Programmers' Candy

Happiness is sitting in a room full of suits and Java guys and trying to explain all the different flavors of IPC you can do on Windows. You're trying to convince them to just go with sockets, because it'll have to work on Unix too in the next go-round, but the other stuff sounds so shiny and foreign and exotic to them, and they really want to have a go at it, moth-to-flame style. Or more to the point, they want you to have a go at it. Somewhere they've picked up the notion it'll be "faster" to go with something else, and not just because it'll have to be done in JNI. That may actually be true, so long as we don't mean "faster" in terms of development time. They also don't have any metrics or estimates on how fast is going to be "fast enough" for their needs. It's all just hunches and irresistable shiny objects right now So you're in a room with these guys, trying to explain the differences between a.) memory-mapped files, b.) shared data segments (blech!), and c.) opening another process and writing into its address space (yikes!). Plus a few other things you tossed in for the sake of absolute completeness, so they can't come back and demand why you didn't tell them about, say, doing it with custom window messages or NetDDE or something equally nutty. And at the end of it, you get blank looks and somebody asks you "Can't you just make an API?" Well, if you mean "Can't you hide the gory details from us with a clean, abstract interface?", sure, of course I can do that. But if you really don't want to know, why do you keep asking me?

Happiness is also explaining, for the umpteenth time, how to use the basic Windows Registry functions properly without screwing up, for really basic no-brainer stuff like listing the keys or values under a given reg key, or getting or setting a given value. It's not hard. If you don't know how, you go read MSDN and do what it says to do. Write a little test program, see if it works how you expect. If it doesn't, go back to MSDN, or just experiment a little until you figure it out. More than likely, you just didn't realize that the name buffer size is an in/out param in RegEnumKeyEx or RegEnumValue, and you have to reset it to the right value after each iteration. When someone says their registry code isn't working, that's pretty much the first thing I look for.

There are a few really obscure hangups and gotchas involving the registry, but you probably won't encounter them unless you deliberately go looking for trouble. (I'm coming at this strictly from a programming perspective, and I'm ignoring larger issues like the lack of meaningful structure, and the whole single-point-of-failure thing, just for example.)

• Key names can contain embedded null characters. The internal Native API calls use Pascal-style UNICODE_STRING structs to represent key names, rather than the null-terminated strings you see in Win32 land. So you can have two names "Foo", length 3 wchars, and "Foo\0", length 4 chars, and Windows will happily consider them different names. They look identical in Regedit. If you have both, selecting either will open the one with the 3-character name. If you just have the 4-character form, you'll just get an error. Since the Win32 functions expect a null-terminated string, and don't expect the null as part of the name, a name with an embedded null is literally unspeakable with the usual functions. You need to use NtOpenKey instead, but first you need to know you need to use NtOpenKey. There's very little documentation about this stuff out there. MS originally used this trick to protect some of the SAM keys under HKLM\Security\Policy\Secrets, and now it's become popular among spyware authors too. Someone at MS gets points for cleverness, but I still think this is a deeply silly and weird "feature".
  
• Registry symlinks are a big botch. I have no problem with the basic idea of symlinks in the registry. Having a CurrentVersion link that points at the current version of something is fine. The problem is that there's no easy way to tell 100% for certain if a given key is a symlink or not. There's a procedure by which you can open a key as a symlink. When you do that, the link data itself lives in a value under the key called SymbolicLinkValue. But just looking for values by that name isn't good enough, because you can just as easily create a value named that under a normal key. And opening a normal key as a symlink just opens the key normally instead, rather than erroring out. There's no property you can query that tells you whether a key is a symlink or not. Which is weird, since the information has to live in the registry somewhere, internally. It just isn't exposed properly to the outside world. Bastards.
  
• There also isn't any good way to know whether a given key is "volatile" (i.e. not backed by on-disk hive data) or not. There really ought to be some way of knowing whether the data you just stuck under key X will still be there afer the next reboot.
  
• Another Native API quirk: In the kernel namespace, the entire registry has a single root, so that HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Asdf is really \Registry\MACHINE\Software\Asdf, for example. \Registry has two subkeys, MACHINE for HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, and USERS for HKEY_USERS. (If you have auditing turned on for any registry keys, accesses will be reported under these kernel-style names.) One fun detail is that the root key itself is not visible with the Win32 functions. I haven't tried this, but it's conceivable that you could mount a registry hive directly under \Registry and it'd be basically invisible.
  
• HKEY_PERFORMANCE_DATA works in a totally different way than everything else in the registry. Walking through its contents causes various performance counter DLLs to be loaded and executed, which a.) can take a while, and b.) may raise security concerns.
  
• 64-bit Windows introduces a brand new layer of complexity, with separate 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the "same" key, and a goofy redirection layer that tries to give you the right one. If you're a 32-bit app on 64-bit Windows, and you want to see the 64-bit portion of the registry, you need to specify the KEY_WOW64_64KEY flag when opening keys. The 32-bit version of a key is stored in a subkey named Wow6432Node, under the 64-bit version of the key. So when a 32-bit app opens HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software, by default it's actually looking at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Wow6432Node, unless the special flag is provided.
  
  So far, so good. But it turns out that you also need to *NOT* specify this flag if your 32-bit app wants to look at the 32-bit key, using the "real" reg path. If you pass the KEY_WOW64_64KEY flag in this case, instead of HKLM\Software\Wow6432Node, you get the real, 64-bit HKLM\Software. Which has a subkey named Wow6432Node. And if you open that subkey, again using the flag, you get HKLM\Software again, and so on, ad infinitum. Which is bad.
  
  The only solution I know of so far is to look for "Wow6432Node" in the key name, and take that as a sign to not use the 64-bit flag. At this point I don't know if keys named "Wow6432Node" are automatically 'magic' or not. If not, even looking at the key name won't be foolproof.
  
• Did I mention there's such a thing as remote registry access? And the 32-vs-64 bit thing can crop up there, too? So you have to either know or figure out what sort of CPU the other box is running, just so you can be sure you're talking to the registry correctly. That's just not very nice at all.
  
• If you need to change or validate settings for all (or arbitrary) users on a given box, you may need to manually mount their user hive under HKEY_USERS, and then manually save the hive when you're done, since HKEY_CURRENT_USER is always you, whoever you happen to be, and not the other user account. Apps really ought to have global settings under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE or something, but often they don't. Windows isn't in the business of enforcing stuff like this.
  
• Windows isn't even in the business of enforcing a limited set of data type in registry values (the stuff you you see in the Type column in Regedit, such as REG_SZ, REG_BINARY, etc.) When you set a value, you can set it to any old 32-bit value you like. So if you have, say, a switch statement based on the type of a registry value, handling all the types listed in MSDN is not enough. You need a default case that at minimum doesn't lead to your app exploding. This is the voice of experience speaking here.
  
• Similarly, Windows doesn't even enforce the types it does know about (although Regedit tries). Just because something says it's a REG_DWORD, it ain't necessarily so, and you still have to check whether it's actually 4 bytes or not. It could be zero bytes, or 5, or 4095, or whatever.
  
• When you create a key, you can optionally specify a "classname", a string of arbitrary length that serves no known purpose and isn't exposed by the standard registry tools. If you're worried about people hiding stuff in your registry, or you want to hide stuff of your own in the registry (your own, not somebody else's, please), this is a good hiding place. It's only visible with RegEnumKeyEx, and then only if someone has the presence of mind to provide a classname buffer. Once the classname is set, the only way to change it is to delete the whole key and re-create it with the new classname.
  
• If you're backing up a section of the registry, or you just need to be sure you can read all of it, you can open it with REG_OPTION_BACKUP_RESTORE, which ignores all those pesky file permissions and so forth. The problem is that you can't use this flag with RegOpenKeyEx, but only with RegCreateKeyEx, with the unhappy side effect that if the key doesn't already exist, Windows helpfully creates it for you, and you may have to look at the "lpdwDisposition" outparam and figure out whether you just created the key or not, and act accordingly.
  

Stumped

Until quite recently, this was just another tree. A tree that happened to grow in precisely the wrong location. I think. It's hard to tell exactly what's going on here.

