stairs x 5

I got a reader question the other day from someone wanting to know more about the steep narrow stairs between the Mt. Tabor reservoirs. I responded, and got to thinking that I hadn't done any stair exploring around town recently. So I figured I'd have another go at it. I'd read there was a loop you could do up in NW Portland where you can hit a bunch of stairways all at once, if you're feeling up to it. I've got a few photos from the excursion, but first a map:



I couldn't find an existing map on the net with the stairs marked, since the city doesn't yet have a NW Portland walking map like it has for the rest of town. The stairs are shown in red, although their positions are sort of approximate. It's the best I can do in MS Paint, I'm afraid.

Writing walking directions from scratch can be kind of tedious, so let me start by quoting a couple of the sources I relied on. A piece about Forest Park at Walk About Magazine covered the stairs, albeit going in the opposite direction than I went:

From here you will walk to the left and downhill, following NW Luray Terrace for about 10 to 5 minutes, then branching right and uphill at the Y in the road onto NW Luray Circus. On the left, almost at the end of this cul-de-sac, is the first set of stairs. (All of the entrances to the stairwells are tough to see as they are covered with foliage and blend with the surrounding houses, so look closely for them.) Go right at the bottom of these stairs, which puts you back on NW Luray Terrace, then when you hit Cumberland Road go left, staying on the left-hand sidewalk. In about 15 yards you’ll cross over Shenandoah Terrace and then — on the left-hand side, just in the crook of the road where it breaks right — the next set of stairs will plunge steeply down to Fairfax Street. From here you want to cross Fairfax, and then cross over to Westover Street, walking about 20 yards to the right where between two houses the next set of stairs waits. At the bottom of these stairs turn left, and follow NW Summit Street downhill to NW Cornell. Turn left up Cornell, walk about 25 yards, cross the crosswalk, and then descend the stairs immediately on the other side of the crosswalk. At the bottom of these stairs take a right down Pettygrove Street, and at the stop sign at 26th Avenue go left onto the paved path. This path cuts between the school and the park and will lead you back to Raleigh Street and your car.

A recent forum post has a similar description, this time going the right way:

Pettygrove Street near 26th there's a stairway to NW Cornell, then take right to NW Summit Street and turn right to next set of stairs, this leads to Westover Street that you cross over and up to Fairfax Street to just up to next stairs that climb to Shenandoah Terrace, then right to Cumberland Rd. and to NW Luray Terrace and turn left till next stairs that go up to NW Luray Circus (a cul-de-sac), this meets again with NW Luray Terrace that you follow up to a pathway that's to Cumberland Road that meets there with the Tunnel Trail on right but keep going along the Wildwood Trail ... till it crosses NW Cornell Road past the parking lot and restrooms and Forest Park's 5000 acre wood... I remember a stone house down along the trail where the name changes to the Lower Macleay Trail.... that can take you back down to the Lower Macleay Park Trailhead on Upshur Street and it's about three blocks to NW 28th Avenue just a few blocks from where you started in Northwest/Nob Hill around trendy-third, I mean 23rd Ave. ... 'PORTLAND'S LITTLE RED BOOK OF STAIRS' by Stefana Young has the guide but I've yet to look for and find it.

Ah, the ever-elusive Little Red Book of Stairs. I still can't find a copy for sale anywhere, dammit. Anyway, there's also a description at NW Portland Neighborhoods, but you probably get the gist by now.

[Updated 5/25/07: Until just now, I'd forgotten to go look for stairs stories in the library's Oregonian database. Nothing about these particular stairs in the O dating back to 1987, but a few stories did crop up:

• A piece from last October, profiling a guy who developed an interest in the city's public stairs. He was taking photos and notes and had no idea what he was going to do with them. That's easy, if you ask me. Put it on the net. Share information, don't hoard it.
• From 1998, a walking tour of the numerous stairs in the Alameda neighborhood. I don't know Alameda too well, so this is unexplored territory for me so far. If I get around to checking it out, it would be safe to bet there'll be photos here.
• A '99 article about the Elevator Stairs, which mentions the Little Red Book. They were one of the author's faves, and they're one of mine too. I've already covered them in a previous post.
  
• And a '97 bit about the stairs in Mt. Tabor Park.

There are a few other old articles out there, but these are the most informative & useful ones.] The hardest part to any stair excursion is finding the stairs. They're unmarked, so you have to look a bit, and you want to avoid mistaking someone's front steps for a public staircase. It's easier to do than you might think. That's where this post comes in, I hope: I've got photos of each staircase from the top and the bottom, to make them easier to locate out in the field. Or that's the plan, anyway. As you might've guessed, our trip begins at the stairs from NW Pettygrove up to Cornell, although you could just as easily start off with the stairs on Quimby, Overton, Northrup, or Marshall, if you prefer, since they all end up on Cornell. So here's the Pettygrove side:

And the Cornell side:

Looks pretty steep, huh? Well, that's just the beginning. A short walk uphill gets you to the next set, from Summit Ave. up to Westover Rd. The Summit side:

These stairs have seen some maintenance recently. Here's a post all about stairs from last June over on jgaiser's blog, and he's got a photo of the Summit-Westover stairs caked in moss. He also includes an envy-inducing photo of his copy of the Little Red Book. So ascend those newly cleaned and maintained steps, and this is what you'll see on the Westover side:

Ok, so far so good. We're already getting a decent view from up here. If you look off in the distance you can see Mt. St. Helens on the horizon. Just below it you'll see a water tower, which looks like the one next to Going St. up in North Portland. Which means that just to the right of it, and not visible to us, is tiny Stanich Park. But that's a different expedition, and I do hate to digress. Honest. Anyway, those last stairs put you close to one corner of a four-way intersection, where Westover, Fairfax, and Cumberland all join together. The next set of stairs is diagonally across the intersection, from Fairfax Terrace up to Cumberland Road. (Cumberland loops around, see?) Here's the Fairfax side:

If you're like me, these stairs may start to feel like entirely too many stairs right about now. Sometimes you just have to stop and take photos of the flowers... if you're like me, anyway, which you probably aren't:

Ok, so here's the (vertigo-inducing) Cumberland side of the steps, finally:

Moving right along, walking a bit uphill (and west), we get to the stairs from Luray Terrace up to Luray Circus. The base:

And the top:

So you're at a cul-de-sac here, and all you can do is walk downhill until you're back on Luray Terrace. Which begs the question: What's the point of these stairs, if you can just as easily walk around the block? Beats me. At least there's a decent view:

You probably get a better view if you own a house up here, or know someone who does, which I don't. Still, you get a wide vista of the Willamette, with the BNSF railroad bridge and part of the St. Johns Bridge in the distance. Not bad. From here, the hike directions usually send you up Luray Terrace and into Macleay Park, from where you loop back around down into NW Portland. That's sort of what I did too, but I'm trying to keep this post reasonably focused on stairs, if I can. I've got park photos too, but we'll save those for another post, ok? So from here you can either follow the directions from one of the sources given above, or turn around and go back down the stairs, or I guess you could take the sidewalk down if you're feeling mundane, or go by street luge if you're a little more adventurous. It just so happens that I looped around through the park, and ended up back on Cornell, where I ran across the stairs connecting Cornell & Quimby St., right at a steep corner on Cornell. Unlike the other stairs, I was heading downhill at this point, so here's the top first:

And the Quimby side. This is right at the corner of Quimby & 29th Ave.

If you're doing this for the sake of completeness, the Overton, Northrup, and Marshall steps are nearby. Or you can be like me, and declare Mission Accomplished and go locate a frosty beverage of some sort instead.

indegree

People don't link to me very often, so I get a little thrill out of it when it happens. I figure it's only fair that I link to whoever's linking here, thus completing the circle and all that....

Today's batch:

• At PortlandArt.net, a user comment about the tram tower, back when it was going up.
  
• An autolink to a comment of mine, not sure if this counts as proper linkage or not.
  
• A few links to my widely-read Kelly Butte post from July '06:
  
  • "Thank You For Not Wearing Lycra" at Yamabushi Mon Amour
    
  • "Random Links Lack of Content Edition" at Welcome to Blog.
    
  • "Kelly Butte" at Sellwood Street
    
  
  
• Two links to my post about the erstwhile Bridge Diner.
  
