The Marquam Bridge, alas

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A while back, I set a challenge to myself to try to make the Marquam Bridge look interesting. Which is a real challenge, as in real life it's not very interesting at all. Nobody (myself included) ever has anything nice to say about it. It's a big, ugly, cheaply-built, 60's freeway bridge, and it's part of the freeway that hogs the east bank of the Willamette.

So I don't know whether I've succeeded here or not, but this is what I've got for the time being. Maybe next year I'll do the Bridge Pedal, the one time each year where you can walk or bike over the Marquam and the Fremont. That way I might get some cool photos from the bridge. That'd be cool. The one great thing about the Marquam is the view of downtown, which is pretty much unparalleled -- except maybe by the view from the Fremont. It's a shame that under normal circumstances you only catch fleeting glimpses of this view while dodging semis and weaving around geezers in Buicks.

If I did the Bridge Pedal thing, I could also get some nice photos of the Marquam's intricate architectural details, if it had any, which it doesn't.



Some years ago, I had a near-accident on the bridge. I was going eastbound onto the bridge, a bit too fast, when a very slow UPS truck pulled into my lane just ahead of me. I had to slam on the brakes, and I ended up spinning around, ending up on the shoulder (there's a shoulder on the ramp, but not on the bridge itself), facing the wrong way, into traffic. I'm still amazed I didn't hit anyone, or ram into the bridge railing, or flip over the railing entirely and plummet into the river. I didn't even scratch the paint on my car, amazingly. I had to wait a while for a gap in traffic so I could get turned back around and continue on my way. That wasn't fun at all, and I occasionally still think of that incident when I drive over the bridge. I shouldn't bear a grudge against the bridge itself over a thing like this, but I have to admit I sort of do.



I suppose I ought to go ahead and make a proper bridge post out of this, although for reasons I've just explained, I might be a bit more halfhearted about it than usual.

So... here are the Structurae and Bridgehunter pages for the bridge.

The city has an old photo of the bridge under construction

And on Flickr, a cool time lapse video of traffic at night.



The Zinester's Guide disses it a little.

Here's someone's vision to get rid of the Marquam and turn the remnant into a park.

Part of Ursula LeGuin's The Lathe of Heaven takes place in an Alien-run antique shop located beneath a surviving remnant of the destroyed Marquam Bridge.



Other photos, from across the Information Superhighway:
[1] [2] [3] [4]

Keller Fountain

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If you live in Portland and have a camera, sooner or later you'll end up with a bunch of photos of downtown's uber-famous Ira Keller Fountain. Or at least that's what's happened to me.

Normally the Keller Fountain wouldn't meet my criteria for inclusion here. It's not at all obscure, certainly; it's about as non-obscure as anything in the whole city. I also don't have any particularly original insights about it. I do have some photos, though, and it's popular enough that it's not hard to find random weird stuff about it out on the net. So I figured I'd pass a few of those links along, along with a few of my old photos, and presto, voila, a new post here on this humblest of humble blogs.

That may be the secret to this blogging racket: The lower you set your standards, the easier it gets.



Special insights or not, I do love the place, especially the little behind-the-waterfall nook. They'd never put something like this in these days, for fear of homeless people sleeping back there, like anyone could sleep with all the noise, no matter how drunk they re. Or there might be perverts lurking, or evildoers doing evil, or ne'er-do-wells doing their thing, whatever that is. Or teens engaging in a bit of heavy petting after the prom, for that matter, which is of course the worst thing of all.

It seems like there's always a faint whiff of weed smoke when you walk past the fountain at night. And sometimes during the day, too.



The park was recently invaded by Imperial Stormtroopers. You know, from Star Wars. Dang, I missed it. Everyone fighting over who gets to be Vader, and when it's finally your turn you realize it smells all sweaty from the last 20 geeks who've worn it, and then it turns out you get lice or crabs or cooties or something from the costume, and you have to explain to the doctor what you were up to. And what's with the single sandperson over on the side? Do you get to be the sandperson by drawing the short straw, or the long one? I guess I just don't understand how these things work.

