Time Barbarians

If you've been reading this blog for any length of time (which you probably haven't), you already know about my weakness for cheesy 80's sword and sorcery movies. And yes, Gentle Reader(s), I've got a new one for you today, one so low-budget and obscure that even I hadn't heard of it until recently. I present to you... Time Barbarians, an entry in the little-known but important subgenre of time-travelling barbarian films.

A scant few online reviews of the film have appeared.
The New York Times sums it up thusly:

When evil wizard Mandrak kills the wife of Doran, the warrior king, he immediately escapes through a time portal to modern day Los Angeles in an attempt to escape Doran's wrath. Doran follows him, however, and now the barbarian stalks Mandrak through a world that he does not understand. He will stop at nothing to have his revenge against the sorcerer, but who know what havoc he will wreck on the fragile city along the way.
Cammila Albertson, All Movie Guide

MK Magazine is less charitable:

“Time Barbarians” is a low-rent “Conan the Barbarian” with all of the compulsory trimmings; swords, sorcery, warriors, forces of evil, crystal amulets, kings, wizards, muscle men and near-naked barbarian babes. In a feeble attempt to pull his film away from the glut of others, that are completely superior to his, director Barmettler threw in a time travel subplot that drives the film from inept to sheer silliness. Scenes of our leading man hulking along the sidewalks of L.A., in a loincloth, getting into fights with a local street gang calling themselves, of course, The Gladiators is a sight to behold, but it certainly doesn’t save this amateurish mess. Barmettler went on to direct “Witchcraft 8.” - Christopher Curry

And At-A-Glance Film Reviews has a longer, even more uncharitable review here, giving the thing one star out of five, and wishing he could give it even fewer than that.

Pshaw, I say. It's clear from all of this that most reviewers just don't get the whole S&S genre. Zero stars out of five? Ridiculous. In a vastly superior ratings system I invented just now, Time Barbarians rates three furry boots out of a possible six. Decent, not a classic perhaps, but good for an evening of fun if you're in the right mood. Which, in the end, is all we can reasonably ask of this type of movie.

A few gems from the film, plus various comments about it:

• Our story begins with a bit of scrolling text, a la Star Wars:
  

  
  "In an ancient time of swords and sorcery lived a remote tribe of barbarians who battled the forces of evil. These barbarians were protected by the power of a crystal amulet
  
  This is a story of their king."
  

  
  
• Ok, that isn't precisely the beginning of the film. The DVD really begins with a typically atrocious intro by that Troma guy. This isn't actually a Troma movie, thank goodness, they just got the video rights to it somehow, same as Wizards of the Demon Sword. So that Lloyd guy really has no business introducing the movie. He annoys the hell out of me. When you see the guy with the bow tie, skip to the next chapter on the disc. As an aside, I'd like to take this opportunity to declare holy jihad against all men who wear bowties. They're a plague on our society, and I hate them all.
  
• The amulet everyone's fighting over is a very ordinary-looking chunk of glass. In a belt, no less, very much not hanging around anyone's neck on a string. Which to me makes it a non-amulet, but hey. I'm not an SCA medieval costume geek, I could be wrong here. Also, other than shooting people forward in time to 1990 L.A., we never see any sign of the awesome powers it's supposed to possess. We don't even get a good explanation of what these powers are. It does have a nice rainbow twinkle visual effect, though, so that's something, I guess.
  
• Right at the beginning, Doran vanquishes a baddie (who keeps hooting insanely throughout the whole fight) but doesn't kill him, a shockingly un-barbaric act that comes back to haunt him later, somewhat. Instead, he takes the baddie's mask and has a bit of swordplay with Lystra, his lady friend. She's pretty handy with a sword, by S&S movie standards, and has the crystal amulet for protection, and thinks he's an evil barbarian. Not smart, Doran. One false move here and this could've been a very short movie.
  
• After the fight and inevitable tender moment, he gives her the amulet, which she was already wearing just a few minutes earlier. She acts all amazed, like she's never seen it before. If we play S&S movie geek and assume it's not just a silly continuity error, perhaps they've just been married for a long time, he's fallen into a giftgiving rut, and she's pretending it's a neat new gift in order to spare his feelings. Hey, I know people like that. It could happen. Usually in this situation people don't say "The power and strength fill me. It is as if I too were a great warrior." like Lystra does, but I'm chalking that up as just a matter of personal style.
  
• A bit of deliciously bad dialogue about that pesky amulet:
  

  
  D: "My vow is to use its power to protect my people. To teach them honesty and bravery. To seek the truth. And if this is done, then the people of Armana shall be protected by its power."
  L: "So you have done. They worship you, doran"
  D: "That is not what i seek, for I am not a god. All i ask is that they listen and follow. Their lives then are their own."
  L: "You become wiser with each day. I am honored to be your queen."
  D: "My grandfather gave me fair warning. And you too must beware its power. For with one thought, one can make great journeys, to lands never seen by thine eyes, a land where one may never return. So dream not of lands other than this, or you shall leave me forever. The power shall make us great warriors. And with it we shall build a new world for our children."
  

  
  
• S&S movies ought to have at least one scene in an idyllic barbarian village. If you don't have enough extras to film one, it's ok to lift some stock footage from some other S&S movie. It's fine. It's all good. You can probably recruit local renaissance faire types to be extras, free of charge, for this sort of thing. Very often they even come with their own props. The village scene in TB is not the best you'll see. It looks like maybe a dozen hippies in a state park campground, which is pretty close to what was actually going on. But that's ok. All you really need to do is suggest a pastoral paradise, and your viewers' overactive imaginations will fill in the blanks. Geek or anti-geek, moviegoers all know the boilerplate S&S plot by heart. You're just giving them basic visual cues, and they'll do the rest.
  
• Doran's buddy Bartaga shows up and wants to go "hunting" with his king, spurning the advances of his would-be lady friend. He and several other characters are skinny, hairy little people with wild eyes. They work pretty well as barbarians, but I can't help thinking they look like junkies desperate for a fix. I mean, this was made in L.A., at the end of the 80's, so that's not much of a stretch here. Bartaga swills from his wineskin every chance he gets, so the druggie angle is almost too easy.
  
• You could probably get a term paper out of the homoerotic angle, too. Let's be honest, every S&S movie has that to some extent. I mean, furry boots and loincloths? And when Doran embarks on his quest to find Mandrak, he expresses his fear for Doran's safety, whining "Who will I hunt with?" in the event Doran dies. It never gets totally overt, of course, because that would make the core audience nervous. There's just enough there to make the movies properly campy. Bartaga & Doran, Mandrak and his #1 henchman. We see more of these relationships than we do Doran and Lystra/Penny, and these guys bicker like old married couples. I'm not up on the latest academic phraseology or anything, but it's obvious what's going on under the hood here. Beyond that, well, write your own damn term paper, already, don't expect me to do all the heavy lifting for you. Sheesh.
  
• Doran & Bartaga are wandering through the forest, bickering, when suddenly the Gatalite bandits (the bad barbarians) attack! There's a big swordfight with half a dozen bandits or so, including one female bandit. The crazy hooting guy is back, he's a bandit leader. Doran ko'd, so B. fights the other guys, and hooting guy kills him.
  
  The bandits' lair: fog, skulls on sticks, but looks like one of the other areas in the same campsite we saw before.
  
  The lair sequence goes on and on. Yawn. The Gatalites decide to sacrifice him to Moltar, their god of the underworld. They tie Doran up, he chats with a fellow inmate briefly. There's a female captive nearby too, who apparently doesn't get rescued.
  
  The baddies sacrifice the fellow inmate first, by pretending to cut the guy's throat from behind. You can see the "priest" squeeze the fake blood packet under the inmate's neck. Great stuff.
  
  Then hooting guy threatens Doran: "Tonight you meet Moltar. Strip him to the skin" and henchmen arrive to do it, cackling.
  
• The big Deus ex Machina:
  All hope appears lost, and it looks like Doran's going to be Moltar's next sacrifice... But then!
  In a bit of magical music and heavy fog, a wolf trots past the camera. Suddenly, a woman in white appears! It's the wizard! And she's dressed in a transparent white outfit.
  
  The scene's not long, but it's worth it for the wizard's exquisite scenery chewing. After a brief bit of small talk, she demands
  "Where is my crystal amulet???"
  Doran lowers his eyes and responds "I lost it", like he was 8 years old and had lost his math homework.
  She berates him for this, and gives him a quest to travel to the future and bring the amulet back to her, or else his tribe will be cursed.
  She orders him: "Find the man who belongs to that hand on your belt."
  Suddenly, a magic sword appears. She tells Doran: "It will take it to your destination, and for the love of gods, don't lose it."
  
  There's a thunderclap, some cheesy "lightning", and Doran pulls the sword from a stone. He quickly kills the bandits, and then tells the hooting guy
  "Your evil Shall end. By my hands!", and kills him barehanded.
  Doran then holds the sword aloft, goes "huaaaagghhh!!!" and gets teleported to 1991 LA.
  
• We cut immediately to L.A., where intrepid TV reporter Penny and her cameraman Bryce are in front of a run-down warehouse, doing a report on local street gangs. Penny looks just like Lystra, with big 80's glasses and one of those womens' business suits from that era with the frilly bit instead of a tie, and humongous shoulder pads.
  
  Seems the street gang "The Gladiators" has a protection racket going, and they've been extorting money from the warehouse owner. Suddenly, the gang appears, attacking Penny as she's trying to do a report. Bryce runs away, of course.
  
  The head Gladiator is a chubby guy with a peroxide buzz cut and a tie-dye shirt, who giggles insanely all the time. Just as they're about to get rough with Penny, Shazam! There's a thunderclap and a bit of lightning and some fog, and Doran appears. He immediately sees what's happening, and shouts "Free her!"
  
