Stanley Cup in Portland, August 17, 2011

So the Stanley Cup visited Pioneer Courthouse Square around lunchtime today, and I stopped briefly to take a few photos. If you don't like these, I suspect you can find better ones on the interwebs somewhere.

I haven't been paying close attention to current events and coming attractions here in town of late, so I didn't realize the Cup was coming to town until I saw a mention of it on Dave Knows Portland. I don't know how he manages to keep track of all this stuff, especially since he lives in Astoria these days.



In any case, his story in turn links to an old post of mine about the Portland Rosebuds and the 1916 Stanley Cup. Which, I'll point out once again, was ours for about a month. It's not just me being eccentric here either. It's a minority opinion, but I'm not alone here. From the book Deceptions and doublecross: how the NHL conquered hockey by Morey Holzman & Joseph Nieforth, pp 99-100:

As PCHA champions, the Portland Rosebuds took over stewardship of the Stanley Cup from the 1915 winners, the Vancouver Millionaires. Team manager Ed Savage dutifully engraved his team's name on the coveted bowl:

PORTLAND, ORE.
PCHA CHAMPIONS
1915-1916

thus solidifying the City of Roses' claim as the first U.S.-based club to win the Cup. (This practice ended after the 1916 series; thereafter, a team could only be recognized as Cup champs if it won the Stanley Cup series. Reference sources therefore consistently name the 1917 Seattle Metropolitans as the first champions from south of the border.)

The Rosebuds would not get to keep the Cup for long, however. Georges Vezina starred in leading the Montreal Canadiens to their first Stanley Cup championship, as they beat Portland three games to two.

So there. Told ya.

Jaguar XKSS, Portland Art Museum

A few photos of a Jaguar XKSS at the Portland Art Museum's "The Allure of the Automobile" exhibit. This is one of only 16 that were built before the Jaguar factory burned down, including the XKSS blueprints. So that was that. This particular car was once owned by Steve McQueen (of Bullitt fame), so it has a bit of extra car-nut cachet to it. Another went to Cuba and spent the entire Cold War there, before making its way to a rich collector in the decadent West in the 1990s. Another went missing for many years before turning up in Chicago a few years back -- and then making its way to the hands of another rich collector. I don't usually post car pics here, but I recently did the "go to the car show with dad" thing and ended up with a bunch of photos. He's a bit of a car nut, ok, more than a bit, and I remember him going on about the XKSS -- how rare they are and how it's a shame there's no chance of ever seeing one in the flesh, and so forth. So when one came to town, I figured he might be interested in having a gander at it. And oh, how right I was. Lunch was a bit later than we'd planned due to all the extra XKSS ogling. So that was kind of cool. Also in the back of my mind I figured it'd be interesting to take photos of something else for a change, instead of the usual flowers, statues, bridges, etc. The light isn't really the best for photography; this is the first time the museum's allowed cameras in for a special exhibit, and they aren't really set up for it. I understand they've been doing special "photographers only" sessions, where they let you bring a tripod and even use a bit of flash, which I suppose is what you'd want to do if you were really going to be hardcore about this. So the problem is that you've got rather dim artificial light, with lots of little spotlights, lighting cars that are often extremely shiny and sometimes painted very dark colors to boot. Plus you've got tourists constantly elbowing you. I'm just happy I remembered to bring a wide angle lens so I could fit the whole car into the frame. That's my one and only beginners' photo tip for today: If you're in cramped quarters taking photos of a car, you'll want a wide angle lens. This is also true for other kinds of large object. So yeah, in short, this is not exactly the famous 1980s "Decisions, Decisions" poster you're looking at here. But hey.

glass effects

A couple of old (circa 2005) digital photo experiments from the archives, along the lines of "what happens if I shoot through this glass object" -- besides confusing the hell out of autofocus, I mean.