• My recent Willamette Stone post got linkage at ZehnKatzen Times, and my post linked to an earlier one of his about the stone. Because we're totally postmodern like that.
  
• A bemused link to "Twenty Thousand", my mother-of-all-referrer-pages post. I haven't done a referrer-page post in ages. Maybe that last one finally got it out of my system. At least for now.
  
• Silflay Hraka links my mini-roadtrip beer post, in his(?)/her(?)/its(?) "A Carnival of Beer". Mmmm..... Beeeeeer.....
  
• Something called "Kids Picture Contest" linked to my Bonnie Lure State Park piece, according to Technorati, but that site seems to have disappeared now. So I'm not sure if this counts as linkage either.
  
• Neighborhood Notes links to my bit about the film "Portland Expose".
  
• I've even gotten a few links ( [1] [2] [3] ) directly to photos of mine on Flickr, credited and everything. Creative Commons rocks.
  

an evening out

From yesterday evening, an attempted moblog gone awry...

---

I can never get the hang of this fashionable lateness thing. No matter how late I think I am, no matter how fashionable I try to be, I'm always there way freakin early. Stupid law-abidingness, assuming rules are observed, and things are as they're said to be. Silly me.

It's not that I'm always punctual. I'm not at the office at the crack of 9 each day. Hell, usually it isn't the crack of 10 either. But get me outside my comfort zone and I become mr. On the dot. Here I am at the doug fir again, waiting on another dahlia show. Doors open at 8, I got here half an hour in, and... Nobody. This is what comes from being a non-inveterate concertgoer. I just don't grok the local folkways.

Doesn't help that there's no BB reception here, so I can't mess around on the net or anything. I'm such a nerd. So I'm dinking away on the gadget anyway, sipping a vodka tonic, trying to look tres chic for all the people who aren't here. And yes, I realize smartphones aren't a universal status symbol. At least w/o reception I won't get sucked into any office email threads. Lecturing about the usefulness of GetProcAddress is not my idea of a good time. At the moment, I mean. During office hours, playing guru is great fun (and much easier than doing real work). Did I mention I'm a total nerd? It's true.

---

This isn't the first time I've done this. Here's an earlier Doug Fir-based moblog attempt, which I looked at later and decided it wasn't worth posting, what with babbling on about politics and all. It's more sort of notes for a moblog post really. I include it here primarily so that I can do a fun post-within-a-post-within-a-post thing, with another layer of nested blockquotes:

Ok, so I still got here way early. I swear I'll never get the hang of this club thing.

Had a great time regaling all and sundry about the outsourcing fiasco. I think I got geek points yesterday. Also, spent part of today explaining the thing with windows file access times I blogged about a while back. I may not be the world's greatest buzzword engineer, but I am the king, the one true king, of domain knowledge.

Someday I'm going to have to post about unix auditing. Talk about domain knowledge.

Why don't I post about tech topics more often?

North korea, that I've threatened to post about for days: the fundamental issue here is that it's always a poor idea to make threats you aren't in a position to follow through on. Don't put someone in your axis of evil, and then give them 4+ years lead time to get ready for your plans, if you have any. I'm not saying dubya's policy is the only failed policy; the be-nice policy of s. Korea, china, and russia hasn't gotten results either. Other than possibly keeping someone in nk from starving. But it also doesn't aggravate the situation.

All W did was tip our hand years in advance. Scaring the baddies shouldn't be an end in itself. Always plan for how they might actually respond, don't just assume bullying them is bound to succeed.

Look at sco. They made all sorts of claims and threats against the linux world, and where are they now? They couldn't back it up when their target didn't back down, and there was no plan b. And even if there was a plan b, no matter how great it sounds, people remember it wasn't plan a. Democracy in iraq was plan b, after the wmd thing fell through. Plan b never gets as much credibility, or as wide a constituency. It's a fact of life.

See what I mean? Someone obviously needed to chill out and relax a little.

---

The WW had a big expose piece today alerting us that p-town is full of cokeheads. Not a "something should be done" piece like the O did with meth or anything. As far as I can tell, the point was partly to give us a knowing, lurid giggle, and partly so they could put a nagel print on the cover, and partly to coin the term "snortland", which you have to admit is kind of clever. I mention this because the piece mentions a bust going down in the doug fir's mens room a couple years ago. Greeeeeatttt. I'm not a judgmental person, generally, but this is one of the rare things that make me think less of someone. I've seen plenty of bad hollywood movies, and read about how they came to be. I'm pretty sure the coca plant is not a net benefit to humanity, just from that. We've already got quite enough arrogance and selfishness and greed going around already, thanks. I'm not saying put anyone in jail. I'm just saying cokeheads shouldn't be suprised when people make fun of 'em.

---

I did a blog post earlier today with even more photos. I never get a lot of orblogs visitors from those. And yet, they're easy, and it still never ceases to surprise me when I come up with photos that look good. I tend to be self-deprecating about it and credit the idiot-proof camera. And to a degree I'm right; I can get good results without having to know all that much about cameras, optics, etc. It's also nice to get good results w/o spending lots of money, because I'm cheap. I already have a camera - why buy another, until this one breaks?

It's also true, though, that I've always sort of wanted to be good at this. I had an old 110 camera as a kid and tried "artsy" shots even then. Not all that successfully, but I tried. It's the lack of instant feedback, and the cost of film, that held me back, I think. No more "make the shot count". Just take lots of pics, try lots of stuff, and eventually something may turn out ok.

---

[short break]

Again I wasn't too lucky getting anyone else within my orbit to come this time, but it's about the music, not the socializing with those who orbit me, really, so whatever.

There's a bunch of teachers sitting behind me, gossiping. They're all the same.

I swear I won't touch this thing when the music starts. I'm not quite that much of a nerd. I think.

Vodka tonic #2 now. Not great really, but cheap & inoffensive, & they come in cheap plastic cups. Awesome.

I sort of left off with the political posts the last few days. I at least ought to gloat about the election, but I haven't yet. Or gloat about Wolfie. At least Falwell's still dead, the bastard.

That'd be a good movie plot come to think of it: the rapture happens, separating souls from still-living bodies, which become the undead. Zombies? Vamps? Rapture is either magical, or corporate (enslaved zombies)

I'm full of genre movie plots. Did I ever tell you about my s&s plot? All those classic s&s pix were filmed in argentina during the dictatorship, in the runup to the falklands. Film crew has usual unheroic type characters, but has to save their people from the junta. Local creative types exactly the people who'd be under suspicion and get "disappeared". Juxtapose against film's hackneyed script (spoof?).

It's starting to fill in now. I've been here about an hour, so it's about time. Past showtime and no show yet. Bastards. I did *my* part, dammit. I'm not just a nerd, I'm a freakin' calvinist. Part-time, about some things, I mean.

For lunch today I tried Ziba's Pitas, the Bosnian cart up on Park by the Galleria. Yes, Bosnian. And I'm sold. Tomorrow, will it be Bosnian again, or the Peruvian joint a few carts down? I'm spoiled for choice, honestly. I lean towards Bosnian, because of the feta cheese thing. Mmmm...

Tptb tell me I'm working on Solaris again, which is awesome. My Sun box is relevant again, although I still need to get its damn video card issues worked out.

---

It'd be fair to wonder why I do this. I don't go to that many concerts, but I keep going to dahlia. A friend dragged me to the first one, and it was more than fun. It was *cathartic*, as silly as that sounds. That's rare. Then the vocal half went to nyc to seek her fortune, and I figured, never again will I experience that. Now she's back, and they've got all new material, and... Yeah. I've missed the last few monthly gigs, first because of the weather, and then that damn sore toe. It still isn't better exactly, but I'm doing this anyway, dammit.

So I'm perhaps not the most high-value fan a group could have. I admit that. But I think I do ok at it, anyway. It's not like 7th grade, it's not about impressing anyone, or getting societal approval or whatever. It's all about letting go for a while. Perhaps you don't realize how hard that is?

---

[opening act begins]
...

Sophe Lux, opening act. Show fine, music awesome. Maybe not dance -> 3/4 time often. Waltz, I dunno how. Bought 2 cds. Yes, typing on BB again, but no music right now. Gimme a break, already. I'm doing this for *you*, dammit. Show some luv.

...


[Show ensues]


...


