Flickr page, but it's even more fun to just drop an url into the tool yourself; watching it run is half the excitement.

If you look at my del.icio.us sidebar, you might notice I've been bookmarking a lot of graph theory and Web 2.0 stuff lately, including a lot of OPML and XOXO stuff. Just some ideas I'm kicking around, and I'm not sure where it's all headed, if anywhere. If anything fun ever comes of it all, you might read about it here first, or not.

Thursday Market

Here's yet another sign that summer's just around the corner, despite what the weather might lead you to believe. The Portland Farmers Market began its thursday forays into Yuppiestan (a.k.a. Pugtopia, a.k.a. the Pearl District) yesterday. The locals annoy the hell out of me, but the market's close to the office, so I keep going back. Oh, and did I mention yesterday was also First Thursday as well? Jack Bogdanski has a short, curmudgeonly bit about yesterday's, um, art extravaganza. He's basically the local blogoverse's grumpy old guy who's against everything new, dammit, and he's overly fond of conspiracy theories, but he can be fun to read, and he's a rare break from the city's usual shiny-happy-people boosterism.



Anyway, fresh fruit season's only just begun, but local strawberries are starting to show up now, and I'm willing to put up with a lot if there's fresh fruit involved. Mmmm.... Strawberries...



As an extra bonus feature, here's a broken window in an empty building in the Pearl. The building was recently vacated by an auto repair business that had been there long before the area became all ritzy and trend-o-licious. Now the building's up for sale or lease, and I expect that before long we'll see a nice new wine and cheese shop, or maybe another doggie day spa. Or maybe they'll just tear the building out and put in a high-end condo tower at taxpayer expense, and then put in the doggie day spa. Goodness knows we need more of those. The building behind it is also vacant at the moment, so maybe that's where the inevitable tapas-n-cocktails bar will go.

a squirrel

Permit me to try to convince you this is an artistic photo of a squirrel, not merely a badly shot, blurry one. It's clear to me, in retrospect, that I was subconsciously aiming for precisely the effects you see here. The photo conveys a strong feeling of rapid, jittery motion, putting the viewer in touch with the hyperkinetic essence of squirrel-ness. The viewer perceives the inner squirrel in this image (and not in the icky-roadkill-photo sense, fortunately). So in that regard we have to consider this image a resounding triumph.

The bidding starts at $500.

Haditha

If you read just one story about what happened in Haditha, it should be the Washington Post's article "In Haditha, Memories of a Massacre", by Ellen Knickmeyer. As the Haditha situation plays out, we're going to see the usual talking heads going on about chains of command and rules of engagement, quibbling over each comma and semicolon in the applicable rules and regulations, and speculating over who knew what, and when. I know this will happen, because it always does. We'd much rather argue over bloodless technicalities and dry legalisms than over right and wrong, so that's what we'll do. After a few 24-hour news cycles of this, we all get numb to the situation, it becomes the "new normal", the media proclaims it stale news, and we can all go back to fluffy celebrity gossip.

The Knickmeyer article is the antidote to this, for a terribly simple reason: It names the victims. They weren't generic "evildoers", fiendish cartoon Arabs with outlandish facial hair and nothing but murder on their minds. They weren't abstract statistics. Each one had a name, and each had a life story. Each of these lives was cut short on November 19th, 2005. In our name, with our tax dollars.

We'll see a lot of the "few bad apples" argument over the next few days and weeks, like we did with Abu Ghraib. And there's a kernel of truth to the argument, in that massacres of civilians are not standard operating procedure. If it was standard practice, we surely would have heard about it before now. The Bad Apple argument is fundamentally a defensive one. It lets the focus stay on alleged rogue elements at the bottom rungs of the chain of command, shielding higher-ups from any responsibility. By demonizing the direct perpetrators, it also lets us avoid the uncomfortable possibility that they were simply ordinary people pushed to the breaking point. We're lucky we'll never know just how many people would behave the same way under those circumstances.

Another thing we'll hear a lot about is the coverup angle. Ever since 1973, the very first thing you learn in journalism school is that it's never the action itself that's important, it's the coverup. It's always all about the coverup. It would be impossible to count all the generic coverup stories hitting the media since 1973, most tagged with the inevitable "-gate" suffix (lesson #2 in journalism school). If the initial scandal is something mundane like fooling around with an intern, or hiding bribe cash in your freezer, sure, go ahead, focus on the coverup if you like. But the lessons of journo school don't hold in this case. Any coverup would just be the panicked reaction of timid bureaucrats. The killings are the real scandal. Period.

