...wherein I repent, but not just yet...

A chair under the Fremont Bridge. This chunk of land kind of looks like a city park, but it's owned by the Oregon Department of Transportation, and they don't much care for pedestrians. The place is covered with signs ordering you not to step off the sidewalk under any circumstances, because if you do, you're probably one of those icky homeless people who live under bridges or something, or at the very least you've violated the Law, and therefore it's off to Guantanamo for you, buster.

I actually stepped off the sidewalk a bit so I could take a few photos, although I was legal (I think) when I took this one. Ultra-candid admissions like this are one reason I use a pseudonym when trolling the interwebs.

I'm usually extremely lenient if people want to use photos of mine (in the rare cases where this happens), since I don't plan on making any money off of 'em anyway. But if you want to use this photo for your latest shoegazing indierock album cover, I'm going to need a cut of the proceeds. Thanks.



A discarded "nonpartisan" voters' guide in a trash bin on Lovejoy near one of the streetcar stops. By taking this photo, I got into a long conversation with an older gent who regaled me with tales of crooked politics in Philadelphia. For the first 5 minutes, it's great to find someone else who understands the Electoral College, and after that it's kind of tiresome.



Speaking of politics, here's another great reason to remember to vote in November.



The Fremont Bridge from the new Riverscape development, on Naito Pkwy north of the bridge, between 14th & 18th Avenues.

I've always wished I'd been in town in 1973, when the bridge was built. Seems the whole huge central span was constructed off-site and then barged in and installed as a unit. Call me an engineering geek if you like, but I really would've liked to have seen that.



The pedestrian path at Riverscape, and some of the townhouses. The area actually had a slightly bleak and empty feel to it, but maybe that's just because it's extremely new, and the path doesn't actually connect to anything to the north or south. It almost connects with another greenway segment that's part of the Fremont office complex just south of the bridge; the two pieces are separated by about a block or so of vacant lot, which I think is owned by the city as part of the "Big Pipe" project.



The "Fountain for a Rose" in O'Bryant Square. I risked life and limb for you, my Gentle Reader(s), and walked through the square rather than skirting the edge. You may be surprised to hear this, but I didn't see a single discarded syringe, nor did I see anyone who looked likely to discard a syringe in the near future. Maybe that's because it isn't dark yet, or it's the wrong day of the week, or the square's supposed legions of druggies all saw me coming and all hid somewhere. Or maybe the place just gets an undeserved bad rap from people who haven't been there in years.

---

Updated 1/18/2011: I snipped the first couple of paragraphs off of this post, which didn't add anything and referred to an allegedly "weighty" post I supposedly had in the works and never quite got around to writing. Here they are, for posterity or whatever, mostly because they help explain the title of this post:

It was unsubtly brought to my attention that my recent posts have featured far too many "dull" photos of flowers and fruit and plants generally. This is probably true, quite honestly. Certainly it's true that this blog hasn't been very dialup-user-friendly of late. I promise, the next post will be about a weighty topic, with no graphics whatsoever. More than likely it'll be about North Korea, and perhaps I'll even explain exactly how the current situation ought to be solved, if I figure that out between now and then.

But that post isn't quite ready to go yet, and I'm not quite ready to get on the wagon just yet, so here are a few more photos. No plants, though.

autumnal & fogbound

Ok, so now we're getting our annual helping of autumn fog. Lucky, lucky us. At least it can make for fun photos now and then. I like the middle one with the crow, although taking black and white photos of a crow on a foggy day almost feels like cheating somehow. It's just too easy.



In any case, I'm much too busy to do the traditional all-out Friday linkdump today, but here are a few odds and ends I ran across in my spare moments:

• Meet Mus cypriacus, a newly-discovered mouse species endemic to Cyprus. Well, ok, "newly-discovered" in the sense that nobody realized they were a separate species until now, although it seems they're a local household pest on the island.
  
• Here's your friendly neighborhood reminder about tomorrow's Fresh Hop Festival at the Lucky Lab pub in NW Portland. Mmmm.... Hops....
  
