post-election edition

Well, obviously the big news is that my "endorsees" did a lot better than they did in the May primary, where I didn't pick a single freakin' winner. So clearly the general public learned their lesson and heeded my advice this time. I'm sure that must be it.

Ok, let me qualify that. Three of my high-profile picks were obvious protest votes. I came out against Ted, and David Wu, and Leslie Roberts, even though I was sure all three were a lock to win. If either Ted or Wu had been within a couple percentage points of their Republican opponents in the last polls, I would have at least considered voting for 'em, even though I'm no fan of either guy, just to keep the Rethuglicans from winning. So being able to vote for third-party candidates this year was an enjoyable luxury. And the Leslie Roberts thing, well, a write-in candidacy is always an uphill battle. Charles Henderson grabbing a quarter of the vote in a write-in campaign is huge, almost unheard-of in this state. With any luck, Roberts will get the voters' message and approach the job with at least a vestigial amount of humility, compassion, and professionalism. You're a judge of the Oregon Circuit Court, 4th District, position #37. You aren't Queen of the Universe. Deal.

I didn't mention my local state legislative race in my "endorsements" post, since the R's didn't even bother to nominate anyone this time around. Geez. I'm not actually going to vote Republican in any conceivable situation, but I'd at least like to have them on the ballot. If there aren't any wild-eyed wingnuts to vote against, it takes a lot of the fun out of voting. So anyway, my state rep won. And the D's won the House back. So hopefully they can demonstrate they're a bunch of responsible adults, and we haven't just traded one gang of crazed ideological nutjobs for another.

The voters took my advice most of the time on this year's crop of ballot measures, at any rate. Measure 42, the insurance & credit score measure, didn't pass. It's kind of too bad, but I'm not exactly surprised. The insurance industry ran an effective "no" campaign, and the measure probably lost 10-15% of the electorate just because Bill Sizemore was behind it. Still, a decent measure failing is less bad than a bad measure passing, and no bad measures passed this time around. The thing I'm really confused about is Measure 46. Measures 46 and 47 were a conjoined-twin pair of proposals: 47 was a campaign finance law, and 46 was a constitutional amendment to make campaign finance laws possible in this state. 47 passed, but 46 didn't. WTF?! There's some debate about whether some of the provisions in 47 can take effect without 46 in place, but it's still a peculiar result. Isaac Laquedem, who endorsed 46 and said no to 47, wonders whether the voters didn't understand the two measures. I, too, am surprised that at least 14% of the electorate voted in such a seemingly pathological way. I can think of at least three explanations:
1. The voters are much more sophisticated than they get credit for, and they read M. 47 carefully and decided they wanted only those reforms within it which didn't require a constitutional amendment. That would be suggesting that 50+% of the voters are more sophisticated than I am, since I didn't do that. So I firmly reject that suggestion.
2. The voters want campaign finance reform in the abstract, but not this particular reform, so by deliberately voting yes on 47 and no on 46 they were trying to cast a purely symbolic vote in favor of the general notion of reform, just to "send a message". I doubt this because this kind of behavior is usually media-driven, and I haven't seen or heard of a single media outlet anywhere statewide encouraging people to vote this way.
3. The voters are smoking crack. Lots and lots of crack. And meth, too. And sniffing glue. And slamming down Everclear jello shots, with OxyContin chasers. And maybe licking a toad or two, while they're at it. Plus they're just plain stupid.

I'm leaning toward explanation #3, but hey, I've always been a cynic.

In the ultra-obscure West Multnomah Soil & Water Conservation District races, I did better than I thought. I figured that for anything as low-profile as this, a vote for anyone other than the incumbent would be the longest of longshots. But in the sole contested race, the challenger (who I endorsed) won. So I really hope Mr. Goode wasn't the good-ol-boy-network candidate, challenging an "outsider" incumbent. There was really just no way at all to find that out one way or the other. The district's "permanent rate limit" measure passed, although I came out against it. I'm not heartbroken about that, and anyway I figured that anything with the word "conservation" in the name was a guaranteed winner in this neck of the woods. The good ol' boys who got re-elected will probably waste the money on pet projects, or just swipe it, or whatever, but really it isn't a lot of money, all things considered. So no biggie, I guess. It'd take the entire annual budget of 60+ soil-n-water districts to pay for a single aerial tram, to put things in perspective.

In mildly related news, the tram is finally up and running, kinda sorta. So I expect to have pics and/or video of the new beastie here in the near future, when I get around to it.

Rumsfeld Cuts & Runs!

So Rumsfeld's resigned already. That was awfully fast. In a way I'm kind of disappointed. For the last six years Rummy and Dick and George and friends swaggered around like they owned the world and everyone on it, but take away their rubber-stamp Congress and they fold up like a house of cards. That's just sad. If only we'd known this was all it would take to bring the crazies to heel, we'd have done it years ago. Damn.

At least Rummy's guaranteed to get himself a nice, shiny "Medal of Freedom" for his efforts, as a sort of consolation prize. Kind of like what they did with George Tenet, come to think of it. (Unless Rummy gets pissed off about being hung out to dry like this, and writes a lurid tell-all book. Sure, sure, that would never happen in real life, but it's fun to think about.)

All of this is not to say I expect the next two years to be a kinder, gentler era of bipartisanship. I think we can safely ignore all the morning-after happy talk we're hearing today. With Democrats running the show in the House, and maybe the Senate, I imagine Karl Rove and Ken Mehlman will have plenty of stuff to distort and lie about to rile up the wingnuts for '08. I haven't seen a full accounting of the seats the R's lost and where the former occupants fell on the ideological spectrum, but I read somewhere that many of the seats they lost in the northeast were formerly held by "moderate" Republicans. So the hardliners will probably dominate the House Republican caucus even more than they did before, although that fact won't matter as much as it once did.

I also don't expect any serious policy changes in Iraq. Short of cutting off money for the war (a drastic step I don't expect to see), Congress doesn't have a lot of options in the foreign policy area. Even if they did, the Decider's made it very clear he believes he has the inherent, absolute right to take the country to war with anyone, anytime, anywhere, and torture or kill anyone he pleases whenever the mood strikes him, without having to so much as ask anyone's opinion. I don't see that changing. George doesn't say "stay the course" in public anymore, but I expect that's what he'll do, or try to do. And if it ends up in the courts, I don't see the Supremes lining up against him, not with Scalia, Roberts, Thomas, and Alito on the bench.

Since he's still basically got a rubber-stamp Supreme Court, I'd be surprised if the Bushies aren't at least daydreaming about how to abuse a certain obscure, never-used provision in Article 2, Section 3 of the Constitution:

He shall from time to time give to the Congress information of the state of the Union, and recommend to their consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient; he may, on extraordinary occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them, and in case of disagreement between them, with respect to the time of adjournment, he may adjourn them to such time as he shall think proper; he shall receive ambassadors and other public ministers: he shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed, and shall commission all the officers of the United States.

All you'd need to do is engineer a pro-forma adjournment "dispute" between the two houses in the outgoing lame-duck Congress, and have George ride in on his white horse to save the day, adjourning both houses until, for example, Inauguration Day, 2009, or simply "until further notice". Then all you'd have to do is convince five Supremes that the plain wording of this passage doesn't explicitly prohibit that long of an adjournment, and the Decider has clear sailing for the rest of his term in office, with no pesky subpoenas to answer or investigations to stonewall. Sure, the public probably wouldn't take kindly to this, but the next election isn't for another two years, surely they'll get used to the new state of affairs sooner or later. If worse comes to worse, you can always blame the whole thing on 9/11.

In any case, I'm just happy we've gotten through another election without (so far) seeing any mention of the accursed name "Boies". The Virginia senate still isn't settled, so we're not completely out of the woods yet. But I've got my fingers crossed.

Unexposed

The famous "Expose Yourself to Art" statue is gone! This lumpy square of asphalt is all that remains where Kvinneakt (that's her official name) once stood. They're going to tear up the transit mall for MAX construction next year, so it was time for her to go.

On the way home from work yesterday I saw the statue swaddled in a protective wrapper, sort of a bubblewrap burqa. I thought it'd make a good picture and resolved to come back today, but she was already gone. The city can move remarkably fast when it wants to.

