monday image-o-rama

So we're finally seeing the beginning of the end of our wintry drabness and grimness. Or at least it's the beginning of the beginning of the end. It's not quite prime photo season yet, but here are a few anyway....




Detail of the hat sculpture in Pioneer Courthouse Square. I can't find a lot of info on this thing (understandable, since it's really tiny), but someone else has a photo of it on this page.




A weird sunset in downtown Portland, taken about a month ago.




Did I mention it was almost spring? Here's more evidence.




Me, kicking it with my Argonath homies...

Portland Exposé

So I recently got my hands on a copy of Portland Exposé, a cheesy grade-Z crime pic from 1957. It combines two of my favorite topics on this blog: local history, and awful, awful movies. The thing was actually filmed here, at least in part -- and as everyone knows, basically all movies filmed here are horrendous. It's pretty much a law of nature, but that's a subject for another post. Stumptown Confidential has a bunch of stills here and here, and there's a fun local review of the thing at Duck Duck Book Trying to figure out exactly where the thing was filmed is half the fun (including the top photo, which I'll get to in a bit.) Making fun of the movie is the other half. And the movie really is fun, at least in a so-bad-it's-good way.

The film is one half of a double-feature disc titled Forgotten Noir Vol. 1 (which Netflix has here), and once you see it, you'll understand why it was forgotten. And don't think it just hasn't aged well; the NY Times reviewed it when it came out, and the reviewer was highly unimpressed.



You might be wondering why Hollywood set the movie here, back in an era when our fair city was even more obscure than it is now. Seems there was a highly colorful corruption scandal here back in the 50's, as depicted in Phil Stanford's book Portland Confidential. (slabtown chronicle has more on the book here). Yes, it was an era of hard-drinking tough guys in fedoras, gun molls, crooked cops, the mob, the whole deal. We had it all, and half a century on it's pretty much impossible not to romanticize the whole thing. Anyway, the movie came out on the heels of the scandal, just in time to cash in on our city's fleeting notoriety. The plot isn't related to the actual scandal, though, except for the location and the mob angle. Everything else is the invention of the screenwriter's fevered, yet oddly prudish, imagination.

The executive summary version of our story: Our hero is a humble innkeeper, and he and his family have an establishment somewhere on the outskirts of our fair city. Everything seems idyllic and peaceful until organized crime moves in. They offer our hero a deal he can't refuse, and overnight the inn becomes quite the popular night spot. He's not happy, but he's making tons of money. But then, an icky henchman takes a liking to our hero's underaged daughter, and it's payback time. He takes what is apparently a middle-management job in the crime syndicate. They run just like a proper 50's business: Everyone wears a suit, and the accounting department keeps meticulous records, which is convenient. But little do the evildoers know that our hero is actually in cahoots with the G-men. He's going around taping conversations like mad, using a huge tape recorder he hides under his suit. This can't go on for long without being discovered, and it doesn't. But just when the baddies are about to do unspeakable things to our hero and his daughter, the G-men burst in, there's a nice big fistfight, and Public Order is restored once again. The End!

But this doesn't really do the film justice. For that, we'll need the traditional bullet-points-o-crap format:

• One important lesson we learn from the film: It's a slippery, slippery slope into the clutches of the mob, and it all starts with pinball. No, seriously, it does. Bear with me here. Sure, you start out thinking you're dealing with a reputable pinball dealer, but sooner or later the mob horns in on his turf, and then you belong to them. Pinball is fine for the kiddies, as we all know, but it has a vague corrupting influence on grownups who play. No, really, it's a 100% totally true scientific fact. Ask anyone.
  
• Since pinball turns responsible adults into amoral gambling fiends, from there it's a short step to slot machines, and once you've got slot machines all hell breaks loose: Drinking, dancing, carousing... At this point it just seems like the mob has a better idea of how to run a fun nightclub than our hero does. Oh, but they have bigger plans. Hookers, dope, guns, "illegal surgery", the whole deal. And once you've got that first pinball machine, there'll be no stopping any of it, so be warned!
  
• You'd think that as popular as pinball apparently was back then, they could've found actors who knew how to pretend they were playing. But noooo. Someone really ought to have explained what those little buttons on the sides were for.
  
• The old lady freaking out when she wins at the slot machine is a real hoot, too, shrieking and grabbing coins off the floor. I think we're supposed to gasp at the utter depravity of it all. You know, because only depraved people are happy when they win stuff. I gather that's the message we're supposed to get from this shot. I'm not entirely sure.
  
• A lot of the main characters in the movie are so old for their parts it's almost surreal. The teenage daughter looks about 28, and her allegedly clean-cut fraternity boyfriend looks about 40. And the mom looks about 60.
  
• A striking thing is what they leave out of the litany of lurid sins: Nobody suggests there's anything wrong with letting your customers get completely soused and then drive home in gigantic V8-powered sedans with knobby little tires and no seat belts or other modern safety equipment. And when the daughter's boyfriend decides she must be "easy" because her dad owns a popular night spot, everyone laughs off the attempted date rape as an innocent misunderstanding. Oh, and everyone smokes, of course. That goes without saying.
  
• On the other hand, in 2007 just about every bar in town has slot machines, in their modern "video slots" incarnation. And every last one of them is owned and operated by the state. We all have a patriotic duty to go down to the local watering hole and drop a couple of twenties on the video slots, to help keep the state solvent for another year. Although many of us continue to neglect our patriotic duties, present company included. I just don't see the attraction, myself.
  
• At one point there's a speech by a heroic labor union leader(!) who says the rank and file oppose all this organized crime business, and it's time to root it out. He even helps direct the police crackdown on the baddies, which is unusual given what little I know about the normal police chain of command. I guess this character's presence is supposed to combat the prejudices of the day, when in the public eye the unions were all a bunch of crooks and commies. This is one of the movie's rare attempts to be broad-minded, so I figured I ought to at least mention it.
  
• There's a guy in the movie who's the big boss in town, the capo de capos, who we only ever see from behind, talking on the phone. For all the movie's pious moralizing, it goes to great lengths to give the baddies a certain mystique. Kids, do you want to grow up to be our sour-faced hero, proprietor of the No Fun Cafe way out in the boonies, or do you want to be Mr. Big?
  