Ok. Home now. Very tired. Happy. Did I say "tired" yet?


Zzzzzzzzz.....

Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless handheld

3rd avenue commute

A few pics taken while walking to the office this morning. It's one of the little perks of living downtown, I guess. And one of the little perks of warm(ish) weather, too.



The soldier statue in Lownsdale Square, one of several Spanish-American War memorials around town. If alien archaeologists ever dig up the city, someday in the distant future, they'll assume that the war was a really big deal, or at least that it somehow affected us in a significant way. I've really never seen a good explanation about why our forebears thought we needed so many memorials back then. But then, society is on sort of a memorial-building kick right now, too. And, sadly, a memorial-generating kick as well.




A rose next to Keller Fountain, since it just wouldn't do to post without including at least one flower. I'd lose my street cred, or whatever.




A bit of Keller Fountain itself. You probably haven't noticed, but I don't post a lot of photos of the thing. It's not for lack of trying. I just don't seem to have the knack of photographing it in a reasonably pleasing way. Even this one isn't all that great of a photo, but I kind of like what the water's doing.




A fern on a stone wall in Pettygrove Park, the often-overlooked little green spot behind the horrible black 200 Market St. building. The park's full of little grassy hillocks, with paths winding around them. In the sunshine, when the light's just right, you half-expect to see doors and chimneys and hobbits gamboling about. When the weather's bleaker, you fully expect barrow-wights.

photo monday rides again

Assorted recent pics, FWIW:



The sky, a couple of hours ago.




The sky, a couple of weeks ago.




Detail of the Steel Bridge, with a bit of steel showing.



The tram, from SW Water Avenue & Lane St. I like this: An unreasonable number of wires snaking off in all directions, and one has a tram full of people hanging off of it.




Construction in the Pearl. It's all about framing the shot, you know.




Sun & leaves, "Unnamed Park" @ SW 14th & Hall, downtown Portland.




Gate at the old St. Mary's Academy block on 4th Ave., downtown. It's just a parking lot now, but with a really amazing old stone wall around it.




Ok, sure it's graffiti. But at least it's graffiti by someone who (maybe) is familiar with Pierre Proudhon. I suppose that's an encouraging sign.




More graffiti, this time opining about the city. This building is the former "Psycho Burger King", at Burnside & Broadway downtown. Spend a lot of time here and you might start to agree with the sentiment expressed here.

photo monday: sneeze-inducing edition

The #1 problem with taking photos of grass is that nobody will ever believe you. You can explain all you like that grass tassels are actually flowers, and that nothing else really looks like it, long, thin, angular and whatnot, and once you get to looking at it it's really kind of striking. Say that all you want. It won't help. People see you taking a photo, and they'll always assume you're doing something illegal, probably immoral, and possibly fattening too.

The #2 problem with taking photos of grass is hay fever. It's not quite peak pollen season just yet, but my, uh, detector keeps going off. I always claim I go to the mat for you guys, O Gentle Reader(s), and this is yet another example. Ok, sure, you didn't actually ask me to nuzzle up to pollen-spewing grass stems of doom, and chances are you don't care now that I've gone through with it. But still.

In case you're curious, photo #1 is from Tanner Springs, #2 is from Frank L. Knight Park, and #3 is in Lovejoy Fountain Plaza.

roses, mostly

Roses around SW 14th & Montgomery, downtown Portland. ODOT plants a lot of roses and other flowers around freeways, I guess to make them a little less ugly. So these are your tax dollars (and mine) at work. I don't drive all that much, so the only way to really get my money's worth here is with a camera, I guess.

The chunk of open space you see in the second photo is not a park, it's ODOT land connected with the freeway, and it's fenced off, No Admittance. I had to peek my camera through a chain link fence to take this. As you can see on this map, it's a fairly good-sized chunk of land just sitting there fenced off, which is kind of a shame. Although I'm not entirely sure what else you could do with it, either.




This one's in what the city refers to as the "Unnamed Park at SW 14th and Hall", a triangle-shaped nook next to I-405, a few blocks south from the last batch of roses.




Wildflowers at Frank L. Knight Park, near the Vista Tunnels.



Flowers in an old stone wall on 4th Ave. The wall's all that remains of the original St. Mary's Academy building. It's been nothing but picturesque ruins for as long as I can remember.

flowers, finally

Ok, I managed to go six posts without posting any flower photos, and before that there was a run of another eight flowerless posts. Some of those recent non-floral posts have even been serious and weighty and possibly worth reading, so I think I'm entitled to a little fun here. Voila, les fleurs:





Assorted wildflowers in Tanner Springs Park, in the Pearl.




Spring leaves, somewhere near PSU (I think).




A rose on SW Broadway near Burnside, downtown Portland.






Clusters of unobtrusive little white flowers. They're actually pretty cool, if you take the time and look closely enough.

Ding, Dong, Falwell's dead

That's one less fundie nutjob out there. Good riddance.

I don't want to hear any of the usual "A Nation United in Mourning" crap from the media about today's blessed event. So here are some fun Falwell links, just so we're all crystal clear on what kind of person he was:

• TheocracyWatch mentions Falwell's unusual views on nuclear war in a piece on Dispensationalism
  
  
• A selection of jawdropping Falwell quotes
  
  
• One Peoples Project: JERRY FALWELL (DECEASED). [Seems they've already updated their piece.] Covers some of Falwell's rather, uh, unreconstructed racial opinions, among other things.
  
  
• HufPo on his 2006 comments comparing Hillary Clinton to Lucifer. I mean, I'm not Hillary fan myself, but really. Fundies say the darndest things.
  
  
• NYT, from 1985: " Falwell Appearance Canceled Over South Africa Remarks".
  
  
• Wash. Post, right after 9/11: "God Gave U.S. 'What We Deserve,' Falwell Says". You know, because of the ACLU, feminists, gays, etc. The wingnuts always strut around lecturing us about how they're so much more patriotic than everyone else, and then they turn around and say stuff like this. I don't get it.
  

There's a GOP presidential debate this evening, and the candidates are scrambling over each other to heap praise on Falwell. No big surprise there. And Pat Robertson offers his public condolences as well. At least we've still got ol' Pat to kick around.

Oh, and here's a rich one, a post whining that "Liberal Blogs Spew Hate on Jerry Falwell Death". To which I can only say, hell yeah. What goes around, comes around, after all.

Meanwhile, here among the living, the US Attorney thing gets even uglier. Everyone keeps saying Gonzo's job is doomed, for real this time, definitely, but the Glorious Leader continues to stand by him, just like he's standing by Wolfie. At this point it seems every single personnel issue is the Alamo all over again, so far as the White House is concerned. And like I said before, that's fine with me. I'd rather they stayed around in their current jobs, scorned by all and sundry. I'd like to see Dubya and the R's in Congress keep going to the mat to defend these clowns, further tarnishing their own reputations in the process. It pains me to say this, but a USDOJ that's effectively paralyzed until 2009 is the best outcome we can reasonably hope for so long as Bush rules the roost. It's not a good outcome, by any means, but all the other possibilities are even worse. A new AG with a functioning staff would mean a fresh assault on basic civil liberties, whereas Gonzo & Co. aren't in a position to do much more in that direction right now.

Updated: A short bit ago, I got an abusive comment from some anonymous visitor, calling me all sorts of names because I won't pretend Falwell's demise is some kind of horrible national tragedy. Sure, I could say all that stuff purely for the sake of politeness. I could be all sanctimonious and say I'm taking the high road, and pretend to mourn the death of someone who would've welcomed mine. But I've always believed honesty is the best policy. We're all better off without the guy. If that offends you, tough. Send flowers to the funeral if it makes you feel any better.

(And in case you're wondering, yes, I do delete personally abusive comments. Them's always been the house rules around these parts. If you can't handle that, if you think I'm being unfair somehow, feel free to go get your own blog and swear at me and yell and scream all you want over there, for all I care. Getting a blog is incredibly easy these days. It's so easy even a fundie can do it.)

an enigma wrapped in a blog

There's a meme going around blogospace by the name of "Bloggy Tag" -- or possibly it's a game, or perhaps it's both -- so let's finesse the question and call it a "geme". In any case, it's a simple geme: One addresses the question "Why on Earth do I blog?", and then one tags five other bloggers with the same question. No, no money changes hands, you don't have to sign people up as "distributors", nothing shady like that. And tagging the other bloggers is quite painless, no visible radio collars or anything. No, it's just a geme. (On the other hand, there's also no chance of winning a pink Cadillac either, that I'm aware of. But them's the breaks, I guess.)