  The Gladiators confront him. He punches giggle guy, who stumbles back and jumps (very obviously) into a dumpster.
  
  Giggle guy tells his henchmen: "Get out your blades.", and they whip out their switchblades, like this is some sort of 50's juvenile delinquent film.
  Doran sees their little knives and says "Your swords match your manhood!". He whips out his magic sword, which materializes on his back when needed.
  Giggle guy's henchmen immediately run away. Giggle man stays a moment, thinks it over, folds his knife...
  and shouts "You SUCK!" and runs away. This is great stuff, I tell you. Probably the best moment in the film.
  
  Penny gets in the van and switches into a convenient little black dress, and stands there staring, drooling at Doran. Cameraman Bryce has an unrequited crush on her. Puny little guy in a lemon polo shirt. I can see why she hasn't noticed him. She convinces him to go back to station w/o her, while she chats up Doran:
  
  P: Wait. What's that thing you carry around on your belt?
  D: A hand.
  P: I kinda figured that. Whose hand is it?
  D: Mandrak's. Iv'e come to find him.
  P: Why do you have his hand? And what are you going to do when you find him?
  D: Battle!
  
  
• The severed hand bit isn't bad. Mandrak gets his hand cut off by Bartaga's lady friend, who gives it to Bartaga as a "trophy of battle" as she dies. Doran carries it around on his belt for the rest of the movie, and when he finally confronts Mandrak, he beats him with his own severed hand. Mandrak falls, and Doran tosses it to him. Mandrak says "My hand!" with a disgusted look of "get it away from me", and cringes and flings it away, since the hand's a bit, um, overripe at this point. In the meantime, Mandrak starts out with a black glove as a replacement hand, and then has some sort of big metal clawlike hand during the final battle. This is never explained.
  
• Oddly, neither Doran nor Mandrak really figures out that Penny and Lystra are played by the exact same actress. Mandrak seems puzzled for a moment and wonders why she looks familiar, but that's about all.
  
• The movie's not without its flaws. (Well, duh!!) Mandrak appears far too late into the film. Once he vanishes into the future, the movie really takes its time getting Doran there, and spends far too long resolving the conflict with the evil barbarian tribe. If Mandrak had been the tribe's leader, it might have made sense.
  If you look at early 80's S&S movies, they tend to clock out at a touch over 80 minutes, while TB runs 96. My theory here is that the boilerplate S&S plot has a natural, inherent running time of about 80 minutes, and if you get too much beyond that, you need to start trimming the fat. If you're making an S&S movie, you'd do well to go back and read Aristotle's Poetics, in particular the chapter about dramatic unity. I mean, the very word "barbarian" comes from ancient Greek. Those guys knew all about barbarian adventures.
  
• Mandrak is a classic, campy baddie, forever shouting "Silence!" and punching his underlings in the face for no apparent reason. We get far too little of him in the film. Other great Mandrak lines:
  "Tell me more of the amulet's powers! Tell me, or you will die by my sword, jackal!"
  "Give me the women or I'll cut your tongues out!"
  "Perhaps you can put me on the televison, make me famous, like ... movie stars."
  "Allow me to introduce myself. Mandrak the Magnificient, at your service."
  Also, he has a great, classic evil laugh, but we only hear it when we first meet the guy.
  
• The music is pretty typical for this sort of movie. Someone noodles away on a synthesizer in a vaguely martial fashion, with a bit of hurdy-gurdy music during the renaissance faire bit. Once we hit the mean streets of L.A., we get someone noodling away on a guitar. You'd think a heavy metal soundtrack would be a natural here, but I can't recall any S&S movies actually doing that.
  
• TB has a lower budget even than most S&S movies. Deathstalker II looks like Lord of the Rings in comparison. In the budget department it's right down there with Eyes of the Serpent, another three furry boot movie from the early 90's. For one thing, TB doesn't have a creature, not even a kid in a teddy bear suit like in Barbarian. This is the most surefire way to tell, because S&S movie makers always add a creature if they have the money for it, even if it's completely gratuitous.
  
• Low budgets are a good thing in S&S movies. Throwing money at a S&S story doesn't make it a better movie. Look how Krull turned out. At best, a big Hollywood budget might get you some cool sets, but the movie as a whole won't be better, and it may well be worse. The first half of Time Barbarians was shot in Arroyo Seco, outside of LA, in what looks like a state park campground. You see the same stream and same trees over and over again, but it's all good. You know they're really different places, because sometimes there are a few fake skulls lying about, or the fog machine is hidden behind a different rock, or sometimes it's even nighttime. The second half is set around modern day LA, in vacant lots and empty warehouses where you don't need an expensive permit from the city to film.
  
• Bad acting is par for the course in S&S movies. Bad acting is almost obligatory, in fact. I mean, of course they don't know how to act -- they're barbarians fer chrissakes. The good guy ("Doran") in Time Barbarians is played by Deron Michael McBee, who you might have seen as "Malibu" on "American Gladiators", back in the day. If you're casting an S&S movie, you want to hire your male lead primarily for the beefcake factor. How does he look in a loincloth? Can he wave a costume sword around without hurting himself or others? If he passes those tests, then figure out whether he can act or not. If not, just make his lines simple and easy to remember, and you'll be fine.
  
• Casting female characters is just as easy: What do they look like? How do they look in a skimpy bikini top with jingly metal tassles? Couple of notes here, though. It's fine to have ugly male minor characters, but all your female characters need to be reasonably attractive, with the possible exception of the wise old woman who lives in a hut somewhere (and for her you can really overdo the ugly, with ridiculous costume warts, etc.) Also, to stay faithful to the genre you probably want to go easy on the silicone. I don't have any particular objections to that, let's be clear here, it's just that this was far less common in 1982 than it is now, and in the classics of the genre the uh, "natural look" is the rule, with fairly few exceptions.
  
• Gratuitous nudity is very important. Since S&S movies are supposed to appeal to the 15 year old nerd demographic, a great way to get in some gratuitous nudity is to have a bunch of women lounging about in the altogether, thinking no men are around to watch, similar to the Porky's shower scene. If you can afford a harem scene, that's ideal. If not, you can do a bathing-in-a-forest-pool scene like TB does. If you're a weirdo, you could do a silver-mining scene like in Slaves of the Realm, a crossover S&S / women-in-prison tale that merits a pathetic one furry boot, because it's boring as hell unless it hits your personal fetish button, and for me it doesn't. Anyway, if you're going to have an outdoor bathing scene, you also need some catty gossiping, and some giggling and splashing water around, just because. Them's the rules.
  
• Hair is very important, too. Your male barbarian needs long hair, but not Aragorn-style realistic long hair. No, he needs primped, permed, glam-metal hair, the pinnacle of 1980's hair care technology. Everyone's hair looks really great in Time Barbarians. Whatever else you say about the movie, it's got that going for it. You just know Doran and Lystra are made for each other, because they in fact have the Same. Exact. Hair. Same color, same style, feathered up the same way and everything. Identical. And each has a headband of course, just because it's the 80's. Mandrak, the baddie, has the inevitable dark hair, with a nice 80's-baddie ponytail, and once he hits the modern era he looks just like a tough-guy baddie straight out of Miami Vice. As usual, side characters typically get dark hair, so they don't distract too much from our blond hero and heroine.
  
• In the present day, Mandrak also smokes, has an earring, has the fashion sense of a classic 80's Colombian drug lord, and knows how to drive shoot an assault rifle. He even knows some of the local slang: When he shoots the head of the Gladiators gang, he says "Have a nice day!" Pretty adaptable guy. You've got to give him that, at any rate.
  
• And yet, he and his henchman came to the future to obtain a huge fortune, but they wind up as common thugs, robbing yuppies in back alleys and blowing the cash in the local skanky dive bar, with nobody but crack hos for company. The amulet doesn't work for bad guys, despite transporting them to L.A. (don't ask), and now they're stuck in the future. Mandrak laments to his henchman over a round of booze "Destiny has cursed us both, my friend", who reproaches him "You said the crystal would make us rich." When Doran kills Mandrak at the end, Mandrak finally gives him the amulet, laughs, and says "There is no way back for you, barbarian! Welcome to hell!". In a better movie, with a better script and actors, this could be touching, full of pathos and irony and all that art film crap. But here, not so much.
  
• Speaking of the final battle bit, isn't it cool how magic swords can deflect bullets? That rocks.
  
• Also, Doran says to Mandrak at the end: "Your evil shall end! By my sword!". Which echoes the bit earlier on when he did in the hooting Gatalite guy, he said "Your evil shall end! By my hands!" before doing him in barehanded. Who says these movies aren't fine art?
  
• Doran isn't in the future for all that long, but he starts to adapt as well. He at least figures out how to work a TV. doran At one point Penny's in the shower, and he bides his time first watching war footage, and then MTV, and then, well, we here some cheesy music but don't see the screen, and we see Doran smile, so apparently he's just discovered porno.
  
• The costumes aren't bad. Well, if you exclude the stuff Penny bought for Doran. Our barbarian hero ended up in a pink "Local Motion" t-shirt, tight acid-wash jeans, and a grey Members Only jacket. But I guess everyone thought that looked tres sexy back in 1990. S&S movies can be real time capsules sometimes.
  
• Mandrak's henchman fares less well, and goes about in LA wearing a beige trenchcoat and a Batman baseball cap. Doran appears to kill the guy but later says he isn't dead and claims "he dies when I say so". But he does look really dead, lying there on a sofa with his eyes open. I suppose Doran never went to medical school. After that, we just never see the guy again, so it's anyone's guess what becomes of him. Possibly he snaps out of it, and is left marooned in the future, without even Mandrak for company.
  
