More news from here, 6-15-06

• Bloglines is having issues right now. It's kind of surprising how quickly you come to depend on a service like that being available all the time. My precious RSS feeds are nowhere to be seen. Even this blog's mini-sibling, cyclotram2, is unavailable right now. Last time Blogger was down, I popped over to the other blog and whined about it. So I figure it's only fair to do the same thing now that the reverse situation's occurred. Once the thing comes back up, I think I'll need to use Bloglines' "export as OPML" feature just so I'll have an offline backup around somewhere.
  
• I've gotten a lot of search hits in the last couple of days because of a brief reference (towards the end of the post) to a Portuguese celebrity named Merche Romero. I'm not sure why. But she does figure in this juicy British tabloid story. I don't actually care about any of this stuff even a tiny bit, but it seems to be driving page views at the moment, so I may as well milk it while I can. I guess I'm just cynical that way. Here's a photo of Ms. Romero, if you're curious. Probably safe for work.
  
• Our Glorious Leader has done an unusual thing, bestowing national monument status on a huge, uninhabited chunk of the Hawaiian Islands. It's one of those things presidents are allowed to do by unilateral executive order, without consulting Congress (which may explain his attraction to the idea). It's worth noting that the R's freaked out when Clinton used this power to create vastly smaller monuments out of unhabited chunks of southwestern desert. But as usual it's ok when Bush does it.
  
• Yet another testimonial about why Windows Mobile / PocketPC / Windows CE is teh sux0r. I've had three or four WinCE PDAs dumped on me over the years, by vendors who I guess hoped I'd write some useful code for 'em. I got them all for free, and I still felt I overpaid. They were all useless junk, not worth the rather generous amounts of electricity I lavished on keeping them charged up. The hardware itself is often pretty impressive, but then they stick this nightmarish botch of an OS on top, and the result is always so slow it's practically unusable. It's a sad fact about the tech industry that while Moore's Law gives a fairly good idea of how quickly processor power is likely to increase, there's no equivalent law that places an upper bound on the speed of software bloat. The more money you've got to play with, the faster it happens, and MS has a lot of money.
  
• Now that Zarqawi's out of the picture, Congress is finally going to have a "debate" about Iraq. Well, it's actually just a political stunt, like everything else they do anymore. They may complain a lot about Bush usurping their authority with his "signing statements", but their actions suggest they've accepted their new role as a toothless debating society with barely a whimper. I can understand their feelings of relief -- knowing that nothing you do or say matters really takes the pressure off. We already know the end result of this pointless debate: This time it's Congress's turn to haul up the big "Mission Accomplished" sign, and it's bound to work out just as well now as it did the first time around.
  
• A NewScientist article about Neptune's family of Trojan asteroids. Only four have actually been found so far, but researchers are estimating there must be a huge number of them out there. More info plus images here.
  
• This was probably accidental, but a brand new form of graffiti has been invented. Check out this pic from Google Maps. This area is a fenced-off former industrial site south of downtown Portland, and in all likelihood nobody would've ever seen this if it wasn't for the magic of Google. So I'd just like to say hello and congratulations to the mysterious "GPK". You're way more famous than any of those small-timers who go around tagging dumpsters and abandoned buildings. If Google can see this, the aliens probably can too. Someday maybe they'll probably up at your door looking for an autograph, or maybe a tissue sample, or whatever it is they do.
  
• Two referrer pages from folks Blogger sent my way when I posted this baby: Walaykinha and Dysdiadokinesis & Mosaicism. FWIW.
  

Behold, the Tram Tower!

The angled whitish bit you see in the picture is the lower half of portland's exciting new aerial tram tower. Over the next few weeks it's supposed to get a little over twice as tall as it is now, and then sprout cables from the top some time in August.

Updated 6/22/06: The second segment just went up, and I've got a photo of it here.

Parts of the South Waterfront district are now open for people to go and wander around in, which I did a couple of weeks back. I've been meaning to post some of the photos but (like today's Washington Park post) I just didn't get around to it until now. So here we are. As usual, clicking on any photo will take you to a larger version:


Two pics of the twin Meriwether condo towers. The whole area's still a construction site, but people are already living in the finished parts of these buildings. The city's promising a public pedestrian walkway next to the river for the full length of the South Waterfront district, sometime in the near future, but that part's still closed off so far. In the second photo you can also see OHSU's new clinic building, and the lower tram station directly in front of it, plus the Zidell Marine barge factory in the foreground. The barge factory is supposed to go away sometime soon, to make way for more condos. This absolutely must happen ASAP, because people who actually make things are icky and non-upscale, and need to be shooed away so they don't alarm the idle rich (and their darling weimaraners). Your tax dollars at work.



Two photos of OHSU's new clinic building. The early PR led us all to think this was going to be a new advanced research facility, but no, instead it's going to house yoga studios and day spas and such, catering to affluent and otherwise healthy aging boomers. Because that's far more profitable than treating actual sick people, and that's the only thing that matters anymore.

The construction in the right foreground of the first pic is for a new city park spanning two blocks. There used to be a mini storage facility here, until the city decided it ought to be a park instead and forced the existing business out. More of your tax dollars at work.


The John Ross condo tower, which is supposed to top out somewhere over 30 stories when complete. This is the same building you see in the background in the tram tower photo. Yes, even more of your tax dollars at work.

The news from here, 6-14-06

• Stephen Hawking says we desperately need colonies in space. Pharyngula is not so sure.
  
• From NewScientist: A theory about why planetary moons seem to have an upper size limit. Several announcements of new extrasolar planets have noted that they lie in their parent stars' "habitable zones". The hope being that one of these planets just might have a big Earth-sized habitable moon or two. That may be impossible under the new theory.
  
• One of the great things about the blog world is that one gets a window into the lives of people in circumstances utterly different than one's own. Here are two blogs by women from the Philippines who work in the Persian Gulf region.
  
• This blog recounts the ongoing story of a large number of cats rescued from homeless camps in the Corvallis/Albany OR area.
  
• Worldwide Pablo has the first post about Portland's shiny new tram tower. I would've thought Jack Bog would've had something unkind to say about it by now. Maybe he's waiting until they've got the whole thing installed, I dunno. I took some pics of it myself this morning, and I'll try to post them later on, if I get around to it.
  
• A fun little bit of Python bashing. The language, not the snake. Bashing snakes would be cruel. Unless by "bash" you mean the shell, not the violent act. And if you do mean bash=shell and python=snake, you end up with a sentence that just makes no sense at all.
  
• A good post at pdxleft about our Glorious Leader's recent heroic photo op in Baghdad.
  
• The food fascists are now suing KFC. Gee, and all this time I thought KFC served healthy non-fattening fare, because if there are 3 words in the English language that I most strongly associate with healthiness, they'd have to be "chicken", "fried" and "Kentucky". (Note for the irony-impaired... oh, forget it, never mind...) Crap like this makes me want to run out and buy one of those "cheesy chicken bowls" they've been advertising lately. You know, the one with a big bowl of mashed potatoes, fried chicken strips, gravy, corn, and a layer of cheese on top. Who the hell are these people, anyway? Here's a great article about the clowns at CSPI, from the libertarian mag Reason. I'm generally not a libertarian on the economic side of things, but eating whatever you want without Beltway control freaks lecturing you about it is an issue of basic personal freedom. Especially since the food police also moonlight as the beer police. Grrrr!!!!!
  
• FOX News manages to be "Fair and Balanced" for once. Seems the Fred Phelps cultists are so nutty even Rupert Murdoch won't touch 'em.
  
• In sad news, Roseburg's Hawks Brewing is ceasing operations, at least for the time being. You can't really understand what an unfortunate turn of events this is unless you've tried their beer. The ESB can't be improved upon. Look for the beer with the boring-est logo.
  
• At least the historic Yerkes Observatory isn't going to fall into the clutches of greedy developers.
  
• Referrer pages of the two folks Blogger sent my way when I first posted this thing: Transglobal Permutations, an interesting blog from Spain with lots of pictures, and Really Nothing To Say, which is just a bunch of empty posts. It bills itself as the silliest blog on the planet, which I think is a bit debatable.
  