So I was tagged the other day by Samuel, proprietor of the ZehnKatzen Times. Here's his Bloggy Tag post, in which he refers to this humble blog as "an enigma wrapped in a blog", which I rather like, hence the title. (His blogroll also lists this blog under "They have seen the fnords". Which is 100% true, incidentally.)

I don't intend to be a leaf node in the great Bloggy Tag tree, so I really will tag my 5 bloggers, honest... although I haven't quite done so just yet. It seems to me it'd be a bit of a faux pas to tag someone who's already been tagged before, since that suggests one hasn't been reading the taggee's blog very closely, and didn't do one's homework. So let's just mark that part as a TODO and move on to the main event.

I'd been thinking about starting a blog for quite a while before I gave in to temptation. I'd spent a lot of time in mostly tech-related discussion forums, and over time I found that I got sidetracked quite easily by off-topic subjects. Often it was political stuff, and nothing tears a forum apart like an unwanted political thread. At the same time, every so often I'd be thinking about something and I'd find myself itching to write about it, but not knowing how or where to do it. Eventually I got to thinking, you know, a blog would be a good way to do that, and I could go off on my usual 50 different directions however I pleased, without getting in anyone else's way, or them getting in mine. I held off for a while, because everyone who doesn't have a blog knows for a fact that all bloggers are preening, self-important losers, and I certainly didn't want to become one of those. Eventually I figured out it was way too late for me to start worrying about that, so I might as well take the plunge. So I did.

I also had the idea that blogging would be a good writing exercise, in a way that office email rarely is. I have a tendency to use longwinded run-on sentences full of commas, and to switch back and forth between past and present tense in a rather random and awkward way. I also overuse certain words and phrases if I'm not careful, such as "rather", "basically", "of course", and "for example", for example. I say these things in the present tense not out of linguistic incompetence (for once), but because I'm not certain I've gotten any better over the past 16+ months. In the larger scheme of things that really isn't all that long, I suppose. So there may be hope for me yet. Although if I'd been going to the gym as religiously as I've done this over the last 16 months, I might have those six-pack abs by now. And to think I was briefly an English major, back in my long-departed college days. It occurs to me that if blogging truly is an art, affecting a really singular style might be a Good Thing. If blogs had existed decades ago, I'm convinced certain writers would've found the medium irresistable. Faulkner, for one, and probably Thomas Wolfe as well. Hemingway might've been more of a Twitter user, texting in "IM HNTNG RHINO" and then "IM 8 RHINO 4 BRKFST UR NOT LOL". But I digress.

So the jury's still out on stylistic tics and such, but I've found that writing ideas down in a blog, knowing that someone might eventually wander by and read them, is a good way to crystallize and capture what you're thinking about. Much better than just sitting around daydreaming, at any rate.

In the beginning I really thought this would be more of a political blog than it's turned out to be. After a post or two explaining in great detail precisely what is wrong with Dick Cheney, for example, I tend to feel I've addressed the issue to my own satisfaction, and I move on to something else. It's the curse of having eclectic interests, I guess. I'd probably have far more regular readers if I picked a topic and stuck to it. Come to think of it, that's exactly what I've done on SNR, this blog's nerdy and utterly single-minded sibling. More about which in a moment.

So there was an initial rush of pent-up opinions, and I tend to think those posts don't rank among my most immortal prose, relatively speaking. After that, I started in with the photos. I really didn't anticipate I'd be posting all these photos of flowers. I figured I'd occasionally post a photo or two just to illustrate some point I was trying to make. From there, the photo side of things grew like kudzu. It wasn't something I contemplated when I started the blog, but it's a big reason why I keep doing it. Some of the credit has to go to the nice folks at Canon, for making a camera that delivers good results on a consistent basis, even though I'm the one using it. That had to take a fair bit of engineering skill.

After a while, I began to realize that there was a lot of stuff that didn't work here, despite this blog's eclectic subject matter (or lack thereof). I'd sort of gotten wrapped up in the SCO vs. Universe situation, toiling on the side of the Universe, i.e. the good guys. I'd occasionally post things of interest to the anti-SCO community here, but then they'd come back a week later and the top story here would be about some photos of roses I took the other day, or a terrible sword-n-sorcery movie I just saw, or something stupid the president just said. Conversely, I imagine that the majority of this blog's nano-cadre of Gentle Reader(s) don't care too much about my techie obsessions. So I started a second blog, the aforementioned SNR, dedicated to ending the SCO menace, and salting the earth from which it arose, and having fun in the process. SNR actually gets far more visits than the main page here ever does, with regular readers from all over the world (although the majority of my hits are Google Image searches leading to this blog.) But low readership or not, this blog is the firstborn, and it's always been the more rewarding of the two to work on.

I didn't anticipate the photo thing, and I don't know what to anticipate next. So I guess you could also say I keep doing this just to see where (if anywhere) it leads me next. Or not. Or whatever. Because in the end, it's just a geme.

Collins Circle

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A few photos of Collins Circle, the weird traffic circle at 18th & Jefferson in downtown Portland, next to the Goose Hollow MAX stop. We are not, generally speaking, a city of grand traffic circles. There's Coe Circle in Laurelhurst, with the famous Joan of Arc statue. There's Ladd Circle in the heart of Ladd's Addition, with a nice little garden full of roses, if you go in season and can find your way around Ladd's Addition. (But hey, wandering around lost there is half the fun.) Here and there around town you'll find a number of mini-circles, which exist to slow traffic down in residential neighborhoods. And then there's Collins Circle, which contains the large and rather puzzling stone sculpture you see here.



People generally don't even notice the thing, which may be just as well. I'm not a big fan of it myself, although you can get some (mildly) interesting photos out of it, and it might be fun spending a few minutes speculating about what it's supposed to be, or what it's supposed to evoke. It looks sort of like an old, forgotten stone wall, sort of like an arid talus slope, and I'm not sure what the shape of it is supposed to indicate. (You can get a better idea of the shape from this overhead view) Is it supposed to shaped like a pizza missing a slice, due to the nearby student housing for PSU? Is it Pac-Man? To me, it gives the strong sense that something's missing here. There really ought to be a fountain, with water running over the rocks, or at least a reflecting pool around it. Or it's a sundial without the bits that tell time. Or it's the base of a missing statue. Or there's a door on one side, leading to the fabulous underground tomb of a cruel pagan king of yore. It could be lots of things, but sadly isn't any of them.



If you want to see more (and better) photos of the thing, Art on File has a few here. The University of Oregon has a fairly large collection of photos, but they are apparently Classified and not to be seen by mere mortals. So if you happen not to be a mere mortal, you might check those photos out as well.

The Oregonian's Randy Gragg was a friend of the circle's architect/designer, the late Robert Murase. When Murase died in 2005, Gragg wrote an article about his life and career, and mentioned Collins Circle in passing:

Like most architects, who deal with clients and budgets out of their control, Murase's projects weren't always successful. Maybe most tragic was the truly excellent work he did in setting the stage for architecture that ultimately failed to rise to the challenge his landscapes made. Chief among these works is one of the most assertive works Murase ever did: the stout, basalt Japanese infinity design he created for TriMet to fill Collins Circle at the Southwest 18th and Jefferson Westside MAX station.
The piece only "met its context halfway," according to Greg Baldwin, a prominent local architect with ZGF Partnership. The subsequent designs around it have failed to hold up their side of the bargain in the form, materials and ideas.
"I look at his work in a lot of places, and I wish the architects had done more -- that I had done more," Baldwin said. "There's an intellectual contribution he made with his work that is more profound than its aesthetic contribution. There are deep polemics, but he never imposed them. It's up to the observer to discover them."

It's nice to speak well of the dead, of course, and it's nice to speak well of one's friends, certainly. But that passage is just rich. It really is. Admit the thing is unsuccessful, but lay all the blame on subsequent nearby buildings that didn't measure up to the "challenge". At the time the article was written, the only subsequent nearby building was the adjacent Collins Circle Apartments, so I figure this is what they have in mind. And it's true, the building is a fairly generic, inoffensive affair, a six story red brick apartment building with retail on the bottom. It's not the work of internationally renowned architects, but perhaps because of that, it's also affordable enough that university students can live there. That's not a point to be dismissed out of hand.