• Did I mention the huge tape recorder yet? We're talking almost shoebox-sized here, and somehow our hero hides it under his suit. Suits were baggy in those days, I guess. Not only is the recorder really freakin' gigantic, our hero couldn't be less discreet about recording people. He's got this microphone on a cord he whips out and waves around when he thinks the baddies aren't looking. Naturally that's how he gets caught.
  
• Frank Gorshin's character is really, really, really creepy. Surprisingly so for a movie of this age. When the other baddies off him for being a liability, you kind of want to cheer them on. Sadly, it's no longer possible for gangsters to dispose of unwanted persons by dumping them on the railroad tracks near Union Station. The area's full of upscale condos now. Someone would be bound to hear the commotion.
  
• The airport scenes don't look anything like the present-day airport. My guess is that we're seeing the old terminal that sat off of Marine Drive. I understand it's still in use today, strictly for cargo. On the other hand, the "new" terminal has been remodeled and expanded so many times that anything left from 1957 would be unrecognizable.
  
• The high-class madam our hero picks up at the airport seems like someone's grandma, and isn't very scary at all. When she explains her hopes to have a proper, classy operation, with all educated girls and no "dipsos" or "hopheads", it almost sounds like a civic improvement program, at least by the standards of the day. If the movie's to be believed, even the crooks of the day were quite a judgmental lot. There were unwritten, informal, but very rigid rules to the game, and the rules were strictly enforced. Laws on the books, not so much. Everyone agreed on what constituted "vice" and tut-tutted about it constantly, but at the same time society was happy to tolerate a bit of naughtiness here and there, so long as it stayed within certain boundaries. "Vice" never poked its head out of the back alleys, and polite society averted its eyes, and people seemed to be content with the hypocrisy for decades on end.
  
  And then the hippies came along a few years later and upended the apple cart. No wonder the older generation hated them so much.
  
• Although now in 2007, being a "hophead" is perfectly legal in Oregon, so long as you have a note from your doctor and an official state ID card. We want the program to be respectable, so it isn't quite PC to say that we have the hippies to thank for it, but we do. Admit it.
  
• The bridge and phone booth scenes (go check the Stumptown Confidential stills) look like the Stark St. bridge over the Sandy at Troutdale, and west-side approach to the bridge. But that's a wild guess. I don't think there's a phone booth there anymore. Actually you won't find a phone booth much of anywhere anymore.
  
• And about that top photo. It's of what I think was the baddies' lair in the movie, since there aren't a lot of buildings that style around here. It's at NW 11th & Davis, and although it's just a parking garage at present, it's right in the middle of a hugely desirable part of the ultra-upscale Pearl District. The Brewery Blocks are right next door, including the new theater in the old Armory building, and a bunch of top-tier chain stores. Powell's is about a block away. Our sleek Euro-licious streetcar has a couple of stops right nearby. The whole area is besieged with affluent shoppers and smug gazillionaire locals and their darling weimaraners. And everything's all so squeaky clean and glossy. Spend a few short minutes in the area and you'll start to miss those sleazy, film noir-ish days of yore.
  
  (Ok, more likely you'll miss the idea of those days. I suspect that life in the "wide-open" Portland of 50's could get pretty nasty, brutish, and short if you happened to know the wrong people. People weren't in the business just for the cars and broads and snappy suits.)
  

another sign of spring...

A few flowers I ran across in the Pearl District earlier today. I'm a bit out of practice so the pics aren't up to my usual standards, such as they are. Oh, well. The top two are crocuses, I'm not sure what the third one is, other than it's a bulb of some sort.



Sure the weather's still awful, but another sign of spring is always welcome. And spring means another season of my wife teasing me about posting all these photos of flowers, and none of people. Oh, well. If I wanted to, I could probably come up with a long list of snarky and misanthropic reasons why flowers are better than people, generally speaking, but I'm not in the mood right now. Maybe later.




Bonus photo: A fun sign on one of the trees on the downtown transit mall. They're tearing the whole thing up right now for MAX construction, except for these trees.

Jesus Sighting in Albany

My wife found this in the Albany police blotter a couple of weeks ago:

Jesus sighting -
Police responded at about 2:45 p.m. Tuesday to a report of a man dressed like a sheik or Jesus throwing things off the Santiam Highway overpass.

According to a police dispatch report, an officer contacted the man, who was wearing a "Jesus outfit" and holding a sign that said "Jesus saves". He told the officer that he had occasionally waved at cars on the freeway, which might have been mistaken for throwing things.

So now when we're driving along the freeway and see someone on an overpass, one of us is bound to exclaim "Look, it's a sheik or Jesus!"

I guess you'd probably have to be there.

The same paper also had an item from the Corvallis fire department. Old electric blanket overheats and sets mattress on fire in sorority house. Sorority sisters scream and cower in fear, until a team of hunky firefighters shows up and saves the day. And then out of nowhere a funky bass line starts playing, and there's a few lines of bad dialogue, and then everyone gets naked, and... wait, I'm not so sure about the last part. That might've been from a movie or something.

Oh, and remember that dream Disney wedding I mentioned the other day? The one that was going to have wall-to-wall coverage on Entertainment Tonight? (Not E!, as it turns out; I got the two confused, I can't imagine how that happened). The one a certain relative of mine was attending? So far as I know the happy day proceeded as planned, but tragically it didn't make the tabloid shows. Preempted by Anna Nicole. Hell, on Thursday it was preempted by Anna Nicole and a piece about a really gross 1000 lb. man. I guess that'll be a fun story to tell the grandkids.

In any case, this week I spent more time watching celebrity tabloid news than I have in decades, probably. I don't think I'm exaggerating there. If only I knew who half of those people were, I might've gotten more out of the experience. As it is, it's just five hours out of my life that I'm not going to get back. Someone owes me much beer.

Ready, Set...

It's not spring yet. It's nowhere even close to being spring yet, and we've still got months of rain and darkness ahead of us. But if you look closely, you might notice a few tentative signs here and there that winter doesn't actually last forever.

It's said that spring begins on the equinox, which is about 5 weeks away now. But everyone knows the real start of spring doesn't come for another couple of weeks, with our fair city's annual Spring Beer & Wine Festival. Mmmmm..... Beeeer....