I don't know where the statue's going from here. The late, lamented Soaring Stones outside Pioneer Place were handed back to the sculptor, and word is they'll likely end up in Seattle. Call me a cynic, but I have a funny feeling the lovely Ms. K. will put down roots in the Pearl, or maybe South Waterfront, or some other official gentrification zone; or maybe she'll end up in the private collection of a wealthy campaign contributor, or she'll just get lost in the warehouse, never to be seen again. It just stands to reason, the way things usually work out these days.

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Turns out I had a picture of one of the Soaring Stones lying around, and here it is.
("Soaring Stones" would be a good name for a band, btw.)

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Updated 12/27/07: If you look closely at the Soaring Stones photo, you'll see a couple of the transit mall's groovy old 70's bus shelters. Those are gone now too, and like the Soaring Stones, they're not coming back.

Also, this humble post has gotten linkage from Portland Public Art. Yay!

Lone Fir

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So here are some of those photos of Lone Fir Cemetery [google map] I mentioned a few days back. I'd never been there before, and I've been meaning to visit for a while now. The idea occurred to me again around Halloween, but it didn't seem right to go just then, since I was going out of historical curiosity, not just to be morbid or out of some juvenile thrill-seeking impulse. Visiting on Halloween just seemed kind of silly and melodramatic. Plus on Halloween, or on the day after, I figured there'd probably be too many people of the living variety there; it'd be like going to the mall on the day after Thanksgiving or something. And in any case, on Halloween it was cold and clear and sunny outside, and I'd had the idea that bad weather would be better for b+w photos. Well, it was raining quite a bit when I visited, and the color photos turned out way better than the b+w ones. Have I mentioned yet that I'm not a professional photographer?

Lone Fir is one of the oldest cemeteries in the area, and Metro administers it under their pioneer cemetery program, even though it's still accepting new residents. Many of the newest arrivals are immigrants from Russia and Ukraine, with long Cyrillic inscriptions and elaborate designs on distinctive polished black headstones.

We Portlanders are a reserved and rather squeamish bunch, and we don't have the same attitude towards death as people do in, say, New Orleans or Charleston. We don't talk about it, we don't think about it, and we avoid places associated with it whenever we possibly can. And naturally we don't admit we're doing any of these things, because that would be talking about it, which we don't do. So even though I've lived here most of my life I knew absolutely nothing about Lone Fir until just over a year ago, when the Chinese graveyard controversy cropped up.




The next photo is of the southwest corner of Lone Fir, or of where it was until 1948. At that point the county decided it needed space for a new office building, and what better place to build than on top of the Chinese corner of the old cemetery? (No, it doesn't make a lot of sense to me either, but those were peculiar and highly bigoted times.) So they dug up everyone in the area and plunked an ugly office building on the spot. Recently the county decided it didn't need the building or the land after all, so they tore the building out and were making ready to sell the land. Then it turned out people had been careless back in '48 and had neglected to dig a few people up. They'd been there all that time, under the parking lot. (I'm sure I've seen a movie or two that started out that way.) So now the talk is that there'll be a memorial of some kind. But right now there's no money for that, so the spot currently looks like this.




The statue in the above picture is part of a war memorial tucked away in the center of Lone Fir. The four sides of the base dedicate it to veterans of the Civil War, the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, and wars against the Indians. We have a surprising number of monuments and markers concerning the Spanish-American War, considering what a brief and relatively bloodless conflict it was. There's a bunch of stuff in the Plaza Blocks, and the Battleship Oregon mast in Waterfront Park, and I understand there's a rather obscure marker near the Veterans Hospital, south of OHSU, and this monument. And if we have four, there are probably even more scattered around the area that I'm unfamiliar with. I've been meaning to do a post about war memorials in the city, but that's going to require a bit of additional research.




Another photo looking across the grounds. Parts of Lone Fir, such as this spot, look rather sparsely "settled". That is, until you realize that of the 30,000+ people here, an estimated 10,000 are either lost or unmarked, due to time, weather, vandals, or simply poor record-keeping.

The interior of Lone Fir is basically invisible from the street on three sides of the place. On the sides facing Stark and Morrison Streets (the north and south sides, respectively), all you see is a high, blank, gray retaining wall topped by a chain link fence, with barbed wire on top. (And yes, that means many of the residents here are in fact above street level, despite being underground.) On the west side, there's a row of houses between 20th avenue and the cemetery, so you can catch occasional glimpses between the houses of headstones backing up to someone's back yard.

There are one or two small signs on the perimeter fence informing you the entrance is somewhere on Morrison St., but even if you're on Morrison it's tough to find the entrance. If you scroll up and look at that photo of where the Chinese part of the cemetery used to be, you'll see another chain link fence in the distance, separating the old parking lot from the cemetery proper. The main entrance is simply a gate in that fence. By all rights, Lone Fir ought to have an ancient, elaborate, Gothic wrought iron fence, and an entrance arch of stone or brick. But it doesn't, and as far as I know it never did.



This last photo is a detail of the tombstone of James B. and Elizabeth Stephens, early pioneers in the area. The back of this stone holds the inscription "Here we lie by consent after 57 years, 2 months, 2 days sojourning on earth awaiting nature's immutable laws to return us to the elements of which we were formed". Which to me is a touching, and refreshingly nonreligious, sentiment.

Clearly I'm not the only person who feels that way. You can't see it in this photo, but above each portrait someone had recently laid a single red rose.

Next door is the oldest grave in the cemetery, J.B. Stephens's father Emmor, who died in 1846. Oregon wouldn't even become a state for another three years. To me, what's even more striking is that the elder Stephens was born in 1777. It's quite rare to see any mention of a year starting with '17' in this part of the world, in any context.

Other info & resources:

• Friends of Lone Fir
  
• Portland Public Art blog
  
• A large number of photos tagged with "lonefircemetery" on Flickr. Most of these are better than my photos, but in my defense it was absolutely pouring rain when I visited.
  
• A Willamette Week article about Lone Fir and a couple of other old graveyards in the area.
  
• A recent Portland Tribune story
  
• An old post about the place by B!x
  
• Lone Fir's page at Graveyards.com. Yes, there really is such a thing. Gives GPS coordinates of the place and everything, and has a photo of the nondescript main entrance.
  

Milestone P2

This small stone object is very, very old, at least by Portland standards. It's an old 1850's-era milestone on SE Stark St., a bit east of 20th Avenue. (Roughly 2300 SE Stark, to be exact.) It's embedded in the north wall of Lone Fir Cemetery, which itself is very, very old, by Portland standards. The "P2" was to indicate it was just two more miles through the howling wilderness to Portland, with its handful of wooden shacks and muddy stump-filled streets.

I saw a brief bit about this milestone quite recently on an episode of Oregon Field Guide, but when I ran across it I was actually on a visit to Lone Fir, which I'll talk more about in a subsequent post. I was just walking along Stark St. and there it was, and I thought, "Oh, that looks familiar." I just can't get enough of weird, geeky, esoteric stuff like this, so I had to take a few pictures, and I had to write a little about it. If this bores you to tears, my apologies. I don't always blog about obscure old rocks, in case you were curious. I'll probably do another cheesy monster movie post next week, and maybe you'll like that post better than this one.

I also thought this was kind of fun because in present-day English the word "milestone" is a generic noun that's applied to all sorts of things. In Monday's Oregonian (11/6/06), the act of sentencing Saddam Hussein to the gallows is described as a "milestone". It's quite rare anymore to see the word used to describe a stone object that marks distance on a road. So this photo shows what an actual, physical, real-life milestone looks like. In case you were curious, or whatever.

This article at American Surveyor magazine discusses this milestone and its siblings at some length. Seems this is one of an original 15 stones, of which nine survive. Milestone P5 is pictured in the article. This is in a surveying magazine because Stark was originally known as the eastside portion of Baseline Road (the name it still goes by out in the western 'burbs), and Baseline is so named because it follows the original surveying baseline that extended out from what is now Willamette Stone State Heritage Site, an obscure and tiny state park hidden way up in the west hills. I haven't been there in years, and I don't remember it being overly enthralling. I don't know what conditions were like at the time the survey was done, but I imagine it wasn't completely overgrown like it is today. Don't go expecting a view.

Legend had it (sort of) that it was good luck to kiss the Willamette Stone. So it's too bad it's not there anymore. The sites linked to just indicate the thing was vandalized; I seem to recall that the original rock was actually broken off its base and stolen. This was in the distant pre-eBay era, so it's probably just gathering dust in some avid collector's attic, or gathering moss in their garden.