Gragg once referred to the circle as "one of the boldest pieces of public art since [Lawrence Halprin's] Lovejoy Fountain.". Which, again, is rich. Longtime readers know I'm a big fan of Lovejoy Fountain, and photos of it show up here all the time. Collins Circle, you're no Lovejoy Fountain.

A 1998 piece about the then-new westside MAX line's public art describes the circle:

Collins Circle, across the street from Goose Hollow Station, was designed as "a gateway to the city." Murase sees the stone-studded traffic circle as a representation of ancient, evolving Oregon landscapes, the boxy stones reminiscent of burial mounds and symbolic of volcanic activity that shaped Eastern Oregon.

"It's a thoughtful place," he said. "It will cause a lot of questions. I like to have people think about it."

In a 1997 overview of the year's "interesting" architecture of the year, the Graggmeister wrote:

The gateway as art
Thought we were just talking about architecture here? Well, an architect wins this category, hands down: Robert Murase for his bracing design of Collins Circle at the crossroads of Southwest 18th Avenue and Jefferson Street and the westside light-rail line. Rendering a spiraling Japanese brush-painting symbol called enso in fractured chunks of basalt, the circle has enough spirituality to lure New Age worshipers on summer mornings. But it has the scale to function as a gateway to the city -- the one of the future rather than the present.

Call me deficient in New Age spirituality if you like (and you'd be right), but a mound of mute stones just doesn't stir my soul much. I look at it, and what I see is a missed opportunity. Somewhere near here, during westside MAX construction, workers uncovered a huge pulley that was once part of Portland's short-lived cable car line. Cable cars once ran from this very spot up into the West Hills, on a long and very steep trestle. The pulley operated a turntable to rotate cars for their next trip up the hill. I wonder if the circle was the site of the turntable, way back when? The story doesn't say exactly, but it seems like a reasonable guess. So some sort of historical, transit-related theme would've been a good fit here.

If you just can't get enough of Gragg's design-junkie blather, he also wrote a whole feature article about the circle back in '97, "The Power of the Graceful Contrast". Towards the bottom, he discloses a controversy about the place:

No less controversial for some was Murase's design for Collins Circle, which had been planted with trees and rhododendrons paid for by local benefactor Mary Beth Collins. Like many recent changes in the city, it was not greeted warmly by many longtime locals.

``The old circle was a nice landscape that Tri Met just scraped away without any public talking to anyone in the neighborhood,'' Portland planner Richard Brainard says. ``You used to come down Canyon Road and the circle marked the beginning of downtown with something green. Now it's just rocks. Bob is a great landscape architect, but the way this was done and the result is just not right.''

Read enough of this and you'll conclude what I concluded a long time ago, that architecture is nothing but the art of creative BS. Master that, and people will let you build anything. You want to sculpt a centaur that looks like Elvis, made out of pure, glowing plutonium? Just memorize a few stock art-world phrases, schmooze with the right movers and shakers, and you'll be good to go. You'll have to design an addition to your house just to hold all the awards your fellow architects will bestow on you. If possible, you'll want to work in a self-conscious small city like Portland, where everyone's been taught that only ignorant Bible-thumping rubes criticize capital-A Art. But I digress.



People who noticed the circle were calling BS on it from the beginning, as you can tell from a 1995 article titled "That Sloping Basalt Feature Will Come Full Circle . . . Eventually". The piece pleaded for patience, at least until MAX construction was completed:

Some people who have glimpsed the sloping basalt feature in the intersection are puzzled: What is it? What is a fortress doing in the middle of the street?

Patience, friends.

When the roadwork is done and the design completed, the image may be more evocative.

The article says the previous landscaping at the circle had been paid for by the Collins Foundation, a local nonprofit, hence the name.

The article also mentions that the sculpture is Not For Climbing. Pedestrians are not wanted here. Or more to the point, I've seen homeless people sleeping among the landscaping in both Ladd Circle and Coe Circle, but not here. Skateboarders are out of luck here, too, come to think of it. You never even see kids playing on it, using it as a play fort or anything. It's entirely uninviting for all of these purposes. I don't know if that was intentional or not, but either way it does a heckuva job.

In fairness, traffic circles are a tough nut, designwise. They tend to be surrounded by a snarl of traffic, so you can't really create them for pedestrians. The Joan of Arc in Coe Circle works - you can see it at a distance, and tell what it is with a glance as you drive by. Likewise with the roses in Ladd Circle. Ladd Circle isn't quite so busy, so you could also walk over to it and look at the roses if you wanted to.

At Collins Circle, half of the circle is busy and half isn't. It wasn't designed for people, but people cut across it all the time anyway, since it's the shortest path between the MAX stop and the sidewalk on SW Jefferson St. You're not really supposed to, but it seems everyone does, and I did when I was taking the photos. It doesn't really catch the eye when you drive past, or ride by on the train. I used to ride right past the thing on the train every day for years and never gave it a second thought. I really never thought about until a week or two ago, while I was searching for anything convenient to add to my ongoing city parks series. It kind of pushes the definition a little, but at least it's conveniently located.

Art people look at the thing and wonder, is it a park, or a sculpture? There's just no end to the art-theory fun you could get out of that question, if you're that sort of person. I wonder the same thing, actually, but for a more mundane, PoliSci-geek reason: Who's in charge of the thing? If some punk kid tags it, which bureaucracy's budget pays to fix it? Some maps, like the city's SW Walking Map, list it as a "Jefferson Street Park", but there's no sign and it's not on the parks bureau's website. The Regional Arts & Culture Council normally takes care of public art, but it's not on their website either. Likewise, TriMet and the city's transportation department also don't claim it.

I tend to focus on parks, historic places and things, local urban legends, social conventions and mores, and such because I'm interested in the shared fabric of the city, the things that make Portland what it is. Why we're not just like L.A. or Atlanta, for instance. I'm not that interested in the official, approved history of the place, and I also shy away from boosterism, whether of the Visitors' Center or "Keep Portland Weird" varieties. I'll make up my own mind, thanks. I occasionally get visitors who freak out when I call BS on some local institution or make snide remarks about the Pearl District or something. But really, how can people say they care about the place but refuse to acknowledge the warts when they crop up? You ignore the warts, you get more warts, and the city you care about loses a little more of what makes it special.

When I see a bungled opportunity like this, it offends me because we really don't have that much common space here, places you can sit and read a book without having to buy a crappy $5 latte, or go for a walk without paying admission. On the very rare occasion that we're creating a park close to the downtown core, the effort ought to be taken a little more seriously than this one was. You don't just pick a well-connected architect and let them have a wank at taxpayer expense, which is basically what the circle is, if you ask me. Somehow we keep ending up with one perplexing conceptual piece after another, while pretending it's all so very sophisticated. As if mystifying the general public was somehow difficult or something. To make it worse, one of the core tenets of the design/architecture world is that once something like this is in place, you can never, ever change anything about it. It's literally set in stone, forever. If you think it'd look better with a reflecting pool at the base, too bad. It wasn't part of the holy original vision, so you're out of luck. Forever. In practice, things do get changed around sometimes, but it's often a long and arduous process. So what you really want to do is get it right the first time. This time we didn't, and now we're stuck with it. Blechhhh.

Corbett Oak

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This is Portland's tiny Heritage Tree Park, at SW Corbett Ave. & Lane St., just south of downtown. The Oregon White Oak tree you see here, known as the Corbett Oak, is a real survivor. Back in the late 1980's, infill rowhouses were going up all over town. Developers would buy up a few adjacent older houses with large yards, tear them out, and replace them with rows of identical townhouses, like the ones you see on the left of the photo. Those rowhouses were supposed to extend the full block, but ran into quite vehement opposition from the neighborhood. At one point the developer had someone come in with a chainsaw to kill the tree by girdling it, making the "save the tree" argument a moot point. Angry neighbors stopped the guy, but even now the tree bears a horizontal chainsaw scar from the attempt. This 1997 Oregonian piece tells the whole story up to that point. Local residents eventually raised enough money to buy the land, and convinced the city to acquire the tiny parcel as a new city park. I imagine that what really saved the place in the end was its smallness; the developer crammed as many rowhouses as he could onto the rest of the half-block, and as a result the remaining bit of land was too small to be viable for development, by him or anyone else.