• Some of the other decorative elements are a bit less, um, professional. There is what I guess is supposed to be the flag of Armana, which is someone's fantasy sketch done in charcoal on white fabric. Everyone had a friend in 8th grade who did designs just like this, doodling on a pee-chee during math class. The rest of the Armana "look" is basically just antlers stuck on stuff, as opposed to the Gatalite (evil barbarian) look, which is fake skulls stuck on stuff. Although, I mean, they are barbarians and all, so I guess we should cut them some slack in the decorative arts department.
  
• TB doesn't overdo it on fog machines like Conquest did, but they're very, very obvious here. What, other than a fog machine, would cause fog to billow out from behind a rock? But hey, things like that are why S&S movies are so great.
  
• Despite the stars lining up, etc., Doran and Penny don't end up together at the end. Instead of that, we get this bit of silly speechifying:
  

  
  D: "I wonder if hope is lost for all mankind"
  P: "No, it's not. You and I are no different. It doesn't matter when it is or where we are. We'll both make sure hope stays where it belongs. In our hearts forever."
  

  
  He then gives her a little scrap of string or leather off his arm as a token of his eternal love, and says "Our love shall be for an eternity", and walks off down the railroad tracks, and eventually disappears.
  
  After he leaves, she tells Bryce to turn the camera on and keep it rolling, no matter what, and starts doing a news report. Fade to credits.
  

Updated 11/8/2010: Someone actually linked to this humble movie "review". It's in this forum thread on a site out of India called eXBii. Definitely not safe for work. You weren't seriously reading this post at work, were you? You were? Seriously?

Saturday Market saved (maybe).

Seems the city's decided to pull the plug on their goofy plan to mess around with the Ankeny Square area. The plan was to get rid of an unsightly, non-upscale fire station, and replace it with a trendy, taxpayer-subsidized condo tower for the idle rich, and then dispose of the adjacent Saturday Market (far too hippie-70's for modern "creative class" tastemakers) and replace it with a taxpayer-subsidized grocery store (also known as a "public market"), also for the benefit of the idle rich. I wrote about this back in January, when it still seemed like a done deal, explaining in detail why this was such a godawful stupid idea.

The reaction across Bloglandia has been pretty predictable. Jack Bog is happy, for once, temporarily, while the Portland Architecture guy and local foodies are livid, sputtering with rage. How dare you refuse us our new shiny baubles? Don't you know who we are?

One of Jack Bog's commenters is outraged as well, saying

I am amazed at the lack of foresight here. With this kind of thinking, Portland looks to be immitating Orange County, California. Does everyone think that projects like Pioneer Courthouse Square, Pioneer Place, Waterfront Park, Eastbank Esplanade, The Brewery Block, & The Pearl District would have just "happened" if left to the open market. The City of Portland and PDC has had a hand in shaping all of the above projects. Take a look at the public investment and see how it leverages private money (which translates to jobs, revitalization and liveabilty).
I am very disappointed to see the Firestation project go away, and with it the Portland Public Market.

That's the same argument as always: "Give us everything we want, or else you'll turn into California!" Now, I loathe California as much as the next guy, or probably more so, but at some point (i.e. now) this just becomes naked extortion. Funny thing, the idle rich in Orange County somehow manage to scrape by without huge public subsidies. Astonishing!!! I wonder how they do it?

I mean, this is all aside from the fact that 3 of the 6 PDC "miracles" listed (Pioneer Courthouse Square, Waterfront Park, Eastbank Esplanade) are city parks, not development projects, per se, and they were only funded through the PDC because it was easier than crazy stuff like, you know, making them part of the regular city budget, or whatever.

I'm not calling the PDC, their developer chums, and their devoted foodie / design-geek fanboys a bunch of crooks. Oh, no, certainly I wouldn't do that. They've all made it very clear, both to themselves and everyone else, that they're only doing this for the highest and noblest of reasons. The fact that they all get extraordinarily rich in the process is just.... well, it's a remarkable coincidence. I'll leave it at that.

I'm also not saying the city should never, ever do this sort of thing. I'm just saying that maybe there are other priorities to consider. Call me crazy, but I'd argue that maybe, just maybe, the city ought to have a go at a few of the classics, such as more jobs & healthcare, and less poverty & crime, and maybe some paved streets in outer SE Portland, while we're at it. Once we've solved those, I'd be more than happy to have a nice long fireside chat about our fair city's desperate shortage of million-dollar condos and doggie day spas.

This isn't the first stupid PDC idea to bite the dust. Remember the ice skating rink they wanted to stick in Pioneer Courthouse Square? Or the plan to demolish a bunch of beautiful historic buildings to put in more park blocks? And let's not forget the (shelved for now) Tanner Springs-style redesign of Watefront Park, which was intended to keep the design junkies happy (and employed) and keep the riffraff out, at great public expense. So it isn't unprecedented for the bad guys to lose a round or two. But win or lose, every time around the strategy for selling their latest scheme to the taxpaying rabble is the same: Plan in utmost secrecy, unveil it as if it's a done deal, then hold extensive public meetings so the public can argue over unimportant details and feel their opinions count for something, the poor saps, and then disregard all that so-called "input" and follow the original plan religiously, for good or for ill.

And guess what? A fresh new stupid plan is already afoot. Seems the "development community" now wants to gentrify the area near downtown that they (and they alone) like to call the "West End". Only problem is that there's a city-owned parking garage in the area, which is, like, totally not upscale. So the genius plan now is to tear the thing out, and replace it with... wait for it... a super-expensive condo tower! Built at taxpayer expense, no less. Who could have guessed?

Bastards.

---

Updated: According to the Portland Architecture guy, killing the plan was a terrible idea because of all the hard work the poor architects had devoted to this latest outpost of Pugtopia. All that time and taxpayer money spent, slaving away over a hot CAD program, all for nothing. Our job, as taxpayers, is to dutifully throw good money after bad, no matter how much it costs in the end. We need to go on signing those blank checks, because our city oh-so-desperately needs to gain the approval of the world's professional architects. That needs to be our highest priority, period.

Also, we need to build million-dollar condos for the idle rich because of 9/11. If we don't go through with the plan, the terrorists win!!! This is because the proposed replacement fire station (sited a few blocks down the street) would have had a shiny new firefighting museum, which would be a great local memorial for those poor New York firefighters. Never mind that the city already has a firefighting memorial -- with a local connection, no less -- at 18th & Burnside (and they're already building a new condo tower right next door).

The constant "Do X or Portland turns into L.A." we've been hearing is really just the local version of the "Do X or the terrorists win." we get on a national level. The idea is to prevent debate: If you talk publicly, or even think about such things, you're actively helping to cause an unimaginable disaster. Now the developers have stooped to playing the terrorist card locally so they can keep wallowing at the public trough. I'm sorry, but that's just despicable. I'm sure they see it as just another sales & marketing tactic, and I'm sure they don't actually believe the latest crap they're spewing (although they're hoping you do), but this is just way, way over the line.

Spooky, Mysterious Kelly Butte

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Here are a few photos of SE Portland's Kelly Butte [map], a city park in outer SE portland between Division & Powell, just east of I-205. Very few people know about this place, and it appears the city likes it that way. I visited on a warm sunny afternoon, in the middle of summer, on a weekend, right in the heart of a 2-million-strong city, and saw exactly two other people, plus one dog. They were as surprised as I was to run across other living souls in the park.

The city parks department refers to the area, very briefly, as "Kelly Butte Natural Area". Which I guess is supposed to indicate that there aren't any public facilities here. Not anymore, anyway.

Kelly Butte is visible from downtown Portland and all over the east side, and and is bordered on three sides by some of the busiest roads in the metro area, but it's not really obvious how to get a closer look at it. First you have to find your way to the park entrance. (I used to say "[a] Blackberry with Google Maps is a real help here", which gives you some idea of how old this post is.). Having been here before in the park's better days is an even bigger help than just going by phone maps. What you want to do is turn off Division St. onto SE 103rd Ave., going south. There aren't any signs pointing to the park, and it's not, umm, an overly affluent area; this may deter many prospective visitors before they ever find the place. Just block out the ominous banjo music you think you're hearing, stay on 103rd, and it'll soon turn into a narrow, rutted road winding up the hill. You'll come to a battered, rusting gate with a heavily vandalized sign listing the park hours. The usual, distinctive wood Portland Parks sign is absent here, and nothing here even gives the name of the park.

So if you leave your car here (locked, of course) and walk past the gate, the road continues to the top of the hill. There you'll find a couple of weedy, abandoned parking lots, cordoned off with lengths of chain link fence. The fences stand ajar, unmarked, neither inviting nor forbidding visitors. There's a stop sign here, for some reason, again heavily vandalized. Next to one of the parking lots is a small meadow area with a nice view of Mt. Hood (top photo photo #2), with unmarked trails leading off into the forest in all directions. On the surface, the whole area looks like the city simply forgot it had a park out here, or they lost the keys to the front gate one day, or something, and nobody's been here for years, maybe decades.

If you look closer, you can see that a (very) minimal level of maintenance is going on. The grass in the meadow has been mowed recently, and if you wander down to the lower parking lot, there's a pile of dirt with fresh bulldozer tracks in front of... what on earth could this be?

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Congratulations, you've just stumbled across the park's big forgotten secret. It's not much to look at these days, but this was once the main entrance to the city's Kelly Butte Civil Defense Center. Built in 1956, the city describes it as having been "designed to survive a 'near miss' by up to a 20 megaton bomb and to be self-sustaining for up to 90 days." Here's a 1960 photo of the city's nuclear doomsday bunker, from the Oregon Historical Society. A bit more history at Stumptown Confidential and Urban Adventure League. This page mentions the Kelly Butte bunker as well, while discussing the area's "civil defense" preparedness efforts. Seems they made all these elaborate emergency plans, and then the 1962 Columbus Day Storm hit. That storm, a remnant of a massive Pacific typhoon, was one of the worst natural disasters to hit the Northwest in modern times, and it revealed the Civil Defense Center was not quite the impregnable fortress it had been advertised as.

