Fall Foleyage

And the luridness continues for another day...

• ABC News has even more Foley transcripts. Seems the guy would occasionally wander off the House floor for a bit of net nookie. The comments are kind of entertaining: Mostly outraged citizens, with a few wingnuts desperately screaming talking points and not getting any traction.
  
• The Portland Freelancer explains how Bush can still rescue the Republican Party, by using that shiny new Detention Act against those pesky pages, who obviously hate America, etc.
  
• It's becoming clear to me that Foley's real "sin" in the political universe was resigning. He could have pulled a Tom DeLay, going on the warpath against his accusers, blatantly lying about his actions, and daring anyone to lift a finger against him. DeLay's gone now, but this act worked for years, and it'll work again for the next crooked politician who decides to go that route. The media immediately cowers and falls back into duelling-quote mode, and the story quickly falls off the radar.
  
  Now that Foley's out, the people who covered for him look vulnerable. Dennis Hastert looks to be highest on the sacrificial victim list right now, going by pieces at MSNBC, ABC, and Bloomberg, if they accurately reflect the spirit of the times. Hastert was always a happy-go-lucky nonentity, a kinder, gentler DeLay sock puppet. He never had much of a base himself, and now that DeLay's gone, he no longer serves any purpose. Regardless of what party's in power, the nature of DC is that if the speakership suddenly looks to be in play, it's time for all-out fratricide to see who can grab the gavel. The fact that there's a general election in a few weeks is of no consequence. Despite all the talk about putting party loyalty ahead of personal ambition, there's a point where that's just not going to happen. There's not a single member of congress out there who would resist temptation and not make a grab for the brass ring if it looked to be within reach. John Boehner, the House majority leader, has no loyalty to Hastert, and it sure looks like he's trying to undermine the guy every time he talks to the media. Sure, a leadership bloodbath might work against the party in November, but it looks like he's rolling the dice anyway. And I doubt he'll be the only one.
  
• Dan Savage comments about how the story would look if Democrats played hardball ("slimeball"?) the way Karl and the R's do. He mentions that nobody's accused Hastert of being a pedophile yet. Well, that's not strictly true; I mentioned it yesterday, but only as a joke. Well, mostly as a joke. The guy really and truly does give me the creeps, and he always has. I can't put my finger on it. Spidey sense, maybe.
  
• The Mercury also chimes in with a vintage Foley quote from back during Monicagate.
  
• The Chicago Tribune looks at how the R's high-and-mighty rhetoric has come back to bite 'em in the Foley case.
  
• WaPo makes a similar point here. Is there anything more fun, more delicious, than watching yet another crop of smarmy holier-than-thou politicians get cut down to size? Like I said yesterday, it's a shame this gets the public's attention when legalizing torture doesn't, but if this is what it's going to take to get the R's out of office, I guess I'm ok with it.
  
• I have a theory that you can tell how much trouble a politician is in by how many kids they surround themselves with at their next photo op. Just count the kids, and you know exactly how bad things are. By that measure, Thomas Reynolds is in big, big trouble. The article sums it up best: Crass political theater.
  
• The latest reason Reynolds is in trouble: Beyond the big payoff from Foley, and his attempt to hush ABC up, it turns out that his top aide, Kirk Fordham, used to work for Foley and appears to have known everything for years. So now Reynolds is distancing himself from his own aide, insisting he was never told a single word about any of this stuff, no sirreee.
  
• And in another unsurprising turn, Foley's acquaintances seriously doubt the alcoholism story.
  
• Maybe sensing the alcohol story wasn't going to fly by itself, now Foley's officially come out of the closet, oh, and he was abused by a priest as a child, too, as if that excuses or even explains any of this. I guess that's so he can claim that the whole gayness thing isn't really his fault, and Father So-and-So turned him gay at an early age, against his will, something along those lines.
  
• Understandably, the nation's gay rights groups are not taking his side in the scandal.
  
• As usual, things that surprise the rest of the country turn out to have been longtime open secrets inside the beltway. So now that the open secret is secret no more, the media can finally tell us all about it and go on to explore the wider issue of "outing" politicians. For the life of me, I will never understand how the beltway media game works.
  
• And naturally, the wingnuts are trying to use the scandal to get in a bit of gay-bashing. More on that angle here. It just amazes me the sort of wild-eyed crazies they'll put on cable news these days.
  

tuesday miscellany

This latest passel-o-links post is at least mildly organized; the links are arranged into a few broad categories, including one solely about echidnas. It's not a classification scheme your average librarian would be happy with, but hey. It's what I came up with, and rearranging all the links now would be way too much work. So enjoy, or not...

Sci+Tech

• Slashdot on (maybe) high-temperature Bose-Einstein condensates.
  
• The Panda's Thumb wonders about all that cutting-edge Intelligent Design research that's supposedly going on.
  
• That's the problem, though: The fundies can never quite decide if ID is supposed to pretend to be science, or whether it's the heart of their culture war they're waging against the rest of us.
  
• This year's Nobel in Physics has been awarded for research into the cosmic microwave background, a remnant of the big bang. The creationists would be outraged, if only they understood a single word of this stuff.
  
• I've already mentioned the first pics from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, so that's not news, but here's a side-by-side comparison of pics of the same crater taken by MRO, and by Mars Global Surveyor, which until now was the keenest eye in the Martian sky. Wow. Just... wow. That HiRISE is some kind of camera, that's all I can say.
  
• Like having nightmares? Check out this gigantic deep-sea isopod. Clearly, Tokyo is doomed.
  
• At Pharyngula, PZ lists the top ten reasons religion is like porn. My favorite items:

  
  5. You want to wash up after shaking hands with any of its leaders
  4. The costumes are outrageous, the performances silly, the plots unbelievable
  

  
  
• Some related research, which ought to make a lot of people (especially guys) happy.
  

Politics

• The latest alarming signs of the times at Cosmic Variance.
  
• Tom Tomorrow looks on the bright side.
  
• Kip Hawley is an idiot.
  
• See also Wikipedia on Security theater.
  

Local

• alt.portland introduces a valuable new public service, a guide to gas stations in/near downtown. Sure, sure, gas is evil, we all know that, but sometimes it's a necessary evil, and a scarce one at that.
  
• Happy new (water) year!. It hasn't rained yet, and we're a full couple of days into the new water year, so I expect the local news to start screaming about a drought any day now. They usually do.
  
• This year's crop of GABF medal winners from Oregon. Mmmm.... Beeeerrrr...
  
• The latest "address nerd" post over at ZehnKatzen times, with a rare example of one of the city's old-style street signs. I know I've seen others like that around, but I can't recall where, or when. I may have to try this Pizza Baron place he mentions. I'm a sucker for old-style 70's-80's pizza parlors, and they've nearly vanished from the earth. More than once I've driven all the way out to Hood River for a Pietro's fix, which is an unreasonably long way to go for pizza done the old-school way.
  
• Up in Yakima, WA, a horrible, horrible fire has destroyed 4% of the US hop harvest. Nooooooooo!!!!!!
  
• It's that time of year again: the HP Lovecraft Film Festival, at the Hollywood Theater this Friday thru Sunday.
  

Echidnas

• Accounts from someone who's looking after an orphaned baby echidna (they're called "puggles"). Seems that orphan puggles need to be fed a concoction known as "I Can't Believe It's Not Echidna Milk".
  