• And then, three more visitors from when I added the previous item, arriving here from: Why Aren't I Famous, a blog mostly about hip hop music and culture; Disneyland2006, photos of someone's trip to Disneyland; and orgias69.blogspot.com, which I haven't visited but the URL suggests it's probably not safe for work. So there you have it. Let's see if anyone new shows up here this time when I repost this baby...
  

Washington Park

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KGW's reporting that under a new plan, the area around the Washington Park reservoirs will soon be open to the public during daylight hours, similar to the longstanding arrangement at Mount Tabor. This is about the most unexpected news I've heard in a while, but the logic of the plan actually makes sense. The decades-old chain link fence around the reservoir area doesn't really do anything to secure the area against actual, determined evildoers. Letting the general public into the area means you've got a lot of eyes and ears there. The city could never afford to hire an equivalent number of security guards. After all, this is Portland -- we love our reservoirs here, and people will call 911 if they see anyone trying to mess with them.

I recently walked around the park a bit and took a few photos of the area, figuring there was a blog post in it. Then I got busy with RL work and didn't get around to writing the post until now. I was originally going to write about how it was a real shame the reservoir area's closed to the public, and how it didn't make sense considering the Mt. Tabor reservoirs are open. I was also going to say that opening the area would be the absolute last thing I could see happening, in the current climate. I sure wish I could stop being wrong about stuff all the time.

Updated: Here's the city's official press release about the reservoirs. Seems the local media didn't get the facts quite right: The Hazelwood, Texas, and Vernon Tanks mentioned in the KGW article aren't names for the Washington Park reservoirs, they're other Water Bureau facilities that will also permit public access in the future. Looks like this change has been in the works for a while now for these other locations, but it was all happening under the radar until the Washington Park reservoirs joined the list.

Updated II: The Water Bureau would like to set the record straight: The existing fences are staying up, it's just that the gates will be open during daylight hours so the public can visit the area. If I'm reading this right, they're also only doing this for the upper reservoir, at least for the time being.

This is a smart approach -- there'll still be controlled access to the area, with a limited number of ways in and out, and they can shoo everyone out in the evening. I just wish the fence wasn't so ugly, though. It doesn't fit the character of the park at all. I think a wrought iron fence similar to what's around the reservoir itself would look pretty good, if they can spare the cash at some point.


Anyway, here are a few more photos from around the park. I was originally just going to mention the reservoirs in passing, and I was more interested in the odd, neglected areas in the lower portion of the park.

(I was originally also going to remark about all the nonnative English ivy that covers the park, but it turns out the water bureau's already started tearing it out, so maybe I don't need to complain about that after all.)



This fountain doesn't really count as neglected, since it's right next to the main road and everyone sees it as they drive past. Seen from a distance, you tend to shrug and write it off as yet another fusty old Victorian-era fountain. To really appreciate it, you need to get close to it, and stop, and listen the the water dripping and pinging off of it. It's sometimes called the Chiming Fountain, if that gives you any idea. Other fountains in town are bigger, more famous, and vastly more complex, but this my candidate for the most soothing one in town. Well, except when a bus rumbles by behind you, but hey, we're in the middle of a big city, and you can't have everything.



These winding stairs are part of the multitude of weird pathways that meander down the forested hillside between the reservoirs and the vicinity of Burnside & NW 23rd. Despite connecting two rather popular areas, this stretch is usually pretty empty of people, and the surrounding hillsides block out most city noises. You see nothing but trees, and hear nothing but birds. It's great.

Rumor has it that once you reach the top of these stairs, there's a long, dark tunnel, with a gigantic hungry spider living inside of it. This rumor is untrue, so far as I know.



This is the main path through the same area. City noises are blocked out so well here because this part of the park sits in a sort of mini-canyon. It appears that this path lies directly on top of the stream that drains the area. You'd never get away with building something like this today, and the environmentally correct thing would be to rip this thing out, daylight the stream, and restore the area to a more natural state. Although you'd still be draining into a pipe at the downstream end, so I'm not sure how much good it would really do.



This is not technically part of the park, but it's nearby, and dates to about the same era. This is a detail from the north end of the Vista Avenue Viaduct. This could be a good, ahem, jumping-off point for the usual "they don't build 'em like they used to" discussion, but that's not why this photo's here. What I've always wondered about is the curved concrete bench on the right side of the picture. There's a similar one on the other side of the street, and I think on the other side of the bridge as well. I've never seen anyone sit here, and I'm a little confused as to the designers' intent. Is this something people used to enjoy back in 1925? Sit there and watch Model T's chug their way up the hill and over the bridge? Or maybe it's supposed to be purely ornamental, and actually sitting there would be incredibly ignorant and gauche. Sort of like trying to bite into the fake food in the window of a Japanese restaurant, or something. Who knows?

Mostly not about 2002 JF56

Well, today's the big day. The New Horizons probe will zip past the dinky asteroid 2002 JF56 today, on its way to Pluto. We aren't going to get any pretty pictures, though, since the asteroid's too small and far away for that. If they get more than 2 pixels worth of asteroid, it'll be a big surprise. The whole exercise is really just an engineering test, a practice run for later. Oh, well. So really, when I said today was the big day, I was kind of exaggerating for dramatic effect.

Updated: The first asteroid pics are out, and I've got 'em here.

And with that, I've completely run out of asteroid-related material. Here are a few other fun tidbits I've come across:

• Researchers have discovered a new species of fly in a forest in Scotland. Let's all say hi to Ectaetia christii. That last link is just a reference to the researchers' original paper, and not to the paper itself, because it doesn't seem to be online anywhere. This may be because the paper dates back to 1997. The media's presenting it like it's a brand new species, but it isn't. The actual story: the fly isn't new, but it appears in a comprehensive new book about the area, titled The Nature of the Cairngorms: Diversity in a Changing Environment. To be fair, the BBC story does mention the 1997 discovery a few paragraphs in, but the headline is "New mountain species discovered", not "New Cairngorms books is released". And to be fair, it's standard Old Media practice to have someone else write the headlines, so the article's author probably isn't to blame. But still. If the BBC can flub something like this,
  
• Apostropher suggests a simple way to defeat government surveillance. The graphic is kind of funny, and I'd use it here except that it doesn't have anything to do with asteroids, which is what this post is supposedly still about, except that I ran out of material.
  
• A new Pew Research survey shows the rest the world doesn't like us very much. Even less than they did last year, believe it or not. Here's a previous Pew article trying to explore the reasons behind this, based on actual survey results, not just the usual ideology-driven vapid opinions.
  
• A Slashdot thread about whether native compiled code is becoming a thing of the past. I've been thinking about this a lot lately. I grind out C++ for a living, with occasional forays into Java, and in the past I've held the usual C++ prejudice against interpreted languages. I always said they're too slow and lack crucial features, and the only people who use 'em are effete web designers and toolbelt-wearing IT monkeys, neither of whom count as Real Engineers. I figured web designers were basically marketing folks at heart, and working in IT is one step away from the mailroom or the company motor pool. Now I'm not so sure about all that. I've been playing around with Ruby lately and it's awfully schweet. Even lowly old JavaScript has more power than I thought, if Google Maps is any indication. Heck, for that matter take small stuff like the collapsing tree stuff I recently added to my right sidebar here. This isn't the first time I've messed around with tree views. In a previous job, we pulled off the same trick by writing an ActiveX control, I kid you not. There was some VBScript and ASP glue involved too, but we tried to do as much of the work as possible in C++, because we felt it was the Right Approach. Don't worry. I've completely repented of all that MS stuff now. You won't be seeing any ActiveX controls, VBScript, or .NET stuff here anytime soon. Compiled code isn't going away, certainly, but I'm starting to think its use will be increasingly restricted to certain esoteric specialties: Kernel coding, embedded applications, device drivers, stuff like that, similar to what happened with assembly coding many moons ago.
  