If I remember how the color coding scheme works, the blue spraypaint indicates a water main, orange is phone (or cable TV), and yellow indicates a pipe with something hazardous in it, probably natural gas in this case. White is for "other", generally for marks that don't refer to a buried pipe or wire. I'm going from memory here, and I could be wrong.

Today's South Waterfront update

I thought I'd mosey down to South Waterfront and have a fresh look around, since I hadn't been down that way for a while. The place is surprisingly hard to get to, and it's not really on the way to anywhere else, and there's not much to do once you're there, so it's pretty rare for me wander down that way. But as I'll explain in a minute, yesterday I saw something on the net that piqued my curiosity.

Photo #1 is our world-famous tram tower, now with "saddles" (the curvy bits on top), and a variety of wires attached. To get a sense of the scale of the thing, there's a tiny blob on top of the tower that's actually a construction worker sitting down and welding something. Or possibly mooning the camera. It's difficult to say.

Because the tram's my friend on MySpace and all, I'd like to make it crystal clear this is merely an expression of friendly, public-spirited, neighborly concern. I realize I'm not an expert on building trams, and looks can be deceiving, but I haven't seen much construction progress lately, and I'm starting to worry. I could have sworn the city said the tram wires would be up in August, and it isn't August anymore, and while it's true there are a few guys at work here and there, I don't see the flurry of activity I would've expected. I'd be trying to get as much work done as possible while the weather's still cooperating, if I was running the show.

But then, maybe I could be running the show, if I actually wanted the job in real life. Yesterday, the city put up a job posting for an Aerial Tramway Construction Project Manager. My job, if I chose to accept it, would involve duties such as "oversees and coordinates the Aerial Tramway construction project by insuring construction schedules are met". Actually that's the very first thing they mention. In fact, they harp on it a few more times, with the phrases "responsibility for insuring scheduled completion", "ensures project is completed as planned and on-time", "coordinates work of major contractors to avoid errors or delays", and "works with engineers, architects and construction contractors regarding normal and unusual project problems and phases".

I'd also be responsible for "cost containment, project performance and results", which shouldn't be too hard if everything's going as great as they keep saying. But there's always a catch: "Prepares and makes presentations before citizen groups, funding partners, and the City Council; responds to requests for press information." Ouch. I hate public speaking. I sure do hope it wouldn't involve going back to "funding partners" (listed as OHSU, PDC & TriMet elsewhere in the posting) and asking them for more money. I sure would hate to have to do that. And I can only imagine what the city council would say. I bet they'd accuse me of blackmailing them with a half-built tram, because politicians tend to say mean stuff like that. I tend to get red-faced and stammer a lot in situations like that, even when what I'm saying is the 100% absolute truth -- which I'm certain I'd be doing 100% of the time in this job, because it's a solemn public trust, and a high-profile one, and I have my principles. So anyway I think I may not be cut out for this line of work after all, strictly because of the public speaking thing. Sigh. It sounded so perfect until I got to that part.



So back to the photos. Photo #2 is of our fair city's shiny new South Waterfront Neighborhood Park, two full city blocks of nothing but beautiful green grass. Well, really this is just a placeholder for right now, not the finished park. For now, all they did was grade it, do the usual toxic waste mitigation (which I'm sure is nothing to worry about) and plant all that beautiful green grass. But eventually the city's going to give the place the old Tanner Springs treatment, to ensure the place holds no attraction for outsiders (i.e. kids). So walk your dogs here while you can, or play frisbee golf or have a picnic or whatever, because the design junkies have designs on the place, and after that you will not be welcome here. That'll be a while off in the future, though, since right now the city's got no cash to spare. (*cough* aerial tram *cough*)

If my camera hadn't run out of juice at that point, I'd have taken a photo of the new path along the river. It's really not much to look at yet, though. Like the new park, right now it's the minimum functional implementation: An asphalt path with a few Home Depot-style benches, running for just the few blocks next to where the condo towers are going up right now. So you can't actually hop on the path and walk down to the Old Spaghetti Factory (still the only restaurant in the area) for the time being. Oh, well. At least there's a coffee shop here now. Well, in a manner of speaking. There's a coffee cart, catering mostly to construction workers. From the very small sample I encountered, the iced quad espresso is the #1 choice in the building trades.

Oh, and one more thing. On the walk down to the South Waterfront area, I passed through an area I wrote about back in June, which I referred to as slightly off the beaten path. The reader was supposed to infer the place was much more than slightly off the beaten path. But oh, how wrong I was. The post's second photo shows an overgrown lot next to the gravel road the city calls SW Baker St. Today I was walking along Water Avenue (the paved street down the hill) and noticed the big signs for TheNextGreatPlace.com, the website for the coming-soon Water Avenue Lofts, described as "36 First Class Condominiums from the mid-$200s to $800,000+", with 14 already reserved. Jeepers! There were a few people standing on the sidewalk, looking at the as-yet-vacant lot, and one had a roll of blueprints under his arm. A worrisome thought crossed my mind: What if local developers read this blog, and they're relying on me to seek out weird, out-of-the-way (read "undervalued") corners of town, and then they swoop down and plant condos in my wake. That would not be a happy thought, and I refuse to give it any credence. But still, sometimes I have to wonder, just a little bit.

3 views of Lovejoy Fountain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stairs & Ruins

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No, I'm not wafting around Tuscany, at least not today. These photos are of what was once the gatehouse for an old 19th century reservoir near SW 10th & Clifton, in downtown Portland just south of I-405. Seems the reservoir wasn't big enough and ran dry in the summer, so it was eventually replaced by the much-beloved reservoirs in Washington Park and on Mt. Tabor. I really can't tell where the reservoir itself is supposed to have been. But everyone says there used to be a large body of water around here somewhere, and I don't know why someone would lie about a piece of trivia like that, so I imagine it had to have been around here somewhere.



If you look in through the "window", you can see someone's been sleeping inside there quite recently. I would too, if I was homeless. Not "swanky" exactly, but it has a roof, and it's built better than most new houses these days.

Just to the left of the view in the top photo, 10th ends in a short public stairway up to Cardinell Drive. I was down at the Central Library the other day and looked over their reference copy of the ever-elusive Portland's Little Red Book of Stairs, and plotted this walk out from it, more or less, sort of.

One thing you don't see on the [map] is that there's a path between Cardinell Drive and Hoffman Avenue, right at the hairpin turn where Hoffman turns into Sheffield. The signs indicate it's private property open to public use, "at your own risk". It's a nice, wide, flat path, so I think the "risk" bit is just lawyer-speak, unless you suddenly get the notion to hurl yourself down the hill or whatever.

Going between the aforementioned stairs and the path is kind of interesting, because it turns out there's a gate on this part of Cardinell, to keep out the greasy hordes of the lumpenproletariat. At least the ones who arrive in cars, anyway. There's no gate on the sidewalk part, so you can walk through the area, you just can't drive through. I was actually coming the other direction, from the Hoffman side, so I didn't realize there was a gate until I was already on the snooty side of the gate. Weirdness.

(I'm doing this in backwards order because I liked those gatehouse pics the best and wanted to put them at the top. Plus it seems kind of artsy and pretentious this way, which seems appropriate considering we're in the West Hills here.)

Which brings me to how I got to the Hoffman Avenue end of the path. As you might suspect, it involves stairs. Lots and lots and lots of stairs. The Little Red Book dubs them the Elevator Stairs, and after climing them I tend to agree. Since we're going in reverse order, the first photo is from the top of the stairs, looking out at Mt. Tabor:



The last couple of photos are from about 1/3 of the way up. One photo looks up the stairs, and the other down:

File | Edit | Play | HELP!

This is what happens when animated billboards malfunction, at least when there's a Windows box behind the scenes. Niiiiice. In fairness, it looks like a third-party app has gone south here, not Windows itself, and I suppose this could happen on a Linux box just as easily -- although I've never actually seen that in real life.

To the naked eye, the billboard was just a solid pink-white color, not the odd pixelated pattern you see here. You can't see the Windows menus very well, but I kind of like it this way. It's weird, and funky.

