an african daisy

as seen on wikipedia

A great thing about the Creative Commons license is that you never know where your stuff will turn up next, or who will use it, or what they'll use it for. Case in point: I recently noticed that a couple of my photos on Flickr were getting hits from Wikipedia. After a bit of poking around, I was surprised to see photos I'd taken gracing a couple of Wikipedia pages. Which is perfectly fine with me -- Creative Commons and all that -- it's just kind of surprising. Does that mean I've finally hit the big time, after years of toiling in the dusty backwaters of blogospace (to coin a mixed metaphor)? Or is it a sign Wikipedia's in even more trouble than I thought? I really don't know what to make of it all.

So check out the articles on Mill Ends Park and O'Bryant Square. The O'Bryant Square article is poorly written and uninformative, and uses one of my Holga photos of the place, if you can believe that. I'm half-tempted to sign up and edit the article myself, but so far I've managed to avoid getting sucked into that particular vortex of the Interwebs. Once you start messing around on Wikipedia, I imagine there's no end to it. There's always another poorly-written article to clean up, or tag with the omnipresent "does not cite references" warning, and there's always a pointless interpersonal flamewar to join. In many ways, Wikipedia seems to be the Usenet of the 21st century. I don't mean that in a derogatory sense, or at least not entirely in a derogatory sense.

A search on Wikimedia Commons shows that over time, over a dozen photos of mine have been uploaded by various people, although most don't appear in actual WP articles, at least that I'm aware of. (I've also added the tag 'wikipedia' to the original photos on Flickr, FWIW)

Attack of the Crab Monsters

Today's awful movie is "Attack of the Crab Monsters", a 1957 semi-epic from Roger Corman. Wikipedia's article on the film gives a brief plot summary:

A group of scientists land on a remote island in the Pacific to search for a previous expedition that disappeared and to continue research about the effects of radiation from the Bikini Atoll nuclear tests on the island's plant and sea life. They learn to their horror that the earlier group of scientists have been eaten by mutated giant crabs that have gained intelligence by absorbing the minds of their victims. Members of the current expedition are systematically attacked and killed by the crabs, which are invulnerable to most weaponry because of the mutation in their cell structure. Finally, they discover the crabs are the cause of the earthquakes and landslides that are destroying the island. As the remaining expedition members struggle to survive on the ever-shrinking island, they must also find a way to stop the crabs before they reproduce and invade the oceans of the world.

The description makes the movie sound better than it is, believe it or not. Yes, there's a plot in there somewhere, sort of, but it just makes no freakin' sense at all.

There's a reason I haven't done any bad movie posts for a while. They always turn out to be a lot more work than you'd expect, or at least more than I'd expect. You watch a movie a couple of times, make some notes, and then try to mash those notes into a coherent form, no matter how confused and incoherent the movie itself happens to be -- and tonight's movie is more confused and incoherent than most. This post's actually been moldering in my drafts folder for a month now, and I've already sent the movie back to Netflix so I'm not going to see it again anytime soon. So I figure I might as well post my notes and observations and whatnot, along with assorted stuff I found on the interwebs. It's pretty much a random jumble, but hey, so is the movie.

• The trailer's on YouTube here. It looks like the whole movie may be there, split up in parts -- although I haven't verified that, and I'm not sure it's there legally. So if you look for it and it's gone, you're out of luck. Tough crabmeat.
  
  
• Or if you just want to see the climactic scene (such as it is), it's on MySpace here.
  
  
• The movie's page at BadMovies.org has a few stills and sound clips. I don't have any of those here, because a.) I'm not sure it's copyright-kosher, and I don't want the MPAA's jackbooted thugs giving me a hard time about it. And b.) it would require more effort than I feel like expending. So I do have a photo of the DVD. It's not a very good photo, but then, it's not a very good movie, is it? The only thing remotely special about the photo is that I took it using an ancient lens I found at Goodwill this morning (a preset Takumar 135/3.5, for anyone who cares), and I did this because the lens dates back to 1957, just like the movie. Incidentally, the only camera that appears in the movie is a TLR operated by the German nuclear physicist. As it turns out, TLRs have a distinct drawback here, in that you have to look down into the camera, away from the giant land crab, in order to focus and shoot. Most people don't realize this.
  
  
• More reviews at DVD Drive-In, Delirious, Fantastic Movie Musings & Ramblings, Horror-Wood, The Delirious review reads a hell of a lot into the movie, trying to make it sound deep. I remain unconvinced.
  
  
• A poem inspired by the movie. Seriously. It makes a lot more sense than the movie, if you ask me -- a situation that rarely occurs in the (in itself rather rare) translation from film to poetry.
  
  
• The animated title sequence is cool -- despite being mostly about octopi, which don't appear in the actual film.
  
  
• The intro takes an odd second-person tone, as if it's the start of a videogame (or maybe an old choose-your-own-adventure book):
  
  

  "You are about to land in a lonely zone of terror . . on an uncharted atoll in the Pacific!
  
  You are part of The Second Scientific Expedition to this mysterious bit of Coral reef and volcanic rock. The first group has disappeared without a trace! Your job is to find out why!
  
  There have been rumors about this strange atoll . . frightening rumors about happenings way out beyond the laws of nature..."

  
  
  
• And then we get a rotating globe, highly overexposed. And then nuclear tests, a bunch of stock H-bomb footage. Then floods due to the nuclear test, and people running away as their village is destroyed. Nice miniature work, considering the era and the budget.... Actually I wouldn't be surprised if the opening disaster footage with the miniatures and fleeing crowds is from some other movie with a bigger budget. That would be the Corman way, after all.
  