This page at the city government website says the P4 milestone still exists too. Apparently it's easy enought to find that official guided walking tours of the area sometimes start there. One puzzling bit is that while the P2 stone is near SE 20th, this page asserts the P4 stone is at SE 61st Avenue. City blocks downtown are 200 feet on a side, but I don't know what they measure outside of there. If it's 200 feet everywhere, neither milestone would be in the right place, and the P2 stone appears to have been in its current location for an exceedingly long time.

Updated: I went looking for P4 a while back, but no luck. And I'm not the only person out here on the interwebs who's looked: The estimable Mr. Klein of ZehnKatzen Times fame reports having no luck finding P4, P5, or P6, but he did track down Milestone P7, with photos and everything. It's at the corner of 117th & Stark, and you can actually see it plainly in Google street view:

View Larger Map

The sign next to the milestone apparently says that P2, P4 thru P7, P9, P13, and P14 still exist. Or they did, supposedly, at the time the sign went in, whenever that was. Also, here's a Gresham Outlook story with photos of various milestones.

Updated again: Ok, just go and check out the Stark Street Mile Markers blog. History, photos, exact locations of all the extant ones. Very cool, although I'm almost kind of sad that someone else has gone and done this already. And here I was fixin' to start a new project...

spotlight

Here's a fun economic indicator for you. This spotlight was running last night during First Thursday in the Pearl District, trying to grab attention for yet another new condo tower. In past years you didn't have to do this. All you had to do was wander around the Pearl looking vaguely like a real estate developer (hint: riding a Segway helps. Seriously.), and people would stop you in the street and give you suitcases full of cash, begging you for a few square feet of precious Pearl real estate. It could be 50 feet underground, with knee-deep murky water, but so long as it was 50 feet underground in the Pearl, potential buyers would form a line stretching all the way from the California border.



[Note to prospective condo buyers from California. See those little streaky bits in the top photo? That is the substance we call 'rain'. It's cold, and wet, and falls from the sky. It tends to happen a great deal in Oregon. But no worries; usually July and August are (mostly) sunny, and sometimes parts of September can be nice, and occasionally a few days in June, too, if it's a drought year.]

So now they at least have to advertise the things a little, as you can see here. The downside of this is that the Pearl still isn't built out, so they'll keep doing this once you've moved in, and then that damn spotlight's shining through your loft windows, as seen (sort of) in photo #2. Photo #2 is the Marshall Wells Lofts building, a former warehouse renovated a few years back. The building isn't quite as illuminated as I'd like, but the spotlight was rotating, and the camera itself has a split-second lag when you're trying to take a photo, so getting everything timed right is an art I haven't quite mastered.


That's about all I've got on the First Thursday front. I've been really busy this week, as you might be able to tell from the lack of posts since Tuesday. I'd managed to collect a few photos and links about echidnas and I was going to do a mini-post about that, but I didn't even have time for a mini-post. I got a couple of SNR posts out, but those don't take as much time or effort; it's mostly a matter of checking Google News and making snarky and cynical remarks about the latest batch of stuff I run across.

So first, a big pile of Flickr photos of echidnas: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7].

Also, some bits about a visit to the Australia Zoo (also with a bonus wombat photo); your questions answered about how echidnas do it; an echidna wildlife encounter. Oh, and echidnas were recently named Animal of the Day over at TheWebsiteOfEverything. So now you know.

That pretty much uses up the echidna material I had, so on another utterly unrelated note, here's a great video on YouTube about the latest innovation in Texas cuisine: Chicken Fried Bacon. No lie. It's on YouTube, so it must be true. In a remarkable coincidence, not a single thin person appears in the video.

I actually do have something I can segue into from that, believe it or not. Here's yet another ooky recipe from the Baker County paper, from the same little old lady who did the Mock Chow Mein and "Different" Carrot recipes I wrote about previously.

Today's taste sensation is Easy Shrimp, Potato Soup, for which you will need the following:

1 cup hash brown potatoes
1 cup tiny salad shrimps
1 tbsp. cornstarch, mixed in
1/2 cup water
1 quart milk
1 tbsp. Worcestershire sauce
Salt and pepper to taste

Place the liquids and cornstarch [I assume this means the cornstarch water, milk, and Worcestershire sauce] in a large pot and bring to a boil until thickened, about 5 min., add the shrimp and potatoes [she doesn't specify how long to cook after this, or at what temperature.] and serve with toast.


As with most of her recipes, there's a kernel of an idea here, so that you could in theory create something edible if you depart far enough from the recipe as given here. There's a long, rich tradition of dairy+seafood soups out there, and these often incorporate potatoes as well, as in most common clam chowder recipes, for instance. Since this is a long and rich tradition, in this modern era one can visit the local grocery store and buy a can of clam chowder, or salmon chowder if you want to be fancy. Yes, even in Eastern Oregon. I don't know that you can get canned shrimp chowder, but you could get a can of Cream of Potato soup and add shrimp to that, if you absolutely must have shrimp in your soup. Any of these options would be easier than this allegedly "Easy" recipe. What's really puzzling is that this is the first recipe from the old bag that doesn't include any canned soup. The one time it could be employed to maximum effect, and she suddenly goes all DIY. I don't get it.

But as always, our focus is still on how to make something from scratch that's vaguely like this recipe, and have it not totally suck. Personally, I have no trouble boiling a pot of "liquids" for a few minutes and then tossing in a few basic ingredients. My big stumbling block is the shrimp. I can't stand shrimp, especially those rubbery pink little larva-like shrimp you see all the time. So let's take a more generic approach and just say "catch of the day" instead. It could be shrimp, if you're insane, or clams, or fish. If you like smoked oysters, they'd go well here. My aversion to shrimp is a big reason my wife clipped this out of the paper for me. That, and the recipe's gratuitous abuse of poor, innocent hash brown potatoes. They deserve better. Much better.

As for the rest of the recipe, just go out on the net and find a from-scratch chowder recipe and glean what you can from it. There's tons of them out there, and they're often the product of much deep thinking and meticulous research. Lesson #1 is that the recipe as given is sorely lacking in saturated fats. Some portion of that quart of milk will need to be replaced with cream, maybe heavy cream. And you're also going to need to add bacon, at minimum. You'll probably want butter, too. Please note we aren't making health food here. If you make the soup base rich and tasty enough, maybe you can just dispense with the seafood element entirely and just have a nice bowl of Bacon Chowder. Doesn't that sound nice? I'd totally eat that. And this way it's earth-friendly, too, since you won't be contributing to the global overfishing crisis. So you can eat your bacon with a clear conscience. It doesn't get any better than that.

photoquota edition

I still haven't gotten around to sending Flickr any money, and as a freeloader I'm chafing under their 20MB per month upload quota. It's a use-it-or-lose-it proposition, and your unused MBs don't roll over to the next month, so I'm trying to use up as much of it as I can before the month ends (about 15 minutes from now). Here's one new pic from today (the top one), plus some tidbits from the archives:



A rose at the Police Memorial in Waterfront Park.




Moss in Lovejoy Fountain Plaza




Ivy somewhere near PSU, I think on SW Lincoln or Jackson.




The Union Bank of California building on SW Broadway, downtown Portland.




Acorns somewhere near PSU.




Discarded electrical gear in the South Waterfront district.

crows

I've been having a great deal of trouble coming up with properly Halloween-ish photos. It's cold and clear and bright and beautiful outside, which is great if you're a trick-or-treater, but not so good if you're me and you're looking for something bleak and grim to take photos of. Yesterday morning would've been better, and tomorrow will probably be better, but neither day is Halloween.

As I mentioned before, taking b+w photos of crows and bare branches definitely counts as cheating. I'm not proud of it, but I did what I had to do. These were taken at the crow colony in Waterfront Park next to the Burnside Bridge. So, ok, the existence of this colony of crows is kind of a weird thing. It's a mildly creepy spot if you think crows are creepy, which I don't. Stand there long enough and you'll eventually meet one of the park's many drug dealers. Unlike the crack dealers on the transit mall, the weed dealers on the waterfront are nothing to worry about. They're usually cheerful and friendly and quite open about what they're up to, and if you're not looking to buy anything (which I'm not), it's just "ok, have a nice day". If this state ever goes the legalization route, these guys will probably go legit and open up Amsterdam-style "coffee houses" or something. Well, it'll be like that for a while, but because this is the US and not the Netherlands, soon a vast, aggressive, soulless Starbucks-like corporate chain will emerge, crushing everything in its path, while loudly claiming to be "kind" and "mellow" and all that. It'll be all slick marketing and minimum wage employees, and exclusive CDs at the counter, and corporate-logo upscale smoking paraphernalia, and words like "artisanal" and "fair trade" plastered on the merchandise, the whole works, and 20 years from now people will scratch their heads and wonder why anyone ever believed there was something revolutionary or countercultural about the stuff.