Reason #687 why anonymity is a Good Thing

I would never admit to this if I used my real name here. If you've been paying attention, and I hope you haven't been, on Valentine's Day there's going to be this sickly-sweet "fantasy wedding" at Cinderella's castle at Disney World, involving a local couple from the Portland area. They won the all-expenses-paid 50 guest bash in a bridal magazine essay contest. A close relative of mine is a friend of the happy couple, and will be attending the joyous event. Among other things, this will involve the musical stylings of Michael Bolton (not the one from Office Space), and posing for the ever-roving E! network cameras. I gather it's pretty much going to be part wedding, part mini-reality show. And said close relative is quite excited about the whole thing. I mean, a wedding, and free tickets to Disney World too. Could it get any better than that?

Eeewwww. Cringe. Shudder. Gag. Anonymity means people who know me in RL can't connect the dots and make fun of me in person. And they would, too, simply for sharing some DNA with someone who voluntarily danced to Michael Bolton. Anonymity also means that if this relative (who I do like, except for the occasional lapse in good taste and judgment) runs across it, he or she won't know it's me, or at least won't be able to prove it. I mean, hurting people's feelings isn't the point of this, not at all. I'm just saying I wouldn't have gotten married at Disney World for any reason, for any amount of money. And if I'd so much as suggested it, my wife would've immediately called the whole thing off, and she would've been right to.

Oh, and while I'm reveling in being anonymous, another close relative has a small Measure 37 claim in the works. I think this particular claim has a certain amount of merit, but if I said so and signed my name to it, I'd have pitchfork-wielding Pearlies and bike fascists and such showing up at my door waving torches and demanding blood. And I'm really not up for that, quite honestly.

tram, tram, tram, yada, yada, yada

If I really, truly cared about gaining street cred as an Important Local Blogger, I probably ought to say something about the Burnside-Couch Couplet thing. But I've never really been one for poetry, quite honestly. So instead, here are even more pics of our fair city's shiny new aerial tram. If I'm boring you, I humbly apologize. I just might say a few words about the couplet whatzit before I'm done, if I feel like it.



The tram, with the moon. I trust neither requires an introduction at this point.



The tram doing its thing, from Lair Hill Park. In the foreground, part of Land Form, a 70's-era sculpture by Bruce West. Portland Public Art has a fun, snarky look at this and other works by Mr. West. For the life of me, I never will understand that era's fascination with brownish rusting chunks of steel. But posing it with the tram seemed, y'know, artistic. The usual art world phraseology is that the two are "carrying on a dialogue" with each other, or some such. But if so, what are they saying? I took the photo and even I have no idea, so it's probably safe to assume they aren't saying anything at all.



Sunset with aerial tram. You can almost see all the rich doctors on board, squinting and shielding their eyes. At least now they have an excuse to buy those $3000 Italian sunglasses they've been coveting.



Another pic from the recent snow apocalypse. This is taken from one tram car looking at the other. I actually had to do a bit of GIMP work on this one to get rid of a reflection of my hand holding the camera. Trust me, it didn't add anything to the shot.



A tree in Lair Hill Park. Oh, and there's something weird in the sky, off in the distance.



Ok, here's both of 'em together. It's like Cute Overload, except with trams instead of cute animals. Not that I'm saying the tram is cute or anything.

And about that couplet: If I can finally turn left off of Burnside (legally), hey, that's great. I'm all in favor. But a streetcar? I like the streetcar just fine and all, but running down Burnside? I'm not so sure about that. As far as I can tell, the powers that be now think the streetcar's primary virtue is that it's really slow and gets in the way of people in cars, who are by definition Pure Eeeeeevillll. Why else would they insist on running them along major streets -- not just Burnside, but also along MLK and Grand through the central east side? And what ever happened to the central east side being a designated "industrial sanctuary", by the way? Now the whole area's supposed to become the next "market rate" (i.e. mega-million-dollar) condo farm, once South Waterfront is all built out. Did we have any public meetings about this and I just didn't hear about it? I suppose that's possible, but it sure smells like yet another backroom deal to me...

scenes from an upgrade

So I finally got around to putting a reasonable amount of memory in the Mac mini at home. I've had the thing for close to two years now, and I've been convinced it needed an upgrade for a while now, but the prospect was a little intimidating. Adding memory to a Mini is a fun little chore, so here are a few photos.

I should start out by saying that although I'm a computer geek, I'm generally a software geek, and I'm not the world's biggest hardware tinkerer. If there's a hardware problem, you call IT and a harried, underpaid, sleep-deprived schmoe with a tool belt will come and take care of it. If the hardware needs to be upgraded, you talk to management, fill out the appropriate TPS reports, lobby for budgetary approval, and wait, and wait, and wait, and eventually a harried, underpaid, sleep-deprived schmoe from IT will arrive bearing shiny new hardware.

Except that doesn't work so well at home. And for some reason I keep buying hardware that's hard to upgrade. Not impossible; that would take all the fun out of it. It's always possible, just rather harder than it needs to be.



Note the putty knives. The putty knives are for opening the case. Seriously. You open the Mini by wedging the putty knives into the left and right edges of the underside of the case, and prying the thing open.

Some people have suggested that you can get by with a single putty knife. Which I suppose is possible, but they're cheap and they make the job easier. So get two.

Sadly, I was not doing the upgrade with an accomplice, so there aren't any photos of me actually prying the case open.

I should point out before I get much further that there's a lot of other info out there about upgrading Minis, with photos and everything. Some of the photos are better than mine, which shouldn't come as much of a surprise. Here are a few I referred to when getting ready to take the plunge. You probably ought to look at them too, if you're thinking about doing the same:

• MacWorld
  
• Russell Beattie
  
• Method Shop
  
• Gadget Lounge
  
• MacInTouch
  

Ok, so here's the Mini with the case open. The accounts I read invariably talked about an alarming "rice krispie" sound, which is supposed to be the little plastic case latches unlatching. It didn't make much of a sound for me, though. Go figure. A bit of advice: If you're prying open a computer that isn't designed to open easily, and you're afraid of damaging it, but you have to be a bit ungentle to get the job done, a glass of cheap domestic syrah may be helpful. Two glasses would probably be overdoing it. A closeup of the Mini, caseless. There's not a lot of empty space inside the thing, as you can see here. G4 Minis have a single DIMM slot, which can take up to 1GB memory. Memory's cheap these days, so you may as well max the thing out. The memory's the green doodad on the left. Basically you bend back the black plastic tabs on each end that hold the module in its slot, slide it out, put the new one in, and relatch the tabs. There can be a bit of prying to get the old one unseated, and some shoving to get the new one in place. If the latches won't latch, you'll have to push on it some more. But before you start shoving, note that there's a little notch in the bottom of the memory module, which is there to keep you from installing it backwards. If you're holding the thing backwards, no amount of shoving will lead to satisfactory results. Here are a few (PC-centric) pieces on how to install memory properly. I forgot to take any pics of me actually installing the memory, but here's a shot of taking it out of the package. This photo is for the obligatory cheap shot about plastic packaging that's almost impossible to open. In the unlikely event that you have some pinking shears handy, they do a decent job, and there's less danger of you slicing your hand open than there would be with a straight blade of some sort. Bleeding all over your new memory is inadvisable, after all. So the installation went fine, yada yada, and here's the machine all booted up. You might as well make sure it boots before putting the case back on. If it doesn't, it's putty knife time again. Overall, the upgrade was easier than I was afraid it would be. So far as upgrading Mac memory goes, it's much easier than upgrading a Mac Plus, but not anywhere near as easy as upgrading a Mac IIcx. (Please note how I subtly demonstrated my Mac oldtimer street cred in the last sentence.) The machine does seem noticeably faster now, since it doesn't have to swap as much as it once did. GIMP is happier, and gcc is happier, and even iPhoto is less sluggish than it once was. But still, no machine is ever really fast enough, and so I'm starting to read up on overclocking your Mini. Although the part about changing out resistors on the motherboard sounds a little shady to me. Oh, and although you probably can't see it in this photo, lurking in the shadows under the desk is my other toy, the Sun Ultra 30 I mentioned a while back. I think it may need more memory too. And the CDROM hasn't worked since I got it, so I need to find a new SCSI internal CDROM somewhere. Plus I haven't gotten around to finding the right keyboard+mouse & monitor adapters yet, so it runs headless for the time being. So there's no shortage of stuff to tinker with, is basically what I'm saying.

And if you're wondering about the two tiny plastic frogs in the photo, they're for good luck. Hey, it can't hurt.

Missing Snowpersons

Yet more pics from our fair city's recent snow apocalypse. C'mon, gimme a break, there isn't much else to take photos of right now.

None of the snowpersons pictured are mine. I don't know who made them. I ran across them here and there when I was out walking around town. That's all I know. They all melted a long time ago anyway.




This is an upscale Pearl District snowperson, right in the middle of Tanner Springs Park. When this one melted, the water ended up in the park's incredibly delicate faux ecosystem, probably setting off yet another miniature ecological catastrophe. I probably shouldn't mention this. Next time it snows, the local Tanner Springs fanatics will be out in force, tasering anyone who so much as touches the snow in the park.

Anyway, you know it's an upscale snowperson because of the hat and scarf. The hat and scarf both seem perfectly serviceable, just perhaps not entirely fashionable this year. People will happily abandon a scarf on an imitation person made out of water, but not in a billion years would they give the same scarf to a homeless person who could use it to stay warm.




This is your basic Edward Hopper snowperson. Sitting on a parkbench at night, forlorn yet stoic, silently waiting for... what?




In contrast, here's a snowperson of the peppy, youthful, collegiate variety. Note the "class of 2009" bit on the bottom. Ah, the carefree dreams of youth, dreams that melt away like... Ok, never mind, I promised there wouldn't be any poetry on this blog.




A workplace snowperson, with pickles for eyes, and a tomato wedge for a mouth. Sure, it's not very good, but it's still awesome. I'm not sure why. It just is. Ok, was.

surly mondayism and assorted crabbage

Ok, see if you can tell whether I'm in a bad mood or not. You have 20 guesses.

• Candid photo of our Glorious Leader found via Trelanea. In a just world, this pic would show that someone has mad Photoshop ski11z, but in our world it probably appears exactly as it happened. I read somewhere that you're no longer required to eat a live kitten to join the Republican Party. But some diehards maintain a stubborn devotion to the Party's age-old rituals. It's sort of like their version of celebrating Mass in Latin, or so I'm told.
• You probably haven't noticed, and you probably wouldn't care if you had, but I'm still using the Old Blogger. I keep seeing glowing reports about New Blogger, and you'd think that as a professional tech geek I'd be really big on the whole early adopter / bleeding edge thing, but I'm not. Trailing edge all the way, baby. I'm basically convinced that if I hit the "upgrade" button, Blogger will lose every word I've ever written, and furthermore, I'm basically convinced that would be a bad thing.
  
  Also, I'm still deeply suspicious about all this newfangled CSS and JavaScript business -- for all we know, it may still turn out to be a passing fad, and we'll all go back to good old 7-bit ASCII text, monospaced font, preferably green on a black background, with a blinking cursor. Hey, it could happen.
• An update on what's become of Stephanie Pierce, the woman who used to run our fair city's Church of Elvis. It's a sad story. Everyone says they loved the place, everyone babbles on about how wonderfully quirky it was, but when the proprietor falls on hard times and gets a bit too quirky, well, then what? Are longtime CoE fans rushing to her side? Well, no. Not so far, anyway. That's classic Portland: If you want to walk the tightrope, we'll all cheer for you. We'll let you bask in the spotlight, and we'll squeal with glee at your every move. We'll do that for years, well after your 15 minutes are up everywhere else. But we won't, under any circumstances, put out a safety net for you. Because in the end, as Portlanders we don't want to spend any money, and we don't want to get involved.
• Remember a few weeks ago when I was gloating about saving my employer a big pile of money they were about to blow on a dubious outsourcing scheme? Well, they spent the money, and it's turning out exactly as dubious as I said it would be. 50% cost overrun so far, and they don't seem to have written any code yet, after endless email threads and constant teleconferences and design documents, and on and on.
  
  I haven't done a lot of gloating around the office, though. In the business world, one is generally not rewarded for saying "I told you so". Oh, nooo, this is the point where we all shrug and act sincerely perplexed and agree that none of us saw the damn iceberg coming, and really there was no way anyone could've guessed it would turn out so badly, etc. I know that isn't true. Hell, probably we all know that isn't true. But nobody's going to go out on a limb and say so. Oh noooo.
  
  It's one of life's little mysteries that we can all be perfectly decent people on an individual basis, but when we form groups over a certain size we always end up with soul-killing bureaucracies. If I had any insightful theories about that, I might have a bright career in philosophy, or maybe management guru-ism. But sadly, I don't.
• I didn't go to the big tram grand opening party, because a.) I've already ridden the thing, and b.) There is nothing lamer than a government-sponsored party. Balloon animals for the kiddies. Yay. The same 4 or 5 musical groups that someone at city hall has on speed dial every time there's a big event. Yay. Politicians making speeches. Double yay.
  
