Snapshots from Fremont Street, Las Vegas

september leaves

Taken outside Keller Auditorium. Lens: A 60s-era Meyer Oreston 50/1.8, found for $10 at an antique shop on Hawthorne.

Apples, Howell Territorial Park

Hydrangeas, Howell Territorial Park

rose & passengers, waterfront park

Aviary Birds, Oregon Zoo

The aviary next to the African Savanna exhibit is my favorite part of the zoo. I've never been able to explain why, much less convince anyone, but that's ok. You have to stop and sit and watch for a bit; it's not really an instant gratification sort of exhibit the way the elephants are, for example.



You'd think that since I stopped and sat and paid a little attention, I'd be able to identify the birds pictured here and provide some useful trivia about them. But sadly that's not the case. As I said in the last bird post, feel free to chime in and identify these birds if you know what they are.

Pics: KOIN Center

A slideshow about downtown Portland's KOIN Center. As with the recent post on the nearby Wells Fargo Tower, most of these photos have appeared here before. There are a few new ones at the end of the slideshow, so feel free to watch the whole thing and wait for those. Or just open the photoset in Flickr if you'd rather do that. Or whatever.

I'd forgotten how controversial the building was initially. In the short period of time between the opening of the eastbound Vista Ridge Tunnel (1969) and the KOIN Center being built (1984), you had a great view of Mt. Hood right when you exited the tunnel. The KOIN Center blocked that view, and was itself topped with a blue pyramid that looks vaguely like Mt. Hood. Which depending on who you talked to was a coincidence, a respectful architectural reference, or the designers adding insult to injury. I tend to believe that if you need unimpeded views of distant mountains, being in the middle of a city may not be the right thing for you.


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idle gossip

I can't decide if I want to wring my hands about anthropomorphizing zoo animals, or just run with it this time and give this photo a silly LOLCAT-style caption. Or there's always option 3, have a self-referential meta-discussion about my dilemma.

Option 4 would be to mention what sort of birds these are and point at a reliable source of further info. That would be more in keeping with what I usually try to do here, but the signage in the zoo aviary isn't that great, and I didn't take a photo of it anyway (or write down names for that matter), and the zoo website doesn't go into detail about aviary birds for some reason. And in short, I have no idea what sort of birds these are. So Option 4 is out, unfortunately.

Also, I can't think of any funny captions at the moment. Feel free to chime in if you have any bright ideas. Or if you can identify the birds, for that matter.

Thx. Mgmt.

tweets & retweets, september 3 2010

So this is kind of an experiment. I've seen other bloggers post daily tweet roundups now and then. It seemed like an interesting idea, and a simple way to diversify the subject matter on this blog a bit more. Putting this together by hand was kind of annoying, though. I haven't yet run across any tools that compile tweet summaries automagically, but now I really think there's a need. It may be time to break out that Twitter API book I haven't gotten around to reading yet...

• RT @OFGProducerEd Oregon's Owyhee canyons to get national monument status? http://tinyurl.com/2cofanw
  
• [blog] Church of Elvis: It's baaack! Portland's legendary 24 Hour Church of Elvis returned recently, after a long...http://bit.ly/dAvU4O
  