• An article about echidnas, with lots of photos.
  
• And still, nobody can answer the eternal question "Why did the echidna cross the road?".
  
• Four more photos of echidnas.
  
• Ok, just one more
  

Random Coolness & Weirdness

• Another four reasons to love Oktoberfest.
  
• How to make your own Discworld cake. This is obviously the most excellent cake ever.
  
• Less edibly, here's the latest advance in breakfast junk food technology: Jimmy Dean Chocolate Chip Pancakes & Sausage on a Stick. Glurrrghh.....
  
• Treehugger tries a foray into math via heirloom tomatoes. I can't make head or tail of what they're getting at, and I detect a strong smell of bogosity.
  

Maf54, where are you?

I wasn't originally going to write anything about the Mark Foley circus (*snort* *giggle*). Over the last few days I've been complaining to people about how this lurid side issue was getting so much more play than stuff like, oh, Congress legalizing torture, for example. But now that the coverup's starting to emerge, now it's starting to get interesting.

[Updated: Ok, I'm hooked on this scandal, I admit it. It's almost a guilty pleasure, in a way. Two subsequent posts of mine about Foleyrama (so far): Fall Foleyage and Kirk Fordham: human sacrifice.]

Don't get me wrong here; I don't buy the beltway-junkie cliche that the coverup is always so much worse than the act itself. We don't know yet whether Foley's advances ever succeeded or not, but his intentions were clear, and when the person in question is under the age of consent, it's not an "affair" (as our own Oregonian termed it in the Goldschmidt scandal); it's child abuse. That's far worse that the efforts by various random Congressbots to hush the story up. Cowardly little men trying to save their own skins and keep their share of power? Hell, that happens all the time. It's only news when that doesn't happen. So of course they tried to cover it up, and plugged their ears to avoid learning any more about it. Well, duh! Big surprise, there. I don't even see a partisan dimension to this aspect of the story; there've been enough scandals on the 'D' side over the years that it's hard to argue the coverup business is a uniquely Republican problem.

But still, I cheerfully admit to a healthy dollop of meanspirited partisan glee at the current scandal. The Foley follies are not the top issue facing the country, but the scandal does illustrate very clearly what sort of people are running the country, and Congress in particular, these days. If it helps the Republicans lose control of either house, great. The issues that really matter haven't quite gotten the job done, so I'm all for plastering Foleygate all over the evening news every night between now and election day, if that's what it takes. If it means Dubya no longer has a blank check to shred the Constitution and start (and botch) wars in every corner of the globe, hey, put Foley's creepy mug on every billboard in the country. I try not to be an "end justifies the means" sort of person, but it just seems unavoidable this time around. The stakes this time are a lot higher than simply which mob of inmates gets to run the asylum for the next two years.

• Since political debate in the media is hopelessly lurid, shallow, and sleazy, I might as well lead with ABC's transcript of Foley's instant messaging excitement, which they've titled as READER DISCRETION STRONGLY ADVISED (caps theirs).
  
• The Portland Mercury's (sorta) own Dan Savage explains exactly where the real badness is in the Foley scandal. Here's a dirty little secret I share with a lot of people on the liberal side of things: Do I personally care about the "gay angle"? No, of course not, not at all, but would I mind if the fundies get all disgusted and freaked-out over it and stay home on election day? No, I wouldn't mind that one bit. That would be just fine. I'm not proud of it, but there you have it.
  
• The real fun in the next few days will be watching Thomas Reynolds, the current Republican campaign committee chair, twist in the wind. I admit I'm not a wonkish beltway type, but I'd never heard of the guy before, and I don't think he's spent a lot of time in the limelight up to now. So far he's not looking too good here. First, here's a bit at ThinkProgress about Reynolds accepting $100k from Foley a few months ago, after he knew about the emails and such. My understanding is that contributing to the party campaign committee is not unusual, in itself, but this still looks like hush money, and it'd still look like hush money even if I didn't have a partisan interest in the matter.
  
• Oh, and let's not forget his behind-the-scenes effort to get ABC to drop, or at least soft-pedal, the matter. At the very least, this guy lacks the basic political instincts you need in a job like his.
  
• What I really like is the way Foley immediately disappeared into "alcohol rehab". It puzzles me to no end how, in this country, rehab has become the respectable way to drop out of sight for a while and wait for things to blow over. Look at Patrick Kennedy, just a few months ago (*snort* *giggle*). The standard rehab strategy isn't working so well this time, though; there was no previous mention of a substance problem, and it's really tough to attribute all of Foley's behavior to one fruity parasol drink too many. Put him through rehab, and all he'll be is a clean and sober pedophile. That's really not much of an improvement, if you ask me. That is, if he really is in "rehab". Post-9/11, Republicans pride themselves on their willingness and ability to make inconvenient people "disappear". Maybe Foley's relaxing in a discreet gated golf resort outside Palm Springs, maybe he's hooked up to the electrodes down in Guantanamo for bringing dishonor to the Party, and maybe we'll never know for sure. Still, the lame excuse for his quick disappearance is more than a little ham-fisted. That's what happens when Republicans bash Hollywood all the time; when it turns out they need some of that special public image magic, nobody will return their calls.
  
• I'm not the only one rolling my eyes about Foley's rehab con game. The latest Eugene Robinson column at WaPo covers that and much more. I love the Oliver Cromwell quote at the end.
  
• More pieces about the scandal, from the SF Chronicle, WaPo, and BBC News.
  
• The IHT notes that the worst thing possible has already befallen the R's: They've strayed off-message. Here's a telling bit:
  

  Added Tony Fabrizio, another Republican consultant: "It's almost like the perfect storm forming against us."

  
  I'm amused by the attitude there: Politics are sorta like the weather, and it's certainly not your fault when things don't go your way. I.e., the public doesn't see things your way. There's no way that objective reality could have anything to do with that, of course.
  
• Let me toss in at least one tinfoil hat item, since it's my blog and so forth. The timing sure is interesting, and the Foley thing sure did a great job knocking Bob Woodward off the front page. I think it's fair to assume Karl Rove's loyalties are to Leader, Party, and Fatherland, in that order. Just maybe, sometimes he has to throw an unreliable Party member to the wolves in order to protect the Decider.
  
• The wingnut-o-verse is trying on various talking points to see if they look flattering. My favorite so far is this piece from some outfit called "Real Clear Politics", which explains that the real scandal here is that some mystery blogger broke the story. The fact that the Republican Party had at least one child molester in a high leadership position is, apparently, a super-hush-hush state secret, right down there with warrantless wiretaps and CIA torture camps. And if you think I sound cynical right now, just go read this piece. It comes right out and says the R's need to dream up a counterstory to keep the fundie rank-n-file in line. Oh, and it dwells obsessively on the gay angle. Yes, Gerry Studds and Barney Frank are gay. Yes, both of them. Film at 11.
  
• I realize that not all Republicans are perverts, at least not provably so, and for those who aren't, I feel their pain, a little. Now maybe they'll understand what the whole Monica thing felt like. Or less charitably, I'll just remind 'em that turnabout is fair play.
  
• As an aside: Oh, I feel so bad for poor ole George Allen, whose own political circus has just fallen off the radar (to mix a couple of metaphors badly).
  