Once I saw a Westside MAX ticket vending system on the blink, which revealed that the systems are coded in VB and run on Windows 3.1. Blech!

But the best example I ever saw was on a local cable access channel years ago. Seems their community bulletin board thingy ran on an Amiga, and I know this because the box had crashed, and the channel displayed the flashing red "Guru Meditation" screen for a couple of days before someone got around to fixing it. That must've really confused the heck out of all the non-geeks out there.

Eek!

They say there's nothing scarier than a clown after midnight. I submit to you that a dimly-lit shop window mannequin after midnight is at least a close second.

It's always the cheerful ones you need to worry about.

A brief, super-annoying video clip

This video clip is of a pile driver in action, driving pilings for the upcoming, lux-o-ritzy Waterfront Pearl condo towers. The clip didn't turn out well, and I figured my two choices were a.) to delete it, or b.) to put it on the Internet to annoy the entire world, and possibly get a self-deprecating post (i.e. this one) out of it. Apparently I've chosen option B.

I will be the first to say this is a truly aggravating video clip, for several reasons:

1. It's just a shot of a pile driver doing its thing, which is repetitive and inherently boring.
   
2. The clip is sideways, because I goofed and filmed it that way, and I haven't figured out how to rotate video clips.
   
3. It's not self-explaining. If you saw it without reading this post, you'd just be going "Huh? WTF?" and wondering what the point of it all was. Cute videos of kittens don't require anything like this level of explanation.
   
4. It's a static shot from too far away, so it's not visually interesting, and you can't really see what's going on very well.
   
5. The pile driver and chain link fence are ugly, even without the action. Even if this was just a photo, it would still offend the eye.
   
6. The sky is kind of grey and overcast. A truly dedicated filmmaker (which I am not) would've taken one look at the sky, packed it in for the day, and then spent the evening partying and schmoozing with movie stars and financiers and E! reporters and such. I probably ought to have done that, instead of filming this, quite honestly.
   
7. Everyone knows HD is the future, and this clip is far from HD. I don't think the audio is even in stereo, come to think of it.
   
8. The loud, repetitive banging noise is really annoying. Really annoying. Really annoying. Really annoying.
   
9. The video is kind of jerky, because I kept flinching every time the pile driver made that noise again. I couldn't help it. It was even louder than this clip would lead you to believe. Way louder. This jerky video business would've been a great thing maybe ten years ago, but the "NYPD Blue" look is so done anymore.
   
10. What I was really trying to do was pick up not just the sound from the pile driver itself, but the series of nearly-as-loud echoes bouncing off all the nearby condo towers. Where you hear "BANG" on the clip, if you were actually there you'd have heard "BANG-bang---bang", with each coming from a different direction, and with the timing of the echoes varying as you walked down the street and the angles of things changed. In person it was really quite fascinating, but the clip completely fails to convey this. In the future, I will recall that a digital camera is not professional grade audio gear, and that there's no such thing as monaural "surround sound".
    

Not aggravating enough for you? Think you've got nerves of steel, do you? Here, check out this new music video by Kevin Federline. Enjoy!

a lemon on the way

My wife's lemon tree has decided to get with the program this year. So far, anyway.

I hope I'm not jinxing the lil' lemon by posting this.

morning sky / evening sky

Above: Morning sky, from the edge of the West Hills.

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Below: Evening sky, from the Pearl District.

Frank L. Knight Park expedition

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When I did my recent piece on Governors Park, I thought I'd found the most absolutely unknown and obscure city park in downtown Portland. I was wrong. I was looking at the city's official Walking Map of Southwest Portland yesterday, and the words "Frank Knight Park" caught my eye. Hmm. Okayyy. Never, ever heard of it, I said to myself. Never even seen it on a map before. And talk about centrally located -- if you live on the west side and commute in to downtown, you drive right past the place every day. It's a small plot of land between SW Montgomery Drive and steep SW Mill St. Terrace, literally right across the street from where US 26 eastbound exits the Vista Ridge Tunnel. (Google Map of the area here) It's the steep, forested hillside on your right just as you leave the tunnel (which puts it in the upper left-hand corner of photo #4, from one of the Vista Tunnel traffic cams). When I say steep, I'm not exaggerating. "Ridiculously steep" would not be exaggerating. I visited the bottom end of the park because I didn't feel much like hiking uphill, and Montgomery Drive is a windy little road with no sidewalks, full of gigantic Lexus SUVs rocketing along at top speed -- and the drivers are all on the phone, of course, and oblivious to their surroundings. Gentle Reader(s), I try to go the extra mile for you guys and "dig a little deeper" and all that , but I usually draw the line at actual physical danger. I imagine the Montgomery side of the park looks a lot like the Mill side, except that you're looking nearly straight down instead of nearly straight up. At Governors Park I was at least able to wander in and look around a token amount. Here, not so much. There's no obvious way in, unless you have mountaineering gear, or a helicopter, or tentacles with suction cups for arms, or whatever.

The city parks department, understandably, doesn't give the place much attention. As I expected, there's no official Parks Department sign, at least on the Mill side. The official website refers to it as the "Frank L. Knight Property", and has very little to say about it: It totals 0.56 acres (slightly larger than downtown's O'Bryant Square, or an average Park Block), and the city's owned it since way back in 1941. As for amenities, there's the usual "Includes natural area". When the city uses this term, it can mean anything from a stand of old-growth trees to an abandoned nuclear bunker, and maybe even the city isn't 100% sure what's there. The parks department page, and the mention on the walking map, seem to be the only two sources of info about the park on the entire Internet. And they don't even agree on the name of the place. Since the city can't manage to agree with itself, I'm going to adopt "Park" instead of "Property", and keep the middle initial, because a place this obscure ought to have a grand name. You could just call it "Knight Park" if you ever had a reason to, although Lincoln County on the coast already has a park by that name As far as I can tell, this post will be the first-ever writeup about the place by anyone other than the city government itself.

I have all sorts of questions the city hasn't managed to answer. First, who was this Frank L. Knight guy, anyway? If he was the previous owner of the property, how on Earth did he convince the city parks department to buy it? It's not like you could put a soccer field here. Maybe you could put a scenic viewpoint up top, or something, if the place wasn't full of tall trees. A mountain goat sanctuary would be logical here, too.

Two theories I'm batting around. First, the city ended up with the property due to unpaid back taxes. It became public property right around the tail end of the Depression, so this seems possible -- in which case the good Mr. Knight probably wasn't the former property owner. Second theory, the current "Property" is what was left over after the tunnel was built, and the city had acted with great foresight by buying this crucial piece of property early on, well before they started digging the Vista Tunnels.

Or maybe they just bought it sight unseen, and Mr. Knight retired to Palm Springs on the proceeds, chuckling gently to himself all the way.

Updated 3/14/11: Thanks to the magic of the Multnomah County Library's historical Oregonian archives, we have a few answers. Frank L. Knight owned Knight Packing Company, a produce company with an old-style address of 474 East Alder, which ought to place it in the present-day Produce Row area. The July 14th, 1946 Oregonian had an article about a posthumous citation for philanthropy he was awarded for bequeathing $700k to Pacific University in Forest Grove. That's a lot of money now, and would have been an enormous amount of money in 1946. The article includes a photo, and says of him:

Mr. Knight, who was born in Des Moines IA in 1884, made his first home in the northwest in Tacoma, Wash., where he operated a shingle mill. In 1899 he moved to Portland, bought a vinegar company, and reorganized it as the Knight Packing company, of which he was president and manager until his retirement in 1936. From 1925 until his death he served Pacific University as a trustee.

A November 22, 1946 article mentions that he also left money for the construction of the downtown YWCA building, which still exists.

As for the park, I've come across exactly 4 mentions of it in the Oregonian:

May 4, 1941:

Park Property Offered - Gift of view property near S.W. 19th avenue and Montgomery street has been offered the city council by Frank L. Knight, 1890 S.W. Vista avenue. The property is west of and adjoins S.W. 19th avenue and Montgomery and also takes in what would be 19th avenue if it were extended. All taxes and liens have been paid and the property can be turned over at any time, said the offer, which will be considered Wednesday.