• Another bit about the new Broadway Brewery over on (you guessed it) NE Broadway. The review kind of misses the point, unfortunately, going on about the food and barely mentioning the beer. I dropped by a week ago, and found the place quite pleasant. Sadly, they don't have their Hop On on tap at the Broadway location just yet, but hey, they're new. It'll all work out eventually. I mean, sheesh, nobody goes to ice cream restaurants and complains about the beer, so what's with the double standard here, eh? :)
  
• Meanwhile, here's a new (to me) drinking game you might enjoy (Legal Disclaimer: Responsibly! Responsibly!!!): Edward 40 Hands. Because nothing improves the beerdrinking experience like a big roll of duct tape.
  
• And xkcd teaches us a valuable lesson about words that end in "GRY".
  

autumnal & roseate

Back in the distant pre-digital camera days of yore, I never noticed all the trees and shrubs bearing fruit (inedible fruit, probably) this time of year. Here are two more examples, plus some nice red-orange leaves I saw this morning. If you want to split hairs, some of the colors here aren't precisely "roseate", strictly speaking, but it's a nice word, and I wanted to use it. Possibly either "rubicund" or "erubescent" would be more accurate, but really, you have to draw the line somewhere. Unless you're writing Victorian epic poetry, and really you shouldn't be in this day and age, "erubescent" is a little twee. Ok, more than a little, even if you're writing poetry of any kind (and really you shouldn't be in this day and age).

...wherein I continue battling that pesky cold...

This pic tries to show what it's like to have this cold. For accuracy, I'd need to add swirls of some of those garish colors on the far side of octarine, but the JPEG format doesn't support those, so this really and truly is the best I can do. So anyway, avoid this cold, if you can. If you don't own any venetian blinds that can support your weight, you're in for a long, long drop.

wellness, perchance

I still have that damn cold, but I've heard that alcohol is a great antiseptic, and I'm currently experimenting, trying to figure out what the required dosage might be, using the participant-observer methodology. In the meantime, it's been (mildly) interesting exploring what it's like to be a stupid person. In the event that I survive, I'd like to thank the nice folks at Girardet and Bendistillery.

So I've got a few more links to dump. If this turns out to be a posthumous post, or the last post before they shipped me off to the State Home for the Extra-Special, well, this probably isn't much of an epitaph. Oh, well. I tried. Honest.

• Whomp Power has yet another take on the Great Hops Apocalypse of 2006.
  
• It's like a bird, but made out of butter. Mmmmm.... butter.....
  
• BBSpot asks Which OS are you?. I turned out to be PalmOS, same as Snabulus. Which isn't so bad; I wrote a few k3wl Palm apps back in the day, and it's good to have the occasional reminder to not assume an int is at least 32 bits, plus coding for a Palm (the last time I did it, anyway) is like coding for a Mac circa 1986, so it's like deja vu all over again.
  
• BBSpot also asks what programming language I am, and I am C++, which is basically true, except for the occasional Java foray, and the too-occasional longing gaze at Ruby. Oh, and Objective-C is niiiice too.
  
• Speaking of Objective-C, AAPL is tweaking the language for MacOSX 10.5. They ain't sayin' just how just yet, but here are some clues.
  
• What, you haven't already given up on Orson Scott Card? Masochist...
  
• More evidence that the Daily Show is just as useful, or just as useless, as the traditional evening news.
  
• NEC has a shiny new chip that supposedly can play HD-DVD and Blu-Ray discs. Wake me up when that hits the market. Until then, I'm boycotting both, just to teach the bastards a lesson about the usefulness of industry standards.
  
• Turns out that being an unlawful combatant has a bright side: You get to have all sorts of fun drugs. On the other hand, if Dubya commits the country to another stupid war based on some random assclown's bad acid trip, I will be very, very unhappy.
  
• At least we're fortunate that our Glorious Leader is an artistic soul at heart. Here's his rendition of John Lennon's Imagine.
  
• A bit of nautical fun with spare change up in the San Juans.
  
• A bit on Web 2.0 security risks.
  
• New near-IR pics of the asteroid, er, dwarf planet Ceres.
  
• The very latest from the eternal cult of Amiga.
  
• And the latest coolness from Saturn, in case you aren't sick of all that coolness just yet.
  
• Meanwhile, in Japan, it's giant jellyfish season again.
  
• A few not-so-recent Guardian pieces about difficult British topics: food, dogs, and the Boer War.
  