• I haven't seen anyone focus on the power angle yet, the fact that it would be extremely hard to have a remotely fair or equal relationship between a congressman and a page, even if the page was a legal adult. The case is an egregious abuse of power, and an example of the sort of thing members of Congress expect to be able to get away with. They seem to think one of the top perks of power is the right to abuse people who can't fight back, for one's own gratification. The closest I've seen to a remark about this is a line in this LA Times story:
  

  
  Like most of those willing to discuss Foley, the young man asked not to be identified by name because of concern that speaking openly could harm his career.
  

  
  So the guy's resigned in disgrace and become a national scandal, and people still have to be afraid to speak out? That sure smells like a power imbalance to me. WIth the occasional nasty exception, the private sector hasn't tolerated this sort of behavior for about 20 years now, because private employers can expect to be sued over it.
  
• Wouldn't it be awful if Foley was just the tip of the iceberg, and it turns out there's a whole massive child sex ring operating in the halls of Congress? I mean, I haven't seen any evidence to suggest that, but nothing, nothing would surprise me at this point. The rush to cover up the case could just be the beltway mentality in action, where nothing matters except raw power, or it could be something more sinister. IAnd I've got to say that Hastert clown has always given me the creeps -- and he was a high school math teacher at one point...
  

---

Updated: A few more bits of Foleyage that caught my eye today:

• An account about someone whose daughter had dinner with Foley. Seems he'd invited several male pages for dinner, and they'd brought a few female pages along sort of as chaperones.
  
• BlueOregon relates the Foley scandal to the larger "culture of corruption" meme, with emphasis on some of our local Rethuglican malefactors.
  
• A Foley piece at Whiskey Bar.
  
• And last but not least, the immortal Jon Swift explains why Foleygate will really be a total disaster for the Democrats.
  

fruit & industry

A few more assorted pics I had lying around in iPhoto:



Rose hips from somewhere in downtown Portland.




Blueberries from the Portland Farmers Market, from a few months back.




The moon over a construction crane, again in downtown (near the waterfront if I remember correctly), again from a few months back.




A bit of industrial grimness from Aberdeen, Washington.

another friday link farm

Ok, let's try this again. A few days ago, I started yet another pile-o-links post and never got around to hitting 'publish', primarily because it would've been like the third or fourth in a row, and it just felt wrong somehow. Now it's been a few days, and Firefox is full of tabs I can't quite bring myself to close, so I figure, what the heck.

So to start out, here's the original list, followed by a list of new items.

• If you like cute echidnas as much as I do, and I realize you probably don't, here are four more echidna photos for your enjoyment, or at least for mine.
  
• This is a very, very fat squirrel.
  
• The development community seems to have fixed its great flaming eye directly on the Hawthorne area. Here's the latest about the stupid parking meter thing that they just refuse to drop.
  
• A bit about the recent John Kerry / beer bong photo. I sure do miss Democrats running the show.
  
• A new multi-year low for SCO: $1.66 per share, closing at $1.69. Awesome.
  
• A ligher shade of umbra
  
• Eek! Jesus Camp! Run away!
  

Today's link farm:

• Another cute echidna. Seems there's no shortage.
  
• Music from a French electronica act known as Echidna (also see here.)
  
• Our Glorious Leader, as translated by Little Richard. It all makes sense now.
  
• The latest snarkiness on the Pacific Northwest Food Scene (TM). Everyone said they loved that Hebberoy guy until his restaurant empire imploded. Now the knives are out. Ah, fickle fate...
  
• An Oktoberfest update from The Brew Site.
  
• The Bad Astronomer posts about a new lobbying group called Scientists & Engineers for America, set up primarily to oppose the Bushies' ideological meddling.
  
• I wouldn't be so fast to join up, though, if I were you; very soon, Dubya's going to have even more draconian powers to drag people off the street and imprison them without trial, purely on vague national security grounds.
  
• Another piece on the same issue. How did we get to a point where everyone knows the bill is a disaster, everyone knows it's un-American, undemocratic, and uncivilized, and yet nobody can stop it. The only people with the power to do so (Congress) all believe it's political suicide to oppose Bush on any issue, at any time. Even now, after everything that's happened over the last half-decade.
  
• Here's a cabbie from Uganda who's probably on George's evildoer list now, too. Read what he has to say about Idi Amin back in the 70's. Eerie, isn't it?
  
• And as usual, there's nothing on Earth more completely freakin' useless than the "Democrats" in Congress. All they do is keep on keepin' the powder dry, and going along with whatever the R's want with barely a whimper. Pathetic.
  
• The next war: Kazakhstan? Well, maybe not, but still, everyone says this Sacha Baron Cohen guy is the ultimate comic genius, brain the size of a planet and all that, but do we really need to go around spreading even more ignorant stereotypes about Muslim countries? What makes that such an ultra-smart idea, exactly?
  
• See, that last bit was a half-joke, because everyone knows the next war is with Iran. Maybe I'm cynical, or paranoid, or just pessimistic, but to me it's felt like a done deal for a long, long time now.
  
• After 95O+ sols of driving on Mars, the Opportunity rover's arrived at Victoria Crater, sending back some fairly dramatic photos. The folks over at UnmannedSpaceflight.com are completely geeking out over it -- and I mean that in a good way.
  
• And here's the first hi-res image from the newly-aerobraked Mars Reconaissance Orbiter. Coolness.
  
• Maybe, just maybe, the city isn't selling off chunks of Mt. Tabor Park after all. Or at least they backed down very quickly. Probably the latter, in which case I'd like to take full credit for the about-face. You're welcome.
  
• Excerpts from yet another hardline Bush speech. He's not quite using the 't' word yet, but it looks like he's edging ever closer.
  
• In Bob Woodward's new book, we learn a couple of things we knew already: Rummy is Clueless and Bush is Increasingly Removed from Reality. Still, the new book may go a small way to redeem Woodward after his last two books fawning over Dubya. I'm sure it must've seemed like a good idea, or at least a lucrative idea, at the time...
  
• So these days we've got a handle on the incompetence side of the Iraq equation. And here's another bit about the corruption side of things.
  
• I hate to end on a down note, so here are some cute cats on Flickr.
  

Updated: Ok, ending with cute cats after all the political nastiness just isn't working. Here are three more pieces about echidnas:

a closeup photo of echidna spines

"Free the Echidnas!"

"You can't pull an echidna backward through a cardigan."

another friday imagedump

It's Friday, plus September's almost up and I'm nowhere close to using up my free Flickr quota for the month. I admit that's not much of an organizing theme, but hey.
Maybe there's sort of a fall theme going on, although it's really more of an unavoidable fact of nature than a theme. It's not like I can do spring photos right now, not in this hemisphere at any rate.



Part of the Big Pink building.



One of the surviving Lovejoy Columns, looking very out of place in the middle of the Pearl District.



Some red berries.



Moon over Rusting Chunks No. 5



This is just a shot of the Hawthorne Bridge, but I thought it looked cool for some reason. I'm not sure why, exactly.



Some orange berries.



A rather bleak-looking 60's era plaza in an office park downtown, off 1st Avenue just south of I-405.



A bit of existential graffiti.



A palm tree in the Pearl District, on a cold rainy day.



The old Pearl meets the new.