The bunker figures quite prominently in the 50's CBS docudrama "The Day Called 'X'", which portrays the city evacuating due to an imminent Soviet nuclear attack. It's also a fun time capsule showing what parts of downtown looked like back then, including parts of Broadway near where Pioneer Courthouse Square is now, and the old Morrison Bridge.

Later on, this Cold War relic evolved into the city's emergency/911 dispatch center, until that moved into a new, above-ground building in the mid-1990s. So it's actually only been empty for about a decade or so. I understand the place was never popular with the people who worked here. I remember seeing news reports about workers' "sick building syndrome" complaints about the place, and the inside walls were (and presumably still are) covered in lurid and disturbing murals painted in the late '80s by the local artist Henk Pander.

Once the 911 center moved out, the city tried to find new users for the place, but nobody wanted it. A Oregonian piece back in December 13th, 1992 put it this way:

OLD BOMB SHELTER AVAILABLE AS 9-1-1 CREW MOVES OUT

For Sale or Lease: One concrete bunker.

With its current tenant about to move, one of Portland's most despised properties is about to become available -- the 9-1-1 center at Kelly Butte.

Originally designed as a Civil Defense bomb shelter, the 18,820-square-foot center offers many uniquely unattractive features. Largely underground, the dark and gloomy center has no view. Employees work under a weird mural of partially standing columns.
``It reminds me of what's left over after a major nuclear attack,'' said Marge Hagerman, a secretary who also thinks the mural is ``sort of tropical. I don't know what the intent was.''

Last spring, a ``sick building syndrome'' felled workers in droves with nausea, headaches, sore throats, rashes and a metallic taste in their mouths.

Despite ventilation changes and special cleaning, another wave of sickness hit months later, bringing ambulances to the center four times.

So far, the city is marketing the property internally. In a memo to bureau officials, Fred Venzke, facilities manager, suggests the center might make a good records warehouse, indoor shooting range, community activity center or computer center.

``Facilities Services would be happy to show you the site and discuss its many possibilities,'' he said, noting the center has a 110-ton air conditioning capacity, emergency power and showers.

If the city can't find any takers internally, the center could end up for sale to the general public.

And the price?

``We haven't even addressed that,'' said Diana Holuka, city property manager.

At one point in the early 2000s it was possible to sneak into the bunker and do a little urban exploration, and there was even a public page of photos hosted on Myspace(!?) for a while, but that's been down for over a decade now & I haven't found a good mirror or replacement for those photos. IIRC it looked wet and gloomy and there seemed to be records and office equipment there that didn't move when the city moved out of the bunker, and were slowly decaying in the elements.

While scanning the interwebs for interesting stuff to share about the place, I came across a document titled Portland: The World of Darkness, which is a guide to the city for some sort of fantasy/horror RPG. It says, of the Kelly Butte bunker and the era that spawned it:

In this time of Cold-War paranoia, vampires were able to increase their holdings within the territory, constructing backalley deals with the local politicians and constructing secret “bomb-shelters” that became havens that would potentially last a thousand years; delightfully, most of these constructions were kept secret. When the paranoia revolving around nuclear weapons settled into a more fatalistic attitude, the shelters (and the vampires who inhabited them) were forgotten by the public.

So someone's finally outdone the "Shanghai tunnels" guys in trying to give our fair city some exciting urban mythology. It doesn't seem all that farfetched when you look at the thing up close, either. The place would be a perfect vampire lair, and you're surrounded on all sides by an area the city's basically written off. You could do whatever you liked and it almost certainly wouldn't make the paper. It's like an all-you-can-eat buffet for the undead. But maybe I've just watched too much Buffy or something. Still, vampires or no, you will want to visit during daylight hours only. It's probably really creepy here at night, plus the park technically "closes" at dusk. I think. There was spraypaint all over that part of the sign.

When I was little, my dad's company installed systems inside the bunker for the city's emergency communications bureau. I'm not sure now whether I ever actually went inside or not, but I remember the outside area pretty vividly. Back around the time the 911 center moved, around 1994-95, I was living in SE Portland and thought I'd visit the park as an adult to see what it was like. It's changed far more since 1994 than between then and the 70's, and it hasn't changed in a good way. In '94 the upper parking lot was open to park visitors, there were picnic tables here, and other park amenities, I think there were basketball hoops, or maybe a horseshoe pit. Nothing fancy, and the place wasn't exactly overrun with visitors, but it felt like a regular city park, and didn't have the derelict, back-of-beyond feel it has now. I don't know what happened here. Maybe this is the place where the parks department absorbs its budget cuts, so they can keep the fountains on in the Pearl District. It's like they've put the whole place in suspended animation, waiting for the condo tower crowd to take an interest in the surrounding area. Here's an angry letter to the Portland Tribune by an eastside resident infuriated about the ongoing decline in local park facilities in SE Portland. The "Division-Powell Park" he mentions is another (older?) name you occasionally see for the park.

[Updated 12/29/06: The Mercury's Blogtown has a couple of posts about the butte today. Post #1 links to this humble blog (yeehaw!), while the second post has actual photos from inside the bunker. Kewl. For the record, I didn't take those inside-the-bunker pics, but whoever did, I doff my hat to you, good sir / ma'am. It's a real shame that Cheney wasn't home, though.

I've been meaning to go back to the butte for a while now. I half-seriously considered going up there a few days ago, on the winter solstice, to maybe set something on fire or whatever. I'm not a religious person, or even a spiritual person, but I thought it might be cool, and by cool I mean photogenic. Sadly, I'm far too law-abiding for my own good, plus it was nothing but meetings all day at the office, plus it was cold and dark, plus I don't really like fire very much, plus I decided it was a stupid idea, so I stayed at home and watched TV instead. But hey, it'll probably be a bit warmer on Walpurgisnacht, April 30 - May 1, so there's still time to organize a proper event. No Morris dancing, though, please. Thx. Mgmt.]

It's not hard to come up with fun ideas for what to do with the bunker. If I was to become a James Bond villain, or a superhero, it might make a good lair. It's not all that huge, so it'd be more of a starter lair, or a pied a lair, so to speak. Or if we're going to stop being geeks for a moment, one obvious possibility is a museum of the nuclear age. It could explain how the bunker worked, do a bit about Cold War paranoia, and present nice Portland-friendly platitudes about why The Atom Is Not Our Friend. Sure, you'd occasionally lose a school bus or two off the narrow windy road to the top, but the survivors would get a good education.

One other thing looked different when I visited in 2006, and it took me a while to figure out what it was. Until late 2005, there had been a rather tall communications tower right near the bunker, but the city had stopped using it and recently decided to remove it due to, you guessed it, vandalism trouble. The local reaction seemed to be along the lines of "Hmm, something looks different. Oh, the tower's gone? Huh. Ok. Whatever."

In truth the spooky Cold War stuff only occupies the eastern half of the park, while the western half is host to an obscure Portland Water Bureau facility holding a huge underground tank. This is part of how Portland was able to just take the Mt. Tabor reservoirs offline a few years ago and just keep them around to be decorative. I don't know whether this half of the butte is open to the public or not. There are similar tanks in operation on Powell Butte and visitors don't seem to be a problem over there, but I've also never heard of people going there and haven't seen any photos from there, and I don't see anything on the map that looks like an obvious main entrance, other than a little driveway that connects into the parking lot of the huge megachurch at I-205 and Powell, which is bound to deter a lot of potential visitors. Or at least it deters me. The water tank area obviously doesn't have trees on top of the tank, so that spot may have a nice view of sunsets toward downtown. Except that after the sunset you're on Kelly Butte at night, which could be a problem.

Years ago I came across a couple of brief mentions of the water facility here, here, and here, back when the tank was above ground and smaller. And the water bureau's website had a few photos of deer at the facility, which is kind of cool, I guess, unless you live next door to the place and have a garden. I haven't checked those links in years though and don't know if they're still valid.

[Updated 9/13/06: A new post on the Water Bureau's blog talks about the bureau recently repainting the Kelly Butte Tank. The post includes a photo of a few people standing in front of the freshly painted 10M gallon tank, which gives you an idea just how big it is. Seems the previous paint job on the thing was done with lead paint. On a drinking water tank. Nice. Granted, it was on the outside of the tank, but still...]

In years past, Kelly Butte also hosted a jail and an associated rock quarry, not to be confused with the similar and much-better-known facilities further north at Rocky Butte. The Rocky Butte jail didn't close until some time in the 80's, IIRC. This page from the county Sheriff's Office indicates the Kelly Butte jail was operating at least as late as 1924. Another page I saw (which I can't locate now) stated the quarry was on the west side of the butte, so a long time I thought the water facility might have taken its place, as that seemed eminently logical. I recently (2022) figured out that the old quarry was actually located I-205 runs now, which is also a logical thing to do with an old quarry, just one that hadn't occurred to me previously. And the jail was right there at the quarry, so that seems to rule out the existence of an intact abandoned jail or extensive gothic ruins hidden in the forest, as cool as that would be.

Directly to the south of the park proper, between it and SW Powell, there used to be an old drive-in theater. Like most of its brethren, the 104th Street Drive-In has been gone for a long, long time, but the cool old 50's era sign is still there, looking just a little more rusty and weatherbeaten every year. The theater's old screen, meanwhile, lives on down at the 99W drive-in down in Newberg. These days part of the area is a large RV dealership, and part is devoted to some sort of industrial use.