The city council took its time considering the offer, as the next mention of it I've found was not until late December of that year.

December 21, 1941:

Gift Ordinance Due - The city council Wednesday will have an ordinance to accept the gift of Frank L. Knight, 1890 SW Vista Avenue, of two parcels of land for park purposes and to express the appreciation of the city for the gift.

December 25, 1941:

CITY GETS VIEW LOTS

The city council Wednesday accepted with thanks two view lots offered the city for park purposes by Frank L. Knight. The property is on S.W. 19th avenue near Montgomery drive and was given the city free and clear. An expression of appreciation for the gift will be made by the city to Mr. Knight.

As you can imagine, most of the surrounding articles relate to World War II. On the same page as the December 25 blurb is a piece titled "Women's Stockings New and Valuable Defense Aid", which is right next to "Alien Travel Restricted", alien meaning Japanese, German, or Italian. The December 21 blurb is on the same page as a notice to homeowners that their Christmas lights need to be turned off in the event of a blackout.

After that, the park appears by name exactly once, on October 25, 1970. It's part of a groovy-looking map of the city park system, which also appears to be a thinly veiled Frank Ivancie campaign ad. When your goal is to dazzle the public with the city's vast park system, I suppose you need to include the really obscure ones too. So it also includes Governors Park, all of the "East Park Blocks", Talbot Park, and "Block 101, Mocks Crest" at N. Willamette & Bryant. The last two spots are really quite tiny, as I've pointed out before, so the map's a bit on the misleading side if you ask me.

In any case, those brief mentions also seem to answer the "why" question, indirectly. The Vista Ave. address given for Mr. Knight is just uphill and southwest of the park, and if I'm looking at the map correctly the "view lots" protect the Knight house's view of Mt. St. Helens, or at least they would have in 1941 when Mt. St. Helens was a bit taller than it is now. And maybe they still do. This is a rare case where I actually wasn't cynical enough when trying to think of reasons the park exists..

I don't really know what you could do with the place. A heroic private developer could probaby cantilever a house or two out over the hillside, but as a park... One possibility would be to make the place a "vertical park", with a staircase from the bottom to the top. The West Hills are absolutely full of weird and obscure public staircases, so that it's actually a lot easier to get around the area than you might think (this is actually why I was looking at that walking map in the first place). So I'm suggesting we put in a few more staircases, at least one here and one at Governors Park, but with a modern twist: Design them to accomodate runners. I expect running up the stairs here would be a great workout, to say the least. And if you blow out a knee on the way up (or down), OHSU isn't far away, and it'd be a golden opportunity to check out that world-class sports medicine department they're always bragging about. Making the stairs ADA-compliant would be very, very difficult, but if you had to, I guess you could always put in a municipal elevator, like they have down in Oregon City. There's just the "simple" matter of finding the money. It would help a great deal if it turned out that Frank Knight was an ancestor of Phil Knight, the Nike guy. There's no real reason to believe that, though.

On Wednesday, I took a few photos of the park, or of what seemed to be the park, since the place isn't marked, obviously. The top photo is the least unremarkable of the bunch. You probably can't get a nice, appealing photo of the park as a whole, since it's pretty much just a chunk of steep hillside covered in trees and scrubby little bushes.

I went back Thursday morning to try to get some better photos of the place, and ended up taking a bunch of close-ups, including the last 4 pics here. It's not all blackberries and wild roses there, but ivy and vine maple are nowhere near as photogenic. The last photo's looking towards downtown from the park... or from Mill right next to the park if we're going to split hairs here.

Here's a house for sale on Mill St. Terrace -- it looks like they're asking a cool $10M for it. Ten. Million. Dollars. For a house perched right over a freeway, no less. I can't see a lot of people falling for that, but I guess you only really need one. Some nice photos of the view from here, regardless.

The vicinity of the park is sort of interesting. Just east of the park, a narrow street called Cable Avenue branches off of Mill. Snyder's Portland Names and Neighborhoods describes the street thusly:

For years, this was an un-named alley. Then, in 1892, a city ordinance designated it Cable Street. The name referred to a cable system which pulled streetcars up an inclined trestle to a hillside terminus at Spring Street. (At that time, 18th Avenue was still called "Chapman Street.") The cars were drawn up the trestle by attaching to them a cable actuated by a system of weights. Cable Street was almost under this trestle. The cable line ceased functioning in 1904, when the "Vista Avenue Bridge" was built across Canyon Road, providing a moderately inclined route which streetcars could use to get to the "Heights".

.

I seem to recall that when the Westside MAX line was under construction, workers discovered a bunch of mechanical bits left over from the old cable car line, right around the new MAX station at 18th & Jefferson. There were promises made about accomodating some of these old bits into the decor at the station, but nothing seems to have come of that. TriMet has a page about our city's brief dalliance with cable cars, as does The Cable Car Homepage, and PDXHistory has a nice picture of the old trestle. Over a thousand feet long, rising at a 20% grade. Yikes! Take that, aerial tram!

More tidbits about the local area:

• An excerpt from the book "Portland Hill Walks" discusses the area.
• A walking tour of another portion of Montgomery Drive, further up the hill.
• The twin Vista Tunnels made someone's list of historic tunnels
• The Mercury points us at a funny YouTube clip created from police videos of the Zoobombers biking through the eastbound Vista tunnel.
• If you're of a geekier bent, here's a bit about the tunnels' lighting systems, in case you were curious or whatever.
• Some photos of the Goose Hollow / King's Hill neighborhood, just to the north and downhill from the park. The park isn't quite in Goose Hollow, and isn't quite Portland Heights (i.e. the rich neighborhood up top) either. Which I guess makes it a "gateway", one of those high-concept things that architects & designers really get their rocks off about. Someone should inform Randy Gragg, or at the very least the "Portland Architecture Blog" guy.
• If you hike around the area much, sooner or later you'll need a beer. And you're in luck: Former Mayor Bud Clark's cozy Goose Hollow Inn is right at hand. Mmm... Beeer....

...wherein I finish my beer...

Photo #1: A nice big glass of beer. Cranberry Éphémère, if you're curious.



Photo #2: Moi, not long after taking photo #1. Did I mention it was a nice, big glass of beer?

Mmmmm..... beeeeerrrr.....

---

Speaking of beer, a piece at Rooftop Brewing about homebrewing with fresh hops. Sounds ambitious. Tasty, and ambitious.

Meanwhile, Beervana points us (well, those of us who remember the original) at an ancient Ranier Beer commercial on YouTube. You know, the one with the motorcycle. You know the one.

Blogriculture has a couple of recent beer-related posts: The aforementioned Rainier commercial gets a mention, and the point is made that while the commercial is great, the beer wasn't then and isn't now. There was a time when people called it the "Green Death", if that gives you some idea. The other post discusses the impact of beer on Oregon's economy. Our stats page at BeerServesAmerica.org is here, but as the post notes, the numbers here are probably understated, since it just looks at the brewing & retail angle, and ignores the agricultural side of things. And we grow a hell of a lot of tasty, tasty hops here.

drizzle

It's that time of year again. Two pics of this morning's fall drizzle, on the transit mall downtown. The first just as the rain began, and the second once it really got going. The second is a color photo, believe it or not.

Continuing with the drizzle theme, sort of, here are a few mostly downbeat items from the interwebs, found over the last few days. Or if not downbeat, at least somewhat lacking in sunshine, sweetness, and light. Or even if they're full of sickly tooth-rotting sweetness, I'll still have something snarky and disagreeable and downbeat to say about them. Because that's the theme for today: Drizzle.

• A post at BlueOregon about the nation's cooling economy.
  
• Also at BlueOregon, a piece bashing the Oregonian's wingnutty editorial about the demotion of Pluto. Also see Bill Maher's very funny rant on the same topic.
  
• Not downbeat, but distinctly lacking in sunshine and other forms of light: Cosmic Variance has a nice, somewhat technical discussion of dark matter. If I owned a brewpub, my stout would be called "Dark Matter", and I'd offer a companion coffee stout and call it "Dark Energy". Because it would be funny. Really.
  