In any case, I've also got an audio clip of crows doing their thing, but I'm still trying to figure out how to get it posted here. Do I have to sign up for yet another freakin' third party service just to post a stupid WAV file? That's.... wonderful. Yay.

Ok, so the crows aren't really doing the trick today, and wandering off on a long tangent probably didn't help either. No fierce predatory creatures today either, although the local zoo has a new ocelot kitten. It'll be fierce eventually, but right now it's just fuzzy and cute.

I do have at least one really gross news item to pass along, though, an item on this week's Salt Lake Tribune police & fire blotter (which I mentioned on SNR a couple of days ago):

A fire broke out at a Salt Lake City funeral home Tuesday afternoon as workers were cremating the remains of a man who weighed more than 600 pounds. In the process, some of the body fat had liquefied and leaked out, causing a fire similar to a grease fire, said Scott Freitag, spokesman for the city fire department. An employee at Gardner Funeral Home, 1001 E. 11th Ave., put the blaze out with fire extinguisher before firefighters arrived, he said. Fire crews assisted with smoke removal. There was no damage to the funeral home, Freitag said.

I'm curious why they said the incident was merely "similar to" a grease fire. Well, no, really it was a grease fire. Eeeewwww......

I think I'm going to stop right there and go to the gym now....

Election Edition

One of the great things about having a blog is that you get to endorse people when there's an election, whereas the unwashed non-blogging masses can't. It doesn't seem very fair, but there you have it. So without further ado, here's who you're supposed to vote for, if you live in Oregon, and Multnomah County in particular.

On the top of the ballot this year we have the Governor's race, and the 1st Congressional District, and I regret to say I couldn't bring myself to vote for the Democratic incumbent in either race. I am, generally speaking, a loyal Democrat, but Gov. Kulongoski is a hopeless do-nothing bozo, and I can't stand David Wu. There's a point where even throwing your vote away is preferable to voting for the "Brand D" empty suit. If either guy loses by exactly one vote, I'll apologize and grovel and all that. Otherwise, I'm voting my conscience, and you can't reasonably ask me not to do that. Joe Keating is the Pacific Green candidate for governor, and I'm voting for him instead of Kulongoski. And in the race for Congress, I'm voting for the Libertarian candidate, Drake Davis, who strikes me as the most acceptable non-Wu candidate, even though Wu's basically a shoo-in this time around. I don't usually vote for the sort of Libertarian who gets on the ballot in this state, but he appears to be the real deal, a Libertarian who's concerned about civil liberties, not just tax cuts. If you're not in the habit of voting for third party candidates, by all means vote for the incumbents. They're useless, but they aren't terrible. Vote for anyone except the Republican in each race, basically.

There's also an open seat on the state Supreme Court. On paper, judicial races are nonpartisan, but everyone knows Virginia Linder is the (moderate) Democrat, and Jack Roberts is the (moderate) Republican. So vote for the Democrat. I don't think Jack Roberts is the Bible-thumpin', wiretappin', waterboardin' kind of Republican, but I'm not taking that chance in a Supreme Court race. One of the great things about this state is that years ago our Supreme Court decided that the state constitution's Bill of Rights confers additional civil liberties on top of those you get from the US Constitution. Since our basic liberties are rapidly eroding on the federal level, our state constitution may soon be the only document that still genuinely means what it says. So Supreme Court races matter now more than ever, is what I'm trying to say here.

The easiest race to call this year was the judicial race for Circuit Court, 4th District, Position 37, where the infamous Leslie Roberts gamed the system so that she's appearing "unopposed" on the ballot. You know it's an extraordinary situation when all the local print media outlets have endorsed a write-in candidate. Take their advice for once, and write in Charles Henderson.

The hardest race to call is another judicial race: 4th District, Position 28, in which there are no less than 9 candidates on the ballot. This race is so hard to call that I haven't actually picked anyone yet. I'll post an update later if/when I make up my mind.

Oh, and in Position 31, vote for Cheryl Albrecht. It's a race between someone with judicial experience (Albrecht) and someone who's been a prosecutor all this time (Kathleen Payne). I tend to look unfavorably on judical candidates who've spent their entire careers handling criminal cases, prosecution or defense. I'm sure it's useful and perhaps even noble work, but I'm not convinced either background makes for a good, impartial judge.

Ok, so now to the obscure special district races. I used to have to vote in a lot more of these when I lived out in unincorporated Washington County, where parks, water, emergency services, and all sorts of other things were handled by single-purpose special districts. Now, to my knowledge, there's just one, the West Multnomah County Soil & Water Conservation District. I wouldn't even have mentioned it, except that I just ran across this item at Bojack, concerning sneaky underhanded doings on the district board. There are four seats up for election. One is contested, two have incumbents running unopposed, and one has nobody running. Apparently under state law only people who own at least 10 acres of farmland in a given zone are eligible to run in that zone. (Is that even constitutional?) Zone 5 was recently redrawn so that nobody is eligible to run for the seat, so that after the election the rest of the board can simply appoint a crony to the job. This sounds like something you'd see in rural freakin' podunk Louisiana, not here in clean-hands process-geek Oregon. So I'm not voting for any of the incumbents, and I'm also not voting for their measure 26-82, the so-called "Permanent Rate Limit", which is actually a weasel-worded property tax increase. Right now the district has no tax base at all, and the measure would give them a small revenue stream of around $1m per year. That's not a lot of money, and the district does good things (at least on paper), so I was all set to vote for it, but I don't trust these people. Throw the bastards out, and then they can ask me for money. Or even better, get rid of this district and its East Multnomah counterpart on the other side of the river, and hand their duties over to the county, or to Metro, someone who's actually accountable. William R. Goode is the only non-incumbent in the race, so vote for him, and either leave the other races blank or write someone in, anybody but the incumbents.

That's the only local levy I'm voting against. As I said, I'm usually a loyal Democratic voter, so I'm voting for money for libraries, schools, and Metro's greenspace program. After spending much of the summer blogging about local parks and such, and wringing my hands about the budget situation, do you really think I'd vote against the greenspace measure? My street cred's on the line here. As with all tax measures, make a list of the measures you agree with, and vote for the ones on the list you think you can personally afford. Nobody should ever ask you to do any more than that.

We've got 9 state ballot measures this year. Most of them are easy calls. Measures 41 and 48 are sneaky, deceptive, and drastic anti-tax measures from Howie Rich and his slimy out-of-state pals. Vote no on those.

Measure 43 is a "parental notification" anti-abortion measure. I always vote against all anti-abortion measures, even ones that appear to be narrowly targeted. The people behind it are the same bible-thumping wingnuts who sometimes put total-ban measures on the ballot when they're feeling their oats. It's not that this is all they want, it's just this is all they think they can pass this year, and if it passes, they'll be back in '08. Never, ever, help the fundies win anything. Vote no on 43.

Measure 44 lets anyone without insurance participate in the state's existing prescription drug plan. It's not universal health care, but it's a step in the right direction, so vote for it.

Measure 40 would require Supreme and Appellate Court judges to be elected by districts. The poorly-concealed motivation behind this is to get at least a few conservative judges onto the statewide bench. The cover story is that judges should represent diverse geographic areas, some of which just so happen to be more conservative than others, by random chance or whatever. And sure, there's a kernel of truth to the complaint, in that almost all judges come from the Willamette Valley. But after all, that's where all the people are, and that's where the most-qualified lawyers tend to gravitate to. The very notion that judges are placed on the bench to represent the "interests" of any narrow subset of the population, geographic, economic, ethnic, or whatever, is disturbing. The courts are not the Legislature, and this measure is a bit hypocritical, coming from the same people who always complain about judges allegedly legislating from the bench.