  
• Right after that, we get a dash of that ol' time religion, with a narrator intoning:
  
  

  "And the lord said, I will scorn man who I have created from the face of the earth, both man and beast and creeping thing and the fowls of the air, for it repenteth me that I have made them."

  
  
  Anybody know if this is a real biblical quote? I mean, the actual bible, not just something Pat Robertson said when he was off his meds. I'm no expert on these things, and the general tenor of it does sound sort of Old-Testamenty, but the wording just doesn't sound right. "It repenteth me"? Say what?
  
  
• Actually I may have those intro bits out of order. I'm not sure now. I doubt reordering them would make them make any more sense, though.
  
  
• The crab costume is pretty awesome. You have to admit it's a highly cool, cheesy, crappy B-movie giant crab, so far as B-movie giant crabs go. It's not that the crabs are perfectly realistic, don't get me wrong. They have faces, with big googly Jim Henson-type eyes. They even have nostrils. And when the crab is trashing the house, it roars like a lion. Well, you hear a lion-ish roar on the soundtrack. You don't actually see it roar. Making its mouth move would've cost money, you know.
  
  
• Speaking of the giant-crab-in-da-house scene... Why do our heroes just stand on the other side of the door when there's a giant crab lurking behind it? And then they just hang out for a while and wait, and then look to see if it's gone?
  
  
• Lots of scenes of people reacting to things we don't see: "there was a mountain there yesterday, now it's gone" and "It has only appeared in the last twenty minutes. And it's over fifty feet deep." If the film was remade today, it would be an hour longer, and the other hour would be all CG showing the stuff they just tell us about.
  
  
• The interior sets are classic 50's den. Wood paneling, decorated with paintings and various tchotchkes, all shipped to the remote South Pacific just to make a bunch of scientists feel at home.
  
  Either a.) the interior scenes were filmed in someone's basement to save money, or b.) they were filmed on a home-sweet-home set left over from some other movie, to save money.
  
  
• The earthquakes aren't very realistic. This was a very early entry in the genre of reacting-to-fake-motion cinema, and clearly there was still much to be learned about getting the actors and the camera shake in sync. It's not Star Trek by any means.
  
  
• Philosophical implications of the crabs absorbing the minds & personalities of various people. Is the crab just impersonating them to catch prey, or do the people really continue to exist as part of the crab & just see things in a new light ("Preservation of the species. Once they were men. Now they are land crabs.")
  
  
• Too many plot holes and nonsensical twists to list. For example, why did their plane (a Catalina flying boat) explode? I suppose it exploded because they had some stock footage of one exploding. Also, they needed a quick plot device to maroon everyone on the island. But the explosion is never explained. Nobody even seems all that surprised by it. Our brave scientists adopt an "oh, that's too bad" sort of attitude, which I think is taking scientific detachment just a step or two too far.
  
  
• And if you like nonsensical plot twists, you'll love the bit near the end where the German guy discovers oil and rushes off into a cave to find more, ignoring the constant earthquakes and, oh, giant land crabs. Lesseee... obsessive secrecy, an all-consuming lust for oil... I have to wonder, did Dick Cheney see this movie as a kid and decide he wanted to be Weigant when he grew up? We'll probably never know for sure, but you have to admit it would explain a lot.
  
  
• The woman doesn't get to do much as a marine biologist, except swim around in SCUBA gear a couple of times. Even though the crabs are underwater part of the time (despite being land crabs). She wears a sort of short-shorts/swimsuit outfit in the water, with a bathing cap to keep the hair dry. On land, she wears the tight collared shirt typical of 50's SF movies, the ancestor of today's white tank top. Girdle & bullet bra, ancestor of silicone, I guess. It's all very tame; you have to have watched as many of these as I have to realize it's supposed to be T&A.
  
  
• There's no safer job than being the only female scientist on the expedition. You'll always make it out alive, along with one of the male castmembers. That's the good news. The bad news is he'll probably leer at you and make a crack about Adam and Eve before the credits roll. And if you do make it back alive, you've probably got a lifetime of cooking and cleaning to look forward to. Niiiice.
  
  
• Incidentally, that doesn't happen in this movie. As soon as our self-sacrificing second hero dies while offing the last(?) giant crab, there's a quick reaction shot from our two survivors, and wham, end of film, the lights go up and the ushers shoo you out of the theater to make way for the next batch of eager cineastes. Rescue? What's that?
  
  
• One of the less compelling love triangles to grace the silver screen. At first when our heroine started making eyes at the local handyman, I figured the filmmakers had just screwed up and forgotten which guy was the love interest. Which would be understandable really, as neither man really stands out in the mind. But no, later they make like they're going to kiss or something, and have a short chat about hero #1. Hero #2 seems crestfallen, even though it seems like she wouldn't entirely mind if hero #1 became crab chow. As soon as he figures out he probably won't get the girl in the end, we know he's a goner. That's how it always works.
  
  
• At one point, our heroine says she'd better fix food for everyone. Usually they just make coffee for the other scientists in this sort of film. Back in college, a sociology prof actually lectured about this, saying that this was a real-world phenomenon. Even when you were in theory equal to the men in the department/expedition/starship crew, somehow it was still your job to make sure everyone had food, coffee, and so forth. She called the phenomenon "waitressing", and wrote a paper on the topic after realizing she herself was doing it at a meeting with colleagues. I'd like to think society's progressed a bit since the Boomers were first entering academia. I don't know what academia is really like these days, but surely by now everyone realizes that fixing dinner, making coffee, and performing menial domestic chores are tasks beneath scientists of either gender. That's what graduate students are for.
  