• RT @DCdebbie Ironic that Glenn Beck had to wear a bullet-proof vest to his own party. He likes 'em armed, but cant trust 'em. Isn't God on his side?
• RT @neologismist Spellchecking ads is not a priority when you're under investigation for fraud http://yfrog.com/nc4w9j #ronideutch
• Lumia Fountain at Aria, CityCenter, Las Vegashttp://t.co/wTJsMwP via @youtube
• Cloud Chamber http://t.co/odZxBpL via @youtube
• RT @marsroverdriver I swear to god, I think of this Trek clip every single time I have to lead. "Risk is our business":http://is.gd/eTUnE
• http://twitpic.com/2kyfay - Big fire to the south of #pdx. Anybody know what this is? Looks like OC/Gladstone area
• RT @AlexisDelCid Someone in the newsroom made a powerful argument as to why pigs-in-a-blanket are a health food. This is my new favorite person
• RT @dreadpiratemick Duke Nukem Forever is trending? What the hell is this, the end of days?
• Leaves turning already. Not yet, dammit, not yet!
• RT @MrWordsWorth When it comes to drain cleaners, I want to know which one werewolves prefer.
• RT @PDXfoodcarts Stop 6 Kim jong grillin. Korean specialties.#foodcartchamp http://twitpic.com/2kwqi8
• RT @LuthorCEO When I think of the little people who gave their all to get me where I am today, I can only shake my head and wonder what they were smoking.
• RT @MarsPhoenix Missing link? @MarsPhoenix data suggests Viking landers found building blocks of life on Mars in '76:http://bit.ly/93T0Od
• RT @GeekToMe I'm totally using this line RT @XeniJardin RT @anildash: Gurl, I'm looking to be the priority in your inbox.#geekpickuplines (@amyguth)
• ScienceDaily | Researchers Discover How to Conduct First Test of 'Untestable' String Theory - http://j.mp/aIBf8z
• RT @mcsweeneysbooksOther Hallowed-Ground Prohibitions. http://bit.ly/dhmaFF
• RT @yottanあ、上から見られまくってる。http://movapic.com/pic/201009030624394c801617bdd61
• RT @manuelquinziato Just learned how to do the "windsor" knot for the tie! Thanks to youtube! Tomorrow there's the wedding of one of my best friend.
• RT @ArchaeoNewsNet The New Science of Network Archaeology http://nblo.gs/7tHYg
• RT @marsroverdriver Ah, yes. Who indeed can fail to recall many a pleasurable hour spent playing Pac-Gentleman?http://su.pr/6LNKQe
• RT @ladygaga http://twitpic.com/2kq73s - CAUTION: Stuffed princess' or otherwise thrown on stage will meet similar fate. Skinny bitch.
• RT @vertegrez Glenn Beck reckons that universities are as dangerous as N. Korea and Iran: http://bit.ly/cpTmRs#ohnohedidnt #politics
• RT @Bill_LCMedia @eddieizzard HuffPost:"Glenn Beck Not Even King for A Day" Beck's racists stunts on Morning Zoo radiohttp://tinyurl.com/39ephnr
• Given the 20th century Spain had, they can't really put up statues of *anyone* w/o giving mortal offense, so modernism it is. #vuelta
• Today's #vuelta observation: They put a lot of weird crap in the centers of roundabouts in this part of Spain.
• RT @Dan_Christensen wow todays days is 90210 who can ever forget that date. wait that's 9-11 or was that a show? ...I'm better at ancient history.

acorn, waterfront park

Church of Elvis

It's baaack! Portland's legendary 24 Hour Church of Elvis returned recently, after a long absence I'd assumed was permanent. It has a new Old Town location on NW Couch near 4th, but other than that it looks the same as the original, mumble-mumble years ago, right down to the psychic Commodore 64 computers. I fed one of them a quarter for old times sake, and took a couple of photos, which attracted the attention of a few passers-by in the process. As I always say, I like to believe I'm performing a valuable public service when this happens.

That's why the 3rd photo is so crappy actually: A woman wanted to show it to her young daughters, passing the bemusement on to the next generation. So I snapped the last photo quickly and got out of the way. Most real photographers would have told them to go right ahead and would've been delighted to have some live people in the photo. But that's not really how I roll here, for good or ill. This humble blog is basically about places and things. People, not so much.

Updated 8/5/2025: Sadly the 2009 revival was all too brief, and the NW Couch location was gone again by 2013. The website stayed up until sometime in late 2016, and I updated the link above to point at one of the last Wayback Machine copies of the site, before it became a content-less parked domain. Unfortunately a lot of the archived web content was created in Flash and is no longer playable due to the Flashpocalypse. I vaguely recall that at one point the Archive.org folks were working on some kind of process sandbox for running old Flash content, but I haven't heard a word about that in years, so maybe that didn't work out in the end.

I also don't know what Stephanie Pierce, the Church's longtime proprietor, is up to these days; no further incarnations of the Church have appeared in the last 12 years, so maybe she has completely moved on from Elvis-adjacent kitsch at this point. And it just might be that, although it captured the spirit of the times in the late 80s and early 90s, those times are long gone now, and GenZ kids might just be bewildered by the whole thing. And as a practical matter, vintage, working C64s are now a bit too valuable to just leave running in an unattended Old Town storefront, and they'd probably be stolen within hours. Still, it would be fun if it could be experienced again somehow, just for the sake of old times. Maybe as a recreated storefront inside the Portland Art Museum someday, or maybe the Oregon Historical Society, I dunno. Maybe if you work up the nerve to go 'inside' you end up in the real museum gift shop, or something like that. That would certainly be one way to appeal to aging GenX-ers as we stumble unwillingly toward the core art museum member/donor age bracket. It would be sort of like adding a wing full of celebrity guitars to lure aging boomers back in the 90s.

De Brazza's Monkey, Oregon Zoo

A few photos of a De Brazza's Monkey at the Oregon Zoo. Is he thinking the deep bittersweet thoughts of a zoo macaque? Or is he just waiting for a bus that never arrives?