I was originally going to title this something along the lines of "seeing the world through the bottom of a glass", but that conveys entirely the wrong tone, & is the sort of half-clever play on words that tends to get newspaper headline writers in unintended trouble. So nix on that.

from the archives: digital photo #1

Was looking through old photos last night and thought, hey, I know, I'll post the boring first digital photo from my first digital camera. And then explain that it's merely the first surviving digital photo, since Canon's instructions said to take a photo and then delete it so you learn how. Which was a useless exercise, in retrospect, since I pretty much never delete photos. So the original original photo, now lost to posterity, was an amateurish unboxing photo taken inside the long-vanished BJ's brewpub near Lloyd Center.

Meanwhile the photo you see here shows a cold, rainy November day at the 7th Avenue MAX stop. Little did I know how many photos of cold, rainy weather I'd be taking in the coming years. Speaking of which, right now it's a cold, potentially rainy day in August, which is just wrong.

Munra Falls expedition

A few more Columbia Gorge waterfall photos, this time of Munra Falls, a small waterfall on the trail to Wahclella Falls, which is off the same freeway exit as Bonneville Dam. It's far from the largest or most spectacular waterfall in the gorge, but when I say it's on the trail, I mean that almost literally; it rushes down a rockface right next to the trail, and you could probably reach out and touch it if you wanted to. It's like a waterfall petting zoo, really.

The one surprising thing is that it's acquired a semi-official name, one which is at least used commonly around the interwebs:

• Portland Hikers' Field Guide has some basic info about the falls & states they're about 35 feet tall. Which isn't much by Gorge standards, but I still wouldn't go over it in a barrel.
• A forum thread at the same site mentions that the stream is called Munra Creek, and this is far from the only waterfall on said creek.
• More info at Waterfall Record and Waterfalls Northwest. The latter has another photo and directions to the falls, if you need directions for some reason.
• Someone's Panoramio photo, which looks a lot like the top photo here. There aren't a lot of fresh, innovative camera angles to be had at this particular waterfall, I'm afraid.
• I sort of assumed the word "Munra" was an anglicized Indian word, but it's actually a surname. Katherine Sterrett Munra ran the railroad's "eating house" nearby, somewhere in the Bonneville area, from the 1880s to the 1920s. As far as I know, the original building no longer exists.
• Yet another forum thread at Oregon Hikers Field Guide discusses place names on old maps of the Gorge, including various things named "Munra". Nearby Munra Point was once called "Mount Munra" at one time. Everything was just a bit more melodramatic back then.

reflections, dreamer fountain

Fremont Bridge, Seattle

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The bridge project takes us north again, to Seattle's historic Fremont Bridge, not to be confused with Portland's own vastly larger (but less historic) Fremont Bridge. As with the nearby Aurora Bridge, this one photo was taken way back in 2006, well before I ever thought of this bridge project. So I didn't take a lot of photos, and I didn't walk across the thing.

For something that's apparently quite the quirky and beloved symbol of a quirky part of town, I haven't come across a lot of interesting stuff to share (and, coincidentally, to pad this post out to a more respectable length). It has a Structurae page if you're interested in the engineering side of things. If you're more up for the artsy-quirky stuff, it turns out that in the summer of 2009 the bridge hosted its own artist in residence. Residence, in this case, meaning hanging out in one of the drawbridge towers, watching the world go by and gathering artistic thoughts. Which sounds like a great job, although I expect the living-in-Seattle part would quickly become annoying. Still, if this software thing doesn't work out, maybe the sorta-new bridge in Charleston needs a blogger in residence, or if not, maybe the shiny new one next to Hoover Dam does, or possibly one of the Ala Wai Canal bridges, or the Millau Viaduct, or, or, or....

aberdeen, wa | september 2006

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From the archives, a few photos from Aberdeen, Washington, a gritty blue collar logging town and seaport on the Washington coast. We occasionally pass through the town on our way to Lake Quinault and points north, and I seem to recall taking these photos as we drove through without stopping.

The one thing in Aberdeen that I wish I had a photo of and don't is a little addendum to the big "Welcome to Aberdeen" sign at the edge of town, a small acknowlegement that Kurt Cobain slept here, once upon a time.