Measure 45 is a new term limit measure for state legislators, replacing an earlier one thrown out by the state supreme court some years ago. I voted for the original measure, but I'm voting no this time, and so should you. After the last term limit measure passed, we got crop after crop of new legislators who knew nothing about the legislative process and cared even less, and brought nothing to the table but hardline ideology, on both sides of the aisle. When the Legislature wasn't gridlocked, it would produce all sorts of ill-conceived legislation. Lobbyists, who weren't subject to term limits, basically ran the show. We'll recover eventually, but legislative term limits were a mistake in this state, and repeating mistakes when you don't have to is not a sign of intelligence. Let's all admit we made a mistake the first time around, and vote no on 45.

Measures 46 & 47 are campaign finance reform, which this state desperately needs. One of the very few downsides to the state Supreme Court's expansive reading of our Bill of Rights is that "free speech" includes the right of huge corporations and other moneyed interests to spend as much as they like during election season. You don't have to be an Ivy League policy wonk to realize this has a corrupting influence on the political process. The local "liberal media" is spinning this as if voting no was a solemn civic duty. I expect they've been listening to special interests -- public employee unions and whatnot -- who've carved out a bit of turf in the existing system and want to defend it at all costs. The system is broken, and I'm not about to pretend it's any less broken just because the "good guys" can buy politicians too. Measure 46 is a constitutional amendment that allows campaign finance laws, and measure 47 is such a law. Vote for both.

Measure 39 is a local response to the recent Supreme Court ruling that allowed local governments to condemn and seize property, and turn around and hand it to other private parties. For some reason, as with the last 2 measures, loyal D's are supposed to vote against this as an article of faith. I guess we're all supposed to be allergic to anything that looks like a "property rights" measure. One big objection to the measure is that it might make urban renewal plans more difficult and expensive. To which I have to say "damn straight". That's the whole freakin' idea. Duh. Since when has the well-being of greedy rich developers been a progressive cause? Why should I lose any sleep fretting about how to make Homer Williams richer? The fact that we're even having a debate about this is a sign of what's been wrong with the Democratic Party for oh, the last 30 years or so. Sometime in the 70's the party became obsessed with celebrities and "limousine liberal" lifestyle issues and began sneering at the bread-and-butter concerns of ordinary people, resulting in the so-called "Reagan Democrat" phenomenon. Reagan was actually far worse for those people on a pocketbook level than any Democrat would've been, but he never sneered at them, and that counts for a lot. It's not actually a progressive act to look at, say, SE Foster Road and imagine tearing out all the auto body shops and replacing them with doggie day spas and yoga boutiques, even if the affluent gentrifiers moving in to the area would be reliable Democratic voters. Running people off their property because they aren't sufficiently upscale is wrong. Period. Vote yes on 39, dammit.

Which leaves us with measure 42. Measure 42 prohibits insurance companies from using credit scores to determine insurance rates. Insurance companies have increasingly been doing this in the last few years, and the practice disproportionately affects low income people. So you'd think the law would be a liberal cause, but it's actually the brainchild of Bill Sizemore, one of our state's menagerie of colorful far-right nutjobs. Sizemore actually got the Republican nomination for Governor back in 1998, and lost by the most lopsided margin in the state's history, dating back to the 1850s. So my natural inclination is to wonder what the secret catch is, and what icky special interest wins if the measure passes. Everyone's been trying to figure that out and nobody's come up with anything concrete, so I'm inclined to think this is a purely personal crusade on Sizemore's part. He ran into some legal difficulties a few years back, and legal problems often mean financial problems, and thus a lower credit score. I expect he's pushing the measure because his own insurance rates went up, and he was outraged and decided to take it to the voters.

If a bit of adversity can teach the guy a little compassion, at least in a limited area, there may be hope for him yet. I'm not holding my breath waiting on that, but I'm still voting for 42. It feels naughty to be voting for any Sizemore measure, ever, but I'd probably heard of the issue before he ever did, so I like to think Sizemore's agreeing with me, not the other way around.

So there you have it. Now vote, dammit, and make sure the thing's filled out correctly, and signed, and mailed back on time. Someday the powers that be will listen to my pet idea of taxing the bejeezus out of people who don't vote, since if they're that apathetic clearly they're ok with whatever the rest of society decides to do. If they get angry about it, they can simply vote next time and get an exemption from the "apathy tax". Sure, some people may not like it, but what exactly are they going to do about it? If they're too lazy to even fill out a ballot, do you really think they'll go to the trouble of suing? Not very likely, I expect. Complain to their legislators? Their legislators can be sure that, by definition, the complainer did not vote for them in the last election, and may not at the next election. So there's really no upside for 'em in helping this person. Anyway, that's a topic for another day. So vote. Unless you're planning to vote Republican, in which case you ought to fly to Palm Springs and play some golf, or go club some baby seals, or whatever it is you people do for fun, and don't come back until the election's over.

From the Briny Deep

A couple of photos from the Seattle Aquarium, taken way back in April. These photos didn't turn out well at first, and what you see here is the result of a great deal of GIMP-fu, erasing bits of glare from the flash, fingerprints, weird reflections. I don't claim to be a photography guru; I'm just happy I could salvage something from the original mess.

Sadly, I've forgotten what kind of fish these are. Likewise, I know the next photo is of a salmonid of some kind, but it's been so long I don't recall if it's a steelhead, or a chinook salmon, or a rainbow trout, or whatever. And I'm sure it was taken at the Bonneville fish hatchery, again way back in April, prior to this year's backyard cookout season. So this particular fish may still be there, or it may not.



I'm probably losing native Northwesterner points by admitting this, but if I go fishing (very rarely) I don't catch anything, and the fish sure don't look like this (anymore) down at the grocery store. So I have to admit I can't tell salmonids apart by sight, generally speaking. Now, I can say with confidence it isn't a shark, or an angelfish, or a seahorse, or a stingray. The lack of whiskers suggests it isn't a catfish either. And it doesn't really look like an eel or a lamprey, either. The fact that it's in this pond suggests it isn't one of those freakish deep-sea fish with the huge teeth. And it's not a jellyfish or a starfish since those aren't actually fish. So I guess I can swing a bit of basic taxonomy, but only up to a point.



The octopus mascot outside the Greek Cuisina restaurant in downtown Portland. Yes, I realize it looks like an escapee from a small town parade float. People (myself included) roll their eyes at it, and at the restaurant, a little. Although that doesn't mean I'll say no to a couple rounds of ouzo and a plate of garlicky stuff I can't pronounce, and after the ouzo I might be willing to break a plate or two, you know, just to keep it real and all. Besides, it's bad for business if your restaurant's mascot is actually scary.

Speaking of cephalopods from the deep, here is the absolute coolest vanity license plate in the entire universe. Ever. Mostly because of the little red handprints...

[Okay, okay, I admit it. I'd started to think the previous "mildly nsfw" post was maybe a little crass and juvenile, and I wanted to scroll the thing down the page a little, just so it's not the first thing people see when they come here. And I had a few vaguely maritime but otherwise unrelated photos lying about, and its true that I'd been playing around with GIMP, trying to clean up the top photo a bit, primarily just to get more of a feel for the program. So anyway, I had the photos handy, and came across the links about that license plate -- go click on them now, if you haven't already -- and I thought I could get a cheap filler post out of 'em. And here it is, apparently.]

mildly nsfw edition

Someone (a utility co. most likely) spraypainted this on SW Stark, in downtown Portland, for reasons of their own. I'm really kind of curious what it signifies, aren't you? (The grad-school theoretical musings about "signifier" and "signified" in this situation are left as an exercise for the reader.)

On a related note, it seems Portland, Maine is home to perhaps the world's only topless donut shop. (Some visitor reviews of this establishment here and here). My wife, who ran across this in the Portland, ME newspaper, suggested it has all the bases covered so far as infantile male desires go. I like to think I know a thing or two about infantile male desires, and I'd argue they really won't have the complete package unless they add, at minimum, beer, bacon, and ESPN. Plus lots of chrome. Possibly cheese, too, and maybe peanuts. Oh, and steaks. And you can't go wrong with stuff that's on fire, either. Everything goes better with fire.

It's surprising that our fair city doesn't feature anything like this. All of our donut shops are of the fully clothed variety. Even Voodoo Donut. Well, the staff, anyway. The customers, I'm not so sure about.

This brings us around to today's lesson in physiology and applied physics.. Although... two small turkeys!? I can't get that image out of my mind now. Other than that, I'm really not in a position to comment at length about the article, beyond offering a sympathetic "Owwww!!!"

