Why I didn't go for a birthday swim...

Box jellies! The authorities don't actually forbid you from going in the ocean when the jellies are swarming, but if you get stung I suspect they roll their eyes and make fun of you (the clueless tourist) for ignoring all the warning signs. I didn't chance it. I've gone mumble-mumble years without being stung by a single jellyfish, and I don't feel I'm missing out on an essential life experience here.

More about box jellies from the Hawaiian Lifeguard Association and the University of Hawaii's Pacific Cnidaria Research Lab.

Happy Malasada Day!

A few photos of the malasadas we had in Honolulu. A malasada is a traditional Portuguese-Hawaiian deep fried pastry, similar to a donut without a hole. Leonard's Bakery, where we got these from, is sort of the canonical choice for malasadas, and it was a short walk from our hotel.



I'm posting the photos now because apparently it's Fat Tuesday today, or "Malasada Day" as it's known in Hawaii. The traditional idea, as I understand it, is that you're supposed to use up all your remaining butter and eggs and oil and so forth before Lent, and that means a big party with lots of tasty deep fried goodness, and then everyone wakes up the next day and it's 40 days of sackcloth and ashes and self denial and silly religious nonsense. The modern-day idea is that the next morning everyone wakes up with empty coral pink malasada boxes and it's time to go get more.



People often say Hawaii is generally a few years behind the mainland when it comes to trends and so forth. I don't know if that's generally true or not, but I did notice that nobody seemed to be selling bacon-wrapped malasadas. I'm quite certain that would be a license to print money, so maybe the "add bacon to everything" trend simply hasn't arrived in Hawaii yet. It's the only plausible explanation I can think of.

crocus buds (white)

crocus buds (orange)

crocus buds (purple)

More photos from the pot of crocuses out on the balcony. They're starting to come up in different colors now, so I've got a bit more variety to work with. This time we've got a bit of extension tube + vintage lens macro business. I probably ought to have included some pocket change or dice or jellybeans or something for scale so you can see just how tiny these flowers are. But that always makes for a weird composition, plus it just didn't occur to me at the time that scale would be an issue. So you'll have to take my word for it that these flowers are not very big. Or just go find some crocuses budding out and see for yourself. Or whatever.

Bull Run Powerhouse

View Larger Map

Today's adventure takes us back to the Bull Run River, last seen in our visit to the Bull Run River Bridge. I made the trek out to this old bridge because it was built with recycled parts of the original Burnside Bridge. And now this post will help explain why, a century ago, the city of Portland saw a need for a bridge way out here in the middle of nowhere. The key is this derelict building just downstream from the bridge. This is the historic Bull Run Powerhouse, a remnant of PGE's now-defunct Bull Run Hydroelectric Project. You might note there's no actual dam here; the dam was on an entirely different river, and water from it was piped underground to the powerhouse here. Meanwhile much of the Bull Run River's original water was, and still is, diverted away to be Portland's drinking water supply. Give solid practical reasons all you like, but I'm still going to believe civil engineers were just showing off when they designed that arrangement.

The photoset would probably be far more exciting if I'd managed to get inside somehow, but I didn't. I wasn't quite interested enough to try sneaking past the barbed wire fence around the place and the security cameras that might still be working. Plus it's been a while since my last tetanus shot. Plus I was there to see the bridge, and the powerhouse

What to do with the building? I haven't seen anyone propose this, but I can't possibly be the first person to see this building and think "McMenamins". They've become the default answer for preserving historic buildings, particularly weird and unwieldy ones. And they've already done at least one other power plant somewhere on their Edgefield campus, so clearly they're the experts on this sort of thing. I mean, beerwise I'd be happier if some other brewery took it over instead. A hotel of the non-brewing variety would be acceptable as well, in a pinch.

This post has been floating around in the drafts folder for a while, primarily because I ended up with a big batch of varied and interesting links to pass along. Taking a pile of raw sources and building a semi-coherent blog post around them is always the hardest part, and I've been procrastinating about that for months and months now. So I think what I'm going to do this time is just sort the links into categories and let you, the Gentle Reader, explore as you see fit.

History

• PDXHistory: "Bull Run - The Town That Time Forgot"
• OpenSpaces: "Going, Going Gone: Reflections on the Retirement of the Bull Run Hydroelectric Project"
• Oregon Historical Society: Bull Run Dam Construction
• PGE's Bull Run Little Sandy Flume Railroad

Preservation

• SaveBullRun.org: SaveBullRun.org
• OregonLive: "98-year-old Bull Run Powerhouse set for preservation"
• OregonLive: "Bull Run River A tour for creatives leads to a new exhibit", in which several painters had a look at the old powerhouse.

Environment

• "The Bull Run River-Reservoir System Model", a paper by a civil engineering professor at Portland State that discusses ways to better manage the old hydroelectric system to improve salmon habitat short of removing dams. Which is kind of a moot point now.
• PGE: Salmon and Steelhead Runs and Related Events on the Sandy River Basin — A Historical Perspective
• Oregon Magazine: "The Old 'Bull' of Bull Run", profiling a longtime Bull Run conservation activist.
• Daily Journal of Commerce: "Bull Run dam removal poses engineering challenges"

Photos

• Wikimedia photo showing the powerhouse from the bridge.
• two photos of the river, much better than the ones you see here.