More existential graffiti, this time with a typo.

dahlia @ doug fir, 9/27/06

Finally made it to another Dahlia show, at Doug Fir last night. I'm not enough of a dork to bring a digital camera to a concert, so this is the closest I've got to photos. Sadly, I am enough of a dork to bring a Blackberry to a concert. Feel free to mock me, if you like. As usual, I got there wayyy early, and sat around typing up a blog post, because I thought it would be awfully l33t to blog from the Doug Fir. Also, I was one of the first people there, so I was feeling a little neurotic. I actually huddled in a far corner of the lounge, furiously thumb-typing away and sipping at a vodka tonic. In that would-be post, I complained about my punctuality neurosis, I complained about geezers hogging the swimming pool that morning, I complained at length about having to wrestle with the company teleconferencing system most of the day and not being able to find anyone who understood how the damn thing worked, not even the corporate phone administrator or the building receptionist. I went off on a deadly serious tangent about gentrification in the neighborhood around the Doug Fir, and reminisced about how the whole area was a no-go zone just a few short years ago, although the developers' future plans for the area also made me really nervous, etc. The idea behind the post was to explain why I needed so badly to lighten the fuck up and click everything else off and just dance for a while, but at that point I was still part of the problem, not the solution. I was actually getting more withdrawn and neurotic as I kept typing. The result was quite a sour, bitter piece, and luckily I wasn't getting any cell reception down in the lounge so I couldn't post it. So I did a "Save as draft", and figured I'd include it in a post today, but today I deleted it by accident. It's probably just as well. There's really no need here for a rant about my uber-punctual German Calvinist ancestors, or little old ladies in water wings. I was even about to start whining about the Dahlia dynamic duo, er, trio blowing off my friend request on MySpace, like that sort of thing actually matters or something. Sheesh. The lost post was fairly long, and I've probably missed a few of its not-very-salient points. I might be able to recover it by grabbing a memory image off the BB using some of the RIM developer tools, and grepping the resulting binary file for the word "dahlia". That would pretty much be for pure geek value, though. This post exists in lieu of that post, and I like this one a lot better.

So I shut the BB off when it started whining about a low battery, and soon I noticed a few coworkers arriving, purely by random chance, so we hung out and gabbed about B-movies and restaurants and such for a while during the opening act, Stalking Jane. I'd never heard them before and I think I'm a fan now; I didn't have enough drinks in me to get up and dance just yet, but I enjoyed the set anyway. Then when Dahlia took the stage, it was time to just check out, lose track of the world, and get lost in the music.

If you hadn't noticed already, this isn't really a review. I wasn't taking notes at that point. There's an eternal tension between truly being in the moment, and capturing the moment for posterity. You can dance, or you can blog, but you can't do both at the same time. 99.9% of the time, 24/6.999, I'm squarely on the 'blog' side of things, sitting above, or at least outside, the fray, commenting on the action in an amused and detached way. If I could have any one superpower, I'd choose to be invisible, and wander around observing people and making snarky and disagreeable observations about them for posterity. Did I mention I was a sociology major for a while? I could have done this for a living, basically. I'd probably have tenure by now, if I'd stuck with it. It presses my buttons. Well, 99.9% of the time. During the other 0.1%, you just have to turn everything else off and just shake that thang. So to speak. So I danced, and now I'm blogging about it -- the 0.1% having expired for the time being.

So what I can tell you about the show is: Great music, great crowd, I love the new material, can't wait for the album to hit the streets, blah, blah, etc., etc.. Basically what I'm saying is that you had to be there.

My media empire grows a little more...

This blog now has a sibling, devoted entirely to my morbid fascination with the ongoing SCO vs. Known Universe circus. If you've been following that stuff, you can now read all about it without having to wade through endless photos of flowers and snarky comments about our Glorious Leader and random babbling about cute echidnas and so forth.

I used to post these news roundups on the Y! SCOX message board, but Yahoo tinkered with its message board system recently and made the thing painful to use. It had always been a love-hate relationship anyway, since the old board system had a nasty way of truncating posts without warning, arbitrarily rejecting perfectly legit urls as 'abuse' or 'spam' and threatening you with the Terms of Service; and even silently deleting posts if they contained links to anyone Yahoo viewed as a competitor -- at least we all figured that's why it was acting that way. An official explanation was never forthcoming.

So after a bit of dithering, I finally got around to clicking "Create blog" yesterday. There isn't a huge amount of SCO news these days, so I won't post there anywhere near as often as I do here. But hey, it had to go somewhere...

Yet another Mt. Tabor controversy

View Larger Map

A few photos of our fair city's Mt. Tabor Park [map], which is in the news once again. Word on the street is that the city's looking at selling off a chunk of it -- and to a creepy conservative religious college, no less.



Naturally, Grandpa Simpson, er, Bojack, & Co., are going ballistic -- see the previous link, or this update. I try not to indulge in hysteria here, and sometimes I succeed, so let's all take a deep breath and try to puzzle out what's going on.



One key point here is that the land under discussion is currently home to a Parks Bureau maintenance facility (above photo), including a bunch of greenhouses to serve the bureau's decorative plant needs across the city. On the map linked to above, it's roughly the area between SE 64th & 66th, just north of Division. It's not exactly the area you think of when you think about Mt. Tabor; I don't think it's even open to the public. This fact seems to have fostered the notion that it's not really part of the park, and what the city does with the land is none of the public's concern. You'd think the city would be a little cautious about this, since the park's one of the city's crown jewels, and the public went ballistic last time the Powers That Be tried to monkey around with the place. (Remember that ugly business about burying the reservoirs?)



Sadly, the bureaucracy has precedent on its side. Some time back in the 90's, the city decided it didn't need Reservoir 2, at the SW corner of the park, so they simply demolished it and sold off the land. Now there's a charmless Beaverton-style subdivision there. The only remnant is the reservoir gatehouse, at the corner of SE 60th & Division, and it's been turned into a private residence. I have to admit I wouldn't mind owning that gatehouse building myself, but I don't understand why they went the subdivision route. Other than generating revenue for the city, I mean.

Another account of the city's periodic real estate shenanigans, from a 2002 letter from area neighbors to then-Commissioner Jim Francesconi, who was responsible for the Parks Bureau at the time:

Commitment to keeping public lands, publicly owned concerns all of us. When the Mt Tabor changes were brought before the Landmarks Commission, the first question the commissioners had was whether or not the reservoir land was to be sold. This was not unfounded, as Reservoir 2, another 1894 marvel was sold and developed in the 1990's. Those of us who have lived in the Mt Tabor neighborhoods for a long time have watched as part of the old nursery land (Mt Tabor Yard), technically part of the park,
has been parceled out and sold for housing development. And recently, we have learned, an historic building in the nursery was demolished. We are interested in maintaining what is left of our green space and history. It is integral to our neighborhood and to the very city itself. We do not want to have what is left of our greenspaces sold or developed. We regret the move in this direction with the sale of Reservoir 2, the adjoining lands in Mt Tabor Yard, and the projected fire station to be built in Forest Park. As the Commissioner at the helm of parks, we hope that you will see fit to spend our tax dollars on protection of what little public land we have left and not continue the precedent of putting these lands up for development.

With a recent history like that, public mistrust is inevitable, and well-earned. While I doubt anyone at City Hall is seriously considering selling off the whole park for development, they clearly don't have a stellar track record of acting in the public interest, especially when that bumps up against the self-interest of well-connected insiders.