• One great fringe benefit of having OSDL in town is that we figure in people's naming schemes. The latest example: Portland 1.0 is supposed to be the Grand Unification of GNOME and KDE. So we'll see how that turns out in RL, but I like the name, anyway.
  
• Some fun with Google code search.
  
• Looks like Hans Reiser may be an evil murdering scumbag. Don't give the guy any sympathy just because you like his filesystem, any more than you'd give OJ extra sympathy because of what he did on the football field.
  
• I know lots of guys who will drool themselves silly over this. You know who you are, so I won't name names.
  
• And I knew all along that those rubber duck derby events were a terrible idea.
  
• And last but not least, today's crop of cute semi-cuddly-wuddly echidnas: catching some rays, strolling on the beach, nibbling on some ants, also eating ants, avoiding people, hanging out with the French, and eating ants. Oh, and waddling about on video, of course.
  

uncommon cold edition

I'm trying to recover from a nasty head cold, so right now I don't have anything interesting to say about much of anything. In lieu of any sparkling insights about the universe, here are a few recent photos, plus a few randomish links further down the page.


Some interesting fall fruit or berries on some sort of deciduous tree. I'm hoping one of this blog's "many" Gentle Reader(s) might be able to identify this tree, because I sure can't. Back in my Boy Scout days, they didn't spend a lot of time teaching us to identify deciduous trees, because it's the Northwest, and we're all about conifers here.


The latest symptom of our fair city's desperate shortage of the letter 'Y'.




Two photos of the salmon fountain tucked away in the parking garage in the SE corner of the Lloyd Center Mall, just south of the Sears store. I'd heard rumors there was a fountain lurking somewhere in the vast reaches of the garage, but I'd never seen it until just a few days ago. So here it is.



Near the fountain, there's a sort of art installation consisting of maybe half a dozen boxes like this one, each containing a consumer object of some sort, and with some words on the outside of the box as a sort of ode to the joy of shopping. Someone came along later and defaced this one a little: Note the word "KILL!" on the glass over the teddy bear. The window on the other side has the word "SHOP!". Reasonable people can disagree, of course, but I think this kind of adds to the art rather than detracts from it. Well, I mean, in the sense that it then becomes an example of the art world's usual boilerplate critique of consumerism and pop culture. You probably can't graduate art school anymore without doing something really absurd and cruel to a Barbie doll at least once.


Speaking of consumerism, here are the shiny new delivery vans at the New Seasons grocery store on Division. Now I can be lying at home, sick as a dog, and a nice shiny van will come and bring me beer. Mmm.... Beeeeer....

• The new Axis of Evil: elephants and catfish, and Deepak Chopra.
  
• Don't forget to "Stick a Yellow Ribbon on your SUV".
  
• And "Don't Be Afraid of the Neocons".
  
• And here's a highly relevant reason to remember October 9th , 1968.
  
• From Bojack, the latest on Hawthorne parking meters and the plan to sell part of Mt. Tabor Park.
  
• A couple of weird empty buildings in downtown Portland.
  
• The latest in extraterrestrial communications, the French way, and the Aztec way.
  
• And just in time for winter, NASA has (allegedly) found the cure for cold toes. Yay!
  
• The same wild-n-crazy guys who recently used the Metolius River as a wort chiller now have their eyes firmly set on that fountain in Pioneer Courthouse Square:
  

  
  ... or at the very least, it might be illegal and we’ll get chased down the streets of downtown by the police with a carboy of steaming wort in our hands.
  

  
  
  
  
  

sidewalk chalk quasi-extravaganza

Our fair city is either blessed or plagued with sidewalk chalk artistes. The stuff is everywhere. Sidewalk chalk is surprisingly hard to photograph (for me), so I had to do a bit of amateur GIMP-fu on these.

I labelled this a "faun" on Flickr but I'm not actually sure what it's supposed to be. Something mythological, probably, or pseudo-mythological. It was in front of the PNCA building last Thursday. Yes, it was First Thursday, but I was just walking through the area on a beer run. I'm serious. Honest.

I also happened to run across a group of zombies, who I thought were part of the Zombie Apocalypse we'd been promised by the Mercury. Turns out they were handing out coupons for someone's Halloween haunted house. Damn. Now even the freakin' zombies have sold out. WTF is this world coming to?