Oh, and did I mention the butte's an extinct volcano? It's true. It's just one part of the extensive, and amusingly named, Boring Lava Field (named after the nearby town of Boring), which is responsible for a large number of old lava domes and cinder cones across the wider metro area. The USGS has more here. More recently, the butte was also affected by the area's repeated ice age floods as recently as 13000 years ago.

This last photo was taken on one of the many unmarked, unmapped trails crisscrossing the forest. The forest is quite dense, and you could easily get lost if you don't keep track of which way you're going. A few spots look like someone has been camping there recently, fire pits and everything. I imagine this would be a good, and extremely secluded, place to have a homeless camp. The forest here is great and everything, but it doesn't take long before you start to feel like leaving. It's not that it feels unsafe, exactly, it just feels like you're intruding into someone's living room. So it's back down the path, trying not to get lost, and back through the broken fences and rusty gates, down the overgrown old road to where you parked, and you're off to your next adventure. Assuming your car's still there.

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Notes

• [Updated 9/26/06: This post had a lot of pics from Kelly Butte, but didn't actually have a photo of the butte itself. I thought I'd fix that, so I drove out to Mt. Tabor this morning before work and took the new (properly spooky & mysterious) top photo. Kelly Butte is the dark forested hill in the foreground.]
• [Updated 1/1/07: Another batch of photos of the place here.]
• [Updated 7/1/09: Yet more photos, this time in semi-glorious infrared.]
• [Updated 8/25/09: And even more photos, this time presented as a fancy Flash slideshow, no less.]
• [Updated 8/27/11: And a long history post (no photos) I did about the erstwhile Kelly Butte Jail, circa 1906-1910]

Friday Aimless Blogging

• Here's some proof that I'm the secret power behind the local media. The Oregonian's A&E section waxes poetic about the hidden joys of Washington Park, following up on this post of mine from a couple of weeks ago. And today's Trib rants about Tanner Springs Park, doing a great job of echoing the sentiments I expressed here. The Oregonian even saw fit to point out those weird crumbling stairs I wrote about, although they refer to them variously as "stairs to nowhere" or a "stairway to heaven", proving once again that the MSM just doesn't get it.
  
• It's been an entire week, which is an eternity and a half in Internet Time, and I still don't have a catchy friday blogging gimmick. The Countess has a cute cat up today. Here are two more Friday cute cats. And another two. And here's one of the blogosphere's inevitable cat carnivals It's clearly a trendolicious trendy trend that's sweeping the interwebs, but sadly I don't have any cute cat photos of my own to post. So in lieu of that, this post contains a bunch of random crap, as usual.
  
• So that last item was about cats, and this one is about fish. Here are three recent items about newly discovered species of fish that were already in the aquarium trade before they were even recognized as new species. This is just bizarre and creepy, and I'm not just saying this as a b-monster movie fan. People are bringing into their homes and businesses creatures that science knows next to nothing about. Nobody knows how abundant they are in the wild, whether they're endangered or not, or what they eat in the wild, or how to care for them in captivity, or what would happen if they got loose in your local rivers and streams, or anything. But so long as there are people with money who want them, who cares? The Invisible Hand says this is a Good Thing, and that's all that matters, dammit. What are you, some kind of hippie tree-hugging commie?
  
• I keep getting search hits here from people looking for info on Ms. Merche Romero, the Portuguese TV personality. Seems she's the GF of Cristiano Ronaldo, who plays (or played) for Manchester United, and who knocked England out of the World Cup on penalty kicks in the semis. Turns out he's been getting death threats ever since, so now the couple doesn't intend to go back, because they don't think it's safe anymore. Um, it's just a freakin' game, everybody. Killing people over a soccer game is maybe not such a super-smart idea, ok? Am I really the first person who's ever told you that?
  

Jaywalking: A Fish Story

In a recent post here, I included an old story I wrote maybe 10 years ago. I have several more of these lying around -- a few, not a huge number of them -- and I thought I'd post another one, for the hell of it. I was never really clear at the time on what I wanted to do with these pieces, or what they were supposed to be. Short stories? Essays? Humor columns? Well, in (current) retrospect I'd like to think they were kind of like blog posts, except from the distant era of pre-blogging prehistory, back when Netscape was a separate company and all that. Hence the word "precambrian" in the last post's title. This post's title is the title of the tale itself. I changed the last couple of sentences around a bit, but otherwise this is as it was written maybe 12 years ago, for better or for worse. Any names you see mentioned are not real names of actual people.

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In college I used to jaywalk all the time. You had to. Everybody did. We were right downtown, and cars were always tearing around coming up the hill to get on the freeway. I guess people figured the freeway was coming up soon, so they ought to start driving as close to 55 as possible just to get ready. I always have to give this as a bit of background, just so people know how dangerous it all was.

Boy was it dangerous. From the bus stop I had to cross five or six busy streets to get to school, and then during the day just going between classes meant another three or four crossings, and then another six to get back on the bus. You get to be a real professional at it.

This is how it's done: You stand as close to the street as you can. If you can get away with it, stand out in the street. For effect, pick a spot in the middle of the block, as far away from a crosswalk as you can get. It's important to be nonchalant about the whole business. Just make sure there isn't any traffic coming, and stroll across. Don't run. You get bonus points if you don't look for oncoming cars once you're walking across. The important point is to be casual about it. If you're at a crosswalk and you cross against the signal, you can usually get people to follow you. That's always fun.

Sometimes you have to tempt fate. I think it's human nature to be that way. Most drivers are pretty observant even if they do drive too fast, and they slow down for you. Some don't have such a keen eye, but they always slam on the brakes or swerve or something. Somehow it always works out. No, the people you have to watch out for are the ones who do it on purpose. There was this one time I was walking along, minding my own business. I'm halfway across Columbia when I hear an engine revving a couple blocks down. The car's speeding up. I'm sure the guy can see me, and he's still speeding up. I guess he thinks he can scare me. Ha. Not very likely. Without hesitating a second, I stop, turn toward the car, and give the guy the finger. I stand there, just like that. I've got two different endings for this: In one version he keeps on coming, and I run and dive out of the way, just in time. In another, the guy screeches to a halt and we argue about it. Sometimes I just end it with giving the guy the finger. It all depends on who I'm telling it to, and what sort of effect I'm hoping for.

Actually the whole thing's a lie. A couple times I remember having people rev their engines, but I don't know if it was because of me. Probably they were just trying to get up the hill. There's no point in even trying to guess. I think the part of stopping in the guy's path and making an obscene gesture came later, the way you always think up the perfect insult half an hour after the argument's over. I thought the story was pretty good.

I was on a date one time and I told the story. I think her name was Krista. It was the first time we'd gone out, and I figured on impressing her. We were sitting down by the river having a bite to eat when the subject came up. I told her the one where I jump out of the way, and I still can't believe that we have people that psychotic out on the road. I don't think I placed myself on a legal crosswalk then, but mostly I did the innocent victim spiel, with just a dash of macho but not overly so. The reasons why we never went out again were, I think, unrelated to all of this. She took it like it was something that happened all the time, and my way of dealing with it was a bit childish. Oh, well. Her loss.

Another time I was telling Mike, my boss, about it. We were out having a beer after work, and this time I played it for laughs. This was the jumping out of the way story too, but I worked in a bunch of details about the guy and his car to make it seem like he was a complete buffoon. Who ever heard of running somebody down with one of those tiny Yugoslavian cars? Why, it could hardly get up the hill. It came off pretty well. It's all in the timing. Then he said something similar had happened to a friend of his, except the driver was really trying to hit him but ended up hitting a fire hydrant instead. The way he told it was just hillarious. I guess you'd have had to have been there. I hate being upstaged. No matter what it is, somebody else always has a better story. This story never gets quite the effect I'm looking for.

Well, no, actually that's a lie, too. I know I told Mike about it one time, but only vaguely, and I don't know how he reacted. Didn't create much of an impression. It sounds better to have something memorable, like being upstaged by an even weirder story that Mike swears is true. Hey, if you can't lie about lying, what can you lie about?

I guess if you think about it, who's to say that maybe I never actually told the story to anyone, either? I could be making that up. But I'd be lying again if I said so.

I'm sure my brother's heard it two or three times. Not all the same version, either. First was the short version where I end it by flipping the guy off. I hadn't thought of either of the endings yet. This story was mostly raw machismo, which you have to parade around in front of younger brothers now and then just to keep them in their place, plus disbelief.

In another version, I did the standard diving-out-of-the-way bit. I made up the part where the driver and I scream at each other just for him the third time I told him the story. The guy turns out to be a real mental case and I run away. Otherwise I'd have to describe what the fistfight was like, and that's just not in character for me. No, the guy acts like he just got out of the state mental hospital. Hair going all directions, driving a Dodge Aries K, a really big guy, looks like a bank vault that a bomb had gone off inside of. He starts screaming incoherently at me and makes to attack me, so I get out of there as fast as I can. If I tell the story again I'm going to have him call me names. That always gets sympathy. Probably "commie pinko liberal" or "Zionist running dog" will do the trick. All depends on the audience.

So anyway, I've told my brother a few versions of the story. I don't know whether he's caught on yet. He's pretty quick, but this kind of story might just not be something you remember. If he ever brings it up I'll pick one version to be true and deny I ever said any of the others. That seems to be the best way to weasel out of it.

I have a car now. I think I hate jaywalkers. The bastards are just asking for it, every single one of them. I mean, some of them even jaywalk with strollers. I loathe them all. Sometimes I even speed up and rev my engine at 'em, just to give 'em a scare. Or maybe I just made that up.

In the Pearl, mid-foray

So I'm on my weekly foray into the wilds of the Pearl District at the moment, in search of fresh produce and pretentious dolts to mock, and there's no shortage of either.