Also, whenever you see someone dressed as Leia, why's it always the white-robed, earmuff-haired Leia from the first movie, I mean, Episode IV? Why's it never the shiny metal bikini Leia from Episode VI? It's all wrong, I tell you.



The Mercury mentions the recent Halprin-themed TBA event. I caught a rehearsal for the Keller Fountain segment, but didn't have a camera along at the time. It was basically women in flowing white outfits, alternately wafting about the fountain, and posing, gazing into the waters in contemplation. Pretty much waft, contemplate, waft, contemplate. I realize that modern dance is high culture, and as a liberal educated sort of person I ought to like it, and sometimes I actually do, but we wandered away after maybe 10 minutes of the rehearsal. It just sort of didn't resonate with me, I guess.



KATU, or a "YouNews" contributor there, apparently never heard of the old detergent-in-the-fountain gag. The gag will never go away, because it's always funny the first time you see it, and they try it, and when they're tired of it someone else will come along and think it's hilarious, and so on.



This was probably inevitable: A VR panorama of some guys doing parkour at the fountain. Some discussion of that here and here. My wife enjoys watching parkour, and I'd probably score serious points for trying it, right up until the first injury.



Here's an awesome pinhole photo of the fountain -- but the caption claims that the park is empty on hot summer days, unlike all the other fountains in town. Weird. That's never been my experience of the place. The sun comes out, the place is packed. Possibly he's thinking of nearby Lovejoy Fountain, which *is* empty most of the time. (Shhhhh, don't tell anyone....)

Da Tung, the Park Blocks Elephant

This is "Da Tung", the elephant statue in the North Park Blocks. An Oregonian article explains how it got here.

When I took these photos, I thought I'd do a sort of blind men meet elephant thing, and get close up enough to the statue that you can't immediately tell what it is from any one photo.

Incidentally, most versions of the story don't mention this, but eventually the elephant got annoyed and trampled all the wise men.

Elsewhere on the net, "Concelebratory Shoehorn Review" has a nice post all about the elephant, and "Portland (OR) Daily Photo" has a post about the north park blocks that mentions the elephant but has no photos of it. And for a really mind-blowing thing, check out this Etch-A-Sketch picture of the elephant. Wow. I can't even draw a straight line with one of those. Actually I'm not that great at drawing straight lines with pencil and paper, come to think of it. But I digress.

The elephant also appears in the Smithsonian's inventory of local public art, FWIW.

Other photos from around the intertubes:
[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Santa Cruz

Here are a few more vacation photos from the archives, this time from Santa Cruz, CA. We didn't stop there very long; this was really just a quick side trip so I could see if I could track down the original tree that the Old SCO corporate logo is based on. I found what sounded like specific directions, which even pointed to a then-recent map of the area, but it turns out that all cypress trees look about the same. Or more to the point, the SCO logo equally resembles a lot of cypress trees, and modern Google Maps didn't exist yet. So no dice on that, I think, but I at least got a few assorted photos out of the effort.

Updated: A rereading of those directions just now (2/1/23) suggests it might be the tree here, which looks a bit worse for wear as time and the elements have had their way with it. Which, frankly, happens to the best of us. Incidentally today is just a few weeks shy of the 20th anniversary of the original SCO vs IBM lawsuit being filed, which is a little crazy.

Monterey Bay

As I've mentioned at least once recently, the season for non-dreary photos is just about done for now, and (unless it snows) it's going to be nothing but bare trees until the crocuses come up, and that's months away. So I thought I'd go back and raid the archives for something a little sunnier.

So these are a few vacation photos from back in February, taken from our hotel balcony in Seaside, California, right next to Monterey Bay. Around that time, I'd gotten the notion that I didn't really need to do a blog post about every batch of photos I put up on Flickr. Which means, as it turns out, I don't need to immediately do a post when I put stuff on Flickr, but I may get around to it eventually.

Check out that sunshine. I remember sunshine...

the eternal cycle

...a tree budding out once again, even as it sheds its leaves...

a rainy november night