  Besides, it's no fun riding on the thing when everyone gets to ride for free. Me, I've got my employer-provided monthly TriMet pass, so I can go ride the damn thing as much as I want. For whatever my share of the $60M comes to, I think I deserve to ride it a few times.
• Speaking of that, I'm rather fascinated by the news that OHSU's selling a block of precious South Waterfront land to build an ultra-ritzy old folks' home. They're stoked about this because, apparently, they'll have all these well-heeled geezers right there at their doorstep, all of them potential test subjects.
  
  Call me crazy, but if I was that age, and looking for somewhere to spend my golden years in uber-upscale urban bliss, I would immediately cross this place off my list. Sure, they'll probably offer a wealth of fun vanity medical treatments, so (for example) you and your beloved Weimaraner can get botoxed together in a luxurious spa-like setting. But in the end, that's not why they want you to live here. The whole time, the medical folks will be eyeing you greedily with their beady little gimlet eyes, just waiting for you to fall and break a hip or something equally lucrative.
  
  In a way, this is a very, very old idea. We may be returning to the 1700s medical model, in which modern medicine existed to palliate the vague ailments of the rich and fashionable, and everyone else could go get stuffed. Typically one would go spend the social season at a fashionable and luxurious spa town (Bath, Carlsbad, etc.), and the staff would fuss over one's every minor ache and pain, and wring their hands melodramatically over one's nebulous feelings of ennui and/or Weltschmerz. Meanwhile, entire villages of common folk were regularly decimated by cholera, smallpox, and other such ailments, but no matter.
  
  If this sounds like fun, our Glorious Leader's new health care plan may be the plan for you. What it boils down to, as far as I can tell, is that big business has decided that their employees' health care is just too damn expensive and they don't want to have to pay for it anymore. They've tried HMO's, they've tried employee wellness plans, they've tried everything, but the costs keep increasing well over the rate of inflation, and now it's time to just throw in the towel and be done with it. Nobody wants to be the first big company to dump health coverage, because there might be bad publicity, but everyone wants it off the balance sheet. If that means casting everyone adrift, to sink or swim as they may, so be it. So the Bush plan provides political cover, giving everyone the "right" to buy individual health coverage, in the unlikely event they can afford it.
• On the other hand, the local TV news coverage of the tram opening mentioned something about the entire 9th floor at OHSU (i.e. the "main" level, where the tram docks ) being turned into an upscale retail/restaurant complex. It's an age-old cheap shot that most doctors only got into the business to fund their real estate and golf hobbies. I'm starting to think the real estate thing has become an all-consuming passion for the guys who run OHSU. I'm starting to wonder whether they wouldn't prefer to dump all that boring medical crap altogether, and just be greedy developers 24/7. I mean, now that the tram's up and running, Marquam Hill is seriously prime real estate, with amazing views and everything. There are plenty of people out there who'd pay millions to have a view like this. One might argue the land's going to waste being used for a mere hospital.
• Oh, and on top of everything else, the Hubble Telescope is broken again.

retrobloggage of the second kind

So this is the latest advance in the little-known field of retroblogging, in which one somehow makes use of something from the distant pre-blog past while creating a blog post. Simply writing about the past is not retroblogging; that's just nostalgia. Real retroblogging is an extension of retrocomputing: Posting something you wrote a long, long time ago counts as retroblogging, and I've done that a few times before. It's best if you rescue stuff off of obsolete media, say, 5.25" floppies, and it's even better if it's in an obscure, obsolete document format and you need to figure out how to get it converted. If you don't have anything in obsolete electronic form, in a pinch I suppose you could transcribe something from dead-tree format. It just isn't very geeky that way, is all, and is therefore much less interesting. (Well, unless the content itself is interesting, I guess.)

Retroblogging of the second kind involves using the technology of a distant, bygone era. That's what I'm doing right now. This post is being composed on an ancient NEC PC-8201a, a portable laptop-like gadget from 1983. I found this baby at a surplus store recently for $25, and it's turned out to be surprisingly useful. It's got a full-size(ish) keyboard, albeit a rather nonstandard one, and a couple of apps in ROM: A genuine M$ BASIC interpreter, a terminal program, and the bare-bones text editor I'm using now. Small LCD screen, takes either 4 AA batteries or wall power. It may not be quite as portable as the Blackberry, but it's easier to type on. Sure, the apostrophe is Shift-7, but I can adjust to that, I guess.

Getting text out of this beastie involves a null modem cable and a second machine with a free serial port. A serial port you can throttle down to 300 bps, or 600 if you're lucky. No disk drives, no HD. Just some sort of nonvolatile ram for internal storage, and the serial port. There's also a parallel port, and a few other connectors I'm not familiar with.

Another fun thing you can do with an 8201 is use it as a serial terminal for your friendly neighborhood Unix box. This involves 3rd party hardware if you're on a Mac, since Steve thinks serial ports are terribly passé (ok, except for Xserves), but a Sun has all kinds of ports for you to play with. This came in handy when I was getting my new Sun box up and running, so I could get to the boot PROM prompt without tying up the Mac. Somewhere out there there's a "trs100" terminfo entry, but I haven't needed it just yet.

Since this thing takes batteries, I may need to take it out and do the retromoblog thing once the weather improves. I can just imagine taking it in to some fancy coffee joint where everyone else is sporting the latest MacBook Pro, and see what sort of reaction it gets. That is, if I cared about the sort of reactions I'd get from coffee shop patrons in this town, which I don't. And if I craved attention from total strangers, which I don't.

It's quite odd working with this thing, given the usual assumptions you have coming frm more modern hardware. You're done editing a file, you turn the machine off. You want to do something else, just press the reset button in the back. On a modern machine, all your precious work would be gone, and you might corrupt your hd or something, if you're unlucky. On the Sun, you tell the machine to shut itself off by doing a "shutdown -i 5 -y -g 0". Which is to say, switch to runlevel 5 (the off state), answer yes automatically to the inevitable "are you sure?" prompt, and initiate the shutdown after a zero second delay. On the 8201, you just turn the thing off. You can even pull the plug, and your files are still there when you plug it back in. I'm still not quite sure what sort of memory it's using such that it doesn't lose everything when the power's removed. Flash hadn't been invented yet in 1983.
The text editor on here is bare bones but useful enough. No spell check, obviously, and no mouse, but most of what I need to do I can do with the arrow keys anyway.