Case in point: I'm grabbing a slice of pizza at Hot Lips, and the guy behind me asks loudly whether that pizza there has.*prosciutto* bacon or not. It's very important, apparently, that we all realize what a discerning foodie he is. It's a real shame (for him) that bacon and prosciutto are two different things. Similar, but not the same -- both are tasty and non-identical parts of the modern world's glorious rainbow-o-pork. Hence he had to repeat the question (loudly) to a confused counter person a few times before she realized what he was asking and said "no". So then he had to play food snob and haughtily decide not to get a slice of pizza after all. I realize I would probably qualify for lots of snob points myself here, if I wanted them, I mean, making fun of someone for not knowing what prosciutto is, how snobby is that? But in my own defense, it's not the not knowing that's so funny, it's that he pretended he *did* know, and left thinking he'd really gotten one over on the woman behind the counter. Stupid poser. Probably from California. Did I mention this guy was about 5'6", tops? The woman behind the counter was about a head taller, and probably that fed in to his behavior as well.

The pizza is delicious, btw, even without any "prosciutto bacon". The guy really missed out on a good thing here.

One more thing and we're done with whatsisname there. What is it with people wearing flip-flops around when they aren't at the beach? This is actually not a snarky rant here. I honestly just don't understand how they do it. My arches and toes would be screaming obscenities at me nonstop if I tried that. Maybe theirs do as well, but they're willing to suffer for fashion and I'm not. I mean, if you consider flip-flops fashion and all.

Right now there's a tv crew filming the market outside, so I'm holed up here for a while until they leave. Shouldn't be too long. Those people aren't known for long attention spans, or so the stereotype goes. Staying off tv is harder than you might think. I dodged the cameras at Reservoir 3 on Monday, and now this. I'm just here for the loganberries. Why can't anyone understand that? Also, tv makes me look fat. IMHO.

I realize I'm technically on the clock right now, but nothing goes with pizza like a nice cold beer, and I believe firmly in the strict separation of the blogosphere and the workosphere: I don't talk in any significant or useful detail about work here, and I don't mention this blog to coworkers. Ok, sometimes I've been known to post from work, but not *about* work. It's not that interesting of a topic for blogging anyway, quite honestly.

And no, if I decide to change jobs at some point, I'm not going to say a word about this blog. It's not about work, so it's none of their business. This current trend of googling job applicants to try to dig up "dirt" on them will only end in tears, I'm sure of it. Some clueless HR bozo will reject an applicant after googling and finding out something they aren't allowed to ask during an interview -- religion, perhaps, or a disability -- and there will be a huge lawsuit, and a 7+ figure payout, and every human resources manager in the country will have to go to expensive new seminars to learn just where the red lines are. Mark my words.

Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless handheld

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Updated:
Yes, I do realize that blogging about pretentious twits via Blackberry® is, itself, not entirely untwittish. I'm aware of that, and thanks for noticing.

The TV news crew was still out there when I left, so they might've caught me on film after all, the bastards. The fact that they hadn't left yet probably means nobody drowned in the Sandy River today, and there haven't been any lurid shootings out in Rockwood yet (although the night's still young). So there's that, anyway.

Echo Gate

A photo of, or at least at the Echo Gate sculpture on the esplanade right under the Morrison Bridge. Despite the view of downtown, it's not the most tranquil location you could dream up. There's a huge amount of noise from the bridge overhead, and even more noise from I-5 just a few feet away, directly behind where this photo was taken. Maybe that's where the "Echo" part comes from. The sculpture is the curvy bit on the left. If you'd like to see what the thing as a whole looks like, instead of scratching your head over this in-vain attempt to be "artistic", you might try: here, here, here, and here. Here's a profile of the artist.

This large pdf from the city says of the sculpture:

Echo Gate: Located underneath the Morrison Bridge, the Echo Gate gives human scale to this immense site. The sculpture echoes the erased pier buildings and Shanghai tunnels of Portland’s past.

The city parks department elaborates:

The Echo Gate, located beneath the Morrison Bridge, is a sculpture that echoes erased pier buildings and the myths of Shanghai tunnels. It is made of copper plate that was heat-formed, fitted, and welded. Two pieces of art sit on a concrete wall that is a remnant from the bulkhead of the Port of Portland's Terminal 2 and serves as a reminder of early maritime commerce along Portland’s eastside.

As a confirmed "Shanghai tunnel" skeptic (see this earlier post for a couple of good links), I'm kind of disappointed to see the city itself buying in to the stories. And even if the legends are more than fairy tales and wishful thinking, is it really a good idea for the city to celebrate a very serious (if picturesque) crime, something the city was supposed to try to stop, something that (allegedly) thrived here because the police force was extremely corrupt and incompetent? What'll they do for an encore, put up gold statues of all those "faces of meth" tweakers? Sheesh. But I digress.

Anyway, I like this sculpture. So new, and already so obscure. By all means, go and track it down, just don't stay for long or you'll go deaf, unless you're run down by speeding bicyclists first. Or people jogging with those giant SUV-style assault strollers. Yikes!

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Meanwhile:


Further afield, here's a new Cassini photo of Saturn's dinky moon Polydeuces. Don't tell me you don't think this is exciting stuff. In previous photos the moon was just a faint dot moving against a starry background, but now we've gotten a slightly closer look. See, it's oval-shaped!

(Ok, I'll admit that I didn't think this quite merited a post of its own, but I still devoted precious blog space to it.)

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Meanwhile:

It's a sickness. It's an addiction. It's a cheap and easy way to generate blog content without actually writing anything. It generates a few page hits from Technorati, mostly confused bloggers wondering why the hell I linked to them. Yes, it's time for another modest batch of referrer pages. People are on some other Blogger blog, and then somehow they then end up here, and I see where they arrived from, and I post it here, because I've apparently got nothing better to do with my limited time here on this planet. At least I didn't devote a separate post to it this time around.

• Greenwich Village Gypsy
• The Best Blog of All Time
• Dlisted
• Power Word Fold, an origami blog. The name is by analogy with "Power Word Kill", one of the most powerful D&D spells out there. Don't ask me how I know this. Please. I beg of you.
• Scaryduck
• Metal Music Blog, from Lithuania. If this blog's any indication, Norway may have a new competitor for the "Heartland of Metal" title. Norway may still have the edge, but I'd still like to see 'em fight it out all the same. Because that would rock.
• Reyno de Letras (possibly NSFW here in the prudish ol' US of A, but pretty tame, and done for artistic purposes.)
• "rake up the past, and discover the mysteries"
• Tamlin (in Finnish. I think.)
• Help! I'm in a Nutshell!
• Semanario La Opinión. In Buenos Aires, seems to be a newspaper or publication of some sort.
• Un Choripán en el Malba
• El Mundo del Graffiti. Graffiti in Chile. Call it art, call it what you will, but whatever you call it, the Chileans clearly have us beat in this department.
• Laura's project life
• Pink Panther going places weird food, tribal practices... cool.
• Amigo Net
• Turismo News. About tourism & cultural events in Italy, in Italian.
• 0okm. All about Sony PSP h4x0ring. As a non-PSP owner, ok, as a non-gamer, in fact, I know basically nothing about this, but it sounds interesting. (Note to Large Media Corp. lawyers: This isn't an endorsement, I'm sure you have all sorts of extensive DMCA and/or Patriot Act powers to use against these guys and all that.)
• mikeperry. The top post at the moment features a cute cat named Samus. Awwwwwww....
• Nicole Angeline's Personal Blog, looks to be new as of today (7/13).
• SueAndNotU, currently travelblogging from Georgia and Armenia.
• Beervana, yet another local beer blog. No, I didn't find this one at random, but I thought I'd pass it along anyway. Prost!

UFO Apocalypse!!!!

This photo is of a super-mysterious object my wife noticed in the sky this evening right around dusk. Sure, it looks a bit like a pair of escaped helium balloons high up in the sky. Or at least it does if you have 20/15 vision, which she does, and I most definitely don't. And sure, when I examined these celestial visitors with a spotting scope (to compensate for my inferior, misshapen corneas and all) they looked even more like helium balloons tethered together, twirling off to an unknown fate. Most likely -- if they really were balloons -- they'd keep rising until they finally burst and then probably fall into the ocean where baby seals would eat them and choke or whatever. But perhaps they aren't balloons. The government often explains away "UFO sightings" by insisting they're really weather balloons, perhaps aided by swamp gas, and maybe the planet Venus as well. Either a.) there's a vast government conspiracy afoot, or b.) UFOs and balloons just look very, very similar, and the government confuses the two just as often as the rest of us do. UFOs can't be ruled out in either case. What's more, I saw no immediately obvious source for any balloons in my couple of minutes worth of idly looking out the window. So either I didn't see the source, or they're really UFOs. I like to think I'm fairly observant, so the UFO hypothesis is clearly the more probable of the two. And this isn't just a run-of-the-mill UFO sighting, either. They're up to something. They don't usually fly in formation like this, and they normally avoid major metropolitan areas like the plague. But no, here they are, brazenly flaunting their alienness right over our fair city. It's clear that the UFO apocalypse is at hand, probably.

There were warning signs, if only we'd been looking hard enough. But no, sadly, at that point we were still operating from our fat-n-happy, pre-7/11 mindset. One key warning we should've clued in on: Here's a recent item (also found by my wife) from the police blotter in a late June issue of the Heppner Gazette-Times, the very same paper that published that tasty yum-o-riffic "mock chow mein" recipe a while back. This is verbatim right from the paper, I swear I'm not making this up. ("MCSO" stands for the Morrow County Sheriff's Office.)

MCSO received a request for information from a caller in Heppner regarding whether a space ship has landed in the Morrow County Area. The caller believes her friend is teasing her but she is unsure. Dispatch confirmed with Boardman PD that Unidentified Flying Objects have landed in the area.

