The Ideal Scout

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A few photos of one of the obscurer (is that a word?) statues around town, a statue of a Boy Scout outside local Boy Scout HQ, between 1st & Naito just south of Lincoln. I probably wouldn't mention it all -- I probably wouldn't even know it existed -- except that a.) it's in my neighborhood, so I see it now and then while walking to or from work; and b.) sometimes that happens after dark, and I see it out of the corner of my eye, loitering there in the streetlit gloom, and the primitive parts of my brain go on mugger alert. No other statue does that to me. Most real live people don't do that to me either. I can't really explain it. It's not like he's brandishing a hatchet or anything, even thought that would actually be a legitimate scout thing to do.

In any case, about the statue: It's called The Ideal Scout or sometimes just The Boy Scout, by the sculptor R. Tait McKenzie. Like a number of other statues around town (Umbrella Man, The Promised Land, Joan of Arc, etc.) it's just one of several copies scattered about the globe. The original statue dates to 1915, and the life-sized version shown here was created in 1937. Portland's copy only dates to 1972, though. Probably about the same vintage as the building it's next to. Which would also be the vintage of much of the surrounding area, come to think of it.

When I covered the Joan of Arc statue, I mentioned the notion of travelling the globe to visit all the copies. (I mentioned something similar re: the Willamette Stone as well, although that's not strictly art.) You could, in theory, do the same for this statue too, assuming you were possessed to do so for some reason. The Wikipedia page about McKenzie (linky is above) lists a bunch of locations of copies. If it's a complete list, you'd be spending an inordinate amount of time in Pennsylvania, which cannot be recommended. Trust me on this. And I'm not sure what the point of such an expedition would be, unless your kid's doing it as a project and will get a writeup in Boys' Life for his efforts, or at least score a merit badge or something. I was going to add "or one of those metal belt loop 'Skill Award' thingys", but apparently those were discontinued way back in 1989. Who knew?

Of course, back in my day going camping meant using our fins to slowly drag ourselves up onto dry land, and then we'd just sit there and watch the earth's crust cool. Ok, we'd also try to sing Kumbaya sometimes. What can I say, it was a dark and primitive time. You could get a merit badge for discussing what fire might be like if it existed. They added a badge for the wheel a few years after I quit, so I missed out on that one, which is too bad since I've always liked the wheel. The knot-tying stuff, though, is exactly the same all these years later. It's just that kids have it so much easier now with their opposable thumbs and all.

Pittman Addition expedition

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Today's fun adventure takes us back to North Portland, to our fair city's kinda-shiny, kinda-new Pittman Addition HydroPark, just north of Going St., and across an ooky skybridge from tiny little Stanich Park. I actually mentioned this place briefly in the Stanich Park post, under the name "Roy Beach Park". That's what a 2002 parks levy doc called it, and this now-vanished doc was the only mention of the place on the interwebs. I mean, apart from this humble blog. And now that the levy doc has exited the series of tubes, this humble blog seems to be the one mention of the place anywhere, at least by that name.

And now the Water Bureau's running the place as part of its growing HydroPark system, as they have some sort of underground "vault" (whatever that is) located here. So they're putting in some paths and a little art and generally sprucing it up a bit -- none of which you can see in the above photo because it's an old photo from 2007, taken along with my Stanich Park pics. Actually the park's official grand opening is this coming Saturday, September 26th 2009, if anyone out there happens to be interested.

FWIW, PortlandMaps indicates that the west half of the park does belong to the water bureau, while the east half belongs to the ultra-glamorous "Bureau of General Services". That's what PortlandMaps says, although in 2000 the Bureau of General Services was merged into the equally glamorous "Office of Management and Finance", and its "Facilities Services Program" is likely responsible for the land here. In case you were wondering, I mean. I know I was.

vegas (and bust)

Here we have some photos of a few defunct casinos around Las Vegas. First up, the former Hotel Nevada and Casino, on Main St. in downtown Vegas, a bit south of Fremont St. It looks like it's been vacant for many years, but according to the only review I've found of the place it was still open in August 2005, and was a complete dump. The review's titled "Welcome to the Bates Motel", and suggests that sleeping there would make for a good "Fear Factor" episode.

For photos of the Hotel Nevada in (relatively) better shape, I ran across photos from before and shortly after it closed.

All in all, this one's probably no big loss.









Next up is this ghostly sign for the former Silver City Casino, just off the Strip near the Convention Center. The casino itself was demolished a few years ago, but the sign lingers on.




I'm actually not sure this next one is really defunct, since I just glimpsed it from the taxi on the way to the airport. The Key Largo certainly looked like an ex-casino, but I ran across reviews here and here dating to late 2008. The small attached hotel is/was a Quality Inn, but the Quality Inn website doesn't contain any mention of the place, so it may be a recent casualty of the economy or something.




And finally, a couple of shots of the Lady Luck, which stands tall, dark and vacant just north of Fremont Street. It was one of the larger casino hotels in downtown Las Vegas until closing in February 2006. That was supposed to be temporary while the buildings were renovated, but then the developer ran out of money, and here we are going on four years later. Still, the hope is that the place isn't permanently defunct. The city's offered various incentives to the owners to renovate and reopen the place, but nothing's happened just yet. Maybe things will turn around once the economy improves. With any luck.

houndstooth & lucite

This is, um, the lid to the ice bucket at our swanky Vegas hotel.