• Rummy, in Salt Lake City, had this to say, seriously:
  

  
  "We face similar challenges in efforts to confront the rising of a new type of fascism," he said.
  
  "And that is important in this 'long war' where any kind of moral and intellectual confusion about who and what is right or wrong can weaken the ability of free societies to persevere," he said, taking aim at detractors of the US "war on terror".
  

  
  
  Am I the only person who sees a conflict between paragraph 1 and paragraph 2?
  
• Someone refresh my memory, wasn't there some sort of big storm down in Louisiana or Mississippi or somewhere about this time last year? I, for one, sure am glad we have Dubya around to do his usual "heckuva job" fixing these things.
  
• The ever-insufferable Randy Gragg, the local paper's one-time "architecture critic" is back in town, and already up to his old tricks. If he and his architect/developer chums are really so amazingly superior to the rest of us rubes, why did he move back here from the bright lights of New York?
  
• This is more of a schadenfreude item than a downbeat one. The Mercury reports on an groovy discovery made in the flowerbeds in front of the Duluth, MN police headquarters. Nelson: Ha, ha!
  
• Sen. Ted Stevens officiated over the opening of a new Iridium satellite center near Fairbanks, Alaska. No word yet on whether satellite phone service also relies on a "series of tubes".
  
• A piece about the late, lamented gas turbine car. It's a weird fit for Treehugger, considering how inefficient the things were, but it could run on peanut oil, or even perfume. Lots and lots of perfume.
  
• Meanwhile, an angry SUV driver went on a rampage today, mowing people down all over San Francisco, thereby doing what all the other SUV drivers in the world merely fantasize about, 24/7.
  
• If you really want to wallow in despair, you might enjoy the site "Fundies Say the Darndest Things!"
  
• In the same vein, you might also like LarkNews, which is sort of like the Onion except all-religion, all the time. At least I don't think it's serious, I hope.
  
• As I've gotten older, I've become more and more opposed to the whole "time passing" concept. Here's another reason why. These days, even "modern" houses can be old and creaky and desperately in need of the This Old House treatment. It's not fair. New stuff should stay new forever. Ok, maybe I'm just grumpy because I found a grey eyebrow hair the other day, for the first time ever. On me. It just isn't right, I tell you.
  
• There's also movie fatigue to whine about. There are vastly more movies than any one person will ever be able to watch. Even if you limit yourself to good movies, or good bad movies, you'll still end up with a Stack of Shame, or a constipated Netflix queue in my case.
  
• It's August, and you know what that means. The holiday shopping season won't really start until back-to-school wraps up, but the fundies are already warming up this year's batch of nutty "War on Christmas" hype.
  
• OlsonOnline picks apart the loaded word "Islamofascism".
  
• I've mentioned before, I think, that I'm the world's worst gamer, and the most unmotivated. I've never actually solved the old Colossal Cave text adventure even though I first played it back in the 70's. So it'll come as no surprise that I'm really terrible at this flash game, which requires being good with a mouse and all. Maybe you'll have better luck. I haven't even had a go at the new Google Maps-based flight sim. As much as I suck at ordinary games, I triple-extra-suck at flight sims, with all those complicated buttons and controls and all.
  
• Pink Tentacle informs us that researchers in Japan have found an ancient stone idol that looks like the head of a kappa, an aquatic monster from Japanese mythology. The first 5 minutes of the movie always begin this way. Tokyo is doomed. Doomed, I tell you.
  
• It's too late to win yourself a World Stupidity Award, but there's always next year, unless this year's winners blow up the world first.
  
• Alt.portland has a piece about Oregon City's Municipal Elevator. I mention it here because it's sort of the Portland area's answer to Seattle's monorail. A weird, down-at-the-heels remnant of the past, a wistful reminder of the unmet dreams of an optimistic, bygone age.
  
• And this is actually a cute animal post, not downbeat at all, although the cat in this Cute Overload post does look distinctly predatory, so this is definitely a downbeat post if you're a steak. Of course, if you are a steak, at that point the worst is already over, so far as you're concerned.
  

A "different" carrot recipe

Hey, campers! Here's another tasty recipe from the wilds of Eastern Oregon. Like several previous items (the UFO invasion in Morrow County, and the local way to make "chow mein", for example), my wife discovered this in a local newspaper from out there, and brought it to my attention, just to gross me out. The dry 2/3 of our state seems like a normal, calm, rural place on the surface, but then you read the local paper and realize you're in Twin Peaks country. I don't know what would be weirder: a.) that people really eat this stuff out there, or b.) they don't (due to common sense and taste buds and so forth), but they put it in the newspaper anyway.

Today's recipe actually comes from the same "nice" little old lady as the chow mein glop I wrote about earlier. This recipe doesn't seem to have a name other than "A Different Way to Cook Carrots". She writes, "For those who do not like carrots, please try this recipe, you might like them this way." Fat chance.

Our delicious, nutritious ingredients:

1 1/2 cups raw baby carrots
1 8 oz. can cream of chicken soup (follow directions on can)
1/2 cup sharp cheddar cheese, grated
buttered dry bread crumbs [no quantity specified]

The directions, such as they are:

• Preheat oven to 350 degrees. [She doesn't say to do this, but it stands to reason.]
  
• In a buttered baking dish [of unspecified size], place the baby carrots in it, and pour the soup over 'em.
  
• Then sprinkle the cheese on top, and finally top it all off with the bread crumbs.
  
• Cover and bake for 30 minutes.
  

When she says to follow the directions on the can of soup, I assume she means to reconstitute it with milk the way you normally would, although I'm not 100% sure about that. Maybe it's just because I'm a computer geek or something, but imprecise directions make me nervous, especially if I'm supposed to eat the end product. I haven't looked at a can of cream of chicken soup in a long time, and there may be other directions besides how to use it as soup. If there are casserole-specific directions, I suppose you'll probably want to use those instead.

The justification given for this dish is that it's a great way to get people to eat their carrots. Which is crucial, because carrots are wholesome and nutritious and full of vitamins and minerals and generally super-duper good for you and all, in case you missed that part back in grade school. The classic way to get people to eat what's good for 'em is to disguise it with so much fat and salt and modern gee-whiz chemicals that you negate any health benefits the clandestine nutritious bits might provide. But hey. At least they ate their carrots. Mission accomplished.

What you get from this recipe, I imagine, is something akin to a chicken pot pie, except without the pastry crust. Which is heresy, of course. The chicken and the crust are what it's all about, and everything else is secondary. I will grudgingly tolerate carrots in a pot pie, because they're traditional and everyone does it, but I really don't think they go with chicken. Or cheese, for that matter. And it's rare that chicken and cheese are improved by being combined. It's like matter vs. antimatter, except three ways instead of two, if you can imagine such a thing.

Despite all the snarkiness, I really do, 100% sincerely, want to help, for real, honest, and if you're going to insist on serving this stuff to picky eaters (i.e. people who don't like carrots), you'll need all the help you can get, so here are some suggestions on how to improve this tasty, tasty delicacy, without making it too much work, or involving any weird ingredients. My sense is that this recipe has less potential for improvement than that chow mein recipe, so I don't really want to get your hopes up too much, but here goes:

1. She doesn't say to do anything with the baby carrots. If you're going to hide them under an opaque layer of salty beige soup, the decent thing would be to slice them up, especially if you're serving this to carrot-o-phobes. It's harder for them to pick all the orange bits out that way. And maybe add some chopped celery while you're at it. I mean, why not? It wouldn't be worse that way.
   
2. In this day and age, suggesting that people make their own pie crust definitely counts as "too much work". But maybe you could get a frozen crust from the store and use that, and bake your soupy cheesy carrots in a proper pastry crust, the way God intended. Hint: You probably want to avoid any premade crusts that involve graham crackers or oreos. I mean, be my guest and try it if you really want to; I just don't think it'll have the desired effect, is all I'm saying.
   
3. If your frozen crust doesn't come with a top, or even if you aren't doing the whole pastry crust thing, you might try some mashed potatoes on top. There's a rich tradition in England of putting mashed potatoes on top of meat pies. I don't normally advocate copying what the British do when it comes to food, but, I mean, there are potatoes involved. You can't go wrong with potatoes. (If you ignored my advice in the last item and went with the graham cracker crust, my advice this time is to leave off the potatoes. Like you'll really listen or whatever.)
   