And in a less-directly-related item, it seems that -- for the first time ever -- teenagers are dancing in ways their elders disapprove of. Shocking! Intolerable!

the wrong sunrise

Another damp and grim morning, this one with the added joy of trekking out to the far reaches of industrial NE Portland to subject the old MG to the rigors of DEQ emissions testing, followed by quite a bit of PHB-herding. It was really quite ugly out there this morning, and I had to venture out into the elements around sunup, which is quite unusual for me. It was an ugly morning and I took no photos, but I did have a few sunrise photos from back in late January gathering dust in the archives, so here they are, instead. I realize these pics are of the wrong sunrise, but it was better, and this is my blog, dammit.



In any case, despite today's pathetic excuse for a sunrise, I really ought to be in a good mood today, even though I'm not. First, a miracle happened and the car passed emissions without having to visit the shop, which is extra nice since I'd procrastinated about this until almost the end of the month, and my tags were set to expire at midnight on Halloween. So that was an unexpected nice bit, even though I got rained on a lot in the process. I guess on the bright side this means I didn't waste any part of a nice sunny day waiting in line at the DEQ station.



Second, I (probably) saved my employer a mountain of cash today. Remember the overseas outsourcing thing I mentioned a couple of days ago? It turns out that the widget this firm in India (which will remain nameless) wanted to build for us -- well, the one part our management thought we actually wanted, out of the huge baroque architecture they were proposing -- is actually just a thin wrapper around the inotify mechanism that comes with Linux kernel 2.6.13 and later. They'd led us (and by "us" I mean "our PHBs") to think this "component X" would be vastly more complicated than that, and wanted gazillions for it, where in reality I could probably write the damn thing over the course of a weekend. Hell, probably a couple of hours would do the trick, to get the core functionality down. Granted, it still wouldn't work with kernels pre-2.6.13, but their stuff wouldn't either -- although they were quite happy to do the "mumble, mumble, subsequent version" song-and-dance instead of leveling with us. Hell, I understand they even led our PHBs to believe this would be super-easy to port to Solaris, Real Soon Now, which is absolutely, positively untrue.

Maybe I'm overreacting, but it really feels like they were trying to pull one over on us. It's vastly more infuriating when someone who is supposedly an engineer tries to con a fellow engineer; you expect that from marketing and bizdev folks, because that's what they exist for. It's a big world, and there's a place for that. But when someone who on paper ought to be a fellow geek tries to dazzle me with slick Powerpoint slides and a bunch of handwaving, that's a mortal insult, and I prefer not to do business with that sort of person. I wish I could just be happy about saving the company money, but I'm still feeling insulted, and that takes priority, I'm afraid. The worst part about it is that they thought we (and by "we" I mean "I") wouldn't catch on to what they were up to. They thought I wouldn't get curious what was so special about kernel 2.6.13. They thought I hadn't done my homework, and wasn't familiar with stuff like inotify/dnotify. They disrespected my Google-fu, and that's something I simply can't abide.

Which is not to say the deal's off, necessarily. I've been around the industry long enough to know things often happen for nontechnical reasons. Right or wrong, it's a fact of life we all have to live with. And I gather that our PHBs and their PHBs go wayyyyyy back, possibly all the way back to wherever it is PHBs spend their larval years (a fraternity, maybe?) So we may still end up paying them to build component X for us, but at least maybe we'll get a better deal on it. Or maybe we'll still get gouged, but in return their PHBs will let our PHBs win at golf, or they'll send us a swanky fruit basket that doesn't quite make it over to Engineering, or something useful like that.

A few echidnas

I'm far too busy to do a serious post today, but here are a few more pics of echidnas I came across recently:

• Stalking through tall grass
  
• Having an amble
  
• Looking for ants
  
• Standing on two legs, demanding a hug (or some ants).
  
• Hanging out at the Adelaide Zoo.
  
• Lurking in the underbrush.
  
• Trying to climb over a log. (This page also has koala and little blue penguin pics too.)
  
• Taking a little siesta.
  
• Getting in the way
  
• Doing the puggle snuggle.
  
• Walking on water. Because they can, you know.
  

welcome to flower mode

Hey, kids! Here's the latest installment in my interminable series of fruit-n-flower photoblog posts. I realize I promised to post about North Korea before posting any more silly photos, but I still haven't solved the geopolitical situation on the Korean Peninsula. It'll be any day now, I promise.

Updated 1/18/2011: Still haven't solved the North Korea thing. Thus, still no post about said topic. I've posted a few (ok, more than a few) additional flower photos in the intervening time though, the latest being some sorta-decent hibiscus photos from Honolulu. FWIW.



Since this day is not that day, here are those fruit-n-flower photos instead. Photos #1, #2, and #4 are from South Waterfront Park, #3 is from Printing Press Park (on 1st next to the Morrison Bridge ramps), and #5 is near SW 2nd & Ash, in downtown Portland.



I think I've said this before already, but before I had this here digital camera I'd never really noticed all the bushes putting out little red berries this time of year. It seems like a strange time to be putting out fruit; maybe it's for the benefit of passing migratory birds or something. In any case, I'm starting to think I'll look back on 2006 as the year I took all those dumb nature photos. I'd like to take more credit for these pics than I really deserve; what you see is mostly the work of the camera's fancy auto-closeup mode, signified by a cute little flower icon. Turn that on, hold the camera reasonably still, and make sure the camera autofocuses on the right thing, and you're 90% of the way there.



It's not that I'm arguing that these photos are capital-A Art or anything, just that this is way better than anything I ever did with my crappy old film camera. Maybe I'll have to go dust the poor thing off one of these days, for old times' sake, just to be retro -- although I'm not very anxious to do that, any more than I am to dust off the old Atari 400 and try to grind out some Java. It just wouldn't be up to the job.



As usual, I have no idea what any of these plants are. I expect that all of them other than the white berries are non-native, and I'm not 100% sure about the white berries either. Feel free to chime in if you know what any of this stuff is, because I sure don't.

South Waterfront Streetcar

A thrilling video of a ride on the new streetcar extension to SW Gibbs St. I think the streetcar operators really enjoy the new extension, since they're off city streets for a bit and they can really floor it for once. Well, "floor it" in streetcar terms, anyway. I think the driver said we hit 29MPH at one point.



I arrived at the tail end of the mini-gala they put on for the grand opening. It wasn't too long after the official 11AM opening, and we actually saw the streetcar full of visiting dignitaries riding the other direction, and we all waved to them. So it's not like we got there an hour late or anything, but already the bastards were out of coffee. There was a tray of mini-scones left, so I grabbed one of those and started moseying around the area. There's really not a huge amount of stuff to do in the South Waterfront area right now. There aren't even any restaurants close by. The closest is the 80's-era Old Spaghetti Factory maybe 8 blocks or so to the south, and I'm not sure it's walkable right now with all the construction.

(Before we move along, note the tram tower on the left of the photo. The actual tram terminal is a large structure a bit off to the right from here. Also note that the streetcar tracks continue south; the upcoming extension to SW Lowell St. is supposed to open around next August or so.)



So first I took another peek at our fair city's newest city park, right in the middle of S. Waterfront. As I mentioned last time around, the thing is two square blocks, cost $7M, and right now it's just a flat expanse of grass. Ok, now it's grass plus this historical marker. This marker isn't new, but it used to be directly under the Ross Island Bridge, where it marked the location of the first pioneer house in Portland. You probably can't read it in this photo, but it reads:

SITE OF PORTLAND'S FIRST CABIN
BUILT 1842 BY WILLIAM JOHNSON
A SAILOR ON OLD IRONSIDES
IN THE WAR OF 1812
---------------------------------
ERECTED BY U.S. DAUGHTERS OF 1812

(Ok, the URL wasn't on the original plaque. I'm just trying to be helpful here.)

It's true that the original location was pretty obscure and hard to find, but it was the correct location, or so we're told. Now everyone can see the thing easily, but it marks the wrong spot.

It looks as though someone just stuck a forklift under the slab it rested on before, and carried the whole thing over as a unit and dropped it here. Nice.





And here are a couple of photos of the new stretch of greenway along the river. Like the Riverscape bit I covered a couple of days ago, it doesn't connect to anything on the north or south. Nobody else was walking there, although there were a lot of rowers and kayakers on the river. On the north, there's the Zidell barge-building operation, although the PDC and friends have their designs on that land, so I expect the Zidell operation will be driven out in short order. On the south, I guess they just haven't gotten around to it yet.