I happened to walk through Pettygrove Park one day a while back, and found that someone had recently been there with chalk. Lots and lots of chalk. This was actually taken in broad daylight, but I think it looks better with this sort of black light effect. You know, for Halloween, etc.


I lost the left edge of this quote, unfortunately; it reads: "The era of procrastination, of half ass measures, of baffling expedients, is coming to an end. In its place, we are entering a period of consequences".

I'm not sure whose initials those are on the quote, but it actually originates with Winston Churchill, and the anonymous chalk auteur misquotes him slightly. He didn't say "half ass", naturally; that part actually reads "of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients". I know this because googling on "baffling expedients" or "period of consequences" brings up a large number of hits. All politicians love this quote. It's decisive, yet generic. It asserts we've been ignoring situation X, and now we have to face situation X, but without naming situation X, or specifying the action that must now be taken. It's useful in all sorts of circumstances. Al Gore quoted it in An Inconvenient Truth. Then-Governor George W. Bush used it in a speech at the Citadel in Charleston, SC, way back in September 1999, when he was fixin' to run for his current job. The speech itself is interesting, laying out his plans to transform the military, which is something that's now usually blamed on Rumsfeld. It looks like the buck doesn't stop at the Defense Secretary's desk after all.


This was on the sidewalk outside the Sears store at the Lloyd Center Mall. This'll really teach those corporate-lovin' Sears shoppers, and next time they'll wise up and buy Birkenstocks instead. Oh, wait, Birkenstocks are made of leather; they need to buy something that's kinda like a Birkenstock, but made of organic hemp, or mud, or tofu, or something like that, no matter how much more they cost. Also, shopping at the Mall is not allowed. You need to buy directly from the person who made them, or make them yourself, or do without shoes entirely. And if you can find a local shoemaker, someone with acceptable ideological bona-fides, of course, it has to be a barter transaction, because money is corporate. Maybe you can wash their recumbent bicycle every Saturday for six months, or make them an organic macrame plant hanger, possibly. Or give them copies of some old Dead shows you have on tape. (You do have some of those, right?) And then everyone smokes a bowl, and the whole world is all rainbows and unicorns and crap.

I absolutely agree that child labor is awful. I wholeheartedly agree that cheap overseas labor eliminates jobs and drives down wages here. But I'm not convinced the correct response is to go around lecturing working class people, the very people most affected by declining wages, people who maybe can only afford to shop at discount stores like Sears or Wal-Mart. Telling them they need to be paying a lot more for the basic necessities of life, in the name of ethical purity, but neglecting to mention how they're supposed to afford it. That makes very little sense to me. That's like trying to cure poverty by instructing the poor to buy mansions in Beverly Hills: If they do, clearly they aren't poor anymore, therefore Mission Accomplished. Feh.

A complete Shimkus

Ok, I'm not quite done with the Foleygate posts just yet. It seems that now John Shimkus, the head of the House page board, has decided he needs to go on the warpath too, and is demanding apologies from the Democrats for allegedly leaking the scandal. You know, because just like the wiretap thing, and the torture thing, the leak is the real scandal, not the act itself. At least that's how it is in the beltway universe. The politicians are outraged, and they demand to know why we can't just leave them alone and let them do their dirty deeds in peace.

The perfect response has already been made, by Nancy Pelosi's spokesperson:

"Republicans just don't get it; every mother in America is asking how Republicans could choose partisan politics over protecting kids, and the Republicans are still asking who could have blown their cover-up," Pelosi spokeswoman Jennifer Crider said.

I admit the title of this post is a cheap shot. I'm making fun of the guy's surname, implying it stands for something obscene, or at least scatological. It's true that he's a congressman, but some of his ancestors who shared his surname might (in theory) have been normal, law-abiding citizens who just happened to have a silly last name. But in this day and age, people don't really understand anything more complex than that, so I might as well, and it'll probably help reel in the Google hits. My original Foley post ended up with a ton of hits just because I used the term "Maf54" in the name, and for a while I was in the top 10 search results for Foley's nym. And if I've learned anything from the Republican response to the scandal, it's that the absolutely most important thing is to figure out how to misuse the scandal du jour for short-term personal advantage. Look at all the R's jockeying for Hastert's job even as we speak. So clearly I can't be doing anything wrong here. You probably ought to elect me to something, if you know what's good for you.

it's photo phriday again...

