It's The World Famous Land Manatee!

We're looking after a pair of cats for the next couple of weeks. The, uh, larger-boned of the two is a Himalayan of indeterminate gender that spends roughly 23 hours a day sleeping, and the other hour pestering you to go to bed at 9pm. Other than that, it basically doesn't move much. Sleep, pester the humans, eat cheese... Have I mentioned that it demands a pinch of Parmesan twice a day? That might help explain its, uh, generous proportions. It's actually a very nice cat, just sort of... different. It walks around with an abstract, distant look on its face, as if it can see the world behind the world. Or maybe it just has bad vision, it's hard to tell with cats.

Anyway, I've mentioned this beastie over on the intertweets a few times, nicknaming it the #LandManatee. That, understandably, generated requests for photos, so I took a few, and here they are. They're not the best cat photos I've ever taken; natural sunlight works a lot better, but we only have the cats for two weeks, and it's May, so I doubt we're going to have any proper sunlight while they're here.

dogwood, first avenue

irises, tanner springs

Like the title says, some irises (I think) at Tanner Springs Park in the Pearl. Fun fact of the day: "Irises" is only the correct plural when you're talking about the flower. If you mean the iris in an eye, the plural is "irides". I wasn't aware of that until just now. And it doesn't explain what the plural of an iris in a camera lens would be. I've always assumed it was "irises" for all 3, clueless barbarian that I am. But this would be similar to the case of "virus", where it's "viruses" for computer viruses, and "virii" for the real thing.

Someone, somewhere, is probably making up the rules this way just to be difficult.

City United, Country United

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A few photos of the odd mural in the tiny neglected plaza next to the downtown MAX turnaround, on SW 11th between Yamhill & Morrison. It has the phrases "City United" and "Country United" on it, so I'm guessing that's what it's called. According to this 2007 press release, the mural was a joint effort of the police bureau and a couple of social service agencies, enlisting street kids to help spruce up this blighted spot. The mini-plaza is still generally empty & neglected, since it's in a weird location and there's really nothing to do there unless you're a transient looking for somewhere to sleep.



But at least it's all bright and cheery now, I guess. The part with the bonfire is kind of alarming, though. Sure, everyone's united, but I'm not sure their intentions are peaceful. Give them a few AK-47s and it'd look a bit like a mural out of Northern Ireland. Although in recent years those are starting to be seen as just a belligerent form of folk art, and even a tourist attraction. Maybe that's the ultimate goal here, I dunno.

pearl contrail

They say that composing photos with strong diagonals will communicate feelings of energy and vitality. "They" being the sort of people who say that kind of thing with a straight face. In any case, it's a dark grey friday in April, and it would be charitable to say I'm half awake, and it's time to head off to the office for an Important Meeting. So I figure a little "energy and vitality" can't hurt, even if it's complete voodoo.

rain between cobblestones

Taken recently on NW 14th near REI...

sketchy

Found a tutorial on how to do a "sketch effect" in GIMP, making photos kinda-sorta resemble line drawings, assuming the person doing the line drawings was someone with talent, i.e. not me. I mean, maybe I shouldn't run myself down like that; I can do stick figures, and stick figures seem to be working out ok for xkcd.

Anyway, here are a few preliminary results from last night.

crab attack!

Ok, technically these crabs aren't attacking. They're basically just sitting there watching the aquarium tourists wander by. But nobody's going to click on post titled "crabs not doing much", are they?




If you search YouTube for "crab attack", I'd guess rougly 90% of the results are actually crabs trying to look threatening as they run away, chased by camera-wielding divers. If you're going to do that and insist the crab's really attacking you and not the other way around, you might as well go all the way and accuse the crab of hiding WMDs before you chase it. Just sayin'.

zoo lizard

The great thing about lizards is that they're really good at holding still. They also manage to look rather droll as they hold still, even though they aren't actually thinking much of anything at all, on account of being lizards and all.




As with the preceding frog photo, I really ought to have made a note of what sort of lizard this is while I was at the zoo. Figuring it out after the fact from the zoo website isn't really working out.

a frog at the zoo

I probably ought to have made a note on what kind of frog (or toad, possibly) this was. I seem to recall it was in the "Predators of the Serengeti" exhibit, but the zoo's website doesn't mention there being any frogs (or toads) in said exhibit.

sea urchin

Ocelots

A couple of ocelots at the zoo. One was asleep, while the other was pacing the enclosure rather rapidly, as if he'd rather not be in there. It was, frankly, one of those moments that makes me skeptical about keeping animals in zoos. Some species appear to do ok, but others just don't seem to fare so well, mentally or physically, in enclosed spaces like this. I do understand the education and conservation arguments for zoos, and I doubt I'd ever get to see a live ocelot otherwise, and I'm not actually arguing against zoos, in general. But that doesn't make it any less unsettling when you see a cat pacing and looking trapped.



Surprisingly, ocelots do occur in the wild in a couple of places in the US. There's a small population in South Texas, and one was recently sighted in Arizona as well. If they happened to live in more forward-thinking parts of the country, this might be an opportunity to lure in well-heeled ecotourists, paying big bucks for a chance to maybe see an ocelot, or a jaguarundi, or even a jaguar in the wild. I usually roll my eyes at the whole ecotourism thing, but it really does seem like there's an opportunity here.

Wilson River Bridge, Tillamook

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A few photos of the bridge over the Wilson River at Tillamook, just south of the famous cheese factory. Although it looks a bit worse for wear, it still seems like an absurdly grand and out-of-scale bridge for the location. The Wilson River isn't very big, and the site of the bridge is in the midst of flat muddy farm country. Maybe the location is more challenging to build on than it looks. The wikipedia article (above) indicates that this was a very early bridge of its type, so possibly the state prototyped the design here before using it where it was really needed. Dunno.

As one commenter notes below, this is a Conde McCullough bridge (like many bridges along US 101), so it does have historical significance to Oregon. It's not anywhere as big or showy as its better-known siblings in Newport, Florence, Coos Bay, etc.. You can see a distinct family resemblance to other smaller McCullough bridges, though, like the bridge in Oregon City even though the latter is a through arch design.



I should probably point out that these were taken from a moving vehicle, and we didn't stop to take a closer look at the bridge, much less walk across it. I don't think I've made this clear before, but the whole walking across thing is strictly a Portland-area project. Elsewhere it's strictly optional, especially when the area smells heavily of dairy cows.


Btw, this post is getting tons of hits from some somewhere on Facebook. Not sure what that's all about. Anyone want to enlighten me? Thx. Mgmt.

Updated 8/31/10: Aha. We have linkage from the Tillamook Headlight-Herald group on Facebook. One commenter whines about me mentioning the odor, and implies that we city folk don't know where cheese comes from. I guess on the theory that if you love sausage, you ought to love everything about sausage factories too.

I was around cows a lot as a kid, actually. My uncle had a few dozen at least; it seemed like hundreds at the time. I helped out with the cows now and then. I was hauled out of bed in the middle of the night more than once to come watch a calf being born, I guess because it was supposed to be educational or something. And I gotta say, I didn't like the smell of cows then, and I don't much care for it now either. And I do like cheese, and I'm not going to apologize for that. Stop me if you can.