4. Add some garlic, maybe some onions. Even garlic powder would work in a pinch, for this sort of thing. If you think garlic's a weird ingredient, there's nothing I can do to help you.
   
5. If you have a can of peas or a bag of frozen peas lying around, this might be a great opportunity to dust it off and inflict it on the unwary. Just hide 'em under the soup, like you did with the carrots. Peas are traditional in your classic pot pie recipe, so you can get away with it, although I personally don't hold with cooked peas, generally speaking.
   
6. But please, please don't try the above with lima beans. Your oven will explode and burn down the whole neighborhood. Or to be more frank about it, I refuse to offer any useful advice when it comes to lima beans; if I have to make up crazy nonsense to deter people from using lima beans, I'll do what I have to do. You have to draw the line somewhere.
   
7. Find some way, somehow, to ditch the canned soup. Ok, I'll admit that getting some chicken and doing up some gravy would be harder than just going with the canned soup, so let's agree that "not using canned soup" is an advanced technique here.
   
8. This will probably taste better after a few drinks, especially if you used the Oreo crust. Like the recipe itself, it wouldn't do to get too fancy here. Martinis would be correct if you're trying for the whole 50's suburbia effect, but they just seem a little too swanky under the circumstances, and I just don't think the pairing is quite right, flavorwise. Rum-and-cokes would be better, and drink 'em out of jelly jars if you've got 'em.
   
9. Just pack it in and make the damn chicken pot pie, already. Or get a frozen pot pie from the grocery store and microwave it, if you're feeling unmotivated. It'll be a million times better, either way.
   

That chow mein recipe I covered (or variants of it) turns out to be a time-honored taste sensation native to the upper midwest, and today's recipe certainly has a sort of cornfed, stick-to-yer-ribs quality to it as well. I wonder if the, ah, chef is originally from that neck of the woods. From the grainy photo of (allegedly) her next to the recipe, I'm guessing she's somewhere in her late 70's to mid-80's. If you read local obits of people that age and older, a remarkable number of them were born somewhere in the Midwest, usually the Dakotas or rural Minnesota, and moved out here some time between 1910 and the dustbowl era. My own grandfather-in-law is yet another of these Minnesota migrants, and my father's family came west from Missouri about that time, and I've met several other people who did this as well. Nobody's every really explained why all these people left en masse, although I suppose the climate may have been a factor.

Right now it's state fair season in the Midwest, which is a great chance to examine the current state of the art in the local cuisine. Pharyngula has a bit about the state fair in Minnesota -- tater tot hotdish on a stick! deep-fried Oreos! The Champagne of Blogs offers a similar report about the Iowa State Fair, with plenty of photos. Deep-fried mac & cheese! Pork chop on a stick!

I hesitate to mention this, because I'm not a mean person, but on one hand you have this... cuisine, and on the other you have all these nice, well-meaning little old ladies whose husbands all had heart attacks and kicked off at age 55, my own sainted, dearly-departed grandmother among them. As I said, I'm not a mean person, so I would never, ever suggest there's a causal link here or anything. I'm just sayin'.

Green, Yellow, Red, Grey

Weird, yet somehow appealing, in an abstract, formal sense. Well, to me, anyway.



Bonus photo: On the transit mall, downtown. Because I'm way too chicken to take pictures of the crack dealers.

transitions.2

Tiny flowers in Jamison Square. Fall is just around the corner, but someone hasn't gotten the memo. Nursery plants can be so obtuse about these things.

I'm not usually all that tuned in to the seasons and so forth, but in the past week or so I've noticed a change in the air. Or maybe it's the angle of the sun, and that the days are shorter. Starchy root vegetables sound even tastier to me than usual. There's a sense, perhaps an instinct, that the slack days of summer are ending, and it's time to get serious about... something. Surviving the winter? Holidays? School?

One nice thing about fall is that it's harvest time, meaning hop harvest time, meaning fresh hop beer time once again. This year the annual Fresh Hop Festival is at the new Lucky Lab pub up in NW Portland. The last couple of years it was held out at the Golden Valley pub in McMinnville (see Sunday's post). It's kind of a shame it's moved, although I can understand wanting to be closer to where most of the beer geeks live.

On a related note, it'll be Oktoberfest season soon. I've never really understood why Portland hasn't gone in more for Oktoberfest, why there isn't a huge tent in Waterfront Park and a long weekend of silly beer-drenched revels, tubas, lederhosen, women in low-cut outfits carrying giant steins of beer, politically incorrect drinking songs, the whole deal. You'd think that would be a natural fit here in Portland, but it doesn't exist. It's a real mystery, and a damn shame.

A few days ago I was up at Reservoir 3, enjoying the peace and quiet. A squirrel ran by, and around a corner, completely ignoring me. You can tell it's getting to be fall when squirrels are so busy foraging they barely see you. This isn't always a great plan when you're a tiny rodent, though; I heard a bit of rustling and scuffling, and when I rounded the corner I came across the squirrel again, trying to escape from a huge red-tailed hawk. The hawk hadn't managed to catch the squirrel, but it was cornered, out in the open. The hawk hopped about on the ground, trying to move in for the kill. Then they both saw me and froze. The hawk glared, enraged. It must've thought I was here to take its prey. I imagined it was considering driving me off, beak and talons slashing away. I stared at it, it stared at me, and the squirrel bolted for cover. Up a nearby tree, into the canopy, and it screamed squirrel obscenities at the hawk once it was safely out of view. The hawk kept glaring, refusing to give ground and let me pass. Not only had I deprived it of a meal, I'd failed to catch the squirrel myself. Yes, I really am a pathetic excuse for a predator. I can't deny that.

After a few more moments of avian disdain, the hawk flew to the top of a nearby lamppost and completely ignored me. Apparently it had found me unworthy, and had no further use for me.

I really ought to have had the camera along, to capture all the excitement, but sadly, no. Sometimes I'm a pathetic excuse for a photo-predator, as well.



The old Metropolitan Presort building being demolished. Seems they were sitting on prime Pearl real estate, which is way too valuable to waste on single-story industrial buildings. Seems it's still up in the air what's going to go here. My money's on "upscale condo tower", possibly with a combination doggie day spa + trendy martini bar on the ground floor. But that's just a wild guess.

Oh, wait... I was right about the condo tower. Say 'hi' to the 937 Condominiums, a shiny new 16-story condo tower, with a design (supposedly) based on fractals. Woooh, fractals. The ground floor retail tenants are presumably still TBD at this point, but I'm still betting on the doggie day spa + martini bar.

transitions

Photo 1: Leaves changing color already. No, no, this is too soon, dammit. Entirely too soon.



Photo 2: A building under renovation, in the south end of downtown, near PSU. This was built as one of the Portland Center Apartments back in the mid-60's, and now it's becoming yet another upscale condo tower. These must be the old fridges, on their way to the dump, since they aren't made of stainless steel or anything fancy like that. As for why they're outside on the balconies, it's obvious: They're just chillin'.

Lazy sunday alcobloggage

In February, I'll regret not having gone out and done all sorts of summery activities today, but I'm making the choices for today and not for six months down the road, so I'm slouching on the balcony with a drink and something to read, and I thought I'd blog about it so I can go back and read this in the dead of winter and wonder why the hell I wasn't at the beach, or out wakeboarding, or driving the MG with the top down, or whatever. Well, it's because I wanted to, and I can, I guess. And I agree, that's a lame reason, but there you have it.

So I have 3 things in front of me. First, we have "Ultimate", the Sunday paper's glossy new foray into the ultra-luxury lifestyle segment. The cover story gushes about the latest gazillion-dollar hobby ranch development out near Bend. The new gimmick is that all the McMansions there must be done in a style the developers call "Napa/Tuscan". Seriously. A bunch of fake Tuscan villas out in the middle of the desert. There's even a small vineyard as part of the "grounds", growing what the article describes as "French hybrid grapes". Hybrid in this sense means hybridized between European and New World varieties. These hybrids are generally not well thought-of in the wine world, but they'll grow almost anywhere, even in the middle of a desert, a desert with extremely cold winters. It's not really Tuscan without a vineyard, and this is all that'll grow here, so hybrids it is.