  Ironically, at that same former employer, our web designers at one point cooked up a fancy "desktop look", as a blatant copy of Desktop.com. I thought the whole thing was a crazy idea at the time, I mean, who wants a web page with 5000 lines of JavaScript? It drove dialup users absolutely batty, and it was abandoned after a scant couple of weeks or so. Now I'm starting to think that in some ways they were just ahead of their time. Let's not revise history too much, though; it was a really poor effort, ill-conceived and badly executed, and it would be considered just as awful now as it was then. But at the time I thought the whole idea was an evolutionary dead end, and I was wrong about that part.
  
• Ok, ok, I didn't get around to posting about the Stanley Cup Finals last night like I sort of promised I'd try to do. I did catch the last part of the game, just enough to see Carolina win and go up 3-1 in the series. Oh, well. We don't have an NHL team of our own here in Portland, so I don't have a permanent favorite team. I'll follow a team for a while if I like the way they play the game, or if they have a player I like, usually a goalie. When the playoffs start up, we each pick a team to root for. This year I picked Buffalo, and my wife picked Edmonton. We were kind of hoping they'd meet in the finals, but it was not to be. Last time around, we both picked Tampa, and they actually won, which is quite unusual for us. Usually we pick underdogs, and it turns out that underdogs are called that for a reason, most of the time. Anyway, the big attraction with Edmonton was watching Dwayne Roloson at work, and now that he's injured, we've both lost a lot of interest in the series. It's been an oddly lackluster series anyway. I can't put my finger on it.
  
  The first hockey game either of us saw was the last game of the cup finals 10 years ago, when Colorado beat Florida for the cup. This was the famous triple overtime goalie duel between Patrick Roy and John van Biesbrouck, and we just sat there with our mouths open the whole time, amazed by the whole thing. We've been hooked ever since.
  
• I'm not a bicycle nut. I don't have anything nice to say about Critical Mass, and I roll my eyes at the whole bicycle culture thing we supposedly have here. Be that as it may, this is just a great, great story, if a stereotypically male one. If they were doing this in cars instead, someone would probably be dead or in jail by now.
  
• I also usually roll my eyes at hardcore audio geeks, but this turntable is just cool. Mostly because it uses a Mars rover moter. Why? What do you mean, "Why"? In the world of high-end audio, there is no "Why".
  
• Wouldn't it be great to have a mom who grows hops? Mmmm... hops...
  
• Today's entry in the "WTF were they thinking???" department: Three lists of the ugliest cars ever. And more opinions.
  
• And finally, after a bunch of unrelated items, we're back at asteroids. Here's NASA's page about their Asteroid Radar Research program. It's a well-kept secret, I guess because there aren't any rockets involved, and there's very little congressional pork to be had. I've been checking this occasionally for a number of years now. They used to post images on the site as soon as they came in, but they don't anymore. I'm not sure why, but they're probably just trying to keep a lid on prepublication data or something. Still, they've gone in the opposite direction as their colleagues at the Cassini and Mars Rover projects, who post raw images on the net on a near-daily basis. Oh, well. They're just asteroids, after all, so it's not the end of the world, except when it is.
  

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Updated: For a while now I've been meaning to do a braindump of my Firefox bookmarks about beer. So here they are. I haven't gone back and verified that all the links are alive at the moment, so your mileage may vary. Enjoy (or whatever):

News & Reviews

Celebrator Beer News : November/December 2004

The Northwest BrewPage

Oregon Brewers Guild

Michael Jackson's Beer Hunter

BeerAdvocate.com

Realbeer.com

All About Beer

ProBrewer.com: An Online Resource Serving The Beer Industry

Opinionated Beer Page Home - beer reviews with a punch

Master Brewers Association of the Americas

My Life Is Beer!

Wesi's Beer World: Beer ratings for brews from Switzerland, United States, Mexico and England

Stephen Beaumont's World of Beer

The Brew Site: It's all about the beer

Info

Home Brew Digest

BrewingTechniques Online

Home Distillation of Alcohol

Gluten Free Brewing Grains...Good, Bad and Otherwise

Mark Brooks (Norway)

Yeast - gaianstudies.org

Cindy Renfrow - Culinary & Brewing History Links

treatise_on_brewing

fermented foods

Rye-bread Kvass - Brot-Kwass

Herstellung von Kwas

web-Tariff No2.pdf (application/pdf Object)

Beer Manifesto - Beer Style Sheet

Your Free Beer Art History Online Reference and Guide

Beer Details, Meaning Beer Article and Explanation Guide

Bierbörse - Types of Beer

Beer World - Greece

Science

Fermented Red Rice (Ang Kak) and Monascus pupureus. Chronological.

Article_Michalova_buckwheat.pdf (application/pdf Object)

BYO - Could you please cover the major types and strains of barley used in brewing?

Major Acids in Some Food Materials.PDF (application/pdf Object)

Fresh Patents-Method for producing ethanol using raw starch patent apps

ET 9/98: Yeast rises to a new occasion

Molecular Analysis of Maltotriose Transport and Utilization by Saccharomycescerevisiae -- Day et al. 68 (11): 5326 -- Applied and Environmental Microbiology

Introduction to Carbohydrates

Winemaking: Strains of Wine Yeast

Corrosion by Beer

Stores

Freshops

Consolidated Beverages - Supplier of quality malt to brew pubs and microbreweries

BrewSource.com -- The Source for Making Beer

- Beer Making Kits, Wine Making Kits and Supplies

mjrbc_intro

Global Beer Network

Destila v

CABRI: Yeasts

Madeira Wine, Fine Wines Online !! Taylor & Norton

The Ultimate Beer and Brewery Resource: What Ales You

BeerBooks.com - Find any book on beer!

Virginia's Most Complete Home Wine & Beer Supply

Beer Necessities

Regional

Indiana Beer - Beer News, Calendar, Beers, Brewpubs, Bars, Liquor Stores.

Michigan Beer Guide, The Guide To Craft Brewed Beer in Michigan

Real Beer New Zealand :: Home

BelgianStyle.com

Benelux beerguide: Beer styles - alphabetical overview

THE BEERS AND BREWERIES OF FRENCH SPEAKING EUROPE - FRANCE & SOUTH BELGIUM

SNAFU ( S. Nevada)

French Brewpubs

MaitreBrasseur.com, brasserie et bière artisanale

Not, not, NOT posting from Vegas.

I'm getting really sick of one blog after another blabbing on about the big YearlyKos convention/party in Las Vegas. I'm not there. I don't know if invites were required or not, but nobody invited me, and I wouldn't have gone anyway. I guess I've never been much of a joiner. You may or may not have noticed that I almost never use the term "we" when talking about Democrats, even though I'm registered as one. This wasn't a conscious decision; it just never occurred to me to think of myself in the same boat as, say, members of congress, or beltway consultants, or similar organisms.

I think everyone was there except me. And not just the usual political blog suspects, no, I'm seeing YK posts from science and tech blogs as well. Apparently all the cool kids were there.

I think I would've been bored to tears, at least when I wasn't gagging on all the mutual amiration and craven sucking up to power. I'm sure I ought to care a great deal about the day-to-day wonkage over senate races six states away, but mostly I don't. Reading about polls and spin and positioning is at best mind-numbing, and often it's a cause for despair, even when the "good guys" win. Somebody's got to do this stuff, I guess, or at least somebody thinks it needs doing, and they want to do it. I'm just glad it isn't my job.

Also, I'm kind of antisocial in RL, and I'm usually not too keen on meeting new people in person, especially in bulk. That's just the way I am. If I somehow did get dragged to a YK-style event, I just know I'd end up sulking in a dark corner, nursing a stiff drink, while the rest of the room went all starry-googly-eyed over some random governor with expensive hair. I'd much rather observe than participate, and I'd really like to do it from behind a two-way mirror, if at all possible, and with the participants hooked up to monitoring equipment of some kind. Did I mention I have a social science degree? One effect of a social science degree is that you get really leery and disdainful of crowd behavior, and you don't want to be a part of it yourself. I should note I also don't go to mass demonstrations. I don't join antiwar marches even though I'm deeply opposed to the war. The whole thing with clapping or chanting slogans in unison just repels me. I'm just never up for doing that, unless maybe I'm at a hockey game.