...in other words, no massive link dump today, I'm afraid. I'd gotten to about 3 Firefox windows full of maybe a dozen tabs each, full of all sorts of scintillating, quirky bits-o-the-web, when Firefox suddenly died on me. Splut. This probably had something to do with the latest Mars photos from MRO, which clearly show the tiny rover Opportunity on the edge of a huge crater. And not just the rover; you can actually see the rover's shadow in the picture, if you squint a little. The full size JPG of the crater runs around 16MB(!), and even that's a small excerpt of a much larger 100MB JPG image. Dang...

(One scintillating, quirky bit did survive in an email, at least. Here is the Nietzsche Family Circus, which pairs random Family Circus cartoons with random Nietzsche quotes. It sounds weird, but it's really funny. Ok, to me. I could sit there and hit refresh for hours, but maybe I'm weird that way.)

I'm also not real keen on doing another Foley post just now, and not posting anything at all isn't really an option, so instead here are a few more recent(ish) photos from around downtown Portland:



A defaced "No Smoking" sign at a bus shelter on SW 1st, downtown.





Two pics of the mysterious hand sculpture in a parking lot at NW 5th & Glisan. I really like the wadded-up pair of jeans wedged between the pinkie and ring finger.



Grapevines at the tiny catholic church on 5th near PSU.



Some late-season wildflowers, also near PSU.



A cutesy, yet bossy sign ordering dog owners not to allow their pets to do any business next to this tree. This tree sits outside someone's ritzy townhouse in the Pearl, if you hadn't guessed that already.

I especially like the bit with the bike cable around the sign to prevent anyone from stealing it.

today's fall photo harvest

I'm taking color photos while I still can, as the long grim black-n-white months are nearly upon us. I admit I did take a few early b+w pics a couple of weeks ago when we had a bit of rain. I wandered around the Pearl trying to take pics to make the place look drab and grim and industrial. (I posted a few of those pics here last friday.) I cheefully admit that using b+w is a form of cheating on that point -- and not just plain vanilla cheating; this is Amateur(ish) Photography 101-level cheating. But so be it. It does usually work, after all.



Until the rainy season really begins in earnest, I can get by with another old chestnut from the Amateur(ish) Photography 101 bag of tricks: Beads Of Water On Stuff. Again, it often works pretty well, which is why it's an old chestnut. Also, anything with autumn leaves usually turns out ok, plus people will cut you slack if the work isn't absolutely top-notch, since there's this common notion that pictures of leaves turning or falling are sort of a metaphor for something or other. Or possibly a simile, or maybe an analogy. Or whatever.

Kirk Fordham: human sacrifice

So now ABC's reporting that Foley/Reynolds staffer Kirk Fordham has been thrown into the volcano by the Repugnican leadership in hopes of quieting the growing scandal. Somehow, I have this feeling the beltway scandal gods won't be appeased by the sacrifice of a mere chief of staff, a guy nobody'd ever heard of before outside Capitol Hill. Wonkette has the story here.

(Never heard of the scandal gods? Most people haven't, so let me try to explain. I'm not religious, and I don't believe in the scandal gods myself, but our nation's leaders do believe. That's the single fact that explains just about everything. It seems that every now and then, the scandal gods become angry, for reasons no mortal can ever hope to understand. So then a scandal erupts. The scandal isn't anyone's fault, it's certainly not because anyone's done something wrong, it's just that the gods sometimes get angry for inexplicable reasons of their own. Since it's always hopeless to try to understand what all the fuss is about, the answer is to just start throwing people into the volcano until the gods are appeased and the problem goes away, and life returns to normal, exactly like it was before. What's sad is that the scandal-god cult persists because throwing random underlings into the bubbling lava appears to work a lot of the time.)

One interesting thing is that the aforementioned ABC story asserts Hastert himself gave Fordham the heave-ho. Which is sort of irregular. Didn't that job belong to Thomas Reynolds, Fordham's actual boss? I guess when everyone's worried about saving their own skins, protocol falls by the wayside.