The article profiles the retired couple who bought the first house in the new subdivision. Seems that now that they're experts on the Tuscan lifestyle, they're considering a trip to Italy to see the "real thing". Wow.

There are also articles on $35,000 outdoor grills, and Lamborghinis, both of which are incredibly practical in our drizzly climate. Not. Overall, the magazine invites public ridicule, as does following its dictates.

The facing page across from the end of the Tuscan ranch blather contains a house-for-sale ad, for the house discussed in the article. If they really loved the place so much, why is it for sale so soon? The world can be so damn mysterious sometimes.

The second item is a 70's paperback, "The Serial: A Year in the Life of Marin County", by Cyra McFadden. It's a great satire on an era that deserved it. Gold chains, hot tubs, cults, drugs, it's all there. In other words, the larval stage of people who are now scrambling to buy gazillion-dollar Tuscan hobby ranches in the middle of the freakin' desert.

I bought the book some time ago, at a great used book store down in McMinnville. We went back yesterday, to discover that the bookshop is gone, replaced by... an upscale wine bar. Seriously. The place was empty when we walked by, but it sure looked sleek and expensive. We didn't go in. And why bother with a pretentious wine bar when Golden Valley Brewing is just down the street, I ask you. Mmm.... Red Thistle Ale...

Item #3 is a stack of geeky math papers, which I probably won't get to, y'know, with the booze and all. (The booze is just a mundane gin & fruit juice concoction, whatever was here w/o going to the store, basically.)

Actually I haven't gotten around to any of the 3 items yet, due to this moblogging business. It's not really a lazy Sunday if you sit and write about it instead of living the moment, so I'd probably better wrap this up. See ya!
Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless handheld

This Beat is Tikitronic

Two vintage tiki masks adorning the soon-to-be-bulldozed Jasmine Tree restaurant, near PSU in downtown Portland. (Shiny new condo tower, coming soon, courtesy of local taxpayers. I'm resisting temptation to go off on a rant about that, but see the user comments on the above link.)

The Jasmine Tree is one of our city's last vestiges of "tiki culture", something I never really got into, but which is near and dear to a surprising number of people. For example see these reviews and writeups about the restaurant at Tikibars.net, Humuhumu.com, and NWTiki

I did happen to go there on New Years Eve a few years ago. There was a sort of dinner-theater musical revue show that was supposed to culminate in champagne-soaked revels right on the dot of midnight. They actually ran out of material about ten minutes shy of the witching hour, so there was a bit of awkward standing around until we got to the champagne. But hey. If you've never heard "Proud Mary" sung in broken English in a tiki-themed Chinese restaurant on New Years Eve, you may have already lost your last chance to. Dinner included a nice big platter of that sliced, cold BBQ pork, with the hot mustard and sesame seeds. I don't care whether it's authentic. I loved the stuff as a kid, and having it once again with a fruity parasol drink in hand was just freakin' sublime. Ok, this was after the second or third fruity parasol drink, if I recall correctly, which I probably don't.
After a couple more parasol drinks, I finally started to understand the weird animatronic "Enchanted Tiki Room" show at Disneyland, which until that moment had just mystified the hell out of me. That moment passed, and the singing animatronic birds once again mystify the hell out of me.

The funny thing is that the New Years excursion was my parents' idea. They were going with friends, and invited us to come, so we were going with a bunch of people who were all huge tiki fans back in the day and didn't see anything ironic about it at all. It was just like the old days, I gather; couples going out for dinner, parasol drinks, and a show. This was probably the right way to do it. When people see chop suey on the menu and start laughing derisively, it really ruins the whole mood.

The only worrisome part of the evening was how a few mai tais in a Tiki bar can bring out the un-PC-ness in people of a certain age. I've tried to explain, very patiently, that it's not ok to refer to people as "Oriental", but the advice doesn't really take even at the best of times, and it's far from the best of times when you put people in a restaurant that reminds them of when they were 23. At least the place was noisy, and I don't think anyone overheard them. Or at least, I didn't see anyone I knew there, so if anyone was offended, at least they were perfect strangers, which is something, I guess.

Let's be honest here, the JT is a total dive. It's survived as long as it has because it's near the college, and it offers cheap mixed drinks and karaoke in a weird retro setting, and you can get a bento to go for lunch (a distinctly non-Tiki practice). Let's not pretend it's a cultural treasure here.

Here's a Christian Science Monitor article discussing the hipster-driven resurgence of the Tiki phenomenon in recent years. I don't really know (or, quite honestly, care) all that much, but I do have a few theories, or, ok, notions, of my own about why people found this stuff so appealing at one time, and why some do now. I'm sure there've been many books written, probably even doctoral dissertations written, on this topic, and we could go look at those, but where's the fun in that? I mean, this is a blog. Uninformed speculation is the heart of what blogging is all about.

People enjoy the temporary fantasy of an exotic, non-urban, magical land, where life moves at a slower, more sensual pace, and there's always time for another drink, and the friendly (if a bit simple) natives bid you a hearty welcome, or aloha, or arrivederci. I say "arrivederci" because I gather that in the 21st century, rural Tuscany has replaced Polynesia as Pop Culture's distant, exotic land of choice, just as Polynesia replaced the 1920s-era fixation with "Arabia". The retro fad isn't really about Pacific island culture, either; the yearned-for distant land in this case is 1959 America, not Polynesia. (By "Polynesia", I mean the pan-tropical Tiki universe, which also included China, "the Orient", Florida, and sometimes Cuba. And Bali, and maybe the rest of Indonesia. And Singapore. Anywhere with palm trees, basically. It was the 50's & 60's, and nobody really knew or cared about the differences between all these places.)

Tiki had a bit extra going for it, in that it provided an excuse to show a little skin, in an era when an excuse was needed. Consider the old National Geographic policy on nudity: You could show it, so long as the people being photographed were "innocent" natives who didn't know it was sinful and wrong. The plethora of tropical island B-movies from the era took the same tack. You could show skin, anywhere from flashes of bare midriff up to substantial nekkidness, so long as everyone acted like it was no big deal. Island maidens could splash around in the lcal waterfall all they liked, wearing nothing but a smile, so long as they remained blissfully unaware there was a movie camera lurking in the bushes. I think it's telling that the genre started to die out in the late 60's, when the, uh, taboo receded a bit.

A couple more Tiki-retro articles here and here, if you're interested.

If I was a Real Journalist (and not merely part of the unwashed blogging rabble Real Journalists alternately sneer at and quiver in fear of) I'd go visit the city's soon-to-be only vintage tiki bar, the Alibi up on Interstate Avenue, and interview people at both places, and do original research and so forth. Pshaw! It's not that I'm opposed to going to a corny retro bar and downing mai tais, per se, it's just that I haven't had time, what with having an RL job and all, and I can't write it off as a business expense, and basically I'm just lazy & haven't gotten around to it. Plus, if I go at a later date, I can use that for a followup post, which will make me look far more dilligent than I actually am.

Word on the street is that someone's going to be opening a brand new tiki outfit called "Thatch", somewhere in off the hipster regions. Somehow it just won't be the same. I can't really put my finger on it. It's sort of like how old B monster movies are great, but new B monster movies (like the stuff you see on the SciFi Channel) are godawful trash.

I mentioned tiki / tropical island / jungle B-movies earlier. Here are a few, most of which I've seen. I have mentioned I'm a B-movie dork, haven't I? I thought about doing mini-writeups about each of these, but I've already spent far too long working on this post. Each link takes you to the IMDB page for the movie, and there's plenty of info there if you're interested.

• Bird of Paradise, with Joel McCrea and Dolores Del Rio.
  
• She Gods of Shark Reef
  
• Fiend of Dope Island
  
• Pagan Island
  
• Wild Women of Wongo
  
• Love Goddesses of Blood Island
  
• Horrors of Spider Island
  
• Lost Jungle
  
• Prehistoric Women. Actually a caveman movie, but has the feel of a tiki / desert island movie.
  