And to top it all off, gambling is of no interest to me, so there wouldn't even be that as a distraction.

It's always iffy to place any weight on anything the Old Media says about blogs, but the Guardian is usually less brainless than US-based media. Here's their take on the big YK party.

Salon takes on the shindig as well, with a piece titled "How much is that blogger in the window".

And for a little perspective, here's one of several posts at SocraticGadfly about diarists getting exiled from the DailyKos media empire for not toeing the party line. I frankly don't get the whole notion of having a diary on someone else's site. To me, the whole point of writing on the net is that you get to toss your ideas out into the world, for good or ill, unedited and unmediated by anyone else. Don't get me wrong, I like page views as least as much as the next blogger. But given a choice between saying whatever's on my mind to a smallish audience, or mouthing a focus-group-approved subset of what may or may not be on my mind to a large audience, I'll stick with my current merry little band of Gentle Reader(s), thank you very much. I wuv you guys-n-gals.

In that spirit, the rest of this post (after the big HR tag) has nothing whatsoever to do with political blog navelgazing, and even less to do with the '06 midterm election.

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• An article about the mythical "hafnium bomb" and other tales from the lunatic fringe of defense technology.
  
• The tale of a tiny near-Earth asteroid, and the odd counterintuitive tricks gravity pulls sometimes.
  
• Game 4 of the Stanley Cup Finals is tonight. I haven't gotten that worked up over the playoffs this year, but I probably ought to put together at least one all-hockey post before someone wins the cup. It's on my to-do list, so maybe I'll do it after the game tonight. Now that Roloson's injured, the whole series just isn't as interesting. Go Oilers, I guess.
  
• Incontrovertible video proof that George Washington was a real American superhero.
  
• Is this blog boring you? You might enjoy it more after it's been run through Gizoogle.
  
• An interactive beer map of the greater Portland area, which just happens to be centered at the true center of the known universe, a.k.a. Tugboat Brewing.
  
• I may have to make an exception to my usual anti-meetup policy, you know, the one I was just talking about earlier. Seems there's a local beer bloggin' shindig in the works, in connnection with the big Oregon Brewers' Festival next month. I don't know if I technically count as a beer blogger or not. I'd just describe myself as a general blogger who's inordinately fond of beer. But they don't seem like the sort of people who stand on ceremony. We'll see.
  
• And finally, a beer item that's also a coffee item. Seems that you can protect yourself from the health effects of too much beer by also drinking too much coffee. Yay for science! If you plan on drinking a lot of coffee, and you live in the area, permit me to recommend the coffee from Blue Gardenia, my current favorite. In the last six months or so I've really soured on dark roasted beans. I don't care what Starbucks and Peets and their imitators all say; if it tastes burnt, it's burnt. It's a cheap, blunt-instrument way of introducing flavor, sort of like oak in chardonnay. I'd almost call it cheating, since you don't need to start out with good beans. There's really no reason to start with good beans, if you can't taste them in the finished product. The coffee industry (and Starbucks in particular) has promoted the notion that the darker beans are, the stronger and more sophisticated the coffee is, which is silly. Starbucks even has this spiel about how you're supposed to start out with lighter roasts and graduate to the dark stuff, like sort of like training wheels or something. It's pretty similar to what people thought about Guinness and other stouts in about 1985 or so. The beer world moved past that thinking long ago, and maybe the coffee world's starting to do so now as well.
  

On Neocons

[ This was supposed to be a big grand post where I figured out the neocons once and for all, or at least tossed around a few ideas about what they might be up to. That's quite an ambitious undertaking, and I never really finished this post. It starts out with complete paragraphs and devolves into incomplete notes, and eventually just sort of peters out. It's been sitting around as a draft post for about a month now, and I don't feel like adding to it at the moment, so I figure I might as well just post it as-is, since it's either that or delete it. Maybe I'll come back and polish it up later, or maybe I'll just post a new followup later on, depending on how I feel. 7/13/06.]

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This is yet another in my ongoing series of posts trying to get a handle on neocons, what makes them tick, and how they've managed to keep their scaly hands on the levers of power despite the Iraq fiasco. I don't have a particular thesis here, exactly, other than that neocons are a malignant force in our society and they need to be stopped.

To start off, here's an alarming article I came across yesterday that examines "Straussism", the ideas of Leo Strauss, the neocons' founder and patron saint. There's more to present-day neoconservatism than the founder's ideas, so this is only part of the picture, but it's an important part.

Two of the traits the article mentions are things I'd noticed before:

• Just about every international disagreement is presented as a choice between war (hot or cold) or Munich-style unconditional surrender to an implacable foe. It goes well beyond the Mideast, although the current focus is there because they make such fantastic moustache-twirling melodrama villains. But neocons see the rest of the world the same way. Cheney's busy trying to restart a cold war with Russia, and Bush is already accusing the new president of Bolivia of being antidemocratic. Here's a story I came across yesterday about the administration's ongoing foreign policy bungling in Latin America. Over a few short years, they turned nearly every government in the region against us. This would be front page news if it happened somewhere that the public cares more about.
  
  I think in the end they'd rather make enemies than allies. It confirms their paranoid view of the world, and it's a way of drumming up future business (i.e. war).
  
  
• Another interesting point is that neocons aren't trying to convert the public and convince everyone to be a neocon. As the first article noted, there's one ideology for the leaders, and another for the rabble. The vast majority of the population, in the neocons' eyes, is only useful as cannon fodder in our perpetual war against just about everyone else. Apocalyptic Christian fundamentalism serves this purpose admirably. Just so long as the elite isn't required to join the peons' church, or abide by the peons' rules or morality, anyway. That would go against the natural order of things.
  
  
• It occurs to me that the neocons isolating the US from our allies was a deliberate strategy, not a misstep. Trying to recreate (perceived) Israeli situation: surrounded by hostile powers, with almost no friends, militant, siege mentality. An article I can't find anymore compared neocons relationship to the country as a domestic abuser to victim.
  
  
• These guys are a deeply strange bunch of people. Trotskyites, even ex-Trotskyites, are an exotic species, far outside the usual range of US politics. Others abandoning all of liberalism over 60's chaos. Still fighting over the 60's now -- pathetic.
  
  
• Curious mix of naivete and cynicism. Playing Risk with the world.
  
  
• Example: Ledeen - optimism that Iran revolution is just around corner, we'll be greeted as liberators, etc. Saying this for years.
  
  
• Example: Wolfowitz - childish dream of empires; creepy conservative love of Roman Empire; see Holland's Rubicon book. I was basically a neocon at age 12 or so, listening to Reagan blather on. Maps, history books, etc., easy to get sucked in, but easy to outgrow, too. Essentially a childish impulse.
  
  
• Example: Kristol - Iraq a minor speed bump on road to Iran war. Neocons don't believe in feedback. Don't learn from mistakes, ignore them. How people react to your behavior doesn't matter, no chance your actions will anger anyone, there's no downside to making enemies and losing friends. Can't imagine why anyone would disagree with their ideas, so simply dismiss other opinions. Double or nothing, "flight forward". Not just right by definition, but successful by definition.
  
  
• Egotism, refusal to acknowledge any faults or mistakes, because they aren't part of the Plan.
  
  
• Hubris, something the classicist twits (VD Hanson) ought to have heard of once or twice.
  
  
• Example: Jay Garner - Noticed was wearing one of those magnetic bracelets on TV one time. Belief in faith/magic. Leave in 30/60/90 days, hand keys to Chalabi & go home. Why didn't that happen? Bad plan, but there was no plan B.
  
  
• New Iraqi flag, flat tax, neocons experimenting on Iraq. Vs. "aggressive nationalists" (cheney, rummy) who don't care what happens to the place, so long as we win.
  

"Wilsonism" and liberals - Somalia (GHWB started it, not Clinton), Haiti, Bosnia/Kosovo, Darfur. We should be more skeptical, don't be a tool in the hands of the warmongers. We aren't omnipotent. What could we have actually done about Rwanda? Or Somalia?
(what can we learn from the paleocons?) - healthy skepticism about whether it's any of our business, and whether we can really change "those people".