Oh, and Reynolds really, really wants you to know that he had absolutely no clue what his own chief of staff was up to. Ok, yeah, I'm sure that must be 100% true.

An earlier ABC piece questions Hastert's future as Speaker. Included is a bit from that slimeball Grover Norquist, who has the notion that Republicans can turn the whole thing around to their advantage by harping on the timing of the story, and trying to figure out who leaked it. I guess that's the only thing they've really got to go on, but Norquist's notion that everything will be fine if the R's just attack critics instead of cleaning house, well, that's the sign of someone who's been inside the beltway for too damn long and has lost touch with the outside world.

Norquist's not the only one who wants to go on the warpath. Hugh Hewitt seems to think the real guilty parties are the liberal media and the Democrats. Well, he would, wouldn't he. Big surprise there. Something tells me the R's have operatives scouring the country right now, trying to identify the pages who "leaked" the story to ABC, so they can get the full Anita Hill treatment.

The striking thing to me is how scripted the whole scandal feels. And I don't mean just politicians here. The media response to scandal follows an absolutely rigid template. Everyone asks precisely the same questions, we get the same tired duelling quotes for the requisite number of news cycles, and in the end the problem "goes away" when a key figure or two are offered up as scapegoats, and resign, or get fired and/or convicted. And nobody presses for reforming the system that led to the abuses. What's the point of having a big scandal if nothing changes as a result? If the result is always just that the media and public get jaded and it doesn't even make the papers next time it happens, that should be a sign that the system is fundamentally broken and no longer able to self-correct when it's abused.

It wasn't always like this. Here's a WaPo guest piece by Joseph Califano, describing the last scandal involving Congressional pages back in 1983. I sure do miss the days when we had grownups running the country. Grownups, and people who had basic respect for the institution they went to DC to be part of. The current leadership came to Washington precisely because they hated government and wanted to run the whole thing into the ground, by any means necessary (witness Norquist's infamous remark about drowning the government in a bathtub). And on that count, at least, I have to say they're doing a heck of a job.

---

Updated: Ok, now Hastert himself has gone on the warpath. I'd never seen that spectacle before, and it looks sort of like the movie Beverly Hills Ninja, starring Chris Farley as the aforementioned ninja. Yes, the movie's a comedy, not a drama. Anyway, Hastert wants us all to know that the whole thing is a Democratic conspiracy, in fact, it's all Bill Clinton's fault. No, I'm not exaggerating, he really thinks -- or at least says -- the scandal is the work of some sort of dark Clintonian cabal. Wow. Fascinating. Oh, and George Soros is involved, too, of course. While there probably are some wingnuts out there who still froth at the mouth, Pavlov-style, at the mere mention of Clinton, something tells me this isn't going to be the magic formula that makes it all better for poor ol' Dennis. All in all, today's trial balloons weren't very impressive, so it's going to be fun to see what tomorrow's crop looks like.

The same piece mentions that Roy Blunt, the Republican whip, is also repositioning himself away from Hastert now. As far as I'm concerned, Hastert is a complete nonentity, and nothing will actually change based on whether he stays or goes. The only reason I'd like to see him go is to watch the fratricidal infighting within the Republican ranks as people jockey for the Speaker's gavel, hopefully right before the election. That would be niiiiiiice.

---

Even more Hastertia from the "liberal media":

• The NYT claims Hastert said he'd resign if it'd help the party. By doing so, he convinced Paul Weyrich to retract his call for Hastert's resignation. DC is a weird, weird place.
  
• An NYT editorial speculating about the R's using the scandal to go on an anti-gay jihad.
  
• A perceptive opinion piece about the scandal at the Seattle P-I.
  
• The same paper has a bit about Newt Gingrich reappearing to inform us all that Democratic sex scandals are vastly worse than this Foley business. And he should know, since he was cheating on his wife while he was leading the fight to impeach Clinton, and he divorced one of his previous wives while she was in the hospital being treated for cancer. Yeah. Gingrich is a total expert on this stuff.
  
• Here's a Sidney Blumenthal piece about Foley written for the Guardian.
  
• Even the Times of London is less than supportive, and they're a Murdoch media property, let's not forget.
  

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...