I understand there are a few games for this thing too. I tried downloading a Frogger clone for it, but I haven't gotten it working. Something about the BASIC text getting mangled somehow on the trip from Google cache to Mac text file to bits over a serial cable to here. And my BASIC is really rusty, and I'm not sure it would be healthy to unrustify it.

insert replacement post here...

Dammit. I was in the middle of writing a long-ish post in which I asserted that I'm still alive, made lame excuses about why I haven't posted for a few days, and then rambled on about a number of unrelated topics I used to post about more than I do now. Then Safari abruptly died on me, nuking the whole thing in the process. I really don't feel like trying to redo that whole post right now, but I was also going to post a few more snow photos, and here they are:

Video: A ride on the tram

Here's a video clip from my big tram ride yesterday. Ok, it's not the best video you'll ever see. As usual, I forgot that the camera only wants to film in landscape mode, so the video's sideways until the point where I realized my mistake. Just so you know, the 90 degree rotation you see is merely the camera moving, not the tram as a whole. For $60M, it really ought to be able to do tricks like that, but if it does they're keeping very quiet about it. Anyway, you'll need to turn your head for the first part of the video. Think of it as an opportunity for a little "audience participation". That's my positive spin on the situation, and I'm stickin' to it.

You might note that the video ends part of the way up. This is because my camera batteries died, quite abruptly, at that point. Have I mentioned yet that nobody from Hollywood is returning my calls? It's true.

The audio track includes the operator explaining a few things about how the tram works, so at least the video's kind of educational, somewhat, I guess.

Video: A ride on the tram

D'oh! Blogger got confused and published the same piece twice. If you're looking for my super-exciting tram video, you'll want to go here instead. Enjoy!

Snow Day on the Tram

So today I got to ride our fair city's shiny new aerial tram. Seems that because of all the snow, they decided to temporarily open the thing to the city's non-medical riffraff, people such as myself. They weren't exactly encouraging the public to show up; the announcements said the tram was open to OHSU employees, VA & Shriners hospital staff, patients, and "others" who "need" to travel between Marquam Hill & South Waterfront. I figured that was my opening: I definitely fall into the "other" category, and "need" can be a very, very subjective term when you want it to be. It didn't seem very likely that they'd station a security guard at each end, screening each prospective passenger and rejecting anyone who seemed to merely want to ride it. That wouldn't really be the Portland way. But in case there was a security guard, I figured I'd try to talk my way on board. I'm really not very good at that at all. I almost never succeed at talking my way into anything, but in the worst case I'd just have had to get back on the streetcar and go home. They don't let OHSU grab people off the street for medical experimentation anymore, or at least that's what I've heard.

As I suspected, they were running the opening the Portland way: Open the thing to everyone, but word the announcement in such a way that not a lot of people show up. Imply there are vague, yet strictly enforced, rules on who can board, and let the public imagination run wild. That kind of talk is guaranteed to set off alarm bells with anyone who's ever gone through US Customs. But if quizzed about it, city officials can honestly claim they never specifically said there would be body cavity searches. It's just that they also didn't say there wouldn't be, and relied on the public's fear of confrontation to do the rest. Portlanders are experts at conflict avoidance. There are certain benefits to this, a reasonably low murder rate (by US city standards) for example. But it also means that you'll miss out on a lot of stuff in this town unless you learn how to not take the hint.

In any case, there were a few other joyriders besides myself, and the tram operators seemed happy to see us. Perhaps we were a nice break from all those doctors, endlessly prattling on about their golf scores and real estate deals and trophy wives. For a moment I was almost kind of disappointed that getting on board was so easy. In case you were wondering, no, I wasn't planning to mention anything about being an Important Local Blogger Of Note, or demand "don't you know who I am?". I doubt I'd try that even if I was, in fact, an Important Local Blogger Of Note (which I'm not). I can throw an elbow or two around if I need to, figuratively speaking of course, but I just can't do pretentious or self-important. I can't even fake it. Anyway that would seem like cheating, somehow. Journalists call themselves the "fourth estate", so those of us out here in blogospace are probably the eighth or ninth estate, at minimum, and therefore far, far below the minimum rational threshold for VIP treatment. If anyone tried to give me free stuff simply for having a blog, I'd instantly lose all respect for them.

So riding the tram was more fun than I thought it would be. Whether it's $60M worth of fun, I really couldn't say at this point. The trip only takes a few minutes, and I was taking pictures pretty much constantly both ways, so I may have to go again to ride it just for the experience. I almost got back in line and rode it again immediately, but sadly I had places to be and things to do. Maybe I'll go again tomorrow if it's still free.

The top photo is from the upper tram station at OHSU, with a tram car departing. As I've mentioned before, I've (unofficially) named the two cars "Tom" and "Lance", after a couple of mono-testicled celebrities. I haven't yet figured out which is which, though.




A genuine, real-life photo from the tram, looking north towards downtown Portland. The street on the left is SW 1st, with Naito Pkwy on the right. This angle is probably going to become a standard tourist shot as soon as they start letting real photographers on board the tram. Someday you can tell the grandkids you saw it first right here on this humble and highly obscure blog.




The other tram car, again from the upper station. These babies were pretty much made to order for a really fantastic James Bond fistfight. Yes, yes, I realize they did the fistfight-on-a-tram thing in On Her Majesty's Secret Service, but that was a long time ago, and our tram looks way cooler. The governor's office has a couple of people whose 24/7 job is to bring movie productions to Oregon. If they don't already have the whole fight scene choreographed out, they aren't doing their job.

The key unresolved problem is what James Bond would be doing here in the first place, and what he'd do for the rest of the film's running time. We have a few people in town (mostly Republicans) who could be passable Bond villains in a pinch, but none of them have colorful henchmen that I'm aware of. It's a real problem.




Another photo from the tram, this time of SW Terwilliger, looking all snowy and alpine and BMW-commercial-like. You might notice that the road is oddly free of runners. Where'd they all go? DId they stay home just because the whole thing's a treacherous sheet of ice right now? Weenies. Wimps.