About that Zarqawi guy

I've fallen behind on my blogging duties. Zarqawi got bumped off nearly a week ago, and I haven't chimed in about it yet. So I guess this is a little overdue, especially since I've been posting about Iraq on a fairly regular basis. So a few quick thoughts about his demise:

• As a card-carrying member of the liberal blogosphere, I think this is a great development. By now you've probably heard from a lot of loudmouth conservatives who insist that liberals are sad to see Zarqawi go. They're lying.
  
• I'll try to be charitable and just chalk their rhetoric up to them grasping at straws, hoping that this somehow vindicates them in going to war in the first place. Bzzt, wrong. It was still a stupid idea.
  
• Saying it was a terrible idea is not the same thing as wanting to lose. That's just crazy talk. Winning would be great, however you want to define that. Just so long as it means we get to go home. A peaceful, democratic Iraq would sure be nice, too, if that's really what the locals there want. It's just that I'm not an optimist.
  
• I'm not being contrary or defeatist here. It's just that our current leaders don't inspire a lot of confidence. I don't think Bush, or Rummy, or any of their underlings have a clue about what the insurgency is all about. I've seen it remarked on several times that if you work in this administration, learning Arabic is career suicide. The thinking, apparently, is that if you can read the local newspaper anywhere in the Mideast, you'll hear the siren song of Islamic fundamentalism and "go native", therefore you can't be trusted. That's... remarkable.
  
• This may sound a little glib, but any time the world loses a homicidal religious fanatic, of any religion, it's a great day for the human race.
  
• Media accounts about Zarqawi's death have cautioned that he had nothing at all to do with large segments of the insurgent population, and we're given a laundry list: ex-Baathists, other Sunni fundamentalists, nationalists, and so forth. Nobody really talks about the "nationalist" category much, or explains what that means, because we'd much rather believe this is all the doing of a few charismatic Bad Guys (Saddam, Osama, Zarqawi, etc.). The really scary prospect is that of ordinary people who simply don't like having a foreign army occupying their country. We don't seem to have done a very good job convincing these people that we're the good guys. Announcing the fact repeatedly on Fox News doesn't really help in this regard.
  
• "Nationalist" insurgents are scary, too, because their reasoning isn't utterly alien in the same way that being a Baathist or an Al Qaeda member is. If a foreign army invaded and took over your country, and killed your friends and neighbors at will, and treated you like dirt, and didn't speak your language or respect your culture, what would you do? No, don't get mad at me for asking the question. Seriously, what would you do?
  
• You hear some debate about whether the insurgency is mostly local, or mostly "foreign fighters". I gather the party line leans toward foreign fighters and not locals, but if that's true, the logical course of action would be to try to stem the flow of angry young Wahhabi fundies into the country, and we really haven't seen that. We've gotten some occasional criticism of Syria, since some people in Neoconland would like Syria to be the next war, but when was the last time anyone publicly criticized Saudi Arabia? They can't all be sneaking in from Syria, especially the ones who turn out to be Saudis.
  
• And let's not forget that the anti-Shia rhetoric Zarqawi was spouting wouldn't be out of place in a Saudi classroom. Shiites are regularly attacked in Iraq and Pakistan, and discriminated against in Saudi Arabia itself, and let's not forget the Lebanese civil war. A concerted campaign like this doesn't simply appear out of nowhere with nobody backing it, and no money behind it. I'm not saying this in the neocon sense, where foreign involvement means you need to start bombing all the surrounding countries.
  
• As I said, I'm trying to be charitable about conservatives and the reasons why they're trying to use Zarqawi to attack their domestic opponents. There seems to be a notion that anyone at all different from them is an enemy and can't be trusted. If you're not a far-right megachurch fundie, you must be a traitor, plus you're going to hell, too. That's is the only reason I can see for the ongoing Pentagon/NSA surveillance push: Nearly everyone is a potential (or probable) evildoer, so they need to know all phone calls, all website visits, every credit card purchase, and on and on, sort of the modern day version of commies hiding under every bed. There is such a thing as being too paranoid, and "better safe than sorry" isn't always true. Gathering all this information would be pointless unless you intend to act on it at some point, and in the current administration the info will be in the hands of people who see "enemies" everywhere, nearly all of whom are not real enemies.
  
• Meanwhile, in other Mideast news, say hi to "Maskiot", the newest Israeli settlement on the West Bank. Somehow we're supposed to achieve a just and lasting peace across the middle east while ignoring blatant, illegal land grabs like this. Apparently we can't say, wait, that's wrong, stop it right this minute. But it's perfectly fine to engage in an endless series of wars to subjugate anyone in the region who might object.
  
• Take Iran, for example. Our glorious leaders have reached the bitter bureaucratic infighting phase over a possible war against Iran. Early this week we got the surprising news that we would now consider talking to Iran and even offering them incentives over the nuclear issue. Word is this was Condi's idea, and crazy ol' John Bolton is already trying to sink the idea.
  
• That last link goes on to talk about Leo Strauss and the neocon philosophy. I've got an unfinished post about that topic that I may have to finish up and post as sort of a followup to this post. The more you look at these guys, the weirder and scarier (and less "conservative") they are.
  

2666: A Mildly Belated Milestone

So I'd like to bid a hearty welcome to visitor #2666, who arrived here a mere 3 days too late for the big 6/6/06 festivities. I think I forgot to mention that I was trying to run through the Seven Deadly Sins on the 6th, trying to complete the set within 24 hours. Quite an oversight; it was probably the Sloth part acting up. Sloth was pretty easy, really. As for the others:

Gluttony

Well, for lunch I wandered up the the Rogue brewpub and had a large Kobe beef burger smothered in bleu cheese and bacon, with fries, and a couple of beers. I could have picked out something even more expensive, but a Rogue burger was exactly what I wanted at the time, so that's what I did. As a bonus, there was no small amount of Sloth afterwards. And if we're going to read the Old Testament literally -- which is official government policy these days, so we'd better if we know what's good for us -- I seem to recall some prohibitions on eating pork, and on serving meat with dairy products. So I get a little extra credit for that, since I'm the one awarding the points here.

Envy

While I was walking to work in the morning, I couldn't help but notice a beautiful white Porsche 356 parked by the curb, and almost blundered out into traffic while I was staring at it. I wasn't feeing especially resentful towards the car's owner the way I would've if it'd been any other sort of Porsche. You know, slimy lawyer, trophy wife, coke habit, bad combover, etcetera. But there was still that lingering feeling that someone had lucked out, and it wasn't me, and the universe was terribly unfair. I didn't vandalize the car, and I didn't hang around the vehicle until the owner returned and lecture him (or her) about global warming, the way some Portlanders would. But I think this still probably counts as envy, of a sort.

Greed

On my 6/6 post, I did mention something about buying a pile of heavy metal CDs for the occasion, even though I'm not the world's hugest metal fan. I didn't originally plan to buy five CDs, but the "aww, just one more" impulse kept kicking in, which is textbook greed for ya. In this day and age, it seems decadent to buy music on physical media, and buying a whole CD when you haven't heard all the songs on it now seems risky and extravagant. I mention this part because it seems to me that it's somehow more "sinful" to be greedy like this over an idle impulse buy than it is over something you know you'll treasure forever. Maybe this is gluttony, not greed, I dunno. I was never 100% clear on the distinction here. But either way, I get extra points here too, because of the heavy metal and all.

Wrath

I'm not an especially wrathful person most of the time, but there was a little incident on the 6th that let me check this one off. It may have been a pure coincidence, but on that day this humble blog got a visitor from SCO's UK office. I mean, it can't possibly be a day devoted to ultimate evil unless SCO's involved somehow. This person must've read a post of mine over at the Yahoo! SCOX board, clicked on my profile to try to learn more about me, and found the link to this blog from there. That kind of pissed me off, so I immediately posted to the SCOX board again, reporting the incident and saying I was thinking about posting some porn here in hopes of getting this person fired for visiting that sort of website on company time. I didn't actually do it, because this is not that sort of website, but it was fun to think about. And it was certainly fun to imagine scaring the snot out of one of Darl McBride's lesser minions.