If we're going to look at people higher up the military hierarchy (which is highly unlikely), the question shouldn't be how far up the coverup went, but how far up approval of the killings went.

What happens now? I'm a cynic, of course, but I think the answer will be "nothing". Everyone who has the capacity for outrage has been outraged nonstop for years now, and it hasn't helped yet. The 29-percenters out there will offer all sorts of lame excuses for what happened, and hold everyone blameless (except maybe a few token enlisted guys who'll take the fall). They'll harp on the ongoing investigation and demand that we reserve judgment and not dare to form an opinion until... well, until it all blows over, basically. They'll get on TV and explain how the only wrongdoers here are the liberal media types who made the story public, because everything's peachy keen so long as it all stays top secret. We'll also hear the refrain "the insurgents do this all the time", which I guess is supposed to make it all OK. If Zarqawi does it, it's fine for us to do it too, apparently. I guess I've got this crazy, funny, archaic idea that Marines ought to be held to a higher standard than that. I'm just weird that way, I guess.

Some hardcore chickenhawk types will go further and cheerfully approve of the massacre, probably on "they all look alike" or "they're all terrorists" grounds. Yes, they mean all of them are terrorists, and they all deserve the ol' Haditha treatment, especially cute little kids. What, you thought I was exaggerating? See here for more fun examples. I sure hope Shelby Steele and David Usher are happy now. If this isn't the red-blooded savagery they had in mind, I can't imagine what they must have meant. Something even worse, maybe?

Our Glorious Leader, in his cherished role as commander in chief, bears ultimate responsibility for the soldiers' conduct, although he can't actually be court-martialled for it. He's responsible in a formal sense, but he also bears responsibility because he fostered a situation where the ordinary rules don't always apply. Sometimes the Geneva Conventions are applied, and other times they aren't, and no clear guidelines are given about when the rules are really rules. Sometimes they apply, and sometimes they don't, and there's no guidance given so the average grunt can determine which is which. Bush openly scorns the notion of any kind of international standards of basic civilized behavior. He's pushed "terrorism" as the universal loophole, getting you out of any obligation you'd rather not comply with. He's encouraged people to wrongly blame Iraqis, and Muslims in general, for 9/11. If you demonize the "enemy" population, and incite US public opinion against them, atrocities of this kind are inevitable.

tags: bush iraq haditha massacre

100% Fresh PDX Pix

Bachelor's button near SW Moody Ave., near Ross Island Bridge.



Great Blue Heron directly under I-5, taken from Eastbank Esplanade.



Wildflowers near SW Moody.



Blackberry bushes blooming next to Eastbank Esplanade, with downtown in the distance.

Mmm.... Sunshine...

It's sunny outside for once. Too sunny to get any work done, and too sunny to tinker with a post about neocons I've been working on. So here I am, sitting on a park bench along the Eastbank Esplanade, enjoying the sun and moblogging just because I can. What I can't do is post photos from this gadget -- maybe someday I'll figure out a way to get the BB and the camera talking to one another, but it doesn't just happen right out of the box. So technology still has a ways to go. I'll just post some pics later. I'm sure that'll be ok.

Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless handheld

enjoy the silence

Ramble & Rose

This rose lives near SW 4th & Montgomery, in downtown Portland.

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The courts in California have ruled that I would have a right to protect my confidential sources, if I had any. Woohoo!

Bad, bad Apple. Shame on you. Very naughty.

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I occasionally do a Word of the Day thing here (very occasionally), and today you get two for the price of one, and both are Japanese loan words. Chindogu is the art of inventing things that appear to solve everyday problems, but aren't actually useful or practical. Such as a hat with a roll of toilet paper attached, for the convenience of allergy sufferers, for example. There's a whole subculture of people who do this for fun, and I can see how it could be fun. I didn't realize there was such a thing until I recently stumbled across (and bought) a slim 1995 book about the pastime, 101 Unuseless Japanese Inventions: The Art of Chindogu, by the gentleman who originated the art. Fun! For more fun, visit the International Chindogu Society.

Sangaku are geometry problems traditionally presented on tablets in Japanese temples. Never heard of such a thing? You're not alone. I understand they're obscure even in Japan. Here's a site from Japan (in English) devoted to preserving the surviving examples of the art. There's also a book in English about sangaku (which is how I first heard of it), unsurprisingly titled Japanese Temple Geometry Problems. A few college libraries around have it, but it seems there was only a limited print run back in the late 80's, and I haven't been able to find my own copy yet.