150k

So my Sitemeter counter just ticked over to 150,000 a few minutes ago, for whatever that's worth. That number sounds fairly huge, even spread over the 5.5 years this humble blog's been around. Although that also works out to about 75 visitors per day, which is distinctly non-huge. So whatever.

In any case, lucky visitor #150,000 arrived, not from Google, but from something called Fast Browser Search, which I'd never heard of before. They searched on the phrase "octet plus one", which led to an old bad movie post of mine from way back in December '06. You'll have to go read the post if you're curious why I used the phrase; as for the search hits I get on that phrase (a surprisingly high number), I haven't the foggiest idea about what they're actually looking for, and the other search results besides me don't offer any obvious clues. This particular visitor didn't stay long, and all I know is that he or she is a Comcast customer somewhere in the US, on either Pacific Daylight Time or Arizona (blech!) Time, using Internet Explorer 7 (blech!) on Windows XP (blech!), and (I think) MS Office installed (blech!). And they arrived at precisely midnight local time, which seems appropriate somehow, this being a serious major milestone and all.

This milestone probably just means this blog's warranty has now expired, and everything will rapidly go to pieces after this. I would find that entirely unsurprising.

In any case, if you find yourself pining for a bit more tasty bad movie goodness, why not check out the new Tumblr site called Trailr that I created a few days ago? It's not just cheesy movie trailers, but I liked the name and I wanted to use it even if it's only mostly accurate. So enjoy, or whatever.

screamer, sw morrison

after hours

car coming

scrub jay, july 2011

flag shadow

horsetail falls, may 2011

Ferry Street Bridge, Dayton OR

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A few photos of the Ferry St. footbridge over the Yamhill River in Dayton, OR. I happened to be in the area back in April and stopped briefly for a look. In retrospect I probably ought to have, y'know, looked around the town itself as well, but I was on vacation and trying to hit a bunch of places on the blog todo list, and being a bit monomaniacal in the process. And in my defense, a torrential downpour opened up while I was on the bridge, so it wasn't really a great day to be walking around looking at old buildings and so forth.



The city of Dayton is thinking about replacing the current bridge with a new structure, as they think it's a bit long in the tooth for a wooden bridge in this climate. That document doesn't go into any depth on the origin of the current bridge; it mentions it was built some time in the 1970s (but they weren't sure exactly when) and the easement status for it is unclear. Which kind of suggests to me that building it wasn't an official city project. Or it was and they just weren't as wound up about meticulous recordkeeping back then. Or everything's documented to the hilt, but whoever wrote the report didn't spend a lot of time on historical research. These are all possibilities.



As the name of the bridge suggests, the bridge is at the foot of Ferry Street, which is the main drag through town. And as the name of the street suggests, there once was a ferry across the river at this spot. The local historical society's "about" page mentions that the ferry came first, in the 1840s, and the town later grew up around it. The book A History of Oregon Ferries since 1826 has a couple of pages about Yamhill River ferries, and it seems to indicate Dayton didn't get a (non-railroad) bridge over the river until some time in the 1890s. The current bridge is just outside of town, a bit upstream. There's a bit of debris on the bank of the river immediately upstream of the bridge that looks like it might have been a dock at one point, although it's hard to imagine that any part of a wooden dock would have survived the elements for ~120 years. It's probably something much newer and unrelated.



In any case, the bridge seems nice enough. It has that groovy 70s Oregon look, where we were all going back to the land and building everything out of good, honest solid wood from here on out: Geodesic dome houses, hot tubs, probably even the solar panels. Note that this was back before anyone ever heard of spotted owls, obviously. It totally looks like it could've been someone's DIY project, using plans from the latest Whole Earth Catalog.



The only problem with the bridge is that it doesn't really go anywhere. There's a bit of parkland on the far side of the bridge, along with what looks like, um, the municipal sewage lagoons. Or maybe they're just irrigation ponds, I'm not totally sure. But that's about all there is. The bridge might be convenient if you're on one of those long distance bike rides around the Willamette Valley that my coworkers love to brag about doing, and you'd kind of like to avoid riding on state highways clogged with 18 wheelers and casino-bound RVs. That would make sense anyway.