That last sentence is the real kicker. The cool heads at MCSO must see this stuff all the time. They certainly didn't seem to think it was a big deal. Not a word about dispatching a patrol car to check up on these UFOs. Nothing about alerting NASA, or the National Guard, or CNN, or anything. And the local paper didn't splash the news all over the front page, either. Just an item in the police blotter, nothing more. Lesser mortals might have freaked out over the prospect of making first contact with an alien civilization, perhaps even hostile aliens. But not our friends out in Eastern Oregon. Those people are tough as nails.

But wait, there's more! It just so happens that I've watched a number of wretched sci-fi movies recently, and several involved UFOs. Coincidence? What are the odds that a normal, well-adjusted, average citizen would just so happen to have seen several obscure UFO movies right around the time the UFOs actually show up? (For the present time, we will not be discussing whether I qualify as normal or well-adjusted, because I'd rather not go there.)

Terror in the Midnight Sun

If you ever wanted to know what it's like when aliens attack Lappland (in far northern Sweden), now's your chance. This is actually an ok movie for what it is. You can tell it's a Swedish (in part) movie because the heroine is far more spunky and independent than you'd see in a US film from 1958. Oh, and there's even a racy-for-its-day shower sequence. Ok, you can also tell it's Swedish because of the long musical number in Swedish, which our hero helpfully translates in what's supposed to be a romantic scene. Basically there's report of a big meteor crashing in Lappland, but it turns out it's the aliens, come to Earth perhaps in search of iron ore. The main aliens are your standard bald guys in cloaks and high collars, looking much like the grim reaper in The Seventh Seal (another Swedish film). They don't stray far from their little spherical vessel, but they brought along a large hairy creature with an underbite and big soulful eyes, which roams the countryside leaving utter destruction in its wake. Well, not all that much destruction, really. The final tally: It does in exactly one guy, a very minor character at that, plus a few reindeer. It destroys two small airplanes and a few cabins, and knocks over some teepees. (Ok, small scale models of planes, cabins, and teepees.) It also carries the screaming heroine around for a bit, as monsters tend to do. The monster isn't given a name or title in the movie, so I'm going to name it Woogums, because I thought it was kind of cute in a muppet-creature sort of way. Everything's going great for the aliens until Woogums wanders into a Lapp village and spreads the aforementioned mayhem. The Lapps are pissed off by this, and they grab their skis and flaming torches and hunt the poor creature down. Clearly its alien masters didn't teach Woogums basic monster tricks like hostage-taking, because he gently sets the heroine down on the snow, giving the angry Lapps a clear shot. So they set poor Woogums on fire, and he falls off a convenient cliff. The aliens realize they've been beaten by the restless natives, so they put their UFO in reverse -- literally, because the takeoff sequence is just the landing sequence run backwards -- and our heroes have a nice chuckle, the end. I thought the skiing bits were filmed well, and the sequence where the alien baddies try to menace our heroine is completely weird and surreal. Like I said, this movie isn't bad, if you're into this sort of thing.

Invasion of the Animal People

This comes on the same DVD as the previous movie. In fact, it mostly is the previous movie, except butchered up by the infamous Jerry Warren. His MO was to take B movies from overseas, hack chunks out of them seemingly at random, and then add unbelievably dire new footage of his own. This time, Warren added an extremely long and nonsensical intro by the one and only John Carradine, plus a pointless framing story that looks as if it was filmed in someone's basement, with a cast and crew of no-talent amateurs. Also, Warren moves the snowbound action to Switzerland instead of Sweden for some reason, and then has his drama-class-dropout hacks point at Greenland on the map when discussing the action. Oh, and he cut out the shower bit, I guess to make the movie less "European" or something. In fairness, I actually kind of liked his earlier movie The Incredible Petrified World, which is 100% Warren-made footage. It's not exactly a thrill ride. You might very well fall asleep. But it's got diving bells and mysterious caves. I liked the movie because I know I would've loved it if I'd seen it as a kid.

Reptilicus

This has nothing to do with UFOs at all. As I noted earlier here, Reptilicus is the Danish Godzilla. The version I saw was severely edited down for TV, but I gather I missed very little. Perhaps there's someone out there who gets a scare or two watching a marionette monster "eat" a cutout photograph of a Danish farmer (which is supposed to be the farmer). I just thought it was really funny. Since the movie comes from a country known for far more serious and artistic films, perhaps we should assume there was a deeper artistic motive at work. I mean, it isn't actually true, but I like to be generous. Rather than a failed attempt at a "realistic" farmer-chomping scene, maybe we should regard it as a successful symbolic representation of the abstract idea of a giant acid-spitting reptile eating a farmer. Also, it comments on society's ills, and contains as many levels of irony as you can handle.

Zeta One

A semi-groovy, wannabe-sexy British SF movie from 1969. This thing is a real mess. I think they must've started out trying to make a low budget British Barbarella, completely botched the attempt, tried to salvage it by wrapping a low budget Austin Powers-ish secret agent tale around it, and mostly botched that part as well. The only things the "Barbarella" side has going for it are the mod 60's clothes (orange minidresses and white go-go boots, rrrowrrr!), and some groovy sets. The go-go-boot-wearing Angvians are from space, or another dimension, or something "far out" like that, so the movie very loosely fits into tonight's UFO theme. On the "Austin Powers" side, our hero gets to drive a Jensen Interceptor, the perfect car for a hip 60's superspy no matter how big your movie's budget is. Also, there's one funny scene where he argues with a petulant voice-activated elevator. For a minute or two, it's like something Douglas Adams would've written, and then it's gone and we're back in grade-Z territory.

The Crater Lake Monster

I had high hopes for this one. I figured any monster movie set here in Oregon would be worth seeing. Well, except that it wasn't filmed here, the lake looks nothing like our Crater Lake (the real one is far more scenic), and they never mention what state this is supposed to be happening in. It sure looks a lot like California, though. Our plot: Meteor crashes into lake, heating it up, causing frozen plesiosaur egg to hatch. Stop-motion plesiosaur gets big in a hurry, and chows down on nearby cows and dimwitted tourists who keep on wandering out on to, and into, the lake, for a variety of farfetched reasons. Eventually the townsfolk have had enough, and one of our heroes does the beast in by gashing it with a snowplow. The end. The movie makes a lot more sense once you read the cast bios on IMDB. Nobody had much of an acting career outside of this movie, but several cast and crew members went on to lucrative mainstream visual effects careers, working on big-budget Hollywood movies. So maybe it's best to think of this movie as a feature-length audition tape, and a successful one at that. The stop motion work really is pretty decent for something a few guys threw together on a shoestring budget. The rest of the movie is godawful, sometimes wandering deep into so-bad-it's-good territory, including the absolute worst day-for-night work I've ever seen. If your "nighttime" footage is shown in full color, it doesn't matter how many times you have your actors insist it's the middle of the night. You won't convince anyone, least of all the audience.

The UFO connection? Well, um, UFOs are kind of like meteors if you don't know any better, except that meteors are made out of solid rock or metal and don't typically mutilate cows or kidnap people for experimentation, so far as anyone knows.

Reservoir 3: Grand Opening!

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Here's Reservoir #3 in Portland's Washington Park. The area around the reservoir was reopened to the public today after being closed for at least 30 years or so. I've wanted to explore this area since I was a kid, but up until today if you somehow got close enough to take photos like these, you'd win a one-way ticket on the next flight to Gitmo. Right up until the reopening was announced, I was absolutely sure this would never, ever happen. But amazingly it did, so "Woohoo!"

Here's my previous post about the reservoirs and the surrounding bit of Washington Park. I'd actually taken the previous set of photos before the reopening was announced, and I was actually going to do a post lamenting the fact that they were fenced off and strictly verboten for the foreseeable future. Long ago, I figured out that the universe is set up to do precisely the opposite of whatever I think it's likely to do, so this undoubtedly only happened because I was so sure that it wouldn't. So I feel I deserve a bit of the credit here.

The walkway around the reservoir. The path's a bit narrow, like at the Mt. Tabor reservoirs, but people jog around those all the time, so it'll probably work out ok here, too. Just watch out for the rain gutter on the right. You could twist an ankle if you aren't careful.

A detail of the wrought iron fence around the reservoir. The outer fence, which excluded the public from the area until about two hours ago, is currently just ugly chain link and barbed wire. This is apparently going to change over the next few months. If the new iron fence they're promising is anything like what's around the reservoir itself, it'll be a major improvement.

The park's Grand Staircase, which until a couple of weeks ago was buried under a thick mat of ivy. This was taken by peeking through the fence at the top, since there's no gate at the top, and the stairs look like they'll need a little TLC before the public can use them safely.

Reservoir 4 (I think that's the name), downhill from Reservoir 3. This one isn't open to the public, at least not right now. From bits of conversation I overheard during the big shindig, it seemed to be on the mind of nearly everyone who showed up. If there's any way to open that area up, I'm certainly all in favor of it, speaking as a registered voter and city water ratepayer.

Here's a Flickr slideshow with more of my Washington Park & reservoir photos, if you're interested.

For some reason I managed to not get any photos of the bagpiper (in Oregon you can't have an official occasion of any kind without bagpipers), or of the security guy on his Segway. Maybe I'm just a jaded urbanite, and maybe I'm just hard to impress, but I see bagpiping street musicians all the time downtown, and I've been nearly run down on the sidewalk by a speeding Segway on more than one occasion. So if the city really wanted to impress me and put on a real spectacle, they ought to have combined the two and put the bagpiper on the Segway. That would've been something else, probably.

Updated: There's been surprisingly little media coverage of the event. Which means one of two things. Either a.) the media is clueless, or b.) this really is just a weird personal interest of mine, and everyone else in town could care less about it. Wait, don't answer that.