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While I'm braindumping about books and linking repeatedly to Amazon, I was at the Multnomah County Library yesterday and found a math book I've been trying to track down for a while, On Quaternions and Octonions, by Derek Smith and John Conway (he of surreal numbers fame), continuing on with my weird recreational math interests. It's fairly technical and I only understand bits and pieces of it right now, but I do like a challenge.

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I don't have a favorite book, or top ten favorite books.
Best beginning: Man's Fate, by Andre Malraux. The book as a whole isn't my favorite, but any book that starts off with an attack by stealthy Chinese assasins can't be all bad.
Best ending: Looking for a Ship, by John McPhee. The book is a look at the state of the US shipping industry. At the end of the book, McPhee's travelling on a rusty cargo ship, and the engine dies, leaving it adrift in the middle of the ocean, end of book.
Most overrated writer: Alice Walker. Strictly for people who like their politics predigested and spoon-fed to them. Sort of a matter of perspective -- if you filed her books under young adult, there would be less cause for criticism. There's a reason Toni Morrison got the Nobel, and Walker didn't.

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Several recent good books about beer and brewing:

• Radical Brewing, by Randy Mosher
  
• The Belgian beer trilogy of Farmhouse Ales, Wild Brews, and Brew Like a Monk.
  
• Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers, by Stephen Buhner. I'm absolutely not a new-agey herbal hippie or anything, but it's a fascinating book, regardless.
  

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The beer in front of me at the moment is a Ruth, from the nice folks at Hair of the Dog Brewing. And right now, at this very moment, I'm eating tater tots. Ok, they're organic tater tots. No foolin'. Along with a little sauce I whipped up out of some yogurt, black pepper, and vast quantities of garlic. Mmmm.... garlic.... I wouldn't go so far as to say tater tots are a regional specialty in this part of the world, since that woudn't be strictly true, but they were invented here. My foodie friends, and I do have them, tend to ignore the contribution of the humble potato to our "regional cuisine" (such as it is). When people blather on about Pacific Northwest food, it's inevitably the usual salmon, blackberries, mushrooms, basically a subset of what the Indians presumably ate (in a very different form) before the pioneers showed up, with some upscale herbs and greens and so forth thrown in to keep the rich Californians happy. This is mostly restaurant food, imagined into existence by people with the very best of intentions. Nobody cooks the stuff at home. It would be nice, to be sure, if we had distinctive, regional, traditional food here, but we don't. The area simply hasn't been settled long enough for that to happen, and for most of that time, food was just something to keep you going while you were out in the cold, damp forest chopping down trees. I don't pretend to have made a thorough study of what people actually do eat, but one theme I've noticed is "Chicken-n-Starch". It's chicken in some form, plus a starch of some kind, with a sauce of some sort. For a long time this meant fried chicken with jojo potatoes. For the uninitiated, jojos are just potato wedges, lightly breaded and then deep-fried. The breading usualy has a little black pepper in it, but they usually aren't all that spicy. They're sort of like jumbo french fries, but they're served with ranch dressing, not ketchup. I don't know why, that's just how it is. You don't see fried chicken and jojos at restaurants very much. You do see them a lot at grocery store deli counters, and little gas station convenience stores out in the middle of nowhere. Although even rural gas stations have embraced the newer chicken-n-starch that's become popular in the last 20 years or so, the chicken teriyaki rice bowl. When moving back here after living in the deep south for a few years, I knew I was back in Oregon when gas stations outside small towns advertised "Gas-Bait-Espresso-Teriyaki". You don't see that sort of thing in rural Georgia, generally speaking. The teriyaki bowl is really simple: Just grilled chicken over rice, with sweetish teriyaki sauce over the top. Sometimes you get veggies too, and maybe a little pink pickled ginger on the side, if the place is trying to be fancy. Sometimes it's called a "bento", which in local terms means the exact same dish served in a rectangular box instead of a round bowl. This wouldn't be called a bento in Japan, but no matter. I think the teriyaki bowl became so popular because a.) it seems like a healthier choice than fried chicken with fried potatoes, which I'm sure is true; and b.) it's nonthreatening, not a big challenge to the palate, and doesn't contain any weird ingredients. It's just chicken-n-starch in a new form. Nobody hates it. How could anyone get worked up about it? It's fine. It'll do. It's the default lunch choice for office worker bees everywhere, myself included. Although I go with the Japanese curry sauce instead of the teriyaki if there's a choice (and usually there isn't). I mean, my foodie chums love to go on about Asian influences, but somehow that always translates into sesame-crusted ahi tuna sashimi, or something along those lines, when the real Asian influence is sitting right in front of them, and they haven't noticed it yet.