Ok, it's also possible they all slipped and tumbled down the hill. But hey, if anyone needs a ride to OHSU, the tram's right here.



Looking downhill (east) from the upper tram station, with the South Waterfront condo towers in the distance, and the Lair Hill & Corbett neighborhoods in front of them. It really is quite a long drop, once you get a good look at it. Neighbors have complained about the possibility of tram-based voyeurs peeping into their backyards -- like anyone in Lair Hill really has much of a backyard -- but nobody seems to have considered the impact, the literal impact, of the constant rain of colorful Bond-villain henchmen plummeting from the sky, crashing through roofs, flattening one's award-winning roses, alarming children and small animals, disrupting traffic even further, and generally lowering the tone of the place. It's always the problems people didn't anticipate that turn out to be the real killers.




The lower tram station. This is kind of boring in comparison to the other photos, but I figured I needed it for completeness. Someday the barge-building operation on the left edge of the picture will be gone, replaced by more condo towers, and then this photo will be a collector's item, sort of. Get 'em while they're hot.


Updated 1/18/06: Here are a few other rider reports I've come across:

• A post on greyduck.net about yesterday's free tram rides.
  
• Tales from the Tube reports on riding the tram last week. And the photo of the thing is nice, although my pics contain snow and are therefore better.
  
• And Russ at Portland Metblogs rode the tram back in December. I'm starting to think that everyone else with a blog has ridden it already. Or at least everyone with a blog and more chutzpah and/or connections than I do, in other words basically everyone.
  

Snowday!!! W00t!!!

One great thing about living downtown is not having to drive anywhere when it snows. So far I'm enjoying this snowstorm (ok, snowstorm by Portland standards) much more than the last one, 2 or 3 years ago. Back then I was stuck with trudging half a mile through the snow to get to the nearest MAX station. It really was uphill both ways, too. Seriously. Plus my driveway was solid ice and I couldn't drive anywhere for nearly a week, and the trains weren't always running either, something about ice building up on the wires. It was a total mess.

Now I can just walk to work if I have to. This is doubly nice right now because the downtown transit situation is quite chaotic; they moved the downtown bus mall to 3rd & 4th avenues temporarily just a couple of days ago, and the new bus routes have switched over to their new snow routes, which even the drivers are unfamiliar with. Until today I'd never ridden on a bus #43 that drove into town from near the Goose Hollow MAX stop and then turned south on Broadway, but that's what it did today. The driver said he was going to Washington Square, and I wished him luck as I exited the bus. It sounded like he needed it.

So I had a big boring meeting all morning, and then the company told everyone to go home, which was my cue to wander around town taking photos. And, as usual, I'm posting a few that I thought turned out ok. The top photo is of Reservoir 3 up in Washington Park. The walkway around the reservoir wasn't open today, unfortunately, but I suppose that's understandable. The water bureau certainly has more important things to worry about right now.



SW Jefferson near Washington Park, with the Vista Bridge and a bit of downtown. The puffy bits that look like flowers are actually blobs of snow that collected on overhanging vines. I thought that looked kind of cool, so here's the photo.



Early morning, Lovejoy Fountain Plaza



Lovejoy Fountain Plaza again, early afternoon this time. With snowboarders. How cool is that?



Snow on the Columbia River Crystal sculpture on SW 2nd.



Snow on the Plaza Blocks, downtown Portland.

Here There Be Stupid Dragons...

A few photos of that controversial dragon sculpture the PDC recently installed in Chinatown. The biggest criticism of the dragon is that the symbolism is apparently all wrong. I'm not an expert about that, but the thing certainly looks ridiculous. That much is painfully obvious. I'm by no means the first person to say this, but it looks like something straight out of Disneyland. Ok, no, something rejected by Disneyland.

Really I suspect this cartoon-Chinese look was the intention from day one. The Powers That Be don't want a real ethnic Chinese neighborhood here, because that would be strange and foreign and insufficently upscale. No, they're redecorating the area to make it more attractive to rich, lily-white empty-nester Californian condo buyers, people who think they're exploring "pan-Asian" culture by guzzling $17 wasabi-ginger appletinis. The pseudo-Chinese stuff is just there as the latest trendy, meaningless design motif, an empty postmodern reference to what used to be here before the rich twits moved in. Just like the ugly wall of rusting railroad ties in Tanner Springs Park. For some reason people think it's extremely artistic and cultured to do this, even while sneering at Hillsboro subdivisions named after the groves of trees they replaced. In the end it's really pretty much the same thing.

Some people say the dragon looks like it's collared and chained up. To me, it looks like the dragon head is being extruded somehow. And I don't care to speculate much further regarding the "somehow" part.



Here's the overturned wok detail beneath the dragon. The overturned wok is supposed to be a symbol of bad business, bankruptcy, and famine. Nice. Nobody bothered to consult nearby businesses about this, of course. And why would they? The dragon's certainly not there for their benefit. The sooner they close up shop and make way for yet another exclusive doggie day spa, the happier the PDC will be.

We're told the PDC and the artist were astonished by the public outcry. Which is a typically Portland reaction: They did this with only the noblest of intentions, so why are people upset? It's not like they're in the Klan or anything, you know, and people should be grateful for wonderful urban goodies like this super-cute new dragon.

This happens a lot here. While we have a lot more money in town than we did back in the 1950s, we still tend to be ignorant, provincial, and poorly educated, and we get deeply offended when anybody calls us on it.

I haven't seen anyone remark on this, but to me the really alarming part is the severed duck head behind and to the left of the wok. I prefer my public art without the severed heads, thanks.



A closer look at the dragon. I swear, this thing is about two steps away from being Barney the Dinosaur.



The dragon is just one of a series of decorative doodads. The dragon is the one across the street, while the closer one seems to have a sort of commerce theme. In place of the wok, we have some fish heads, an abacus, a calculator, stuff like that. Basically more random crap that's supposed to look vaguely "Oriental". I use that word advisedly: I've noticed that people in the target condo demographic, affluent 60-something white retirees, tend to still use it, with all its patronizing connotations. At least when they're among their own kind, or they've had one too many of those wasabi-ginger appletinis. A couple more of those and they start saying "chop chop" to the waiter, and it's all downhill from there.

You might assume that there's supposed to be a dragon head here too, but someone beheaded it, or it fell off, or something, but you'd be wrong. It sure looks like there ought to be one here, though, and without it it's not clear why the whole ring-holding-up-a-rock thing is here, since it's not doing anything in particular except holding up the aforementioned rock.