  
• The film features a shifty German nuclear physicist, straight from Central Casting, who knows more than he'll say, or at least he implies he does. He gets eaten before he can fess up, probably because the screenwriters couldn't figure out what he was hiding. If you're hiding something, why the constant stream of cryptic, portentious comments? He arrives on the island in dark glasses and a trenchcoat. I can see the dark glasses, it being a tropical Pacific island and all, but a trenchcoat?
  
  
• An example of his secretive Teutonic shiftiness: "Are you hiding something from us, doctor? A theory, perhaps?"
  "Maybe."
  
  
• Another: "Doctor Weigant, you are a great nuclear physicist, while I am a provincial botanist. But there are things I do not understand."
  "there are many things I do not understand also, Jules. You had better climb."
  
  
• Jules, the provincial botanist, is the token French guy, again straight from Central Casting. He doesn't do much in the film, until he manages to get his hand sliced off by a falling stalactite (or was it a stalagmite? I can never keep those straight.) It's a remarkably clean cut for something done by a falling rock, but no matter. They bundle Jules back to the house and put him to bed, but his big scene is yet to come. He supplies the film's one real moment of pathos: The crabs call to him in the voice of a previously-eaten scientist. The wounded, half-delirious French guy stumbles out to follow the voices, only to get a giant crab claw around his neck. So, so sad.
  
  
• Then the crabs start talking with Jules's voice. I did enjoy that part, crabs speaking with a French accent. I'm not sure why exactly. The crabs already look like Henson characters, and with that silly accent, you half expect John Denver to show up and sing a duet with the damn things.
  
  
• Decent underwater footage, although obviously shot in a tank. The credits note the underwater scenes were shot at Marineland of the Pacific, an erstwhile aquarium in the LA area. Closed in 1987 and spend the next couple of decades as an abandoned amusement park, until developers finally got hold of it. Seems there's an entirely different movie in this.
  
  
• SCUBA footage was a B-movie staple back in the day, and it never really worked very well. There's no dialogue, of course, and faces are hidden by the scuba gear, and you can't tell people apart. And generally nothing really crucial to the plot happens during a scuba sequence. The story just comes to a screeching halt until the scuba stuff is over, and the scuba stuff tends to go on far longer than it needs to.
  
  
• Some choice crab-related quotes from the film.
  "Land crabs and seagulls. Everything else is dead." The seagull bit is never explained. And unfortunately we never encounter any giant seagulls. It's a real shame -- giant homicidal seagulls would be pretty damn creepy.
  "Nothing but land crabs"
  "What's down there?"
  "What could be, other than earth, water, and a few land crabs?"
  "Helpless, nothing. Did you ever see a bunch of them start on a wounded Marine? They finish him off in five minutes."
  
  
• Nesting sea turtles for target practice? Jeebus. The 50's really were a dark and primitive time.
  
  
• Nobody seems to be surprised when disembodied voices call to them. They just go, "Oh, that's McClain from the first expedition that disappeared, I'll go see him."
  
  
• Our heroine and one of the lesser scientists answer the disembodied voice of "McClain" and wander off to look for him. This involves rappelling down into a newly-formed pit, using primitive 1950's climbing technology (i.e. just a rope). The lesser scientist takes a tumble, and she faints or passes out or something. When she comes to, there's no sign of ol' whatsisname. "He went into the pit. He must have fallen during the quake", she explains. She conveniently fails to mention she was helping.
  
  
• People are commenting on someone down in the pit, either McClain or the other guy (I forget which), wondering if he might be alive down there:
  "He could be, assuming this was caused by a disturbance."
  
  
• At one point Weigand picks up a microscope and looks into it, handheld. Um, that's not going to work. Plus he's a physicist. So I guess he might not know about how to work a microscope.
  
  
• When the Navy grunts get eaten (after we no longer need them as comic relief), the crabs don't really use their voices much. The class divide continues, even after being assimilated by giant energy crab-monsters.
  
  
• Other than the dynamite-as-poker-chips bit, the Navy guys really don't serve much of a purpose. If the movie ever explains why the scientists needed a team of demolitions experts, the explanation must be so quick that I keep missing it.
  
  

notes to self, photo edition

One of my many bad habits is that I spend an inordinate amount of time surfing the net on the ol' Crackberry. If I have a spare moment, or I'm bored, or nobody's looking, or nobody I know is looking, or nobody I particularly like is looking, or I generally just feel the inclination, I tend to whip out the BB and start Googling about. It's convenient, but it's really not the best web browsing experience you could ask for, so often once you've found a page you want to bookmark it for future reference with a 'real' computer. Adding it to the BB's bookmarks isn't too useful; if there's any way to sync its bookmarks with those on a host machine, I've never seen it, and I'm not sure that would be useful anyway. I've figured out how to post to del.icio.us from the BB, but the process is rather inconvenient. What I've found works best is to just mail page addresses to another (non-BB) email account.

So the other day I thought I'd go through and organize my pile of emailed links. I soon realized most of them were photo-related, and those alone made for a rather substantial list. Once I had that list formatted up half-decently, I thought, hey, I've put some work into this, I might as well share the result. I'm not sure it'll be useful for anyone except me, but hey, it might be...