Anyway, here are a few links to pass along:

• The Portland Tribune has a small blurb about the reopening. The blurb claims the reservoir closure happened because of 9/11, which is untrue. The area had been closed for decades prior to 9/11. Trust me. I was there, I saw it with my own eyes.
• The Oregonian ran a captioned photo [PDF] of the festivities. I'm not in this picture. If the camera had been pointed just a tad more to the left you might've gotten a chance to see what I really look like, but you're out of luck. Sorry.
• The water bureau's news update, with a photo of that bagpiper I mentioned. I'm not in this photo either. Sorry.
• One local TV station has a small story up on its website, including a photo of that guy on the Segway. From the back, no less. So I forgot to photograph a few things, and the local media thoughtfully covered for me. Cool. Thanks, guys.

non-friday eclectica

Everyone knows that Serious A-list Bloggers do something whimsical on Fridays. I figure I ought to come up with something similar to the "Friday Cepahalopod" deal over at Pharyngula, but I haven't settled on anything just yet. Perhaps the ever-fruitless search for a Friday gimmick will be my Friday gimmick. Yeah. That sounds like a real pile-o-fun.

Ok, so I started this post back on Friday, but I only came up with a couple of random items, nowhere near enough for a proper eclectic grabbag post. It's not really "eclectic" unless you've scraped up a minimum of 6 or 7 items. If you've only got two or three, it's just pathetic, not eclectic. And going with 6 or 7 items is like going with the minimum 19 pieces of flair. It's the bare minimum, and that just won't do. It seems unenthusiastic. But I'm also working on a self-imposed deadline here. I'm planning to go check out the big Reservoir 3 opening gala up in Washington Park, and I'd like to get this POS out the door before I go. So here ya go, here's your seven items. Don't blame me -- I just work here. Like, whatEVER....


(Also, between Friday and today I went to a wedding, watched the World Cup final and a couple Tour de France stages, watched another really terrible movie, and made a rare visit to a suburban shopping mall, but I'm not going to post about any of those things at the moment. I started this post before any of those events, so I'd better get this thing out of the way first, or I'll be violating the spacetime continuum, and my grandparents won't be born, or something, possibly. I think I read something about that happening once, somewhere.)

• Two photos of an adorable echidna moseying around the Outback.
  
• Also on Flickr, the infamous Zinedine Zidane headbutt from yesterday's World Cup final, immortalized in Legos. Legos rock.
  
• GREASECOPTER!!!! Yarrr!!!!
  
• Creationists are freakin' insane.
  
• Read this article about why the Busheviks have botched things so badly. Choice quote:
  

  
  Contemporary conservatism is a walking contradiction. Unable to shrink government but unwilling to improve it, conservatives attempt to split the difference, expanding government for political gain, but always in ways that validate their disregard for the very thing they are expanding. The end result is not just bigger government, but more incompetent government.
  

  
  
• More on the unlamented-by-me demise of Microsoft's WinFS.
  
• Satirical art is not dead after all. Check out the "Yellow Car Project", which pokes fun at our fair city's legions of bike fascists. Of course, as a bunch of pretentious, humorless twits, they naturally didn't get the joke at first.
  

Tram Tower: All Grown Up Now

Here's a new photo of the tram tower, with the new top segment added on July 5th.

Something rotten in the state of Delaware

The progressive world-o-blogs is on fire over the "religious cleansing" story out of Delaware. It's an appalling story. Here are a few articles about it:

• Preemptive Karma
  
• Jesus' General
  
• Political Cortex
  
• I Speak of Dreams, including a good timeline of events in the Dobrich case, and links to local news coverage.
  
• Crooks and Liars
  
• Bartholomew's notes on religion (another post here)
  
• DailyKos
  
• ProgressiveU
  
• AlterNet
  
• Give Up Blog, including a rant on why the poster hates Delaware.
  
• JewsOnFirst
  
• Dispatches from the Culture Wars
  
• Talk2Action
  
• Seeing the Forest
  
• Atrios/Eschaton
  
• Bitch Ph.D.
  
• spiiderweb
  
• Jack's Shack -- be sure not to miss this comment to the post. Yikes!
  
• ThinkingMeat, regarding the nutty ranting of a certain "Kender". So yes, "Nedd" has at least one camp-follower.
  
• ThoughtCrimes.org
  
• ravings of a semi-sane madwoman
  

I don't have a lot to add about the incident itself, other than to chime in and register my disgust at what the fundies are up to now.

It occurs to me that the way the story's being covered does point out a serious weakness in our land-o-blogs, in that nearly all of the blog stories out there simply quote other blog stories as sources, which to me seems sort of insufficient. Once one blog has the story, it takes on a life of its own and every blog (including this one) has the story. But the latest action in the Dobrich case happened back in March and now suddenly everyone's wringing their hands about it in July. I know I hadn't heard about the case until now. What was that again about blogs being able to respond so much faster than the Old Media?

The first Bartholomew article and the post at I Speak of Dreams are the only ones to point at any "MSM" news stories outside of blogtopia. I'd like to try to remedy that a little, so here are some news stories I've come across. Simple matter of googling.

• A story from this March, and an earlier 2004 story, both from a local newspaper covering southern Delaware (i.e. Sussex County), coastal Maryland, and the eastern shore of Virginia.
  
• The same paper also covered the 2005 filing of the Dobrich lawsuit here, and also carried a letter from four of the area's state legislators supporting the school district.
  
• Here are another two stories, this time from the Wilmington (DE) News Journal,
  
• ...which also editorializes about the controversy here.
• The Coastal Point newspaper has also run at least two stories about the case.
  
• Two articles from the Sussex Countian paper.
  
• The school district's own insurance company is suing them for not settling the case. Ha, ha!
  
• The News Journals also has a pair of recent stories from June 16th and June 23rd about the IRSD vs. insurance co. case.
  

The articles tend to focus on the school prayer issue, not the intimidation angle, although I'd say the latter is the bigger deal here. Not so much the actions of a couple hotheaded internet bullies. That's just par for the course for how we do political debates in this country anymore. Guys like this "Nedd Kareiva" schmoe always talk a big talk, but that's all they ever do. The pitchfork-wielding locals and their tent revival-style school board meetings are what's really alarming.

We can speculate all we want about why there isn't more coverage in the traditional media outside of Delaware. I'd imagine it's being chalked up as yet another church vs. state battle in some rural backwater. And it's probably true that if the national media covered every last one of these, there'd be no room in the paper for anything else. Just by way of an example, we've had a couple of recent cases right here in uber-bleu-state Oregon, one over a statue of the Greek goddess Hebe down in Roseburg, and another in Clatskanie over a Buddhist monastery. In both cases, the wingnuts came out of the woodwork and said spewed all sorts of jaw-dropping bigoted stuff, but the world didn't end, the badi guys didn't win in the end, and we didn't devolve into a podunk red state because of the actions of a few crazies. Of course, our crazies didn't resort to threats of violence to get their way.

In the absence of media stories, here are a few takes by local Delaware blogs and other websites:

• delawareliberal (and a followup story here)
  
• delawired
  
• karmically speaking
  
• the first slate
  
• Sussex County Online
  

I didn't realize Delaware was full of vicious medieval fundies, but apparently the state has its own miniature red vs.blue divide, with liberal blue counties to the north of the canal that cuts across the state, and everything to the south is banjo-pickin' Deliverance country. The state was a slave state in 1860 but chose not to secede, it hosts a couple of NASCAR races, and I have it on good authority that there's excellent Southern-style barbecue to be had there. Outsiders (like me) tend not to be aware of this. Quite honestly, we tend not to think about the place much at all, period. The last time I did, I'm sure it was in connnection with either a.) one of SCO's court cases, which is happening there due to Delaware's status as a corporate tax haven, or b.) Dogfish Head beer (which is really excellent, btw, if you can find it.)

It's hard to come up with good, shallow, glib putdowns of the place, and in the age of the Internet this means it's nearly impossible to say anything about the place, period. Insults about the state's puny size are stale and not very funny. Bob Hope probably turned up his nose at "Delaware is small" jokes 60+ years ago. So that's out. Although I do remember hearing somewhere that Alaska has a glacier bigger than Delaware, and undoubtedly more interesting as well. Back when I lived in South Carolina some years ago, there was a saying attributed to various historical figures saying that the place had to be a state, because it was too small to be a country, and too big to be an insane asylum. If that's true, Delaware is far too small to be a country, and maybe just about the right size for an insane asylum.

At one time in the 1600s the place was the colony of New Sweden, so maybe we can joke about giving it back, but that's not exactly a laugh riot either. If we're going to split hairs, the Swedish part was in the northern, blue-state end of the state, so maybe the knuckle-dragging mouth-breathers downstate can joke about giving northern Delaware back to Sweden or something, I mean, not to give them ideas or anything. Besides, if we're going to talk about giving anything back to anyone, the Delaware Indians have a prior claim.

I've been to Delaware exactly twice. Travelling south to north 20 years ago, I remember seeing strip malls, getting bored, and falling asleep. Travelling east to west across the northern tip of the state, I remember being angry at the exorbitant bridge and turnpike tolls. (As of last year, it's $3 to drive the full 11-mile length of the Delaware Turnpike, and another $3 for the bridge from New Jersey.) That's all I remember of the place. If I lived there and the restless natives started threatening me, packing up and leaving would be the easiest thing in the world to do. Although I'd still do like the Dobriches and sue 'em, purely on of the principle of the thing.

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Updated: Somehow I just knew we hadn't heard the last from the good Monsieur Nedd Kareiva. Two updates at Jesus' General -- seems like the ol' Neddinator would like to sort things out with a round of fisticuffs. He's also having words, no, repeatedly refusing to have words, with "meatbrain" over at ThinkingMeat. Wow.... just... wow.... You can't make this stuff up.