To me, and probably to most people, the land is part of the park, and if for some reason the city doesn't need it as a "backstage" area anymore, it ought to be turned into something the public can use and enjoy, not quietly sold off as surplus property. There's all sorts of things you could do with the area. Ball fields, open space for the off-leash dog folks, or maybe a greenhouse/conservatory people could visit and enjoy in midwinter. I've long thought it'd be nice to have something like that in town, somewhere to visit during the 9 months of the year when it isn't warm and sunny here. True, the place would be awash with tour buses full of geezers much of the time, but the inevitable gift shop might go a long way to plugging the hole in the city's parks budget, just on the collectible spoon and novelty shot glass revenue alone.

For a little more background on the area, the local neighborhood association has a history of the park and its reservoirs here.

Jack & friends suspect all sorts of dark fanciful plots, full of new aerial trams and condo towers and such. And in truth I wouldn't be surprised if money and insider connections played a part in this proposal, but this is a classic case where one shouldn't attribute to malice what one can attribute to stupidity. Recall that Dan Saltzman, the city commissioner responsible for the Parks Bureau, was also responsible for the abortive hide-the-reservoirs plan. He unveiled it as a done deal, not open to public debate, only to have the whole thing unravel at his feet. I mean, I think he's generally a decent guy, and his heart's in the right place when it knows what the right place is. He probably read somewhere that unveiling a grand plan and presenting it as a done deal is a mark of a decisive, forceful alpha-male leader, and possibly that's even true, generally. It's just that when he tries it, it's always a ham-fisted, politically tonedeaf effort on behalf of a poorly thought-out idea. And then when the proposal garners public mistrust, suspicion and hostility, he doesn't have the clout to push the thing through over everyone's heads. If you'd like an object lesson in the ungentle art of the fait accompli, you'd do well to look elsewhere. We are a city of process geeks, for better or worse, and when someone doesn't play the process game, with public meetings, "visioning processes", stroking the fragile egos of neighborhood association bigwigs and whatnot, people get suspicious. If you don't invite everyone to a grand open house right off the bat, people assume you're conspiring with greedy cigar-chomping developers. That accusation is true far more often than it ought to be, so it's only natural that people assume it's always the real motive. If it looks like you're trying to sneak something unpopular through before the public catches on, that's never going to boost your poll numbers.

Oh, about the other photos: Photo 1 is of the long, narrow stairs between the upper and lower reservoirs. The stairs are quite a workout. Not only are they long, without a single landing on the way up, they also get increasingly steep as you near the top. Photo 2 is looking southwest from the upper reservoir, with the lower one in view along with a tangle of Oregon Grape and various vines. The ducks in photo 3 were at the lower reservoir, just steps from a sign forbidding visitors from feeding any wildlife that might be present. Apparently the city tries to capture any beasties that hang around here too long, and I don't know what becomes of them after that. Probably they just truck them somewhere and release them, but that seems kind of silly for a bunch of plain old mallard ducks. They aren't exactly rare or anything. And duck can be awfully tasty. So who knows, really?

...wherein I seek my lost relevance...

Another day, another semi-random link dump. I seem to have fallen into a blogging rut: When I'm not posting amusing riffs on misc. news items I've run across, I'm posting riffs that try to be amusing but fail miserably. As I've mentioned before, I often feel guilty that I don't cover weighty political topics more often. We live in in the midst of a global crisis, no, crises, and nobody can afford to take things lightly, but I do anyway. I shouldn't, but I do. I try to justify it by saying I live by the old H.L. Mencken quote:

The liberation of the human mind has never been furthered by such learned dunderheads; it has been furthered by gay fellows who heaved dead cats into sanctuaries and then went roistering down the highways of the world, proving to all men that doubt, after all, was safe--that the god in the sanctuary was finite in his power, and hence a fraud. One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms. It is not only more effective; it is also vastly more intelligent.

While we're talking about Mencken, I'd like to recommend his essay "Gamalielese", if you can find it. I don't see it on the net anywhere, so I suppose it's still under copyright. Search your local library. It reminds us that Dubya wasn't the first brain-damaged wingnut to occupy the White House, although Warren G. Harding was merely stupid and corrupt, and he didn't actually go around starting wars in every corner of the globe and then bungling them. In lieu of the actual essay, perhaps you'll enjoy this post about ol' Warren G.. In a similar spirit, you might also enjoy James Thurber's take on Admiral Byrd exploring the south pole and claiming large chunks of Antarctica for the grateful US taxpayer, but that may be even harder to find. (And again, nothing on the net anywhere.)

On an unrelated-but-serious note, the photo is of the never-used cooling towers for the cancelled Satsop nuclear complex, part of the ill-fated WPPSS (pronounced "whoops") project. If you're driving to the Olympic Peninsula, you can see them near the town of Elma, on US 12 between Aberdeen and Centralia. I realize they were never used, and there's nothing radioactive about them, but I still get a case of the creeps every time I see them.

So anyway, I don't really have anything original to contribute on the political front right now, but I've interspersed a few serious-ish items amongst all the frivolity, just to break up the rhythm a little. So without further ado, let the links commence:

• Happy birthday, Bilbo & Frodo.
  
• Every day, a new haiku about beer. Finally, poetry that doesn't make me cringe.
  
• Today's cute echidna.
  
• Audio clips and quotes from Tron, the best SF movie ever. Don't even try arguing the point with me. Sure, the plot's corny, but Metropolis is much, much cornier and far less coherent, and everybody forgives it because the visuals are so great.
  
• Tron may have to give up the crown soon, though. Turkish Star Wars 2 is on its way. With genuine CGI and everything, apparently.
  
• Local businesspeople don't think the downtown retail environment is doing very well. Funny how the same urbanist types who freak out whenever a business opens in the 'burbs don't bat an eye while their beloved Pearl skims off the top end of the retail trade downtown.
  
• OTOH our local craft brewing industry just had a great first half of '06. I'm happy to say I've done my part to help out with those numbers. Mmmm.... beeeer....
  
• The very latest in local Republican sleaze.
  
• The Guardian informs us that, like the Northwest, the UK has its share of bike Nazis and creepy nuclear bungling.
  
• Friday's cephalopod pic from Pharyngula.
  
• Microsoft is thinking about a free web-based version of MS Works. I didn't realize there even still was such a thing as MS Works, but then, it's been about 10 years since I've bought a PC with Windows on it, so maybe I'm just not up on this stuff. On one hand, I think MS considers Works their cheap-n-crappy alternative for home users who can't afford MS Office. On the other, I seem to recall that it does most of what an average home or office user might need to do, without all the dancing paper clips and cryptic toolbars full of esoteric options and whatnot. Still, what you really want is OpenOffice.
  
• Mars Express has taken some new pics of the notorious non-face on Mars. The Bad Astronomer marks the occasion by making fun of that Hoagland asshat. I've been rolling my eyes at Hoagland since his "alien spaceship in Saturn's B ring" days (what ever happened with that, btw?), and it just never gets old. The BA story's been linked to by Slashdot and Fark, and now by me as well, so Phil's pretty much hit the trifecta here. (Ha, I kid! What is this 'Fark' of which he speaks? I bet there's no such thing.)
  
• Jesus appears to the faithful in ever-more-mysterious ways.
  
• Well, nothing else is working, so maybe this will save the world. It's worth a try, anyway.
  
• From World-o-Crap: Batman vs. the Nazis. They just don't make movie serials like they used to.
  