Other

• USGS: "Virtual Inspection of Cableway, Bull Run River near Bull Run, OR"

Running Horses

Today's stop on the occasional tour of transit mall art is Running Horses by Tom Hardy, on SW 6th Avenue near Madison. If you have a vague sense that this one isn't actually new, you're correct. The horses were commissioned as part of the original Pioneer Courthouse Square project in 1986, and were a sort of companion piece to Animals in Pools, apparently. So they've been removed from their original context here, but I'm not sure that's a problem. There probably is such a thing as too many animal sculptures in one place.

Sybilla Avery Cook's Walking Portland describes the sculpture:

Running Horses, a metal sculpture, is on the Pioneer Courthouse side of the square. Tom Hardy, a noted Oregon artist, has been designing motion-filled sculptures of stone, welded steel, and bronze for over 50 years. Portland contains many of his birds and other animal pieces. His work can be seen all over the United States; an eagle medallion he created adorns the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington D.C.

I don't usually pay very close attention to animal sculptures; I have only the vaguest recollection of where exactly Running Horses was located at Pioneer Courthouse Square. I'm fairly certain I never stopped to look at them in either location until I took the photos you see here. So it's possible I've seen any number of Hardy's other works around town and I just wouldn't know it. The only one I know of that I've seen is the heron sculpture up at Howell Territorial Park; once you know they're by the same guy, the stylistic resemblance is pretty obvious. For more info about him, OPB's Oregon Art Beat did a profile of Hardy in 2005.

Note that in several of these photos, you'll see that Running Horses is just across the street from Hilda Morris's Ring of Time (the little black onion ring-shaped thing across the street). I think it's worth crossing the street to go have a peek at, but I realize I'm not most people, and your mileage may vary.

Big Edge

More art from CityCenter in Las Vegas. This is "Big Edge", by Nancy Rubins, in the traffic circle between the Aria & Vdara hotels. It's huge and made of canoes; you can't miss it.

So why all the canoes, here, in the middle of the desert? An LA Times profile of the artist explains what's going on here. (It's complicated.) And from across the interwebs, here are photos of other similar works, in La Jolla, CA and a temporary one at Lincoln Center in New York, and various others.

a brief metablog update

Just a quick update on the ongoing renovations here at this humblest of humble blogs.

• In a step I've been alternately promising and wringing my hands about for a few years now, I've updated the Map tab here so now it does basically the right thing in almost the right way. Previously you would have seen a couple of mostly broken embedded maps, plus a few paragraphs of me griping about what was wrong with them. Now it's all different. The embedded map was created directly from an exported copy of this blog, converted to KML and then imported into Google Maps. The Map page describes the procedure in more detail and explains why it still isn't the 100% solution -- but despite the process issues this is a big improvement. You can now browse for blog posts on a map, or you can even download the KML file from the Maps page and follow my, uh, excellent adventures in Google Earth. Which looks really cool, but also points out that I really ought to get out there and travel a bit more.
  
  
• I believe I've finally upsized all the photos here to a properly modern size, 640x427 instead of clunky old 500x333. If you see a spot I missed, drop me a line or post a comment and let me know, ok?



• In the same vein, I also upsized the handful of crappy video clips I've posted here over the years. And, I dunno, a few of them look a little better now that they aren't postage stamp-sized anymore. Oh, and there's a link to my pathetic YouTube channel in the navigation bar now if anyone wants to go endure the whole schmear at once.



• I actually made a second pass through after upsizing several videos in order to move everything to YouTube's shiny new-ish IFrame-based player. The controls look slightly different, but the big advantage here is that it's not tied to Flash anymore, and iOS (i.e. iPad, iPhone, etc.) users can now enjoy the crappiness along with everyone else. So sure, I'll probably have to make a third pass through and change everything again once everyone starts using the new <video> tag in HTML 5, but that probably isn't going to happen for a while yet.



• In a similar but not quite the same vein, I thought I'd freshen up my movie posts by embedding trailers from YouTube where possible. In a number of cases it was possible to take it a step further and embed the whole movie, so I've done that in cases where it appeared that the movie had been uploaded legally by someone entitled to do so. I'm aided in this by the fact that many of the best crappy B movies were made prior to the advent of modern US copyright law in 1976, and it was quite easy for films to lapse into the public domain if the paperwork wasn't quite in order. And as this was prior to the home video era, it was generally assumed that your film's productive life was over the moment it left the theaters, so taking care of long term copyright protection was not the high priority it is now. In short, there's now a small motley assortment of cheesy movies you can watch without leaving the confines of this blog, should you care to do that.

world (first avenue)

A few photos from in front of Portland's little World Trade Center complex. The logo has this shiny map of the world, and the map reflects street scenes and so forth, so here we are.



Viewers might reasonably conclude there's some sort of social commentary at work here. I mean, it's a batch of photos of different parts of the world, and the third photo (below) even includes a ginormous police SUV looming over the Himalayas.



I didn't have anything in particular in mind, though. I really just thought it was an interesting reflective surface. Unless maybe it was all completely unconscious, in which case your guess is as good as mine. I mean, if the photos did mean something I have no idea what they're trying to say. If it's just clunky & unoriginal platitudes about globalization or cops being pigs or something, I'm going to be very disappointed.