It would be fun to say these were taken during a wild alcohol-fueled photo binge, but that wouldn't be true. At least not strictly true. Not that I recall, I mean.

shelter, 5th avenue

Rain pooling up on top of Portland's fancy new bus shelters. This is what we encountered upon returning from sunny Las Vegas. It was not a "Yay, Portland" moment.

Neon: Paris Las Vegas

More Vegas photos, this time some night pics of Paris Las Vegas. The Eiffel Tower shown here is not quite as tall as the original, but is still just short of the tallest building in Portland, despite serving no strictly practical purpose.

I'm aware these photos are exactly identical to everyone else's night photos of the place, other than the fact that that they're mine, but hey. FWIW, these were taken from the Deuce bus, as we sat there stuck in traffic for an extended chunk of time.

During our first Vegas trip, wayyyyy back in February, I discovered that Paris Las Vegas is a great (and probably the only) place to obtain a clear plastic Eiffel Tower full of strawberry daiquiri, which you can then walk down the street with, perfectly legally. I didn't get one of those this time around; if you have plans for the day beyond consuming a ginormous daiquiri, the ginormous daiquiri is not an asset, as it turns out.

flamingoes @ the flamingo

A few tourist photos of the flamingoes at the Flamingo Las Vegas. We were actually there mostly in search of parrots, but no such luck, possibly due to the extreme heat that day. The signs asserted that the parrots were away while their cages were being polished, but I didn't see anyone actually polishing any cages. So I'm going to chalk that up as silly PR -- unless the cage polishing team was on break when we were there -- union rules, and all that.

Flamingoes aren't really the most fascinating of birds unless you're an avian taxonomist, and they seem to spend much of the day sleeping, and they don't do much in the way of mugging for the camera. But they do have a certain visual appeal. And since I've been semi-typecast as just a photoblog, a mere source of transient visual stimuli, I think I'll just step aside and let you enjoy the photos, or not, or whatever.

cascade haze

vegas (last time around)

At this moment, I'm in the airport waiting for the next plane to Vegas. Here are a few photos from the last visit.

Apropos of nothing, look at the list of tallest buildings in Las Vegas, and compare it to the tallest buildings in Portland. Our tallest would be #12 on the list in Vegas, just ahead of the Eiffel Tower at Paris Las Vegas. No, seriously, I mean it. And just 3 of ours would make the top 35 in Vegas.

On top of that, the buildings we do have tend to be boring and beige and almost entirely lacking in neon or glitz of any kind. In Vegas they would've all been imploded years ago. Just sayin'.

Colliding Rivers

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Today's expedition through the mini-roadtrip archives takes us south again. This time we're near the small town of Glide, Oregon, visiting the (somewhat) famous Colliding Rivers -- where the North Umpqua and Little River meet head on. Wikipedia and various other sources claim this is the only place in the world where this happens. That's quite an expansive claim, and I'm not sure I buy it, but at the very least it's an unusual situation.



I didn't post the photos earlier because I thought I hadn't captured the place very well. A name like "Colliding Rivers" suggests a violent clash, whitewater spraying everywhere, bewildered salmon leaping in all directions trying to figure out which way is upstream, etc. Instead, I had photos of two rivers gently flowing together at a somewhat unusual angle.

After consulting the interwebs and realizing that everyone else's photos of the place looked just like mine, I figured mine were postable after all. I'm told the collision gets more rambunctious in the winter and spring when there's more water, but people mostly visit in the summer, and I haven't yet run across a photo of what it looks like at other times of the year.



The best photo I've found of the place, actually, comes from the website for the Umpqua National Forest. Their photo gallery page links to a great (but huge) panoramic photo of the area. It does kind of make sense that if two rivers meet head on, you'll want either a lens that captures close to a 180 degree angle, or you'll want to take multiple photos and stitch them together. My little digicam at the time I took these did have a photostitch mode, but using it didn't occur to me at the time. So consider this a note for future reference.

For another angle on the place, here's someone's aerial photo, which makes it a bit more clear what's going on here.

If you want an even closer view, Douglas County has a public boat ramp just downstream.

Also, here's a nice Medford Mail-Tribune article about the place.

One thing I don't have a photo of is the visitors information center. I was unaware of this, but apparently it's a historic building constructed by the Civilian Conservation Corps back during the depression.

Believe it or not, the Colliding Rivers play a supporting role in an idiotic New Age belief. As the, ah, hypothesis goes, the earth is going to bump into something called a "photon belt" in 2011 or so, and a variety of uncanny events, both apocalyptic and wonderful, will occur. This is described in a book titled Touched by the Dragon's Breath: Conversations at Colliding Rivers. Amazon's blurb for the book is an impressive piece of brain-melting word salad:

Touched by the Dragon's Breath is based on actual conversations that took place between the author and his mentor, John Redstone, splashed against the backdrop of Colliding Rivers in Southern Oregon. These weekly discussions, spanning more than three years, explain in detail the significance of 2012, the Photon Belt, Zero Point, the light wave of creation, and the 50-year Time/Space Overlap Zone between the Piscean Age and the Age of Aquarius. In two related conversations about the Seedbed and the Mirror of Life, John Redstone reveals his step by step approach to cleaning up the Belief System, a key element in preparing for the global frequency shift commonly called the Shift of the Ages that will usher in a new Golden Age.

