river traffic, st. johns bridge

A tugboat pushing a barge downstream, from the St. Johns Bridge. I didn't use these in my mega-post about walking the bridge, so here they are now...

a tiny fountain

A few nighttime photos of the tiny fountain outside the PSU Student Health Center building. I don't know anything about it, not even a name, assuming it has one. Which makes this post a lot easier to put together, I guess. It's possibly less boring this way, too.

Pics: O'Bryant Square

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Since I'm on a deadline and don't have a lot of free time at the moment, I thought I'd raid the archives again. So here are a few old photos from downtown's much-maligned O'Bryant Square.

You might notice that almost all of the photos are of flowers. Hey, that's what I had in the archives. I don't have time right now to go take a new batch of photos, or do research for a "comprehensive" post about the place. I just don't.



People seem to think of O'Bryant Square as a miniature no-go zone, full of homeless people, criminals, and junkies. In reality, there are about as many homeless there as anywhere else around downtown. And I've never seen people shooting up, or shooting each other, in all the times I've been by there. It may still happen, I guess, but I've never seen it. So I imagine it can't be as common as local mythology would suggest. The "needle park" thing may have been more true 15 years ago than it is now.



Anyway, they're planning to totally redo the place in a few years, assuming they find the money. Which is fine, I guess. It's pretty much a generic brick plaza as it is now. They don't even run the park's "Fountain for a Rose" fountain anymore. Which is a real shame, as it's kind of a cool fountain. I'd happily do a fountain post about it, if only it was operating. So my wish list for the overhaul has exactly one item on it: Either keep the fountain like it is now, or move it somewhere else that has a bit more visibility.

december sunset

Nobody really wants to be at the office on Saturday, at sunset, still trying to sort out that last stupid bug before the Deadline hits.

When your office is in downtown Portland, though, sometimes there's an upside...

Broughton Beach expedition

Sure, it's Oregon in December, but occasionally the sun comes out, and then it's time to go to the beach. So here are a few photos from Broughton Beach, which is actually a river beach on the Columbia, next to the west end of the airport. I was about to say it's not a "real" beach since it's not on the ocean. But it does have water and sand, and I think that's pretty much the dictionary definition of "beach", so I guess it counts as one. And "real" or not, it's a lot closer than the ocean, so there's that at least, and it's not all that noisy unless there's a jet taking off next door.

A 2007 Oregonian article insists you can't be a real Portlander until you've hung out here on a hot summer day. That must only be true for out-of-towners moving here.

The place is probably packed with screaming kids in the summer anyway. This morning, in contrast, I was the only person there for a while, and then a few people showed up with dogs. It seems to be a popular place for that. The long, flat Marine Drive Trail runs past Broughton Beach, so running and cycling are popular here too. Plus there's watching fireworks. And there's just hanging out on the beach, too, I guess.

This used to be a Multnomah County park, but it was handed over to Metro back in the 90's along with the boat ramp next door, and all the other Multnomah County parks.

The beach is named after one Lt. Broughton, and assistant to George Vancouver when they explored the area way back in 1792. Broughton Bluff, near Troutdale, and Broughton Landing, further upstream near Hood River, are named after the same guy.

A page about Broughton Beach at Columbia River Images mentions that it was once known as "Diddlers Beach". I can sort of understand why the name was changed. A name like that is liable to attract the wrong sort of person.

multi-rusting multi-chunks #25

Our old friend Rusting Chunks #5, as seen through a Mirage 5F multiple image filter. You know, one of those widgets that groovy with-it happening photographers were so big on back in the 70's. I picked it up at Goodwill the other day along with a couple of other funky special effect filters. I'd wanted one of these for quite a while, partly because it's so retro -- I remember thinking it was a cool look back when I was a kid, although I didn't know how they did it at the time. Another reason, which seems to me to be a very sensible reason, is that sometimes it's good to do something simply because it's unfashionable. It's hard to think of anything more unfashionable than this. You could, I'm sure, do something similar and possibly more pleasing with Photoshop. Except that people generally don't, as out-there special effects aren't really the "in" look right now. Unless you count HDR, that is. Hmm... HDR plus groovy 70's filters would make for a really interesting look, wouldn't it? Or a really bizarro look, at least.



It seemed appropriate to use the Mirage 5F on the Chunks right off the bat. Ex-groovy 70's photo gear, ex-groovy 70's art, it just makes sense. It's sort of a process of piling on layer upon layer of terminal unfashionableness until the resulting unholy agglomeration becomes inexplicably cool. Or that's the plan, at least.

Incidentally, the previous post here is about the Kelly Fountain, the Chunks' shiny, wet, and slightly less unhip sibling. That post links to a couple of articles about the guy behind the Chunks. It sounds like even he realizes just how anti-trendy his stuff is these days.

Also incidentally, I've finally found the perfect adjective to describe the chunks, a word I've been seeking for a long time. The Chunks, I've realized, are hegemonic. I don't usually indulge in academic lingo here -- I tend to get it all wrong, and maybe I'm doing it wrong now, and I'm not sure I care, quite honestly. But just look at the way the Chunks loom and dominate their surroundings. If that's not hegemony, I don't know what is. Just look for yourself. You know it's true.



The box of filters ran me close to $40, which I guess is a bit more than I think I ought to have paid for a silly lark like this. But I wanted it, so I spent the money, and now I feel like I need to use it a lot to justify the "expense". I mention this, O Gentle Reader(s), as sort of an advance warning. I may end up posting more multiple image pics here than strictly necessary. Before eventually tiring of my new toy and putting it in the filter drawer with the others, I mean, which is bound to happen sooner or later.

700th post

So this is the 700th post for this humblest of humble blogs. In a way, I mean; that number includes a handful of posts languishing in draft folder limbo. But I'm sure I'll get around to finishing quite a few of them eventually, or not, probably.

This blog also turns 3 years old in a couple of weeks. Which comes to roughly 233 posts per year, or about one every 1.5 days, roughly. Wow. Phrased that way, it almost sounds like work. I mean, except for the money part.

I took advantage of this quasi-joyous occasion to tweak the blog template in a couple of subtly undetectable ways. The HTML header contained a number of keyword metadata fields explaining what this blog is supposedly, allegedly, about, except that I haven't changed them since the beginning of time, and as it turns out I almost never post about hockey, and it's been many moons since I've done a math post. And tagging one's blog as "anti-Bush" is finally, thankfully, mercifully passe, not that I've done a lot of political posts lately anyway. The other problem with the keyword fields is that Google sometimes substitutes them in place of actual post contents in search results, and I'm not sure which of the four fields is responsible, since I'd set them all to be identical. So I went ahead and commented all four out. I may revisit this if I get a sudden precipitous decline in readership or something. Right now, mostly I'm just happy at being able to remove "anti-Bush", finally. It felt good.

I also added a few more links to the Link Tree, things I'd been meaning to add for a while now. Several of them have linked here for a while now, like Lost Oregon and Dave Knows: Portland, so it's only fair, really, and rather overdue. My current inclination is to go through and prune out some old links as well, but I haven't gotten to that yet. And sooner or later I really ought to refresh the whole template, maybe give it a new look or something, since the current template dates back to the Old Blogger days. Seriously. It's just that the current template fits like an old shoe, and I have a bad habit of hanging on to old shoes much longer than I ought to. I'll get around to it sooner or later, for sure, probably.