• April 29, 2008 7:00:57 PM PDT On Camera Creation, Standards, and Custom-made Cameras
  
• April 24, 2008 2:36:10 AM PDT Early Chinon and Cosina 35mm SLR & Lens Similarities? - Photo.net Classic Cameras (pre-1970) Forum
  
• April 21, 2008 10:10:53 PM PDT Tower Cameras
  
• April 21, 2008 9:28:23 PM PDT Blackwell Synergy - J Consumer Affairs, Volume 15 Issue 1 Page 64-74, June 1981 (Article Abstract)
  
• April 18, 2008 5:41:28 PM PDT Collecting Uncollectibles - Rangefinderforum.com
  
• April 16, 2008 10:28:47 PM PDT HYPERFOCAL DISTANCE FOCUSING TECHNIQUE
  
• April 10, 2008 6:18:51 PM PDT MINOLTA VIEWFINDER CAMERAS
  
• April 9, 2008 4:20:42 PM PDT Flickr: Malcolm Ma Photograph/Arriflex -> m42
  
• April 2, 2008 9:19:35 PM PDT SOVIET VIDEO
  
• March 31, 2008 10:36:42 PM PDT OE - Telecentric
  
• March 31, 2008 10:28:21 PM PDT Telecentric lenses simplify noncontact metrology - 10/15/2001 - Test & Measurement World
  
• March 30, 2008 8:02:22 PM PDT MacBSの日常生活的日記: PENTAX SB2
  
• March 30, 2008 2:24:09 PM PDT Rolyn Optics - Universal Lens Mount
  
• March 29, 2008 9:56:50 PM PDT The Luminous Landscape - lens design
  
• March 28, 2008 8:25:01 AM PDT Vignetting
  
• March 26, 2008 11:35:12 PM PDT COSINA COPIES!
  
• March 25, 2008 7:59:02 PM PDT Voigtlander 15mm v Sigma 12-24mm: Intro
  
• March 20, 2008 11:04:47 PM PDT Flickr: Discussing Lista de camaras (actualizable) in Spanish Cameras
  
• March 20, 2008 10:53:58 PM PDT 1890 - 1990 A Hundred Years of Spanish Cameras
  
• March 16, 2008 10:22:34 PM PDT YASHICA.ORG | Geschichte
  
• March 14, 2008 4:08:58 PM PDT Canon EOS Forum: Canon EF body <-> lens protocol - photo.net
  
• March 9, 2008 8:06:23 PM PDT Canon EOS Beginners' FAQ III - Lenses
  
• March 4, 2008 3:37:53 PM PST AF-Confirm Exakta / Topcon Lens to Canon EOS Adapter - eBay (item 230227567218 end time Mar-06-08 16:36:40 PST)
  
• March 2, 2008 6:22:41 PM PST SUBMINIATURE ENLARGER LENSES
  
• February 29, 2008 9:11:26 PM PST Leica and Rangefinders Forum: Yashica Electro 35 to Leica conversions - photo.net
  
• February 28, 2008 1:04:16 PM PST Canon 40D book recommendations? - Digital Grin Photography Forum
  
• February 28, 2008 1:22:44 AM PST Novoflex Nikon Lens to Canon EOS Body Adapter
  
• February 24, 2008 2:18:54 PM PST First-Series EF Primes
  
• January 30, 2008 2:56:51 AM PST Russian Movie Lenses
  
• January 30, 2008 2:39:17 AM PST barryles - m42 cine cam conversion
  
• January 30, 2008 2:10:27 AM PST Lens Mount Conversions
  
• January 23, 2008 8:17:10 PM PST List your dumbest mistakes: Nikon D300/D200/D100 Forum: Digital Photography Review
  
• January 23, 2008 10:46:41 AM PST Comparison: Kodak DC220 and DC120 digital cameras
  
• January 21, 2008 10:08:04 PM PST Blackwell Synergy - J Consumer Affairs, Volume 15 Issue 1 Page 64-74, June 1981 (Article Abstract)
  
• January 20, 2008 2:25:00 PM PST Real estate photos worth more than a thousand words - (37signals)
  
• January 18, 2008 12:37:52 AM PST Borut FURLAN - Underwater Photography
  
• December 30, 2007 11:51:13 AM PST Collectible Cameras - About Us: Used Cameras, Vintage Cameras, Film Cameras, Digital Cameras and More
  
• December 28, 2007 8:29:10 PM PST Я часто видел, как разные люди спорили о том, какой производитель линз лучше
  
• December 27, 2007 7:33:31 PM PST Radiographs of Nature fine art x-ray photography
  
• December 26, 2007 7:20:32 PM PST Using a slide duplicator
  
• December 23, 2007 3:32:12 AM PST Continued Aesthetic Investigation
  
• December 18, 2007 10:54:05 PM PST M42 ir widget
  
• December 18, 2007 9:57:25 PM PST Fluoroscopy: Recording of Fluoroscopic Images and Automatic Exposure Control -- Geise 21 (1): 227 -- RadioGraphics
  
• December 8, 2007 2:16:51 PM PST PHOTOHISTORY - "Ýòàïû ðàçâèòèÿ îòå÷åñòâåííîãî ôîòîàïïàðàòîñòðîåíèÿ". Ã.Àáðàìîâ. Ôîòîóâåëè÷èòåëè
  
• December 7, 2007 12:52:26 AM PST Гелиос 40-2 85/1.5 и другие лучшие портретные объективы всех времен и народов :: Форум :: Клуб Foto.ru
  
• December 6, 2007 10:08:06 AM PST Vision Systems Design - Smart components add functionality
  
• December 6, 2007 12:58:32 AM PST Capturing Images from Photographic Films
  
• December 5, 2007 5:18:53 PM PST Enlarging Lens Test
  
• December 5, 2007 1:26:02 AM PST Photography of the Invisible World: The strangest lens for UV I ever found...
  