Lust

Did I mention this is not that sort of website? Well, it isn't. Because I said so. Also, there's such a thing as too much sharing, despite what the kids on MySpace might lead you to believe. Especially when the flaming eye of Ft. Meade is watching.

Pride

Well, duh, I mean, anybody with a personal blog is guilty of this to some extent. Unless you think your random notions deserve a global audience, why bother? In one 6/6 post on the aforementioned Y! board, I encouraged people to visit here so I could hit 2666 visitors on the 6th. That would've been kind of cool, no doubt about that, but there's also an obvious element of vanity and neediness. I mean, there's no reason to really care about that kind of thing, one way or the other, is there? But it's really hard not to. I freely admit that. And when I finally did hit the magic number, the hit came from a newly added link to this blog. So there. Ha. I still win. Yay for me. Oh, and I just got my first visitor from Luxembourg (that I know of), which is something. So I guess you can either feel bad about feeling good, or you can embrace it. Maybe it's time someone founded a "pride pride" movement, slogan "I'm proud, and I'm proud".

Even More Sloth

Ok, for the sake of completeness, I probably could've worked harder at the office than I did, and I could've gotten to work a bit earlier, and answered emails more promptly. I mean, if I'd wanted to. But it wasn't my fault -- the Man was making me work on a holiday, after all.

For a better treatment of the subject, you might enjoy Dan Savage's book Skipping Towards Gomorrah, in which he sets out to, yes, commit all seven deadly sins, with an entire chapter devoted to each. Chock full of fundie-bashing, highly entertaining, and highly recommended.

If you really want to see serious wrath and envy in action, you can't go wrong with the blog Merche The Reject, which I stumbled across as yet another of those "Next Blog" Blogspot referrer pages. The whole blog is devoted to bashing a Portuguese celebrity named Merche Romero. I have no idea what Ms. Romero did to incur this kind of anger, but clearly either she, or the blog's author, has a lot to answer for, and I'm not sure which of the two it is. It's also clear that by comparison I'm a total 3rd-rate piker in the wrath and envy department, which is fine, really.

Some Flowers, Etc.

A user comment (below) asserts this is a Rose of Sharon, I think specifically the Hypericum calycinum variety. Whatever it is, there are quite a few of them growing wild, or semi-wild, in Portland's Washington Park, down near the lower reservoir.




Meyer lemon blossoms.




A vinca (a.k.a. periwinkle). I actually didn't realize they were the same thing until just now. This one is from somewhere along SW Lincoln, I think.




A yellow iris at the corner of one of the Plaza Blocks, downtown.

Ok, so I'm trying to recreate a post Blogger ate yesterday. Seems like when I get a rare bit of free time to write anything here, Blogger goes down for "maintenance" yet again. I've actually got a whole list of topics written down, but I'd like to get this one out of the way first. I'm just stubborn that way.

Outage Outrage

Ok, this is the second day in a row that Blogger's been flaking out with technical difficulties. Snarl! This time it lost a very nice post I was working on, with flowers and everything. Not good, guys.

But my purpose here isn't to complain. Honest. It's to see if posting by email works any better than normal posting right now. So if you don't see this post, let me know and I'll complain to Management about it.

<B>updated:</B> ok, this message has bounced twice now. Blogspot withdrawal! Angry fist!!!
Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless handheld

Today's Template Tweakage

I've tweaked the blog template so that sections within the Links sidebar now expand and collapse, using some bits of CSS and JavaScript based on stuff I scrounged up from somewhere on the net. It's called code reuse. It's a great, time-honored engineering practice, dammit.

Unfortunately you still have to edit the whole blog damn template whenever you want to add or remove anything from the links section, which is tres silly. That may be tougher to solve. We'll see...

666: Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia

C'mon, you didn't really think I'd get through today without posting about today's date, didja? With a nym like mine, it just wouldn't be right to neglect the, uh, blessed occasion. Even if the nym's origins were sort of pseudorandom at first (see the link on my profile if you care.)

The fun word in this post's title is simply the fear of the number 666, as noted here. And some people really are afraid of it. If you take all that Revelations crap literally, it's just supposed to be the number of the beast, which is the number of a man, or something. It's not 100% clear what this means, since we're reading some random person's 2000 year old, multiply (and poorly) translated, fictional, bipolar blatherings. But the verse in question didn't say anything about the date being accursed, or tell believers to panic if something rings up as $6.66 at the grocery store. But people do anyway, because they're superstitious, poorly educated, ignorant, gullible, and stupid.

One possibility that's occurred to me is that the number just refers to the Romans generally. Roman numerals would've seemed weird and alien to the locals in Judaea at the time, so using them to represent the Romans themselves isn't a big stretch, sort of like how the French sometimes call the English "rosbifs" (roast beefs) due to their, um, distinctive eating habits. 666 in Roman numerals is DCLXVI, which uses each numeral symbol once, other than M. I've never seen this discussed anywhere, probably because it's a bit on the mundane side, and there's no fancy math to play around with. On the other hand, here I explain how to derive the number 666 from the string "George Walker Bush".

A few more 666 links

• Seeing the Forest has a piece about the wingnuts going nuts. Actually today it's mostly not them freaking out, it's us making fun of them. Which is ok, of course, because fundies are evil and they deserve it.
  
• The Sydney Morning Herald also pokes fun at the fundies. Somebody has to do it, and it's safer if there's a huge ocean between you and them.
  
• The local paper in Austin, TX, also has a funny article about the date, which is pretty brave. Of course, people from the rest of the state already know everyone in Austin is going to hell, so this latest business won't come as much of a surprise.
  
• A fun little blog posting about the date.
  
• There's a lively discussion over at UltimateGuitar.com. If you decide to join in, it's wise to be aware that Cradle of Filth is black metal, not death metal. This has already tripped up at least one hapless poster, to his infinite sorrow.
  
• A nice rant over at Tholos of Athena titled Christian Psychopaths.
  
• There's a new "Left Behind" book out today, this one titled "The Rapture". And in another sign of the apocalypse, Ann Coulter's new book is out today as well. Yech.
  
• A columnist at the Palm Beach Post has an amusing post about the date as well, with lots of fun Photoshopped photos. Don't miss the comments thread while you're there.
  
• In other news from the infantile, superstitious end of the religious world (i.e. most of it), the woman who "discovered" an image of the Virgin Mary on her cheese sandwich has a new tattoo of the sandwich. I guess because it was her big 15 minutes, and because she sold the original to an online casino.
  
• SFGate's Culture Blog makes fun of the whole fad of seeing Jesus or Mary on unlikely objects. No surprise here. It's the culture blog in the San Francisco newspaper. You were expecting what, exactly? But they do link to a bunch of stories about instances of the fad. It really does happen, and people really are like that. Making fun of them is almost too easy. Anyway, now you can buy a pan so you can make pancakes, omelets, or whatever with Jesus images on 'em, as many as you like, whenever you want. I'd call that a real advance in technology.
  
• And a fascinating look at Ave Maria, the new theocratic village in Florida planned out by Tom Monaghan, the Domino's Pizza creepozoid. The author looks at the town plans from an urban design perspective, and the closer you look, the more hair-raising it gets.
  

I'm going to run by the local record shop later today and buy some offensive CDs. It seems appropriate. I'll either update this post later or compose a new one, whichever seems more likely to boost my sitemeter hits up to the 2666 mark today. :)

tags: 666 fundies antichrist rapture bush hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia

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Updated: Ok, I picked up a pile of heavy metal CDs, including Slayer's classic Reign of Blood, which I inexplicably did not own yet. I've actually never been a huge metal fan, but it just seemed appropriate today.

I've been informed that today is a huge event in Hell, Michigan. Which I guess is true considering the name and all. But it's the upper Midwest, so somehow they'll find a way to make the whole thing wholesome and family-friendly. I'm not sure they really get it. If there was, say, a Hell, Louisiana, then we might really be on to something.

I already mentioned Ann Coulter's new book. There's a great post about it over at Pharyngula:

Coulter: "Liberals subscribe to Darwinism not because it's science, which they hate, but out of some wishful thinking. Darwinism lets them off the hook morally."