On the base of this particular doodad: More severed heads. Roly poly fish heads, this time. Nice.

The doodads are "gateways" to the new "festival street" on Davis between 3rd & 4th. "Festival streets" are a current urban design fad. Instead of an asphalt street with a raised concrete curb, the whole thing is done in sidewalk-like concrete, with car and pedestrian portions on the same level, separated by a row of decorative posts. This is supposed to make it possible to shut the street off and hold street fairs here, which apparently was impossible until we spent all that money. Never mind that there's been exactly one street fair here so far, a grand opening event staged by the city to show off just how festive a festival street festival can be.

Also, there are palm trees. In Portland. But I already ranted about that a few months ago, and I hate to repeat myself.



On the 3rd Ave. end of the festival street, we finally get a respite from all the severed heads. Instead, this doodad is about the internment of Japanese-American citizens during WWII. I don't even know where to begin on this one.

First, someone ought to tell the PDC that Japan != China. There was a memo, maybe they missed it or something. Ok, it's true there was a Japanese community in parts of Old Town prior to 1941, so maybe they wanted to commemorate that. That's perfectly understandable. But there's already a much larger (and more effective) historical monument about this in Waterfront Park, just 4 blocks east of here. And there's another up at the Expo Center, which was used as a way station for people being transported to the internment camps. So this has been covered pretty well already, and now we're veering into the curious phenomenon of white-liberal-guilt-as-vanity, in which we demonstrate our unimpeachable virtue (and boost our self-esteem) by endlessly wailing and gnashing our teeth over something that happened well before most of us were born.

And it's odd putting this somber item right in the middle of our wondrous new festival street, isn't it? I guess the idea is that carefree drunken revelers will stumble across it and suddenly be taken aback and it'll make them realize numerous Important Truths and whatnot. If that really is the point, and it really is crucial to have some sort of grim historical marker here, our city and state have a long history of mistreating people of Chinese origin, events that continue to go unremarked-upon and uncommemorated. The state constitution used to prohibit "Chinamen" from owning property or holding mining claims. I suppose that if we talked about this stuff too much, we'd have to mention the fact that the Chinatown we're celebrating was created by segregation, both official and unofficial. And that would put a real damper on the party. So we'll just put up yet another marker, a bland, third-rate one at that, about an event everyone knows about & condemns already.



This is on 3rd & Flanders, on the other new festival street, two blocks away (which will make for a rather awkward festival if you want to use both of 'em, but no matter, nobody's going to.) This is perhaps the scariest part of the whole installation. You see, there's more of the same on the way, and we can only imagine what sort of crap they've got in store for the city next. A sculpture of neatly folded and pressed laundry? A doodad with an "opium den / white slavery" theme? Some statues of "famous Chinese people" the condo clowns might've actually heard of, say, Charlie Chan, Fu Manchu, Ming the Merciless, maybe? Animatronic kids with straw hats and cartoon-slit eyes singing "It's a Small World"? The PDC has untold millions of dollars to play with, and no public oversight, so they can probably come up with something even worse if they really put their minds to it.

Notes from the flight forward...

So apparently our Glorious Leader wants to set the whole Mideast on fire now. More fresh bodies for the meat grinder in Iraq, plus exciting new wars in Iran and Syria, and no doubt that's just the tip of the iceberg. Even with a Democratic congress, it's looking increasingly like there's nothing anyone can do to rein the guy in.
Naturally, nobody in the administration's giving any straight answers on what they intend to do about Iran. They make all sorts of threatening noises day in and day out, but we still get the "no definite plans to attack" charade, just like we did in the buildup to Iraq. That little stunt avoids having any public policy debate about what to do. They already know what they want to do, and they don't want the other 300 million of us to get a word in edgewise about it. And if past history is any guide, there probably is no detailed plan hidden deep in a Pentagon vault somewhere. The plan will just be to roll the dice again and assume a miracle will happen this time.

The title refers to a classic Billmon post from last April, which seems more prescient with each passing day:

What we are witnessing (through rips in the curtain of official secrecy) may be an example of what the Germans call the flucht nach vorne, the "flight forward." This refers to ta situation in which an individual or institution seeks a way out of a crisis by becoming ever more daring and aggressive (or, as the White House propaganda department might put it: "bold") A familar analogy is the gambler in Vegas, who tries to get out of a hole by doubling down on each successive bet.

Some people take comfort in W's recent statement taking responsibility for mistakes in Iraq. But even that statement is phrased in a very curious way. What he said, essentially, is that he takes responsibility to the degree that a CEO is responsible for any (purely hypothetical) failings by his underlings. He didn't admit to having personally screwed anything up. That's something we'll never hear from him. I imagine getting him to say the limp words he uttered was like pulling teeth, and he only agreed to it strictly as a PR move, not an actual change of heart on his part. If he'd had a change of heart, or a eureka moment, or any such thing, the response would not be to do even more of what we've been doing without success for a few years now.

Apart from the immediate situation, it's never a good idea when national policies are so closely intertwined with the personal psychological needs of the guy in charge. He won't believe he can make mistakes, and he won't change course, and we all have to pay the price. He's been reading all those history books lately, to the expected round of cheap shots about him reading books for once, but taking cheap shots at the guy just obscures the alarming "lessons" he says he's learning. He knows he's right, he's absolutely sure he's right, he's surrounded himself with toadies and cronies who praise him constantly and tell him he's always right, and now he's got what in his mind is "historical proof" that everyone will realize he was right in a century or two. Therefore, he's free to ignore public opinion, expert opinion (the Pentagon included), world opinion, etc., since he's totally sure that everyone will laugh at all those opinions someday. There's just not going to be any communication into the bubble at this point. He's all defense mechanism, all the time, and nothing gets through.

Reasonable people can disagree, of course, on whether Iran is really the global threat Cheney and friends say it is. I very much doubt that, but even if I was totally convinced, at this point I wouldn't put any faith in the current administration dealing with that threat successfully. They botch everything they touch. If you're a hawk, you probably aren't interested in my advice, but my advice is to find a competent successor for the current guy, and work to get him or her elected in 2008. And please, just put your remaining foreign policy goals on hold until after Inauguration Day. Don't ask anything more of the current bozos, and don't jump on the bandwagon if they're itching to start something new. They've done more than enough damage already.