• December 5, 2007 12:32:08 AM PST Squirl: Russian/Soviet Vintage Cameras
  
• November 8, 2007 11:25:06 PM PST Photon Detector Blog : [joSh]’s homemade magnifying glass lens
  
• November 7, 2007 10:57:44 PM PST Blacklight
  
• November 7, 2007 1:06:52 AM PST Soft focus
  
• November 5, 2007 12:25:57 AM PST Zenit
  
• November 2, 2007 12:56:29 AM PDT Lf 4x5
  
• September 27, 2007 8:12:22 PM PDT Special Lenses For Nikon 'F' Mount
  
• September 11, 2007 5:15:50 PM PDT Ir lenses
  
• September 5, 2007 5:40:05 PM PDT Cmount micro
  
• September 4, 2007 10:57:04 PM PDT Pinhole
  
• August 29, 2007 11:34:08 PM PDT Lf lenses
  
• August 24, 2007 10:43:57 PM PDT Scanner Technology
  
• August 3, 2007 5:10:19 PM PDT Lens
  
• July 8, 2007 3:07:44 PM PDT Cam 3
  
• July 7, 2007 4:32:13 PM PDT Cam 2
  
• July 7, 2007 4:32:13 PM PDT Cam 1
  
• June 29, 2007 9:00:17 PM PDT Hassb"And then there's the Hasselblad name"
  
• June 17, 2007 6:31:43 PM PDT Clevr
  

66,666

So earlier this morning this humble blog recorded visitor #66,666. Which is somewhat interesting in a numerological sense, given my nym (and yes, I do already realize it's a dumb nym.)

Said visitor arrived here all the way from Hong Kong, arriving to check out a recent Holga post, and particularly this photo of "Rusting Chunks #5". The Chunks have been a recurring topic, almost a recurring character here (and on Flickr) since the very beginning, so I guess this is sort of appropriate. Or whatever.

I guess Hong Kong is sort of fitting too, considering that's where Holgas come from (mfr's product page here). You don't often hear about their other camera products -- they've got a 35mm fixed-focus camera that looks like a winking cat... and it plays music! Brilliant! I mean, depending on what music it plays, obviously.

a moblog, just because I haven't lately...

So here I am again, having a beer and noodling away on the Blackberry, probably looking like an utter clown. Oh, well. I'm just getting over a cold, so I'm not too concerned about cutting a suave figure just now. Actually I pretty much never care about that, being a programmer and all.

If you haven't yet experienced the cold that's going around, you're in for a real treat. I was so loopy on Tuesday that I got on the wrong bus and didn't notice for six blocks. It was a C-Tran bus, and the color scheme inside was all different, and I didn't clue in until I noticed the "Now Hiring C-Tran Drivers" poster. Feh.

So I spent yesterday at home, perfecting my hot toddy skillz. And answering work email. The combination worked better than you might expect. I also managed to crank out a new SNR post. If anything, those have become even more rare than new posts here.

The recent scarcity of posts here doesn't mean I've scaled back writing. I merely haven't been *posting*. I actually have a backlog of unfinished posts I need to deal with somehow. Once you have a couple of drafts sitting there, it starts to weigh on you a little. It's a sign you've raised the bar a bit high, and maybe it's time for a couple of light, fluffy, research-free posts, just to get back in the habit. Hence this post, and the previous one about flowers, and the one before that about my hit counter (which incidentally ought to be hitting 66,666 real soon now).

So before I make this into a big deal (or my already low battery dies) I think I'll wrap this up, finish my Chernobyl, and go take some photos.




Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless handheld

assorted flowers, by popular(?) demand

A comment to the previous post mentioned something about flowers, and it occurred to me that I hadn't actually posted any flowers here for quite some time. Recently I've just been throwing them up on my Flickr stream and failing to show or mention them here, purely out of sheer laziness. Or possibly it's ennui... I'm not sure, and sorting it out would take effort, and if I was up for effort I wouldn't be in this situation.



It's not my fault, you know. Taking flower photos means going out in the damn weather, a constant 46 degrees and drizzly for months on end. It's certainly possible to go out looking for flowers, but one often doesn't wish to do so. One often prefers to turn on the fire and curl up on the sofa with beer and comfort food, say, rotisserie chicken and tater tots. Maybe see if there's a good hockey game on. This would all be perfectly normal in February, but it's almost May now, and I am most displeased.



To give you some idea of the true extent of my unseasonable lethargy, today I had a meeting scheduled for a room on the other side of my building. That's basically diagonal across a normal 200' Portland city block, but along a somewhat less than direct route. The total distance would be somewhere between 282' ( = 2 * sqrt(2) * 100 ) for the straight diagonal, and 400' along the perimeter of the building. So let's say 340 feet, plus a ~30 foot detour for coffee. There was also a webcast & conference call we set up so a couple of offsite employees & contractors could watch and listen. So I logged in and watched the webcast, because I didn't feel like walking across the damn building. How pathetic is that?



Be that as it may, here's a selection of recent flowers I don't think I've posted here yet, probably. I could go back and look just to be sure, but you may have noticed I'm a veritable explosion of apathy just now.