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Regional food isn't always an unmixed blessing. The most disgusting and unhealthy thing I've ever eaten was cooked up by a great aunt of mine in Pennsylvania. I forget what she called it, but basically it was white bread soaked in bacon grease and sizzled around in a skillet until it blackened up a little and got nice and carcinogenic. I think there may have been added salt, too, but this was about 20 years ago, so the details are hazy. I remember her saying that everyone used to eat it around those parts, including her late husband, who inexplicably kicked off from a heart attack in his mid-50s. She did use the past tense when talking about it; maybe everyone who ate it on a regular basis had a heart attack in their mid-50's. I probably took a few months off my life just eating it once to be polite. (Thereby proving that politeness sometimes does have a downside.) The most disgusting thing I've ever cooked was an unnamed dish I cobbled up once, quite a few years ago, when I didn't want to go to the grocery store. I've blocked out the complete list of ingredients, but there was corn muffin mix involved, and tomato soup, and a canned vegetable of some kind, layered into a baking dish and baked. Ack! Phbbt! Looking back on it, I assume I must've had a couple of beers before inventing this dish. I tried a bite or two, and my lovely and understanding spouse was willing to at least look directly at the thing (very briefly), and then it went into the fridge, to be disposed of after a decent amount of time had elapsed. My sister still teases me about a little dessert item I made once, long ago, involving minute rice and strawberry jam. But really, it wasn't that bad. It would've been even better if I hadn't bungled the minute rice. I'm a much, much better cook these days, so maybe I'll try it again someday, just for kicks, if I have nothing better to do.

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One of my hopes when I started this blog was that regular exercise would improve my writing. I've looked over some of my recent posts, and it's not time to haul up the Mission Accomplished sign just yet. At least it's exposing certain tics and quirks that keep cropping up again and again.

• Overuse of qualifiers, adverbs, and filler words. I recently caught myself using the word "apparently" twice in the same sentence, which I doubt was strictly necessary. Other favorites include "basically", "probably", "a bit", "kind of", "sort of", "it seems that", and others that don't come to mind immediately. There's no reason to say "I think" in a blog, either.
  
• I'm also prone to long sentences full of commas. I haven't checked yet, but I'm sure there must be style guidelines about how many commas it's reasonable to have in a single sentence.
  
• With all of those complex compound sentences, I can run into trouble making sure that plurals and verb tenses all match up properly. I usually catch this before a post goes live, but not 100% of the time.
  
• The overall effect is that it looks like I'm trying to talk super-fancy, sometimes succeeding, other times not. I could do a better job of avoiding twee-ness sometimes.
  
• I sometimes wonder whether relying on bullet-point lists is a sign of laziness. I've insisted before that it's a proper engineer's way to approach writing, but one peek at the Gettysburg Powerpoint presentation, and my doubts are renewed.
  

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Random philosophy and whatever, basically, mostly inspired by annoying yuppie twits at the grocery store who stand in front of whatever I'm trying to get, mulling over their choices for what seems like an eternity, because every last decision is so damn crucial for these people:

• It's a cliche to say so, but you really do only live once. And for a limited amount of time, too. Those minutes you spent blocking my way in the grocery store are gone, and you'll never get them back. And I won't get mine back either, you bastard.
  
• Exploring the whole "problem space" of life just isn't possible. If you intend to go to a certain restaurant, for example, and it closes forever before you get around to it, it's not the end of the world. You can't eat at all the world's good restaurants, or eat everything there is that's worth eating. So there's really no point in giving yourself a coronary or looking like a complete ass while desperately trying to squeeze every last drop out of life. Because you just can't. Period.
  
• You can do something and have the time of your life (or not), and then move on to something else and never do it again, and it's ok. Really.
  
• There's always a point where, no matter how good something is, you stop enjoying each bite and start just shovelling it in purely out of duty or out of habit. Time to do something else.
  
• Do something to make today be different than every other day of your life. Even if nobody else knows.
  
• Every now and then, when deciding what to eat for lunch, deliberately pick the "wrong" thing, just to remind yourself the sky doesn't fall when (not if) you do.
  
• The actual end of the world is the end of the world, and everything else isn't. And unless you actually die if you choose wrong, it's not a life-or-death decision, now is it?
  

Icy Moons

No, I didn't take these photos, for once. These are pictures of a few of Saturn's moons, taken by Cassini on Saturday, May 21st. The first pic is a nice crescent shot of the moon Rhea. The second is of Enceladus, Saturn's rings, and a second moon not identified by the original image caption. The third image is of the moon Tethys.

tags: saturn cassini rhea enceladus tethys

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.

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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.

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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.

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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".

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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.