As you can see, this stretch is emphatically NOT a city park, and management can kick you out if they don't like you. Probably they taser you if you don't look rich enough.

Like the Riverscape stretch, this bit is kind of disappointing to me. I've made the point before (though I don't think on this blog) that the only reason to care about, much less favor, a private development like S. Waterfront is if we get significant public amenities out of the deal. Which is a fancy way of saying "What's in it for me?" (I'm not yet convinced the tram counts as a significant public amenity.) And this waterfront area sure doesn't look like the fancy high-concept architectural drawings the big boys showed us when they started planning the area. This narrow lil' path won't be able to safely handle the bike and jogger traffic it'll attract once it's connected to the outside world. I guess at least when the first retiree dog walker is mowed down by a crazed faux bike-messenger type, it'll be a really short tram ride up to OHSU.

On the ride back to civilization, I was joined by a few straggling semi-dignitaries and hangers-on, who were either going back to the office, or heading out in search of the perfect fruity $12 cocktail, or possibly both. So I got to listen to people nattering on about which architecture schools all of their friends attended, and blathering self-importantly about some sort of Orwellian-sounding "Bicycle Master Plan". I, for one, welcome our new two-wheeled overlords.

One reason I go to these things is to see what sort of person goes to these things, I mean, other than myself, obviously. This time it was the aforementioned in-crowd, plus a lot of old guys. You know the sort, the ones who think they know everything and want to reminisce about the good old days all the time. They can be kind of entertaining, in an annoying way. They always talk really loud (like on the video clip for example), and it's remarkable how often they're wrong when they're convinced they're right. As far as I can tell, to these guys all historical events after about 1970 are a complete mystery, and a constant source of amazement and dismay. When they see something new, they always say something noncommittal like "well, that's something". I suppose someone back in the 50's taught them that anyone who expresses an clear, honest opinion is a gay communist or something.

So in short, I really, really don't want to be one of these guys when I'm 70. The fact that I showed up despite being about half that age isn't much of an encouraging sign, though. I mean, I guess I can argue that I only did it for my legions of adoring Gentle Reader(s), and that's even almost true. Although I also showed up on opening day for the Red and Yellow MAX lines, plus the 2001 opening of the streetcar and the opening of the Riverplace extension last year. Oh, and let's not forget the big Reservoir 3 gala back in July. I showed up for that too. And all but the last one happened before I ever had this thing.

I'm not so sure I'm going to show up and ride the tram immediately when it opens. I'd like them to get the inevitable bugs worked out first. What it boils down to, basically, is that I guess I've never been big on plummeting, and I avoid it whenever possible.

surly & unmotivated

I realize I promised to make the next post (i.e. this post) weighty and serious, with no photos. I think we're going to manage the lack-of-photos part just fine, the rest I'm not so sure about. As the title indicates, I've been in a surly, unmotivated funk of late, and I think I'll just sit here and complain for a while, if you don't mind.

As a geek, I tend to think in terms of bullet-point lists, as readers of this blog or its geeky sibling have probably noticed by now. So here are a few things that I'd like to register a complaint about.

Outsourcing overseas

This isn't an abstract rant against the basic idea of outsourcing tech jobs to low-wage countries. In RL it looks like my employer's going to contract with some company in India to build a small-ish software component for us. And it's going to be my job to interface with these guys. So far it's been several rounds back and forth, trying to explain that, no, we don't need a whole new network architecture for our product line, and no, we never said anything about wanting a mobile phone-based administration package. What part of "no thank you" don't you understand? Sheesh. Oh, and stop babbling about JNI. JNI is an abomination. A useful abomination, sometimes, but an abomination nonetheless.

I guess I can't fault these guys for being hungry, nor can I fault them as engineers for generally wanting to build stuff. But c'mon, already. How about you guys go read our requirements doc a couple more times, compare that with your proposal, and then get back to me?

Blogging malaise

I think I've fallen into a rut here. I don't feel like I've produced anything terribly useful on this blog for a while now. Well, there've been a few interesting photos lately, but as I mentioned before, posting too many of those is unkind to my vast legion of faithful Gentle Reader(s) with dialup connections. Yes, it wasn't very nice to either of you guys, and I humbly apologize. The streetcar stop down at South Waterfront opens tomorrow, so I'll probably get a post out of that, but that's not exactly uncharted territory for this blog.

I also feel guilty because I still have a sort of sense that this ought to be a political blog, but usually it isn't. I have a sense that this thing would be more "worthwhile" somehow if I talked about the great issues of the day a bit more. Hey, I got a few posts out of the Foley thing, but I'm still not convinced that counts.

The tyranny of usefulness

I've been spending more and more time lately posting over at SNR rather than here, since (understandably, I guess) a lot more people are interested in the SCO saga than in play "follow the bouncing Markov chain" with me. (Which is a fancy way of saying this blog is full of mostly unrelated crap, and I bounce from one thing to the next with very little rhyme or reason. If I hadn't eternally perma-banned the phrase "random musings" from this blog, that would be the phrase I'd use.)

So anyway, right now I'm getting more positive reinforcement posting there than I do here, even though SNR is much more narrowly focused and really not as rewarding to work on. People actually thank me for writing the other blog, and I don't get much of that here. I mean, not that I'm feeling needy or insecure or anything, I'm just saying that providing a "valuable public service" can be kind of addictive, even when it isn't all that much fun. It's a problem.

Govt. aggravations

So yesterday I got a grand jury summons from Washington County. Luckily for me, I haven't lived in Washington County for about a year now. Actually I guess I shouldn't say "luckily"; I've never had jury duty, and I've always said it's an important civic responsibility that people shouldn't try to weasel out of, plus it even might be an interesting experience. Everyone should do it at least once, and my number hasn't come up yet. I mailed back the flimsy little postcard where one checks the "not a resident" box and gives one's new address, and I have to say it looked like exactly the sort of thing that gets lost in the mail without a trace. Well, if it does, and they send a nice man with a badge around to look for me, he'll be knocking on the wrong door, and the new residents are in for a bit of excitement, I suppose.

Meanwhile, I've also got to renew my vehicle registration again. I could swear it seems like this happens every 6 months or so, even though the calendar says 2 years. And I realize it isn't reasonable to complain about something everyone with a car has to do, but I feel I have certain extenuating circumstances. For starters, my car is nearly 30 years old, and is extremely small. There was a time when under state law, cars over 20 years old were excused from having to pass a DEQ emissions test, but they changed the law back in the early 90's and now the cutoff is fixed at 1974, supposedly forever. The DEQ inspection stations measure emissions in one of several ways, based on the age of the car. Mine, I think, has to go on the dynamometer stand, so that they're measuring the exhaust created when the car is in gear and rolling. The latest generation of equipment simply clips into a connector under the dash and reads an engine code or two. I haven't seen any concrete numbers on this, but I strongly suspect that there are so few cars from the 70's on the road anymore that it's hardly worth it to maintain the testing equipment, and their impact on overall pollution rates is virtually nil. So really, I don't think I should have to take the thing through emissions testing. Since moving downtown, I barely even drive the thing: Maybe once or twice a month, tops.

But as usual, the state isn't listening to reason, and so I have to find a nearby garage that works on MG's. I used to take the car to a place out in North Plains, and I was quite happy with them, but since I've moved that location's become very, very impractical. I think I've found a place to try, assuming they do DEQ work. We'll see.

Ted Kulongoski

I finally got a Kulongoski flyer in the mail today. I was surprised, since his campaign's been remarkably invisible so far. The guy's the incumbent governor, with money in the bank, and he's not getting his message out. I called the guy a hopeless bozo and voted against him in the primary, but I was prepared to admit he was a pretty good campaigner, if a complete washout for the next 4 years afterwards. I'm starting to think he's a hopeless campaigner, now, too. I don't actually want him to lose to Ron Saxton, despite all the Ted-bashing I've engaged in, but I'm starting to worry that he might. Now, in a year that's supposed to be a disaster for Republicans (although I'm taking a wait-n-see attitude on that point), Teddy's on the verge of losing to one. Most newspapers around the state seem to be endorsing Saxton, and they aren't doing so because of the guy's positive traits, but because of their disappointment with ol' T.K.