16 bits, yay

Sometime over the weekend this humble blog welcomed visitor 65536, or 0x10000 in hex. FWIW.

I didn't check quite in time to see how that visitor got here, but most visitors here arrive via Google Image searches, so that's probably what it was. I suppose it's for the best that I missed the blessed event, otherwise I might've felt obligated to give out a special prize or something, I dunno.

How to walk the Morrison Bridge and not die, probably

View Larger Map

So recently I thought I'd have a go at walking across the Morrison Bridge and back without dying. It's harder than you might think. Although the bridge is right in the center of town, in the midst of our little bike/pedestrian mini-semi-utopia, it's enormously hostile to bikes and pedestrians, and almost nobody uses it. Except cars, obviously.

Updated: The walkway on the south side of the bridge was redesigned & renovated in 2010, so if you're looking for practical info you'll want to check my "Morrison Bridge Revisited" post, and just regard the first part of this post as a record of how bad things used to be. The walkway on the north side of the bridge hasn't been touched so far, so the return leg of this adventure is still up to date.

Think of the last time you crossed the Morrison. You were in a car, right? Or if not a car, you were on a bus. Or you biked, but only in the sense that your bike was on the bus's bike rack until you were safely across the bridge. I bet you didn't walk, in any event. If you're like me it may have never occurred to you to try. It's not like you often see people doing it as you drive across, after all. There's a reason for that; it's not just because you're driving 55 on a metal grate in the pouring rain, nervously eyeing the semi the next lane over. Most of the time there really isn't anyone at all walking or riding across the bridge. Crossing on foot, you encounter a series of increasingly silly obstacles, one after another, and after a while you just want to start laughing when you meet up with the next one.

The first obstacle is figuring out where the hell to get on the bridge. Say you're downtown, and you feel like wandering over to Belmont for some shopping and general hipsterdom. You don't have bus fare, as you're trying to get into the proper hipster spirit, and therefore you're also too lazy to walk a few blocks south to the Hawthorne. Suddenly a light goes on, you have a crazy idea that just might work, so you walk to the corner of 2nd & Alder, where the eastbound ramp to the Morrison starts. But no luck here. There's a big "NO PEDESTRIAN ACCESS" sign, and a "no bikes" sign for good measure.

So the obvious choice is out. What you need to do is continue down the stubby remaining bit of Alder, and look for a flight of stairs going down. The stairs take you to a stretch of 1st reserved for MAX trains only. Look both ways (as it'd be a shame to die this early in the excursion), cross, and you'll see a sort of passage through the chain link fence that keeps the homeless from sleeping under the bridge. Go through that and you're in a parking lot, surrounded on three sides by the curved ramp from Naito to the Morrison. To your immediate right there's a flight of stairs going up to the ramp. Take those up to the sidewalk and you're on the bridge. You've passed the first test.

Come to think of it, the real obvious choice, as in, what a tourist without a map would try first, would be to find Morrison St. and follow it to the river. Only to discover there's no bridge there. Despite the name, the Morrison Bridge only connects to Morrison St. on the east side of the river. More in a bit on how this came about.

You'll notice a couple of things about the sidewalk pretty quickly. First, it's really narrow, with no buffer or barrier between you and the cars speeding by on the bridge. If you encounter someone coming the other way, one of you may have to stop and act small so the other can pass. Presumably the designers didn't think this would happen very much. Although it's also true the bridge was designed way back in the 60's, and people weren't quite as wide back then. The second thing you'll notice is that the sidewalk part of the bridge hasn't received regular, enthusiastic maintenance over the years, so some parts are on the uneven & crumbly side. A third thing you might notice is that everything is gray. The bridge is done in that gray bleak brutal concrete look everyone was mad for back in the 60's. I may never understand what they saw in this.

A couple things to check out on the way across: The airport control tower-style, uh, control towers -- there are two of them, one on each end of the lift span, but I read somewhere that they only use one of them. So possibly the other could be turned into a McMenamins or something. That might be fun. If you look closely at the west tower, there's plaque listing the Multnomah County commissioners, the county engineer, and the construction firms that built the bridge. I say "look closely" not because the plaque is small, it's actually pretty large but it's barely readable. If you want your name preserved for posterity, don't do it in dark brass letters inlaid into dark aggregate. Just sayin'.

If you want a less official, more human angle on the people who built the bridge, look at the bit where the two sides of the drawbridge mesh together. The two metal plates are covered with names, I assume of the guys who built the bridge.

With that, we've covered everything about the bridge that humanizes it even a little. So on we go. As you get to the far side of the river, auto traffic splits in a few directions. Left to right, there's a ramp from I-5 & I-84 onto the bridge; a viaduct carrying Morrison St. westbound onto the bridge; a ramp from the bridge onto I-5 North & I-84; a couple of lanes continuing on as Belmont St., which runs on a raised viaduct for a few more blocks before finally touching land at Grand Avenue; and a ramp sloping down to Water Avenue and the eastside industrial district. The last one is the direction you're headed. As a pedestrian, you have exactly two options, and going straight on Belmont isn't one of them. You can follow the ramp down to Water, or you can take the groovy spiral ramp down to the Eastbank Esplanade along the river.

I'm curious about the spiral ramp. What did it lead to back in '64 when the bridge went in? The present-day park only dates to 2001 or so, although there was a little-used asphalt path prior to that, which began at the Hawthorne Bridge and dead-ended at the Burnside.

Going to the Esplanade isn't the point of this trip, though, so let's move on.