A June 1998 story about the park's creation says:

Glazer said the park probably will see few changes. A city sign and a bench might be installed, and a few stairs might be cut on the slope for better access.

It's been close to a decade since then, and those improvements haven't happened yet. There isn't even a sign saying this is a city park. That could just be due to the parks bureau's perennial budget crisis, but if you ask me, it was probably a deliberate decision. Given the current leadership at the city, and the parks bureau in particular, celebrating a neighborhood's victory over big developers is absolutely the last thing they'd ever do. If you let people know it was possible twenty years ago, they might start thinking it's possible now, and we simply can't have that. So the city, or someone, mows the grass, but otherwise it just looks like a well-maintained vacant lot. The only indication there's anything special about the place is a tiny "Heritage Tree" badge on the tree itself. The city parks website says almost nothing about the place, other than noting it was created in '97, and comes to .09 acre -- in case you ever wondered what roughly a tenth of an acre looks like. Elsewhere there's a mention of the tree being designated an official "Heritage Tree". The controversy about the tree actually led to changes in the city's Heritage Tree ordinance, making it much easier to get trees onto the list. Sure, the law's one of those quintessential "liberal city" things that the talk radio crowd loves to freak out over. But it's made the city a better place, if you ask me, so let 'em freak out if they want to.

In retrospect, the development wars of the 80's seem almost quaint. Housing was being replaced with denser, and uglier, housing, but it was still pretty small-scale stuff. We weren't yet building luxury condo towers, streetcars, and aerial trams with taxpayer money. People were actually protesting and going to jail to prevent 1920s bungalows from being torn down, and sometimes it even worked. I'm not an anti-development Luddite by any means. I live in a high rise tower myself, actually. As a general rule, I think infill close to downtown is vastly better than sprawl out at the edges of the burbs, and if you're doing infill, you might as well build tall. But that's not the right answer everywhere, all the time. Our stock of centuries-old oak trees is not getting any bigger, obviously, so there's a point where you have to figure, what does the city need more, one ancient tree preserved, or a couple more cookie-cutter houses?

More info about the park at ExplorePDX, the South Portland Neighborhood Association, and NW Garden History.

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Updated 5/31/07: More photos of the oak, with the chainsaw scar still visible nearly two decades later:

You probably didn't notice, but...

...this blog now features 5% more tasty Web 2.0 goodness. Each post now comes with "Bookmark this on del.icio.us" and "Digg it" buttons, absolutely free. Making them work involved a bit of script futzing, and they're still kind of ugly, but I'm ready to declare Mission Accomplished. As with all Missions Accomplished, the hard part comes afterwards, by which I mean trying to make my posts worth bookmarking. So we'll see how that turns out, I suppose.

I also rearranged the link tree a little. I've never been entirely happy with it. After a long period of utter indifference, I've gone back to being mildly annoyed with it. So I moved a few things around, but I'm still not thrilled about it.

Oh, and for the first time in ages, I did a couple of uninteresting (but text-only!) new entries on a couple of my vast media empire's minor outposts, at MySpace and Bloglines. Nothing very interesting really; I'm just mentioning this for any completists out there who insist on reading every last word I write -- and I expect you probably don't exist anyway, so I'm wasting my breath here.

space roundup

I used to fuss over every last bit of space minutiae on this blog, but I haven't done that for a while. Here are a few recent interesting items I've been meaning to mention but didn't get around to:

• The New Horizons probe flew past Jupiter back in February, on its way to Pluto. That didn't get a lot of press, since I guess visiting Jupiter is old hat these days or something. In any case, here are the cool photos.
  
  
• The Japanese space agency's finally released the full photo sets from the Hayabusa probe's visit to the asteroid Itokawa. Looks like a weird and fascinating place; I don't know how you even tell which way is up on a thing like that.
  
  The website isn't the best-organized I've ever seen, but at least they finally released the goodies.
  
  
• The ESA's Rosetta craft flew by Mars around the same time New Horizons was at Jupiter. The photos at that link are the only ones I've seen so far. But then, visiting Mars really is old hat these days.
  
  
• As for upcoming events, MESSENGER will pass Venus early next month on its way to Mercury. Later that month, Dawn leaves for the asteroid belt, and in August Phoenix heads off to Mars.
  
  
• And another batch of newly named moons of outer planets. They've been handing out a lot of nice exotic-sounding names from world mythology lately. It's kind of a shame that the objects being named are small, nondescript chunks of rock and ice.
  
  When I was a kid, you could memorize the whole list of moons. And really that wasn't very long ago at all, I'll have you know. You could memorize the whole list, I think there were mnemonics for it and everything, and I did memorize the list. Hey, I'm a geek, what can I say?
  
  From here, one more for Jupiter, and 13 for Saturn.
  
  Jupiter XLIX Kore = S/2003 J 14
  
  Saturn XXXVI Aegir = S/2004 S 10
  Saturn XXXVII Bebhionn = S/2004 S 11
  Saturn XXXVIII Bergelmir = S/2004 S 15
  Saturn XXXIX Bestla = S/2004 S 18
  Saturn XL Farbauti = S/2004 S 9
  Saturn XLI Fenrir = S/2004 S 16
  Saturn XLII Fornjot = S/2004 S 8
  Saturn XLIII Hati = S/2004 S 14
  Saturn XLIV Hyrokkin = S/2004 S 19
  Saturn XLV Kari = S/2006 S 2
  Saturn XLVI Loge = S/2006 S 5
  Saturn XLVII Skoll = S/2006 S 8
  Saturn XLVIII Surtur = S/2006 S 7
  
  
  And from here, another four for Neptune:
  
  2002N1 - Halimede
  2002N2 - Sao
  2002N3 - Laomedeia
  2002N4 - Neso
  
  
  The last one is fairly fascinating, if just because of its extreme orbit. It orbits Neptune at an average distance of around 48 million km, and it takes just over 25 years to complete a single orbit of the planet. For comparison, that distance is about 70% of the distance from the Sun to the planet Mercury, and is almost 125x the distance from the Earth to the Moon. Yow.
  
  

flowers, dammit

Ok, so I managed to go almost a whole week without posting any photos. Until now. By "a week" I mean a physical, 7-day week, not the logical, 7-post week I said I was going to do. I didn't quite manage the latter feat; the photos were piling up, and following the rules just started to feel sort of stifling, so I decided to ignore 'em and post some pics anyway. I'd sworn earlier that a photo post would reset the post count back to zero and I'd have to start over. Maybe I'll try that, I dunno. But in any case, here's the latest batch of flower photos, with an extra helping of photoblogging angst. Well, whatever.



Most of these are from Washington Park, which I mentioned in the previous post. So really this isn't an independent post at all, it's just some supplemental material for the last post, and therefore doesn't count against the 7 post requirement. Yeah. That's it. That's the ticket.

Sunshiny

So I'm out enjoying the sun, although I ought to be working right now. A coworker told me he couldn't afford to go outside right now. And neither can I, but here I am. Blame it on spring. I do.

Technically I'm not outside at the moment. I'm combining an afternoon walk with a late lunch, so I'm sitting here with a foo-foo mango margarita, tapping furiously away on the ol' Blackberry. And I feel like such a total dork, but hey.

As I said, really I ought to be tinkering with my Solaris kernel module, or my intractable java bugs right now, or doing something useful, like getting a haircut. But the sun's in my eyes, and I simply can't do any of those things.

Until I started this post, I was reading one of our fair city's free and very silly New Age newspapers. All about "miracles", channeling, reincarnation, quack medicine, the whole works. My wife makes fun of me for reading these things, but it's oddly irresistable. I read these people babbling on about crystals and unicorns and crap, and I see dollar signs. They're practically begging to give their money away, and chances are they've got tons of money, and they don't expect to receive anything of tangible value in return. Sure, it'd still be evil to exploit 'em, in an objective sense, but it's not exactly TV evangelism, is it? It's not like you're ripping off the poor. Silly weak-minded rich people are sort of fair game, dontcha think?

When I was younger and less cynical, I used to be outraged that supposedly intelligent, educated people would fall for this nonsense. I was really big on the whole "skeptical humanist" outlook, and saw the New Agers as a real threat.