In a separate chapter highlighting prophecies from the Hopi, Maya, Aztec, and Tibetan cultures, the author substantiates many of Mr. Redstone s views on 2012 and the Photon Belt, a spectacular band of multi-dimensional light, secretly known to some as the Dragon's Breath. The author also provides valuable, little-known information about water, as well as personal glimpses into his own spiritual journey; most notably, a quest that began over 70,000 years ago in the ancient land of Lemuria.

Uhh... alrighty then. I mean, I'm not arguing this is more idiotic than some of the notions Christian fundies come up with, and at least New Agers tend to be nonviolent when they get wacky about stuff. And at least it tends to be affluent and (supposedly) educated gullible people getting ripped off this way, plus I'm not aware of them wanting the government to impose their ideas on anybody -- no mandatory crystal-gazing in the schools or anything like that. But still, the human capacity to believe complete barking-at-the-moon gibberish never ceases to amaze me, and not in a good way. If the blurb's any indication, the stuff's not even written very well. If I put my mind to it, I'm sure I could churn out New Age crap of vastly higher quality than what's out there at present.

I think I've said this before, but every now and then I'm tempted to chuck it all and run off and start a New Age cult. If only there was a way to make these people give me all their money without having to actually meet or interact with them. I'd still probably feel guilty about the whole thing, and I wouldn't enjoy being mocked by skeptics (and I'd agree with them, secretly, and I'd soon come to loathe my followers). But still, it's basically free money without having to produce anything of value. As I said, it's a tempting idea now and then.

Loll Wildwood expedition

Today's fabulous expedition takes to the rolling hills of outer SW Portland, to a spot the city calls West Portland Park Natural Area, and Metro (and the local neighborhood association) calls "Loll Wildwood". Seems that Metro owns the land as part of its Greenspace program, but the city of Portland operates the park (to the degree that any "operating" occurs here), and both agencies have their own ideas on what to call the place. You'd think that this would be easy -- the surrounding neighborhood has long been known as "West Portland Park", and you'd think the park would've taken its name from that, or vice versa.  But when local agencies have turf battles -- or even worse, try to share nicely -- even the simplest decision becomes 12-dimensional chess, apparently.

If you look closely at the map, you'll note a city water tank on the upper left side of the park. This no doubt belongs to the city water bureau, which has its own system of what it calls "HydroParks", thus horning in on the parks bureau's turf a little. Whenever they get around to doing the HydroPark thing here, I fully expect the area to acquire a third unrelated name, and we'll be playing 12^3 dimensional chess instead.

My main interest was in a historical marker next to the park, which gives rise to the "Loll Wildwood" name. I assumed the park itself would be yet another chunk of generic forest, and I've covered a few of those already, plus I was unable to find a way into the place to see for myself. The idea behind Metro Greenspaces is to just buy land and sit on it for the long term, until funds to develop & maintain the place become available. They haven't gotten to this spot yet. I did peek at a few spots around the perimeter of the park, er, wildwood, looking for anything vaguely trailhead-like, but I didn't see anything that looked promising. Like I said, I had the place figured as generic forest, and all photos inside generic Northwestern forests look alike, so why take more? I mean, I'd be delighted if I'm wrong and there's something unique I need to go back and check out, and if there is please let me know. As it is, I took a few photos of the, uh, wildwood, from outside looking in, but strictly for the sake of completeness. Don't bother complaining to me that they aren't Fine Art, or that they aren't especially good photos. I'm well aware of that already, thanks.

FWIW, the city's vegetation summary page for the park is here. I tend to cover vegetation unit surveys because often they're the only detailed info the city provides about a given place, and they give a very broad idea of what to expect if you manage to find a way to wander in, which I didn't.

But I digress, and I'd just started on about the historical marker. On the shoulder of SW 35th Avenue, near Arnold St., is this memorial to Ernest C. Loll, a Multnomah County Sheriff's Deputy who was killed in the line of duty at this very spot, back in 1935. The unusual detail is that he was on fish and wildlife duty, and was apparently murdered by bird poachers. The account doesn't explain what sort of birds the poachers were after; I'm not an avid birdwatcher, by any means, and possibly it's just my ignorance showing, but I'm unaware of any local birds worth killing someone over. But then, the market for ornamental feathers is not what it once was.

Every year on Peace Officers Memorial Day (on or around May 15th), the county sheriff's department holds a memorial ceremony here.  I ran across a small gallery of photos of last year's event. There's more history about the marker & the name of the park at (recently elected city commissioner) Amanda Fritz's blog. And there's a mention of Deputy Loll on this page at Ancestry.com.