Updated: As it turns out, there is one bridge-related tidbit down on the Esplanade. Remember how I mentioned that Morrison St. downtown doesn't lead to (or from) the bridge? Now you can see why. The previous Morrison Bridge from 1905 (and possibly the 1887 original as well) did link up to the right street. When it came time to build today's replacement, they decided to keep the old bridge in service while the new one was under construction next door. Which meant the new bridge had to connect with Washington & Alder instead. If you look at the seawall on the west bank, you can still see where the old bridge used to be. It's not much to look at, but it's there if you're really curious.

Anyway, you may not believe this, but you've gone as far as you can on the bridge going east. And there's a tricky bit with the Water Ave. ramp. For whatever reason, the traffic gods did not provide a sidewalk directly to Water. No, you go part of the way there, then you double back under the ramp you just came down, and cross a small muddy field to get to the street. Logical, no?

There's a huge staircase going back up to the bridge here. At this point you'll probably be thinking, hey, that random guy on the interwebs was lying, here's the way back up to Belmont. It's understandable. That's what I thought the first time around, but no. Go ahead, try it yourself, and you'll discover the surreal truth. The stairs just go to a triangular area with a bus stop. Once you're up top, there's nowhere you can walk to from there. It's an island, the Great Bus Stop in the Sky. You can either catch an eastbound bus, or take the stairs back down. Those are your only options. It boggles the mind that someone would design a thing like this, but there ya go. It seems kind of glib to blame it all on the 60's, but I don't have any other explanation to offer you.

But regardless, you've reached terra firma on the east side of the river, so we can declare Mission Accomplished for this leg of the journey. Now it's time for the return trip.

To get to the westbound side of the bridge, you'll need to wander through the Central Eastside industrial district and make your way to the corner of Morrison & Grand. It's not as bad or as scary as it sounds. The area's not especially attractive, but there are a few hip restaurants and shops scattered around among the usual light-industrial stuff. The area used to be designated an "industrial sanctuary", but I gather the city has it marked for gentrification now. They've realized our future does not lie in making things, or even in distributing things other people made, but in bowing and scraping and catering to every merest whim of those infamous "rich Californian empty-nesters" we keep hearing about. In a few years, this part of town will even have its own streetcar, if Sam Adams gets his way. So when the Morrison Bridge sidewalk puts you on an offramp while you're still over the river, and dumps you off at the very first street, it really won't be so bad. That is, unless pompous rich twits make you physically ill, which would be entirely understandable.

In the meantime, it's kind of a fascinating area to wander around. So do that for a while, if you like, and make it to Grand & Morrison when you get around to it.

At Grand & Morrison, we have the only one of the bridge ramps that's where it ought to be. It's merely narrow and uninviting, but hey, you should be used to that by now. Unlike the eastbound side, the sidewalk stretches the whole length of the viaduct. Well, with a couple of brief exceptions we'll get to in a moment. But first, take a minute and enjoy the odd view. Despite being on a raised viaduct, you're in a sort of canyon formed by the upper stories of old industrial buildings, some with elaborate decorations, at least elaborate by warehouse standards.

After a few blocks of this, you reach a point where a ramp to I-5 North veers off to the right. And the sidewalk ends. You can't just cross the street, at least not easily or legally, because there's a concrete barrier in the way. Instead, you're supposed to take the flight of stairs in front of you. It's a pedestrian underpass, another of those weird 60's things they don't do anymore. It doesn't go all the way to the ground, just down enough to cross under the ramp to I-5. As is the case with pedestrian underpasses everywhere, this one is usually full of garbage, along with the occasional homeless person. The usual Portland strategy of not making eye contact and acting like the other person doesn't exist may be useful here.

You might have realized by now that most of the bridge's problems stem from trying to work around assorted freeway ramps. Freeway ramps and pedestrians don't mix too well, and the 60's answer was always to shunt everyone except cars off onto skybridges, underpasses, tunnels under the street, it didn't matter too much where you put the pedestrians just so long as they didn't impede car traffic. Combine that with 60's architects' unique flair for making everything they touched look scary and forbidding, and you have a bridge that scares off all but the most determined users. Back then they must've figured that walking was on its last legs, so to speak, and in a few years nobody would do it at all. I think they figured by 1980 or so we'd all get around using atomic jetpacks and personal helicopters and supersonic monorails and moon shuttles and whatnot, eating nothing but vitamin pellets, and living in domed cities under the sea. So it's 2008 now and I'm still waiting for my freakin' atomic jetpack.

The underpass looks like a great place to get mugged or worse. It may be a good thing that the rest of the bridge is so user-hostile, that way there isn't enough foot traffic to make it a very profitable place to be a mugger. Like most businesses, mugging is all about location, location, location.

Once you pop back up to bridge level, a little bit further west there's another set of stairs. These are optional, though, and go all the way down to street level. You'll notice there's a bus stop sign here. This is the westbound equivalent of the Bus Stop in the Sky. I thought about taking these stairs, just so I could say I'd covered the whole thing, but I could see there were a couple of sketchy-looking characters on a landing below, and they seemed to be aware I was there, and I was carrying an expensive camera. So I haven't yet had the full stair experience, I admit. But I'm not certain I've missed anything really crucial here. It's not like there's a shortage of stairs along the Morrison. Hell, the thing's got more stairs than an Escher drawing. It borders on nutty, and goes wayyy beyond non-ADA-compliant.