Pharyngula: "Actually, I use the Nernst equation to justify my immoral behavior. I reserve Darwinism for those nights I need an excuse to go dancing."

Slightly off the beaten path, downtown

Here's one of Portland's (thankfully) rare pedestrian underpasses. This is how you're supposed to get across busy SW Arthur St. / Kelly Ave., next to the Naito Pkwy. overpass, and near the Ross Island Bridge.

I assume the similar portal on the other side of the street (which you can see in the background) connects directly to this one. But I don't actually know that from firsthand experience. I've never actually gone down there, and I think I can live a long and happy life without ever giving it a try. For all I know, it might be fabulous and exciting down there, a maze of twisty little passages all alike, full of treasure and magical delights. But I wouldn't bet on it. I've never seen a single other person use it, and descending into the dank recesses of the earth just to cross the freakin' street is not my idea of a good time. Darting through traffic, Frogger-style, is probably safer. [Legal disclaimer: Don't!]

There's a crosswalk one block to the west at 1st Avenue, but I don't think you can walk along that side of Arthur very easily, what with all the eastbound bridge traffic turning right onto the Naito ramp. So if you don't want to spelunk, and you don't want to sprint for your life, your third bet, if you really, truly, sincerely need to get across the street here, is to take the crosswalk, go south a couple more blocks on 1st and then use the rickety pedestrian skybridge over Naito, and then cut north again once you're across. And voila, you've arrived, finally. Did I mention the place you've just arrived at is often called the Bermuda Triangle?

Suppose now you've wandered around the Triangle and seen and done everything there is to do there. Which is basically to glance at the handful of somewhat ramshackle Victorian houses, and wander the grounds of the Naturopathic College. (You think walking here was hard? See the college's valiant attempt at giving driving directions here. Getting back out of the Triangle is even harder.) If you look south, you'll see more gingerbread Victorians, not quite as run down, and you might want to go have a look, if that's your thing. But wandering over there is easier said than done, and it's not easily said. The right way to do it is to go back over the skybridge, go south on 1st again, and then take the scary pedestrian underpass under Naito. And voila, you're there, finally. Or you could just ride the #43 bus through the vehicle underpass. That would be easier. There's also a wrong way, involving SW Hood Avenue where it passes under the bridge ramps, but I'm not going to describe that in detail, just in case anyone's thinking about trying it. Just don't, ok?

In the near future you'll also be able to watch our shiny new aerial tram from your Triangle vantage point. But don't bother trying to walk to either end of it to get on board, because you won't be able to. Sure, there's talk of yet another pedestrian skybridge, this time over I-5, which you'd get to by crossing the first skybridge, taking the second underpass I mentioned, walking a couple of blocks, and dodging even more bridge traffic. They say they're building it to help the beleaguered residents of this area, so can they get to the lower tram terminal, and beyond it the $himmering tower$ of $outh Waterfrontland (a.k.a. the Shining City on a Floodplain). But I'll believe it when I see it. The thing was tossed in purely as a sop to the local neighborhood association when the powers that be were ramming the tram through the city council (ouch!), and I have this weird funny feeling the "value engineering" process will begin with the skybridge if the tram goes any further over budget. And to get to the uphill end of the tram line, your best bet would be to hop back on the bus, go downtown, and hop on a different bus that goes to OHSU. Or just call an ambulance. They'll even send the Life Flight helicopter if you're convincing enough. That tends to be kind of painful, so it's wise to be 100% sure ahead of time that you really do want to go up the hill that badly.

There used to be a similar underpass under Naito (then Front Ave.) right downtown many years ago. My mom would never let us go through it, no matter how much I begged, and then they put a grate over it and closed it, and now it's gone like it was never there. Now I don't even know where it was, exactly. I've looked, and there's no sign of it. They might have filled it in, but I bet they just bricked up the ends and left it for future archeologists to scratch their heads over, because that would be cheaper.



This next photo is of a funny parking sign on SW Baker St., between Water Ave. and Corbett Ave., a couple of blocks east of the last photo. The city sure does love its parking regulations. Does the city really send someone by every few hours to check that nobody's abusing these choice parking spots? Somehow that wouldn't surprise me.

You probably didn't realize downtown Portland has a Baker Street. It's the rutted little dirt road on the left side of the picture, and it runs for exactly one block, near where I-5 and I-405 meet up. This fair boulevard belongs to a part of the city's street grid where east-west streets are mostly named for Union generals from the Civil War, including Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, Hooker (giggle), and Meade. I don't think they sell a lot of houses to Southerners in this part of town. We also have Grant, Sherman, and Baker counties in this state, if that gives you any clue which side we were on back in 1861. Gen. Edward D. Baker was also the first US Senator from Oregon and a close friend of Abraham Lincoln, and died at Ball's Bluff early on in the war. I've read somewhere that he was the only sitting member of Congress ever to die in combat. That's something we'll surely never see ever again, now that the chickenhawks rule the roost. Actual warfare, the dangerous kind, is now an honor reserved strictly for the toiling classes. Our wise and noble leaders are exceedingly clear on this point. Letting a blood relative of anyone rich or powerful go into harm's way just wouldn't be natural. And besides, in 21st Century America, daydreaming about how fantastic the next couple of wars will be is a full time job, and somebody's got to do it.

Updated: I'm reliably informed by Snyder's "Portland Names and Neighborhoods" that Baker St. is actually named after William W. Baker & Sons, an obscure local magazine publishing firm of the mid-1880's. Various Baker family members lived in the area of what's now Baker St. Baker County, however, is named after the general I was just going on about. So apparently this city does an even worse job at memorials than I thought.




Couple of additional pictures of the area. The first is of the old Greyhound bus garage down in the gully at Corbett Ave. & Sheridan St. There's a sign on the building saying it's going to be the home of a shiny new electrical substation. Well, sort of new -- I gather it'll replace the existing substation down near RiverPlace, which is inconveniently located on some rather valuable real estate. The current substation is maybe 20 years old, tops, as it replaced the original substation that dated back to when the area was a PGE electrical & steam plant. Someday someone will want to build fancy condos where the Greyhound building is now, and then the substation will have to move again. Anyway, I call dibs on the cool wheel design bits on either side of the Greyhound logo.



The other photo is looking north & downhill from the corner of Arthur St. and Water Avenue. You can see the roof of the Greyhound building down the hill, a tiny bit of Baker St., some I-5 ramps, and the rising towers of the Strand condos in the distance, just across the street from the existing substation.

Ishaqi

The first I heard about the Ishaqi incident was the media informing us the soldiers involved had been cleared of any wrongdoing, therefore it's completely unlike what went on in Haditha. The spin we're getting is basically: Sure, a bunch of civilians died, but the soldiers were playing by the rules of engagement, so everything's totally ok. Apparently it's fine to kill all the civilians you like, so long as you do it strictly by the book.

Funny how the Iraqis, including the new government, don't see things quite the same way. This seems to perplex a lot of people here in the States. Suppose you asked them how they would feel if a powerful foreign army occupied this country. Suppose none of that army's soldiers even spoke our language, much less knew anything about our culture, they had zero respect for us, thought we all looked alike, treated us like cattle, and they were given absolute free rein to kill US citizens according to whatever rulebook they felt like obeying that day. Anyone, any time, anywhere. Chances are that people wouldn't be exactly thrilled about the whole situation. And yet people can't seem to form any kind of clear idea about how the Iraqis might see us when we behave -- or even just appear to behave -- that way.

We will, no doubt, hear the standard "war is hell" argument about this incident. They'll tell us that it was unavoidable, and any further efforts to avoid harming civilians would amount to tying the troops' hands behind their backs, like "the politicians" supposedly did in Vietnam. In a way, there's a point here: You can't sanitize war. Attempting to do so may even be counterproductive. If the public thinks modern warfare is just a big videogame, like after the original Gulf War and Kosovo, and they're fed antiseptic phrases like "collateral damage", and never shown photos of what that actually means in real life, they're not going to have the same mental barrier to rushing into war as a nation that expects an inconclusive bloodbath. They won't, for instance, demand really conclusive proof about WMDs before diving into a war, and won't ask tough questions about postwar plans or exit strategies.