• Enchanted Island.
  
• Kon-Tiki. Documentary on Thor Heyerdahl's adventures in the Pacific.
  
• Donovan's Reef -- with John Wayne!
  
• Blue Hawaii, with Elvis!
  

And there's Gilligan's Island, of course, which is sort of a spoof of all these silly movies they kept making. More seriously, the University of Hawaii has an extensive database of films relating to the Pacific, with a focus on documentaries. Why the weird title? Fads come and go, and what could be more unfashionable than 1990 dance music? Not old enough to be retro, maybe will never be retro, since nobody can ever predict that in advance. Well, that's my justification, but it really came about because I was trying to come up with a play on words involving "Tiki", and I came up with "Tikitronic" because I'm a geek, and that in turn reminded me of a song from long ago. So there you have it, if you care.

wednesday things-n-stuff

I haven't done any cute animal photos for a while, primarily because I don't have any. But I do have a few small stuffed animals at my desk, and here's a photo of one. This may appear to be a hippo, superficially, but it's really a wombat. My wife gave it to me, and she says it's a wombat.



Yet another wildflower photo, taken a while back. I was actually going to go take a better photo this morning, since this isn't exactly the best photo ever taken, but the flower was gone, and the ivy median where it used to be had been extensively pruned back. Further down the street there was a white van marked "Inmate Work Crew", and a bunch of shady characters in orange vests were doing a bit of groundskeeping. I didn't get close enought to see whether they let these guys have sharp objects or not, but I don't see how you're supposed to trim ivy if you don't have anything sharp. Yikes!

Various items found on the net:

• Another cute echidna, for your enjoyment, or at least for mine.
  
• Got a search hit from someone at the San Diego Zoo, who was looking for "psycho killer raccoons terrorize olympia". I hadn't heard anything about that, but the zoo in San Diego is highly respected, and more importantly they have echidnas, so I take this sort of thing seriously. Turns out there's an Associated Press article by that title out there on the interwebs. Jeepers! I've never been a fan of raccoons. As much as I go in for the cute-animal thing, I specifically exclude raccoons. Yecch. If they're a nuisance, and a danger to the community, why should they be treated any differently than the way rats are dealt with under these circumstances?
  
• I'm not into motorcycles, in the sense that I have absolutely no desire to own or ride one. I've told my wife several times that she ought to slap me silly if I ever seriously consider a motorcycle, even as a midlife crisis toy way off in the distant future. But they sure can be real purty to look at sometimes.
  
• In somewhat the same vein, here are a couple of cute post-WWII German microcars. Awwwwww....
  
• Perhaps our fair city's Downtown Security Network is perfectly innocent, but the name and concept still give me the heebie-jeebies. Seems now the city wants to catalog all the privately-owned security cameras downtown, you know, strictly as a crime prevention measure. For protecting the children and all that. There's no mention of networking the cameras together, UK-style, so that everyone's under government surveillance all the time. Not yet, anyway.
  
• I've never watched a single episode of Survivor, so normally I wouldn't bother talking about it, but they've really jumped the shark this time. Seems that in the next Survivor series, there will be four teams, grouped by race. Yes, you read that right. The people from the show are spinning it like it's going to be a serious exploration of race in modern America. Somehow I doubt that.
  I also doubt, somehow, that the minds behind network TV reality shows really know anything about the subject or have anything useful to contribute on that count. I can see it now, people getting thrown off the island when it turns out one of their great-grandparents was a non-Aryan mongrel. Maybe next they can group the teams by religion, following traditional US practice: Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and "Other". A huge argument breaks out within the Protestant team, with the Southern Baptist faction accusing the Episcopalians of secretly wanting to join the Catholic team, and insisting on hauling up a huge "Mission Accomplished" sign all the time, win or lose. The conservative blogosphere blows a gasket whenever the Jewish team does well, muttering darkly about "the people who run Hollywood" and so forth. And the folks lumped together in "Other" have a bit of trouble getting along, as well.
  
  Or maybe they could do liberals vs. conservatives, or gays vs. straights, or Italian Mafia vs. Irish Mafia, or Bloods vs. Crips, or, or, or...
  
  Personally, I'd suggest a left-handers vs. right-handers battle, although it really wouldn't be much of a contest. Those righties wouldn't stand a chance, the poor saps.
  
• Slashdot mentioned the latest Windows vs. OSX security article. It's actually not that great of an article, on one hand giving the standard list of Windows design flaws (SYSTEM account, registry, alternate data streams, ACLs, etc.), and on the other singing the praises of Apple's launchd, which is really just a modern replacement for a few ancient BSD-legacy daemons (init, cron, inetd). It's certainly nice that launchd is secure, but comparing it to Windows is... well, I'm trying to avoid the obvious Apples-n-oranges cliche here. It's just not the same thing.
  
  At one point the author says "Windows has no equivalent to OS X's bill of materials, so it cannot validate permissions, dates and checksums of system and third-party software.", which is not exactly true. The MSI installer lets you provide hash values for the files in a package, and it's not difficult to validate files against the hashes provided. The one hiccup is that MSI uses a proprietary hash algorithm, so there's no way to know how secure it really is. I'm not a big Windows fan, and I'd certainly hope that OSX is more secure, but really, if you're writing an article like this, it pays to do a little research first.
  
• On a somewhat related note, check out the return of David Brent, who's now, um, consulting for a certain large software company based in Redmond-where-the-shadows-lie.
  
• Coolest. Beer bottle. Ever. I must find this.
  
• A mini-profile of a local creepy anti-immigrant protester.
  
• The creationists are at it again. Since they can't weasel their beliefs into the schools by pretending it's scientific, instead they're taking a page from Karl Rove, swiftboating their opponents and violating Godwin's Law in the process.
  
  

Apocalypse Not

Maybe I'm tempting fate by starting this post with 5 minutes until midnight, but if the predicted (but only by wingnuts) Great Iranian Apocalypse of 8/22/06 is going to happen, it had better hurry up and be quick about it. Not that I'm trying to encourage that sort of thing, mind you.

A few Iran-related links to share:

• Stop War on Iran blog
  
• An 8/22 story at ThinkProgress
  
• Another story, at Uruknet. I'm not a big fan of Uruknet, but this story's on the mark.
  
• The cheeky Brits over at El Reg chime in as well.
  
• Another fun 8/22 piece at NewsHounds
  

A couple of additional observations here. First, it fascinates me how the apocalypse crowd can blab on and on about Ahmadinejad fixin' to blow up the world, and the question of how he might pull off that stunt never comes up. It's just sort of assumed that anyone who makes mean faces at us a.) wants to blow up the world, and b.) therefore can blow up the world. Bernard Lewis and his adoring fans suggest that the end is near solely because of a date they find significant, and completely ignore the issue of whether there's any credible mechanism for doing so. That's not science. That's not even political science. That's nothing but numerology, and it deserves the same respect we normally reserve for numerologists' predictions. Lewis can have a booth at the state fair, between the palm reader and the bearded lady, if he likes. But an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal? What did he do to earn that sort of honor?

And second, I'm amazed by the near-infinite capacity to forget, as shown by the media and certain segments of the general public. Somehow, the war nuts have managed to keep crying wolf again and again, year after year, and people still shriek "Eek, a wolf!", even though the wolf never shows up. They swear up and down that Saddam has zillions of WMDs, and it turns out he doesn't, and then they swear up and down, with a straight face, that Ahmadinejad has zillions of WMDs, and nobody bats an eye. Somehow, they can keep predicting Armageddon all the time and the public never tires of it, and no credibility is lost when the world resolutely fails to end, again and again. I don't know how they manage this trick, but in terms of gullibility the true believers compare unfavorably even with weird outfits like the old Church Universal and Triumphant, a New Agey doomsday group that holed up in Montana back in the 80's, to await the imminent nuclear war that never happened. Membership dwindled after that, which seems only logical. It doesn't seem to work that way with fundies, though. Every failed apocalypse just whets their appetite for the next prediction, and they remain in a constant end-of-days tizzy, day after day, year after year, and this seems perfectly reasonable to them. That will never cease to astonish me.