• Preemptive Karma and Empire Burlesque cover Dubya's recent "Third Awakening" creepiness.
  
• But there's plenty of religious ickiness to go around: Two more PK bits, covering Der Pope and Ahmadinejad (and the fundies who fear him).
  
• And a deeply scary and unsurprising WashPost story about bungling and cronyism in the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. Ideology and blind loyalty win out over basic competence. Film at 11.
  
• Willie Nelson getting busted for possession is another "film at 11" item, but check out the photo of his stash. Dang. I never touch the stuff, myself, but even I'm impressed. Free Willie!
  
• Grandpa Simpson, I mean, Bojack wonders who Storm Large is. It's one thing not to be hip to that noise the young'uns are jiving to these days. I fall squarely in that category myself. And I never saw a single episode of Supernova. But not even knowing who Storm is? That's just... unpatriotic.
  
• Olbermann is at it again. When's he going to learn how to cravenly suck up to power, the way real journalists do?
  
• Suddenly, the wingnuts love the International Criminal Court. Some of the time.
  
• The latest mission update for the DSCOVR (nee Triana) probe: Still gathering dust in a warehouse.
  
• On YouTube, a snippet of the famous "Turkey Drop" WKRP episode. But be warned, the period hairstyles are most alarming.
  
• Another movie I'm afraid to see. Radioactive carnivorous flying brains are one thing, but red state true believers are another thing entirely. Yikes!
  
• SCO hit a new 52-week low today. $2.01. That's still overpriced by about $6, but it's a good start.
  
• Karen Armstrong has a piece in the Guardian about anti-Islamic prejudice. Sure is too bad that "religion of peace" (as in any religion) is an oxymoron. And that comes on top of being false, and anti-rational. I try to take a pragmatic position here: if it's false but Mostly Harmless, I'll let it pass without serious criticism. But when people devote their lives to murdering one another to appease some imaginary Bronze Age desert boogeyman in the sky, well, I just sort of have to draw the line.
  
• And yes, it is possible for a religion to be Mostly Harmless. Fundies tend to have a cow about pagans and call them all sorts of ugly names, but if you add up the body count over the last 2000 years, the Christians hold an insurmountable lead. As far as I can tell, the worst offense our fair city's local pagan community has to answer for is some truly dreadful amateur poetry.
  
• Lately I've been waking up to Lebanese coffee from Cafe Najjar in Beirut. I found a packet of their vacuum-packed, ground coffee at a stall in Pike Place Market last time I was in Seattle. I've used up nearly the whole packet, and so far the coffee doesn't appear to contain any WMDs. If you're shocked by that, or you think I'm being brave or foolhardy by "risking it all" here, well, I feel sorry for you. Truly. It's your loss, not mine. The other ground coffee in the house right now is French Market Coffee from New Orleans.
  
• A few Flickr links that're about to spill off the 200-photo limit, while I dither over whether to buy the "premium" account: [1] [2] [3] [4].
  

  ---

  Updated 9/14/2013: I was working on an art post about Cobbletale and vaguely remembered I had an ancient 2006 photo of it, and I wondered where I'd used it. Turns out the only place I'd used it was in the "A few Flickr links" item above, where I merely linked to the photos and didn't even bother inlining them. Not sure why I did that; it's possible we still had dialup back then, I'm not entirely sure. In any case, I'm fairly sure that any reasons I may have had then are obsolete now, and I'm going to go ahead & inline those photos, dammit. So here they are, in all their circa-2006 point-n-shoot glory:

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

interwebbage du jour

I'm working valiantly to reduce the RSS backlog I accumlated due to being out of interweb range for several days. Here's some of the more interesting stuff I've come across since yesterday's link dump:

• OMG ROBOT PONY!!!
  
• OMG BEER CANNON!!!
  
• Today's weird Japanese video
  
• The age of glossy OPML startups is upon us.
  
• From /. : The Poincare Conjecture saga takes another ugly turn.
  
• Talk radio wingnut declares war on lesbofascism. So guys, the line to audition to play Marshal Petain forms on the left. And no cuts. Thx. Mgmt.
  
• In fact, the jihad is already starting. See? SEE???
  
• In retrospect, it was inevitable: A New Zealand horror movie about carnivorous sheep.
  
• Rest in peace, Crimson Executioner.
  
• The latest research on wine chemistry. The article mentions that it may eventually be possible to create synthetic wine that's never been near a grape, much less a rustic Tuscan village. Take that, yuppie twits! I should note that the equivalent happened in the beer world years ago. We call it "Coors Lite", when we have to.
  
• SCO's anti-Linux jihad takes yet another turn for the worse. Jeez, how many turns for the worse is it going to take, already?
  
• Today's dinky Linux gizmo. Awwwwww.....
  
• The Guardian scratches its head about LA for the umpteenth time. Personally, I'm rooting for the pink crown rot virus.
  
• From Treehugger, another fun thing to do with old shipping containers. Plus yet another piece about green roofs. Oh, and bicycles.
  
• The experts seem to think they've discovered a slab full of Olmec poetry. Totally unreadable, of course, since we don't actually know the Olmec language. But hey, if it's really poetry that's probably a good thing.
  
• Seems that the poor US education system has certain advantages after all. Really I ought to be ranting about petty bureaucrats and the abuse of power, but it's just sort of funny. What I really want to know is: Did the customs guy himself know the right answer?
  
• Yet another reason not to eat sea turtles. It's actually altruism on their part: They're absorbing the heavy metals to help protect their silly two-legged landbound friends. I'm sure that's what's going on.
  
• Once again, lurid fiction becomes medical reality.
  
• HumuKonTiki proposes a vast labyrinth of underground tunnels to connect all the world's home tiki bars. May I suggest... a swoopy 50's mole machine, perhaps?
  
• Got beer? Got a helicopter? Brilliant!
  
• It's official: Thailand is weird.
  
• Today's cute echidna.
  
• The Guardian bravely attempts to include differential equations in a business article, and almost succeeds. Don't hold your breath waiting for USA Today to follow suit.
  
• George Allen rides again. As usual, Jon Swift has all the gory details. It all makes sense now. Thank you, Jon!
  
• Jared Leto is teh sux0r. Whoever he is.
  
• The Portland Streetcar is coming to Lake Oswego. It'll be the funnest, most awesome six hour commute you've ever had.
  

Olympics

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As promised, here are a few vacation photos from around Lake Quinault, up on Washington's Olympic Peninsula, mostly near the historic Lake Quinault Lodge.



The frog might be a Northern Red-Legged Frog. It leaped across the trail right in front of me, which was a little surprising, hence the shaky photo. Still, it's an awfully cute frog.

Alone at Tanner Springs

The park was empty, on this grim, rainy afternoon. The lone marigold in the pond was the only clue anyone had been there all day.



I was last there one month ago, almost to the day. Today there was far less water in the pond, and both the algae and goldfish have vanished. I gather the city pays close attention whenever I complain. Ok, the lilypads and spiderwebs were gone as well. So they might've overreacted somewhat. But then, I'm notoriously hard to please, and at least they're trying.