I could say "silly me" but it's not just me that's changed. In retrospect it seems like that was such an innocent time, when a few Shirley Maclaine types seemed like something to worry about. As silly as they are, you don't see them screeching about the Rapture and waterboarding people and demanding eternal wars all across the Mideast, do you? As ludicrous as New Agers are, they still qualify as Mostly Harmless, unlike, say, the president, for example. As an entirely nonreligious person, Mostly Harmless is the most positive thing I'm inclined to say about any irrational belief system. Still, the possibility of laying hands on their cash is awfully attractive. I'm pretty short on evil impulses, despite the nym, but sometimes I'm tempted to set myself up as some sort of fancy guru and rake in the bucks. In reality that won't happen; I'm nowhere near evil enough to actually do it, just enough to be sorely tempted sometimes.

Ok, enough ranting. It's sunny out, and that's rare enough that it's a shame to waste a moment of it making fun of people, as much as they might deserve it. I'm outside now - I wandered up to Washington Park and I'm traipsing about taking pictures of flowers and such, like I tend to do. But you don't get to see them just yet, since this post will be logical day 3 of the logical week of monomedia, and them's the rules.

The great thing about Washington Park is that despite being a crown jewel of the city park system, it's full of obscure nooks and crannies nobody knows about. Venture off the beaten path just a little and you could be lost in the Coast Range, practically. Every now and then you'll pass a couple having a private moment, or teens splitting a six pack, and you'll catch the occasional whiff of illicit herbal entertainment. But this is Portland, so one doesn't make eye contact, much less rat anyone out to the fuzz. It's all good.

Wander around the park long enough and you'll stumble across the city's Holocaust Memorial, which for some reason is here in the middle of a serene park setting. It's pretty effective; some might even call it manipulative, with the scattered sculptures of lost toys, eyeglasses, a violin, and so forth. But it's certainly effective. It's a shame that the one lesson present-day people seem to want to draw from the Nazis' atrocities is that Palestinians and other Muslims can, and ought to be, slaughtered with absolute impunity whenever an opportunity presents itself. Call me crazy, but that seems to be missing the point, somehow.

I don't want to wrap this up on a down note like that. I didn't mean to include it at all, except that I stumbled across the thing, as I suppose you're meant to. So let's move on, shall we?

I'm up at the Rose Garden now. We're heading towards sunset, and the camera batteries are nearly spent, so it's about time to head back to Civilization and Responsibility and all that. But it's been a good day. Maybe I'll go ahead and post some photos soon, rules or no rules...

Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless handheld

political odds & ends

• So according to Newsweek 28% of people still think Dubya's doing a heckuva job. Even now. Yikes. On the other hand, 39% of voters surveyed want him impeached. I'm not a big fan of purely symbolic actions, myself, but I still have to take that as an encouraging sign.
  
  Bush's numbers were hanging on in the low 30's for quite a while, so there must've been a recent something that was the last straw for another 3-4% of the population. That actually puzzles me quite a bit. They stood by the guy after Katrina, after four years of Mission Accomplished, after Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and wiretaps, and cronies galore, and now they've come to the last straw. I really thought the remaining 30-some percent were all bitter-enders, diehard flat-earthers who will forever worship the ground Bush walks on, no matter what. I really figured the last clue train had left the station, but it looks like a few folks caught the redeye. Well, welcome aboard. Better late than never, I guess.
  
  The really fun bit about the polls is that Bush is still overwhelmingly popular among registered Republicans. It's just that there are far fewer registered Republicans than there once were. People who don't buy the party line are walking away from the party entirely, which may mean we're seeing a longer-term shift in allegiances. This also raises the odds that the remaining faithful will nominate a complete raving whackjob next year, and they'll be absolutely astonished when the rest of the country doesn't want to drink the Kool-Aid.
  
  
• The Wolfie circus continues to entertain. It's fun to watch Bush, Cheney, and friends expending all that political capital on behalf of various bungling cronies. Everything's the Alamo with those guys anymore. All apparatchiks must be defended to the last, no matter how crooked or incompetent they are, because to do otherwise is a sign of weakness, the terrorists win, etc.
  
  In this case, it appears they might manage to keep Wolfie employed through January 2009, albeit to the great detriment of the World Bank as a whole. Since I'm not a big fan of the World Bank and IMF, this would actually be a positive outcome, as satisfying as it might be to see Wolfie get his walking papers.
  
  
• The US media coverage of the French presidential election couldn't have been more predictable. Time's take: "A 'Pro-American' French President?". Seems like we're always being encouraged to root for far-right candidates in other countries' elections, on the vague grounds that they're friendly and "pro-American". Actually we're even told to root for dictators on those grounds (i.e. Musharraf). Do we really have no other standards for evaluating world leaders? Are we really so insecure and needy that the praise we get from the world's petty autocrats and assorted wingnuts really means something to us? That's.... awful.
  
  
• Someone refresh my memory, has political analysis in this country always been this boneheaded? Apparently the French election result proves that Hillary's doomed too, just like Segolene Royal. You know, because both candidates are female.
  
  This is what passes for serious debate these days. Sure, it makes no logical sense whatsoever, and nobody's even trying to locate supporting evidence for it. But it's an extremely simple notion, easily grasped by extremely simple people, which makes it great fodder for the screaming-head cable shows.
  
  
• Closer to home, the political saga in Gold Hill, OR continues. Chaotic council meetings, a disputed recall election that might end in a tie, a completely botched election a few years back, and on, and on. You just can't make this stuff up.
  
  

The Only Voter's Guide You'll Need, Possibly

If you live in Portland, and don't live under a rock, you already know there's a special election coming up. You've read the election coverage in the local papers. You've gotten fliers in the mail. You might've gotten a recorded call or two at home. Chances are you're wondering what all the big fuss is about. We've got four really geeky city charter amendments on the table, plus a handful of school district and other elections to decide on. Everyone else has tried to tell you how to vote, so now it's my turn, I suppose.

To begin with, I've never been a big fan of deciding substantive issues through special elections. Special elections should be reserved for emergencies: Filling vacancies in office, short term stopgap funding measures, that sort of thing. Voter turnout is always vastly lower than in a normal primary or general election, and everyone knows it. So when measures that would make significant changes to the law appear at a special election, it creates an impression -- rightly or wrongly -- that someone's trying to sneak something past the voters. Even if it's done with the purest and noblest of motives, submitting something to a vote when you can be fairly certain less than a quarter of voters will participate is simply undemocratic. A few years ago the state adopted the so-called "double majority" rule, so that tax measures need a majority of votes and at least 50% voter turnout to pass. I realize not everyone likes the double majority rule, but I'm starting to think we ought to do the same for all ballot measures. That would discourage situations like the present one, where major changes to how the city functions could be enacted by a tiny minority of the city's voters.

Since we don't have any sort of rule like that at present, we may as well get to the ballot measures. Let's start off with the one everyone cares about, Measure 26-91. This is the measure that would move the city from the current city commision model to a strong mayor + city council model similar to what's used in most other large cities. The actual text of it and the other proposed charter changes don't appear in the official Voter's Pamphlet -- and don't get me started about that -- but the city's website has 'em in their full glory, and 26-91 is an 80 page, 500k PDF file. But what it does is pretty simple: The mayor would be in charge of all city bureaus, and city council members would have a purely legislative role in the future.

I voted no, and you should too. The most common argument against the measure is that the mayor hasn't made a compelling case for why we ought to change things around. Perhaps if Mayor Potter had spent the last couple of years chafing at the bit, sharing his frustration about all the great things he'd love to do for the city if only he had the power, the measure might have a better chance of passing. But instead we've had a couple of years of that touchy-feely "visionPDX Process" of his, and even now I still don't understand what the heck that was all about. I can't think of a single thing he's tried and failed to do because of commission-style government. If the current governmental arrangement was obviously unwieldy and nonfunctional and everyone knew it, we'd certainly vote for change. Most likely we'd have done so years ago. But as unusual as our current arrangement is, it generally works. It works about as well as any type of city government works, anyway.