Another bit of spin we'll hear a lot in the near future is conservatives insisting (as they always do) that liberals are happy every time bad Iraq news comes out. Which is a vile accusation, and really bizarre if you think about it. I'm a card-carrying liberal, so I think I can speak with some authority here: I'm alarmed and disgusted, and not at all happy. That should just be common sense. Why is that so hard to understand? The wingnuts don't, because they don't want to understand. They've built up an elaborate fantasyland of stereotypes and crazy notions over the years, and that's all they want to hear about. When a story like Ishaqi pops up, I always hope it turns out not to be true. But over the last few years, somehow things always keep turning out to be true, things I never would have imagined this country would sink to. And I have a feeling we haven't hit bottom just yet, either.

tags: iraq ishaqi haditha

This blog has wings!

This is a picture of this humble blog, created with a tool called "Websites as Graphs", which I learned about here via ORblogs+Bloglines. (Bloglines is neat-o-riffic.)

The chunk on the upper right-hand side is obviously the head, with a neck and a body to the left, and a pair of very obvious wings. Clearly this blog is either a sleek migratory bird, or a star cruiser. Either one would be fine. Savor the image -- it's about the only time you'll encounter anything on this blog heading off to the right.

More images of other websites can be found on this Flickr page, but it's even more fun to just drop an url into the tool yourself; watching it run is half the excitement.

If you look at my del.icio.us sidebar, you might notice I've been bookmarking a lot of graph theory and Web 2.0 stuff lately, including a lot of OPML and XOXO stuff. Just some ideas I'm kicking around, and I'm not sure where it's all headed, if anywhere. If anything fun ever comes of it all, you might read about it here first, or not.

Thursday Market

Here's yet another sign that summer's just around the corner, despite what the weather might lead you to believe. The Portland Farmers Market began its thursday forays into Yuppiestan (a.k.a. Pugtopia, a.k.a. the Pearl District) yesterday. The locals annoy the hell out of me, but the market's close to the office, so I keep going back. Oh, and did I mention yesterday was also First Thursday as well? Jack Bogdanski has a short, curmudgeonly bit about yesterday's, um, art extravaganza. He's basically the local blogoverse's grumpy old guy who's against everything new, dammit, and he's overly fond of conspiracy theories, but he can be fun to read, and he's a rare break from the city's usual shiny-happy-people boosterism.



Anyway, fresh fruit season's only just begun, but local strawberries are starting to show up now, and I'm willing to put up with a lot if there's fresh fruit involved. Mmmm.... Strawberries...



As an extra bonus feature, here's a broken window in an empty building in the Pearl. The building was recently vacated by an auto repair business that had been there long before the area became all ritzy and trend-o-licious. Now the building's up for sale or lease, and I expect that before long we'll see a nice new wine and cheese shop, or maybe another doggie day spa. Or maybe they'll just tear the building out and put in a high-end condo tower at taxpayer expense, and then put in the doggie day spa. Goodness knows we need more of those. The building behind it is also vacant at the moment, so maybe that's where the inevitable tapas-n-cocktails bar will go.

a squirrel

Permit me to try to convince you this is an artistic photo of a squirrel, not merely a badly shot, blurry one. It's clear to me, in retrospect, that I was subconsciously aiming for precisely the effects you see here. The photo conveys a strong feeling of rapid, jittery motion, putting the viewer in touch with the hyperkinetic essence of squirrel-ness. The viewer perceives the inner squirrel in this image (and not in the icky-roadkill-photo sense, fortunately). So in that regard we have to consider this image a resounding triumph.

The bidding starts at $500.

Haditha

If you read just one story about what happened in Haditha, it should be the Washington Post's article "In Haditha, Memories of a Massacre", by Ellen Knickmeyer. As the Haditha situation plays out, we're going to see the usual talking heads going on about chains of command and rules of engagement, quibbling over each comma and semicolon in the applicable rules and regulations, and speculating over who knew what, and when. I know this will happen, because it always does. We'd much rather argue over bloodless technicalities and dry legalisms than over right and wrong, so that's what we'll do. After a few 24-hour news cycles of this, we all get numb to the situation, it becomes the "new normal", the media proclaims it stale news, and we can all go back to fluffy celebrity gossip.

The Knickmeyer article is the antidote to this, for a terribly simple reason: It names the victims. They weren't generic "evildoers", fiendish cartoon Arabs with outlandish facial hair and nothing but murder on their minds. They weren't abstract statistics. Each one had a name, and each had a life story. Each of these lives was cut short on November 19th, 2005. In our name, with our tax dollars.

We'll see a lot of the "few bad apples" argument over the next few days and weeks, like we did with Abu Ghraib. And there's a kernel of truth to the argument, in that massacres of civilians are not standard operating procedure. If it was standard practice, we surely would have heard about it before now. The Bad Apple argument is fundamentally a defensive one. It lets the focus stay on alleged rogue elements at the bottom rungs of the chain of command, shielding higher-ups from any responsibility. By demonizing the direct perpetrators, it also lets us avoid the uncomfortable possibility that they were simply ordinary people pushed to the breaking point. We're lucky we'll never know just how many people would behave the same way under those circumstances.

Another thing we'll hear a lot about is the coverup angle. Ever since 1973, the very first thing you learn in journalism school is that it's never the action itself that's important, it's the coverup. It's always all about the coverup. It would be impossible to count all the generic coverup stories hitting the media since 1973, most tagged with the inevitable "-gate" suffix (lesson #2 in journalism school). If the initial scandal is something mundane like fooling around with an intern, or hiding bribe cash in your freezer, sure, go ahead, focus on the coverup if you like. But the lessons of journo school don't hold in this case. Any coverup would just be the panicked reaction of timid bureaucrats. The killings are the real scandal. Period.

If we're going to look at people higher up the military hierarchy (which is highly unlikely), the question shouldn't be how far up the coverup went, but how far up approval of the killings went.

What happens now? I'm a cynic, of course, but I think the answer will be "nothing". Everyone who has the capacity for outrage has been outraged nonstop for years now, and it hasn't helped yet. The 29-percenters out there will offer all sorts of lame excuses for what happened, and hold everyone blameless (except maybe a few token enlisted guys who'll take the fall). They'll harp on the ongoing investigation and demand that we reserve judgment and not dare to form an opinion until... well, until it all blows over, basically. They'll get on TV and explain how the only wrongdoers here are the liberal media types who made the story public, because everything's peachy keen so long as it all stays top secret. We'll also hear the refrain "the insurgents do this all the time", which I guess is supposed to make it all OK. If Zarqawi does it, it's fine for us to do it too, apparently. I guess I've got this crazy, funny, archaic idea that Marines ought to be held to a higher standard than that. I'm just weird that way, I guess.

Some hardcore chickenhawk types will go further and cheerfully approve of the massacre, probably on "they all look alike" or "they're all terrorists" grounds. Yes, they mean all of them are terrorists, and they all deserve the ol' Haditha treatment, especially cute little kids. What, you thought I was exaggerating? See here for more fun examples. I sure hope Shelby Steele and David Usher are happy now. If this isn't the red-blooded savagery they had in mind, I can't imagine what they must have meant. Something even worse, maybe?

Our Glorious Leader, in his cherished role as commander in chief, bears ultimate responsibility for the soldiers' conduct, although he can't actually be court-martialled for it. He's responsible in a formal sense, but he also bears responsibility because he fostered a situation where the ordinary rules don't always apply. Sometimes the Geneva Conventions are applied, and other times they aren't, and no clear guidelines are given about when the rules are really rules. Sometimes they apply, and sometimes they don't, and there's no guidance given so the average grunt can determine which is which. Bush openly scorns the notion of any kind of international standards of basic civilized behavior. He's pushed "terrorism" as the universal loophole, getting you out of any obligation you'd rather not comply with. He's encouraged people to wrongly blame Iraqis, and Muslims in general, for 9/11. If you demonize the "enemy" population, and incite US public opinion against them, atrocities of this kind are inevitable.

tags: bush iraq haditha massacre