The bottom photo is a detail of the fence along the park's east edge, made of rusty rails from back when the area was a working railyard, with some bits of art glass inserted here-n-there. Through the fence you can barely see a tiny bit of the Lexis condo building. Aside from contending for the most godawful stupid name in the entire Pearl District, it's also a mildly unusual structure: While most Pearl towers are fake stucco and/or brick over concrete, the Lexis has a sleek metal (titanium?) skin over... plywood. Yes. It was originally built as an apartment building, and I distinctly recall seeing a local authority on the real estate scene say it couldn't be converted into condos because it wasn't built to the usual condo standards. Ahh, but recall that there's one born every minute, and so the place was converted almost as quickly as it was built. I wouldn't live there, not even if there was a smoke detector every six inches. But that's just me, with my weird priorities. Sure, it may be an overpriced deathtrap, but it's a super-desirable overpriced deathtrap in an excellent location. Condos here are guaranteed to keep appreciating at 20+% per year from now until Doomsday, or until someone smokes in bed (which is essentially the same thing.) Who could ask for anything more?

[keepalive]

Ok, I'm back from the wilderness now. It's a miracle of modern technology when you can blog from a boat on a remote lake in the back of beyond. But when you can't blog from a boat in the middle of nowhere, it's much, much better. It's good to take a vacation every so often, just to get a little perspective back.

This isn't my "What I did on vacation" post yet, since at the moment I'm simultaneously tired from the trip, and busy catching up with work. This post's called "keepalive" because I sometimes humor myself thinking that some sort of unspecified, unspeakable catastrophe will happen to me, or to this blog, or to my multitudes of Gentle Reader(s), if I fail to post on a regular basis. It makes life more interesting, and it's always nice to feel one's services are required, after all, even when it isn't "true", strictly speaking. I had a cat once who would occasionally decide the linoleum floor in the kitchen was hot lava, and he'd cross the room by leaping from one area rug to another. This post is sort of like that: We'll probably all avoid the hot lava regardless, but why chance it?

While I was away, this humble blog registered visitor #5000, according to the nice folks at Sitemeter. Turns out visitor 5000 showed up here via Technorati, arriving at my recent post marking visitor #4000, specifically the part about recent arrivals from Technorati. And the great wheel of creation turns again, with these recent Technorati arrivals, plus other Technorati and non-Technorati stuff to pad the list up to a respectable length, including a couple of weird search engine hits I got recently.

• Angry and Sloppy
  
• Bizhack
  
• Portland Food & Drink
  
• Pseudobot CO149
  
• City of Roses
  
• Water Studies Photoblog, found via GeoURL.
  
• 1221 SW 4th, Bojack's occasional satire on City Hall blogs.
  
• Hit: program asdf (Which sent people to my recent Registry post, just because I chose to use "asdf" instead of "foo" for once. Wow.)
  
• Hit: chemtrails zum oktoberfest 2006
  
• An article at Reliable Plant magazine, titled Germs, grime, bacteria, and picking our noses at work. Now there's a catchy title for you.
  
• a bunch of conspiracy links, found via that weird "chemtrail" hit. Because if you're going to believe in conspiracy theories, you may as well believe in all of them. You know, just in case.
  

Most of the search hits lately have been for the classics: Windows Registry coding tips, mock chow mein, ortolans, the South Waterfront district, Hercules vs. Hydra, silky anteaters, Kelly Butte, sidewalk ponies, Merche Romero, Saturn 3, and the upcoming UFO apocalypse. The hits just keep on coming. I've been doing this for maybe 9 months or so now, and I still can't get a handle on why some posts really pull in the page views, while others (some of which I really slaved away over a hot keyboard working on) never get a single search hit. Obviously it has to be related to how highly Google ranks the page vs. other pages on the same topic, but how that happens is a real mystery, and Google ain't sayin'. Well, whatever.

So anyway, I'm back, and I'll probably post some photos when I have time this evening or something.

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Some "found on the interwebs" stuff to pass along, since I may as well run with the whole unstructured pseudorandomness thing today:

• Nirvana's Nevermind is 15 years old this month, and I don't feel so young myself anymore. The baby on the cover is old enough to have a long juvenile record by now.
  
• Also from the Mercury, a cat that looks like Orson Welles.
  
• A Shakespearean Insult Generator. Bathe thyself, thou gorbellied, motley-minded moldwarp!
  
• David Brin waxes nostalgic about the joys of line-oriented programming languages, by which he means the classic BASIC language so many of us learned back in the old-sk00l 8-bit days of yore:
  

  
  10 PRINT "HELLO"
  20 GOTO 10
  

  
  
  I have to disagree here. Sure, there ought to be languages easy and accessible enough that kids can learn them, but BASIC is bad for you. It teaches all sorts of bad habits, and it sure doesn't prepare kids for the modern, real world. Just about anything would be better, except maybe Perl, or Intercal. Even back in the day, LOGO was a good alternative to BASIC, and it's a real programming language, a cousin of LISP with some syntactic sugar. Or if we restrict ourselves to languages there's any chance of getting paid to code in, Java is much easier to learn than you might think.
  
• I recently found a copy of Jerry Pournelle's 1984 book The User's Guide to Small Computers, a 1984 collection of some of his classic Byte columns. He discusses the era's programming language options, and as the book goes on you can watch him moving further and further away from line-oriented BASIC as his language of choice, as everyone who uses it will eventually do if other choices are available.
  
• In October, First Thursday will feature hordes of rampaging zombies -- and not of the gazillion-dollar-condo-buying variety, for once. Grarrgh! Brains!
  
• AltPortland has a new section on our fair city's handful of BBQ options.
  
• Seems that the far reaches of industrial NW Portland are soon to be graced with the area's very first vegan pirate bar. Seriously. Their (heavily-flash-laden) website is here. Dialup users may experience a prolonged calming, Zenlike state while the site loads, and loads, and loads.
  
• Seems there'll be a write-in candidate facing Leslie Roberts for that prized judgeship this fall. I don't know enough about the guy to make a decision at this point, but right now I'm leaning towards anyone-but-Leslie-Roberts.
  
• The Portland Public Art blog has a recent post about Columbia River Crystal, which I posted about here. Check out all the security cameras. I guess I'm not the only person who thought that was peculiar. I didn't take any photos of the cameras myself because a.) I hadn't really figured out the photoblogging thing just yet, and b.) if you photograph security cameras, you probably stand a good chance of being labelled an "evildoer" and shipped off to Gitmo or a CIA black site behind the former Iron Curtain.
  

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More:

• Issues of an early-80's journal devoted to the Motorola 68000 of fond memory yet green.
  
• Yet another cute echidna. Awwwwwww....
  
• And a much more technical piece that touches on the genetic makeup of monotremes. Seems they have multiple X (and sometimes Y) chromosomes. But at least they don't have Z and W chromosomes like birds do. That's just all messed up.
  
• Landshark!
  
• Over in the SCO universe, the Canopy Group has gotten a new lease on life with the dubious help of our friends at Solera.
  
• In related news, SCO hit a new 52-week low while I was gone. $2.05. I can hardly wait for the $1 barrier to fall.
  
• Also while I was away, a new ring of Saturn was discovered.
  
• According to El Reg, the next generation of GPU chips may conquer the universe. Hmm. I'm firmly in the "Let's wait and see" camp, especially since right now you need to learn entirely new languages in order to code for these beasties. This sure does look purty, though.
  
• New discovery: a baby Australopithecus afarensis.
  
• And at Cute Overload, a cute lil' snuggle-bat.
  