Speaking of stairs, pretty soon you'll come to yet another set of them, and they're "compulsory" again this time. Time for another underpass, this one for the ramp from I-5 onto the Morrison. I could see, and smell, that someone was sleeping (or passed out, or otherwise incapacitated) down below, so I just jogged across the ramp to the other side when no cars were coming. Which isn't legal, technically, or safe, technically, and Legal says I can't actually advise you to do this, but it's what I did. It's not that I'm afraid of homeless people, exactly; it's just that it felt like I'd be wandering uninvited through someone's living room. With a camera.

This second underpass is kind of a puzzle. It passes right over the Esplanade, sort of the westbound equivalent to the spiral ramp I mentioned earlier. Yet like the other underpass it doesn't connect to the ground. It's almost close enough that you could jump down or climb up if you were really determined to, but there aren't any stairs. When they gussied up the rest of the Esplanade a few years ago, they conspicuously did not put in any stairs here. I'm sure they had their reasons, probably either money or ADA compliance I'd guess, but the effect is quite odd.

Updated: A user comment below explains the missing stairs/ramp here. Basically it's that the Esplanade is all shiny and new and tourist-friendly, and the north sidewalk of the Morrison is anything but, so the Powers That Be did this to keep the riffraff off the Esplanade. It's the proverbial class divide given literal, physical form. The Esplanade is for Us, and the north sidewalk is for Them (i.e. the shrieking hordes of the urban poor), and never the twain shall meet. It's possible, in theory, that They could still hang out on the underpass and beg passing joggers to toss up some spare change, but it's extremely noisy under the bridge, and I doubt the joggers could hear them. This is about the most stereotypically Portland "solution" to a problem I've seen in a long time. It did actually occur to me at the time that this might be the reason, but then I figured I was being too cynical and crabby. Apparently not, as it turns out.

It was at about this point that a bike passed me. It was surprising enough just to encounter another living (and nonmotorized) soul on the bridge, but she was riding in traffic. Including traffic flying onto the bridge direct from the interstate. Holy shit. And I though I was nuts just for taking the freakin' sidewalk. Oh, and on top of being nuts, technically it's illegal too, as pointed out by stern signs on all the bridge ramps. But cracking down on cyclists, even foolhardy ones, is a political nonstarter here in Portland, so you just might be able to get away with it, if you're lucky enough, and crazy enough. The worrywarts at Legal say I can't encourage you to try this, even if I wanted to, which I don't. You're on a bike. Ride to the Hawthorne or the Burnside and use it instead. At least until they fix the Morrison (see below).

In any case, once you're past the second underpass crossing the river itself is pretty uneventful. There aren't even any control towers on this side to break up the monotony. You can read the other half of the workers' signatures in the middle of the bridge, but that's about it.

But the Morrison has one more delightful obstacle in store for you. Remember how you got on the bridge in the first place? This time it's the same thing in reverse. The inevitable flight of stairs dumps you into the inevitable parking lot, with the inevitable chain link tunnel. You scuttle through the tunnel and over the MAX tracks (looking both ways, as it'd be a shame to die this close to being done.) And then... you're home free. You've made it, o conquering hero. And lucky you, Kells is just a couple blocks north on 2nd, and now would be a great time for a Guinness.

After the adventure was over, I thought I'd scan the interwebs and look for accounts by other brave urban explorers, or any other interesting scraps and tidbits I could find:

• Khris Soden has an amusing account that I kind of wish I'd read before setting out.
• The Mercury rhapsodizes about the delights of the bridge's underpasses, although it's, uh, possible they might be joking.
• Lelo explains the bridge pretty well with Morrison Bridge Causes Stupidity & Attracts Stupidity"
• A short description at the Zinester's Guide echoes the usual complaints about the bridge.
• A 2004 Indymedia story about a pedestrian crushed by an SUV on the bridge. I'm glad I didn't read this one before setting out.
• A Flickr photoset from PDX Pipeline.
• Oh, and the photos you see here are just a small portion of my Morrison Bridge photoset on Flickr.
• The Deuce of Clubs has a page about walking the bridge. With a bust of Wagner (I think).

So how is it possible that something this crazy persisted into the 21st century? Why haven't they fixed it? As it turns out, they're finally going to do just that, starting in just a couple of months. In June 2008, the city plans to redo the south-side pedestrian amenities, widening the sidewalk and putting in dedicated bike lanes. The unusual thing is that there'll be bike lanes for both directions on the south side of the bridge. Seems they considered several options: Redoing the south side, redoing the north side, and even running bikes & pedestrians down the center of the bridge. The center option turned out to be unworkable, and the north side would've involved redoing the underpasses, which would apparently cost too much. So south side it is. I think this will be similar to the temporary arrangement they did some years ago while the Hawthorne was closed for renovations. One interesting part about the plan is that there'll be a dedicated "wrong way" bike lane, carrying westbound bike traffic on the eastbound side of the bridge, ending up on Alder St. downtown, which is also one way eastbound. Somewhere among the plan documents there's an elaborate schematic explaining how traffic flow ought to work, in theory, with arrows going every which way and a large "bike box" they hope drivers will comprehend and perhaps even respect. So maybe that'll work out just great, or maybe we're just moving the traffic hazards off the bridge itself and onto city streets. I suppose we'll find out fairly soon, won't we? At least the Morrison's better to walk across than the Ross Island Bridge. Now that is a godawful scary bridge. But that's a whole other story.

The Pearl Is For You!

Someone's temporary(?) graffiti, on Lovejoy near the Bridgeport brewery. Is it serious? Ironic? Post-ironic? Multi-ironic? It can be so hard to tell sometimes.