I'm actually a fan of the commission form of government. Commissioners are expected to shoulder part of the job of running the city, instead of sitting on the sidelines and carping about the mayor, like you see in most other large cities. It's the closest thing you'll see in this country to a parliamentary system (though it's not precisely the same thing). If I absolutely had to change something, I might add a few more council seats and make some elected by district instead of at-large. But that's about all I'd do.

The commission model would be an unworkable disaster in most cities, and I suspect it suits us as well as it does for local cultural reasons. It's fair to say the strong mayor + council model is adversarial by design, and we don't do adversarial very well here in the Northwest. People are too thin-skinned, and take everything personally, and you end up with political gridlock. Look at what's happened with the Multnomah County Commission in recent years, and with earlier versions of the Metro regional government. Strong executives are polarizing, and behavior that other cities would hail as signs of a take-charge leader will just get you called a bully here. For good or ill, that's just the way it is.

A disappointing thing about the debate over 26-91 is that most of the "official" reasons given both for and against the measure are just terminally silly. You're hearing them because they played well with focus groups, and they hope you'll buy 'em, not because anyone sincerely believes them. On the "con" side, a recent mailing warned of the dangers of concentrating too much power in one person, with a photo of Dubya to illustrate the point. C'mon, be serious here. Nobody seriously thinks Tom Potter is a Bush clone, do they? Nobody honestly believes that if you give him more mayoral powers, he'll start in with the wiretapping and waterboarding, right? Right? Puhleeeze. And the specter of a huge changeover cost to move to the new system... well, while I suppose that's possible, that's certainly not why the measure's opponents are against it. And on the "pro" side, they rattle off an array of bad business decisions by various city bureaus (the tram, the water billing software fiasco, etc.), but their argument that these foulups couldn't occur under the strong mayor model is unconvincing. And in truth they don't make an honest effort to connect the dots. It's just: "Remember the tram? You're still angry about the tram, right? Us too, and here's this ballot measure you can vote for." They're hoping you don't notice that the two things are unrelated, so they just do a lot of handwaving. That's most of what their campaign is, handwaving, and a flood of soothing, happy weasel words: "streamline", "efficiency", "modernize", and the like. They're not so big on talking about specifics. They're not so big on talking about anything in particular, come to think of it. But those platitudes sure are soothing. Ok, for most people they're soothing. When I hear politicians using those words, it sets off all kinds of alarm bells. Call me a cynic if you like.

So why the big furor about the measure? It's a measure only a PoliSci geek could love, and reasonable people can disagree on its merits. Let's be honest here, it's what it always is: There's money, power, and influence to be gained by some, and lost by others, and the battle lines are drawn accordingly.

Oh, and if the mayor really truly wants all city bureaus under his control, he can already do that. Let's not forget that part. One of the perks of being mayor in Portland is that you get to dole out, or snatch away, city bureaus as you please. If you don't like the job Commissioner X is doing with the Parks bureau, you just take it away and give it to someone else, or keep it for yourself if you want to. Mayor Potter actually did that for several months after he was elected, before finally doling them out to the rest of the city council. If he wanted them back, he could take them all back at any time, with no ballot measure required.


Measure 26-89 is probably going to pass regardless of anything I say, but hear me out. The measure requires the city to set up a charter review committee at least once every ten years, and this citizen committee would have the power to refer proposed charter changes directly to the voters. This would encourage unnecessary tinkering for the sake of tinkering, and tinkering by an unelected body, no less. If the seats are filled the same way we fill other unelected committee jobs, say, the PDC, the Port of Portland, TriMet, and so forth, this "citizen" committee will inevitably be stocked with political cronies and well-connected insiders, people with ulterior motives. Some of the same people who really want 26-91 to pass would likely end up on the committee, so we'll be voting on a slightly tweaked and test-marketed version two years from now, and when that fails, it'll come back again a few more years down the road. If something is genuinely broken in the city charter, we already have multiple ways to fix it. The commissioners can refer changes to the voters themselves, as they did with this measure, or it can be done by initiative petition. And if a proposed charter amendment can't attract enough signatures, or command a majority of the council, if the only way it can make the ballot is via the proposed charter review committee, it probably doesn't belong on the ballot at all. Vote no.


Measure 26-90 is billed as a housekeeping measure to modernize and streamline the city's employment policies, uncontroversial stuff nobody could possibly disagree with, or so they say. Right now the city charter goes into mind-numbing detail about the city's civil service procedures, and the measure would move the details into a regular city ordinance instead. Sounds nice, right? And once you realize that the measure weakens current civil service protections, it still sounds nice, right? Everyone's heard about those lazy do-nothing government employees who are impossible to fire because of those damn civil service laws. And I'll grant you there can be a grain of truth to that. I've been to the DMV and the post office recently. But let's not forget, the reason this civil service stuff was invented in the first place was to cut down on patronage and cronyism. If you look at US politics in the 19th century, say, the Grant administration, you'll see just how bad things were back before government employees had a layer of insulation between themselves and whatever politicians were in power at the moment. Or you could look at, oh, the last seven years or so. The absence of civil service protections doesn't get you efficient services at a reasonable price, it gets you Brownie doing a heckuva job. We've already seen how bad that can be, and 26-90 goes in the wrong direction. Probably not in quite so dramatic a fashion, I mean, the world's not going to end if 26-90 passes, but it's still the wrong measure at the wrong time. So vote no.


You might imagine that I'm voting a straight 'No' ticket on all the charter measures, but you'd be wrong. Measure 26-92 reins in the Portland Development Commission somewhat, and since it's hard to get more unpopular than the PDC in this town, the measure's bound to pass. I'm voting yes, just like everyone else is. This is the only measure of the four that actualy fixes something that's universally seen as Broken. So let's skip past the merits of the measure, and go straight to managing expectations. The thing not to expect from the measure is an end to the cozy relationship between the city and well-connected developers. The precise cast of characters doing lunch at Bluehour will change a bit, but that's about all. But at least some of 'em will be people you can vote against, unlike the present state of affairs.


My ballot also has a couple of Portland Public Schools races, and a couple of Multnomah ESD races. But I'm not going to make any endorsements of my own on these races; I don't have kids, I don't really like kids very much, and quite honestly I just don't pay that close attention to the issues. Yes, I realize it's important, and I realize children are our future, the little bastards. But seriously, I'm anything but a primary education wonk and it would be irresponsible for me to try to tell you how to vote. Pick your favorite newspaper and vote how it tells you to vote, or read the Voter's Pamphlet and make up your own mind, or flip a coin if all else fails. One thing to bear in mind here is that the PPS races were supposed to be a referendum on the controversial new superintendent, and the media endorsements reflect that. But she just quit to go work for Bill Gates instead. So instead you'll probably want to vote for whoever you think will be good at hiring a new superintendent. Who that might be is anyone's guess.


So there you have it. I've never been very good at predicting what the voters will do, but I'd guess that 26-91 will fail, and the others will pass, giving my "endorsements" a 50% success rate. That would be a lot better than I usually manage, for whatever that's worth. So we'll see how this all turns out.

a logical week of monomedia

It's come to my attention that this blog really isn't about much of anything anymore. I spend so much time working on its nerdy, obsessive sibling that I end up with fairly content-free posts here. The typical Cyclotram post these days consists of a bunch of nature photos, with flippant comments about them, and perhaps a bit of me complaining about my lack of free time to post more. Part of that really is laziness, and part's because I receive a lot more positive feedback for photos than I do for stuff I write, for whatever reason. I certainly don't mind positive feedback, but I started the blog as an outlet for writing about wide-ranging topics of my choosing. I increasingly find myself missing that. So here's what I'm going to do. I hereby declare a Logical Week of Monomedia. In other words, the next seven posts will be substantive, text-only, non-multimedia posts, no photos, no videos, no audio clips, no Flash, no interactive animated holograms, nothin'. And no "found on the interwebs" bullet point lists either, or lists of referrer pages, or stuff like that, because that's cheating too. It just is, don't ask me why. I do reserve the right to post photos if they relate to some sort of important current event and absolutely have to be posted now or never. But I doubt that's going to happen, and if it does, the week starts over. This is a logical week, too, meaning seven posts, whether that takes me three days or fifteen. And this post doesn't count towards the seven, either. And in the unlikely event it only takes three days, I might extend it to the full seven days, and however many posts that ends up being.

Drastic? Sure, sorta, but I'm stuck in a blogging rut and something's gotta give.