...wherein I conquer the moon...

It's true. I've conquered the moon. This photo should be all the proof you need.

I'll be off surveying my newly acquired realm for a couple of days, so don't be surprised if there aren't any new posts here until next week some time. I mean, I technically could, probably, but I expect my time will be consumed by assorted toadies and flunkies and grand viziers and other minions, along with the rest of the moon's vast population, all turning out to welcome their new Colossal Yellow Overlord. (If they know what's good for them, I mean.)

Incidentally, the crater I'm sitting on is either Thornton or Pythagoras. It's hard to tell which, because I'm sitting on it, and I can't see the label from here. (Ok, so the first one is only sort-of named "Thornton", technically speaking.) Here's a recent photo of Pythagoras by the dearly departed SMART-1 probe. As you can see, it's not really the most comfortable thing to sit on, but hey, it's the moon, it's not like there's a wide variety of seating options. You don't even get a good choice of colors, unless you're a big fan of grey. Well, whatever. I conquered it fair and square, and it's mine now, warts and all.

Jewett Park excursion

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Here are a few photos of Portland's tiny Jewett Park, a pint-sized triangle of land at the intersection of Vista & Spring St., across the street from Ainsworth School, up in the West Hills. Here's a Google Map of the area, but you really can't see much from above. The photos above show essentially the entire park, and as you can see the place is basically 100% stairs.

A 1998 Sunset Magazine piece titled "Step up to Portland" talks about the still-elusive Little Red Book of Stairs, and relays this tidbit:

A set of stairs in Portland Heights is actually a park in and of itself. The 18 steps leading from a corner of S.W. Spring Street up to Vista are known officially as Jewett Park, named in 1974 after their creator, Bill Jewett. A bronze plaque next to the steps bears this inscription: "There is nothing like sitting on steps in the sun when one has the unparalleled pleasure of doing just nothing at all."

The full text of the plaque, for dialup users who'd rather not download the larger & more legible version of photo #2 (I've added punctuation as needed, rather than mess around with HTML center tags and whatnot.)

This little park is given to the City of Portland for the enjoyment of the children of this neighborhood in memory of my parents and brother: Stanley Guion Jewett, Leslie Weidler Jewett, and Peter Jewett, who lived next door for many years.

William Weidler Jewett
"There is nothing like sitting on steps in the sun when one has the unparalleled pleasure of doing just nothing at all."
1974

That's the only mention I've been able to find about the place anywhere on the net. The city doesn't mention it anywhere, which is a real shame. Its creation was obviously a labor of love, and it's a cozy, tranquil little spot, even with the traffic on Vista. It would be a nice place to sit and read a good book, if the sun was out. All in all, it's a very civilized little urban amenity. Poetic, even. And (so far as I know) it's unique to our fair city, but without the forced-smile quirkiness and cloying twee-ness of certain better-known "uniquely Portland" things (*cough* sidewalk ponies *cough*)

Incidentally, I'm guessing that the Stanley Guion Jewett mentioned above might be Stanley G. Jewett, a wildlife biologist who cowrote several landmark books about the birds of the Northwest. But I could be wrong.

If you're more into extreme action sports, this may not be the place for you, although it might be fun to jump down the stairs on a skateboard, maybe. Technically you're probably not supposed to do that here, so you didn't hear it from me.

It's funny how something created as recently as 1974 seems like a relic of a bygone era. Today's overprotective parents would never let their kids anywhere near these stairs, at least without swaddling them in protective gear. As if kids had any free time to do "just nothing at all" anymore, which they don't. And then there's legal liability issues to worry about, and ADA compliance, and making it "elder-friendly", and there's the vociferous design-junkie community to pacify (and naturally they'll be demanding a kid-hostile "Tanner Springs II", with whirling razor blades this time if possible.), plus the bike fascist community to mollify, and on and on and on. Which is a shame, since these stairs are an interesting use for a weird sloping little parcel of land.

Diagonally across Vista from the park is what's reputed to be one of the city's best pizza restaurants, cleverly hidden high in the West Hills. I haven't been there, but it seems to come highly recommended. And where there's pizza there's usually beer. If you decide to walk, or bike, or unicycle, or otherwise get here under your own power, braving the narrow little streets and giant SUVs and steep hills, you couldn't ask for a more civilized amenity than that.

Alternately, TriMet Bus 51 runs right by the park on its way up to Council Crest, and there's a stop right at Vista & Spring St. If you're a tourist, or you have company in town and you're playing tour guide, you'll probably end up at Council Crest sooner or later anyway. Jewett Park is right on the way there, if you aren't in a hurry and it seems like your cup of tea. I realize it may or may not be. Suffice it to say that I can't think of anything snarky and negative to say about the place, which is quite unusual for me. You can take that as a recommendation, if you like, or as a sign that I've lost touch with my inner edginess, or that someone's bribing me, or blackmailing me, or impersonating me, or whatever.

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Updated 7/7/08: I recently realized I only had two photos of the park in this post, and they really weren't that great, so I thought I'd go take another batch and update this post accordingly. The full set's on Flickr here. The park itself hasn't changed a bit, not that I expected it would.

...wherein I notice the seasons changing...

Dammit, it's autumn. It's official now, so far as I'm concerned. The top photo shows a wave of dark non-summery clouds sweeping into downtown today, right around sunset. Soon it'll begin raining in earnest. No more of this overnight drizzle nonsense; it'll be coming down in buckets, for days, no, for weeks at a time, and I'll have to keep explaining that, yes, that really is a color photo, it's just that everything here is grey. What, grey isn't your favorite color? Is that what you're trying to tell me?



At least we get a bit of fall foliage first (photo #2), although it's nothing like what you'd see in New England or upstate New York. Somehow we make do.

I realize I've been wringing my hands about the seasons a lot lately, as if there was anything I could do about it, I mean, other than buying a monstrous CO2-belching SUV. And with all this blabbering on about foliage and the seasons, I sound like I'm 70 years old, which I'm not. That, or I'm acting like I've never seen any of this before. Somehow having a digital camera and a blog makes you notice the little things more than you otherwise would. I categorically reject any suggestion that I've taken an interest now because I'm not a spring chicken anymore, or that I just don't have anything better to do. And shame on you for even thinking that. Bad! Naughty!

Creatures with a bit more sense than us (oh, and wings) will be migrating soon. And on a not-entirely-unrelated note, it turns out that our fair city is the "Retail" Birthplace of U-Haul. Who knew? There's a historical marker and everything, although you have to trek out to 88th & Foster to find it. (Or so we're told, anyway. I just found this on the net, and that's all I know about it.)

On a more unrelated note, I've finally figured out something that's been puzzling me for months now. At several spots along the streetcar line, and at other locations in the Pearl, there are these motion-sensored spotlights with solar panels attached, aimed at the sidewalk. Sometimes they trigger and click on when you walk by, which can be a little surprising. There's one on SW 10th around Stark or Alder or Washington that clicks on and illuminates a manhole cover in the sidewalk. The first time I saw this it startled me. I thought it must be some sort of inexplicable homeland security measure or utility maintenance aid or something. Turns out the spotlights are part of an art installation titled More Everyday Sunshine, by Harrell Fletcher. It all makes sense now. I had a feeling it might be art, but it isn't labelled anywhere, and the equipment for each light is quite utilitarian, so it was hard to be sure.