It woudn't be reasonable to blame Ted personally for the fact that the flyer was st00pid. It, and the strategy behind it, are no doubt the product of some clueless, faceless political consultant. It seems that Ted's people have decided immigration is a big issue in the election. I really don't think it is; at least it isn't a huge hot-button issue for me. The fun bit is that Ted's handlers are trying to steer him to the right of Saxton on immigration; he's for rounding 'em up and shipping 'em out, basically, although he hasn't actually been doing that the last 4 years. Saxton himself made some unconvincing anti-immigrant remarks in primary season to keep the Republican primary wingnuts, er, voters, happy, and that was the last we heard from him about immigration. And Saxton's also perceived as vulnerable on the issue since he had a farm for a while and may have employed illegal immigrants. So I think the plan is to play the populist, protectionist card, and paint Saxton as one of those nasty business Republicans who value cheap labor above all else. Hmm. Maybe that'll work, and maybe it won't, but it has the strong smell of a clueless campaign grasping at straws.

Now, Saxton isn't a wingnut himself, or if he is, he hides it quite well, so a Governor Saxton would probably not be the end of the world. I tend to look for more in a governor than not being the end of the world, so I'm not going to vote for the guy myself, but I'm not so sure I'm going to vote for Ted, either. I'm still mulling this one over.

Congressional Democrats

Why, you might be wondering, would I complain about Democrats in Congress right now, right when they're maybe on the verge of taking over. Aren't they on a roll?

Well, for starters I'm still not convinced they're about to take control of either house. There's still plenty of time before the election, and George and Karl still have plenty of dirty tricks up their sleeves, and that's if the D's don't manage to shoot themselves in the foot unassisted first. It's a do or Diebold election for the R's, and I can't even begin to imagine what they might try to pull if their backs are up against the wall.

And if they do win, I'm really starting to worry that they'll blow the opportunity and alienate the public through gridlock and sheer pettiness. As much as the R's deserve it, and as much as I'd personally enjoy watching it, the theme for the next Congress should not be "Payback Time". That means doing genuine oversight and holding Bush's drones accountable, but not fast-tracking the impeachment thing, at least not from day 1. And it's probably not wise to retaliate against R's in Congress who were so mean and unfair in the years after 1994, as much as they have it coming. Or at least, wait a while after the session starts up before really putting the boot in. If the public decides the D's are about nothing but revenge, 2008 isn't going to be a fun election.

None of this has happened yet, obviously, but I have a persistent bad feeling about it, and complaining makes me feel better (temporarily).

Ok, well, that's what I've got at the moment. Actually I've got several more things I would happily go off on a tangent and complain about, but I've reached the limit of what I feel like doing right now. Did I mention I've been feeling unmotivated lately?

...wherein I repent, but not just yet...

A chair under the Fremont Bridge. This chunk of land kind of looks like a city park, but it's owned by the Oregon Department of Transportation, and they don't much care for pedestrians. The place is covered with signs ordering you not to step off the sidewalk under any circumstances, because if you do, you're probably one of those icky homeless people who live under bridges or something, or at the very least you've violated the Law, and therefore it's off to Guantanamo for you, buster.

I actually stepped off the sidewalk a bit so I could take a few photos, although I was legal (I think) when I took this one. Ultra-candid admissions like this are one reason I use a pseudonym when trolling the interwebs.

I'm usually extremely lenient if people want to use photos of mine (in the rare cases where this happens), since I don't plan on making any money off of 'em anyway. But if you want to use this photo for your latest shoegazing indierock album cover, I'm going to need a cut of the proceeds. Thanks.



A discarded "nonpartisan" voters' guide in a trash bin on Lovejoy near one of the streetcar stops. By taking this photo, I got into a long conversation with an older gent who regaled me with tales of crooked politics in Philadelphia. For the first 5 minutes, it's great to find someone else who understands the Electoral College, and after that it's kind of tiresome.



Speaking of politics, here's another great reason to remember to vote in November.



The Fremont Bridge from the new Riverscape development, on Naito Pkwy north of the bridge, between 14th & 18th Avenues.

I've always wished I'd been in town in 1973, when the bridge was built. Seems the whole huge central span was constructed off-site and then barged in and installed as a unit. Call me an engineering geek if you like, but I really would've liked to have seen that.



The pedestrian path at Riverscape, and some of the townhouses. The area actually had a slightly bleak and empty feel to it, but maybe that's just because it's extremely new, and the path doesn't actually connect to anything to the north or south. It almost connects with another greenway segment that's part of the Fremont office complex just south of the bridge; the two pieces are separated by about a block or so of vacant lot, which I think is owned by the city as part of the "Big Pipe" project.



The "Fountain for a Rose" in O'Bryant Square. I risked life and limb for you, my Gentle Reader(s), and walked through the square rather than skirting the edge. You may be surprised to hear this, but I didn't see a single discarded syringe, nor did I see anyone who looked likely to discard a syringe in the near future. Maybe that's because it isn't dark yet, or it's the wrong day of the week, or the square's supposed legions of druggies all saw me coming and all hid somewhere. Or maybe the place just gets an undeserved bad rap from people who haven't been there in years.

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Updated 1/18/2011: I snipped the first couple of paragraphs off of this post, which didn't add anything and referred to an allegedly "weighty" post I supposedly had in the works and never quite got around to writing. Here they are, for posterity or whatever, mostly because they help explain the title of this post:

It was unsubtly brought to my attention that my recent posts have featured far too many "dull" photos of flowers and fruit and plants generally. This is probably true, quite honestly. Certainly it's true that this blog hasn't been very dialup-user-friendly of late. I promise, the next post will be about a weighty topic, with no graphics whatsoever. More than likely it'll be about North Korea, and perhaps I'll even explain exactly how the current situation ought to be solved, if I figure that out between now and then.

But that post isn't quite ready to go yet, and I'm not quite ready to get on the wagon just yet, so here are a few more photos. No plants, though.

autumnal & fogbound

Ok, so now we're getting our annual helping of autumn fog. Lucky, lucky us. At least it can make for fun photos now and then. I like the middle one with the crow, although taking black and white photos of a crow on a foggy day almost feels like cheating somehow. It's just too easy.



In any case, I'm much too busy to do the traditional all-out Friday linkdump today, but here are a few odds and ends I ran across in my spare moments:

• Meet Mus cypriacus, a newly-discovered mouse species endemic to Cyprus. Well, ok, "newly-discovered" in the sense that nobody realized they were a separate species until now, although it seems they're a local household pest on the island.
  
• Here's your friendly neighborhood reminder about tomorrow's Fresh Hop Festival at the Lucky Lab pub in NW Portland. Mmmm.... Hops....
  
• Another bit about the new Broadway Brewery over on (you guessed it) NE Broadway. The review kind of misses the point, unfortunately, going on about the food and barely mentioning the beer. I dropped by a week ago, and found the place quite pleasant. Sadly, they don't have their Hop On on tap at the Broadway location just yet, but hey, they're new. It'll all work out eventually. I mean, sheesh, nobody goes to ice cream restaurants and complains about the beer, so what's with the double standard here, eh? :)
  
• Meanwhile, here's a new (to me) drinking game you might enjoy (Legal Disclaimer: Responsibly! Responsibly!!!): Edward 40 Hands. Because nothing improves the beerdrinking experience like a big roll of duct tape.
  
• And xkcd teaches us a valuable lesson about words that end in "GRY".
  

autumnal & roseate

Back in the distant pre-digital camera days of yore, I never noticed all the trees and shrubs bearing fruit (inedible fruit, probably) this time of year. Here are two more examples, plus some nice red-orange leaves I saw this morning. If you want to split hairs, some of the colors here aren't precisely "roseate", strictly speaking, but it's a nice word, and I wanted to use it. Possibly either "rubicund" or "erubescent" would be more accurate, but really, you have to draw the line somewhere. Unless you're writing Victorian epic poetry, and really you shouldn't be in this day and age, "erubescent" is a little twee. Ok, more than a little, even if you're writing poetry of any kind (and really you shouldn't be in this day and age).

...wherein I continue battling that pesky cold...

This pic tries to show what it's like to have this cold. For accuracy, I'd need to add swirls of some of those garish colors on the far side of octarine, but the JPEG format doesn't support those, so this really and truly is the best I can do. So anyway, avoid this cold, if you can. If you don't own any venetian blinds that can support your weight, you're in for a long, long drop.