I was thinking of putting this in my sidebar but I'm leaning toward not doing this thing. It's an interesting thing, kind of like getting a lottery scratch ticket and finding I won a grand, but it's a distraction, really. The decision is governed by rules of which I'm not aware, which are coded by human developers who layer their own assumptions thereunto. Also it's crufted over by advertising, so the ulterior motive is maybe the profit one and not all that hidden.
It's kind of easy to have an algorithm tell you your writing has Ursula K. LeGuin's voice and figure you've achieved something.
The object of my writing is maybe to be inspired by UKL, but not to be a clone of that.
2945.Here's a delightful yet bittersweet find. Got this from the Salvation Army over at NE 122nd and Halsey (it used to be a Goodwill before the Goodwill got schmancy new digs just south of there) yesterday.
It's a bit of organized labor history, tho' the provenance must be, for the time being, in doubt:
It's a license plate frame from … PATCO. The Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization.
Those of you who are not enlightened as to recent labor history (and that's just about everyone these days) probably don't know from PATCO. Sherman, let's set the Wayback Machine to 1981. Reagan had been in office about a year and a half, and PATCO, in an effort to improve working conditions, struck.
Now, to be complete about it, there were a lot of centrifugal forces in play. Reagan and his team were busy hammering the anti-union key on the Mighty Wurlitzer, and PATCO made some miscued moves on its own … for instance, in the 1980 campaign they supported Reagan over Carter, in dissatisfaction with the way that the Carter-era FCC was treating them (to be fair here, Reagan endorsed the union and expressed support for their struggle, so maybe being a little to credulous was their real sin here. Coulda-shoulda-woulda).
They got what they wanted, and they were about to get it good and hard, as they found out. It may have been Morning in America, but for PATCO, it was about to strike midnight. When PATCO went on strike on August of '81, they did it illegally; there was (and probably still is) a provision in Federal law outlawing strikes by such organizations.
I guess they felt pretty confident. In reality, they overplayed their hand; on the 3rd of August, they struck, and on the 5th of August, they were unemployed. This left a mark on civil aviation that took the best part of a decade to erase, and a mark on labor in America that survives … tragically … to this day.
So it was ironic that I should find such at artifact at the Salvation Army Thrift Store, for a surfeit of reasons. But there it was. Priced to move at $2.99 (but with an earlier sticker that says someone once charged fifty cents for it … good thing I got it before the price went up any more).
The PATCO logo:
is a pretty faithful adaptation of the famous standard logo treatment:
… and the giveaway is the style of the plane, which is dead on target.
As I said, the provenance of this artifact is a matter of debate. The bare metal areas are fairly shiny and well-kept. The paint on the detail has suffered some flaking, though, which indicates age; I'd be willing to bet there's a significant chance that this was from the 70s-80s, when the Long Dark Night of American Labor was getting underway.
2943.… or, The Old Man Mad About Art with Microsoft Excel.
Seriously? He did this:
With MS Excel?
Yep. As quoted, the 73-year old artist, Tatsuo Horiuchi, remarked "Graphics software is expensive but Excel comes pre-installed in most computers. And it has more functions and is easier to use than [Microsoft] Paint."
2943.When I was out pitcher-takin' yesterday, I explored a few features of my camera that I didn't use often. One of them is black-and-white.
Parklane Park is a little triangular park where SE 155th Avenue and Main Street meet: it's bracketed on the south and west by Main St, on the south and east by a curve of the interestingly-named SE Millmain Drive, and on the north by a vacant lot that was at one time a private airport (Trohs Airstrip) and was subsequently a sand and gravel quarry. It's a nice little - but not too little - park embedded in one of those secluded southeast neighborhoods where, if you're lucky, you'll come by and see a league game of baseball or soccer, and kids are always playing.
The camera I own is a used Kodak EasyShare. Even though the supporting company has largely abandoned this, it's rich in features and performs the champ for me and, just for fun, I took a couple of black and white pictures.
One (above) was predominantly light, and I let the shadows frame the picture in the second one, below.
When you live in a world of color, you tend to forget what drama a monotone brings to even the most mundane scenes, and you realize why black and white photography still has a place in artistic photography. When I look at such a picture, the brain gets active in a different way; it begins to work at exploring the light and dark spaces, and fills in color based on whim, whimsy, and memory. Color photos do it all for you - it's all layed out, nothing left to guess at. Black and white, though, draws one into the frame.
There's dramatic tone in the darks and lights, mystery and intrigue in the way the world has paradoxically been reduced to a shadow of itself while somehow becoming sharper and more defined. Details not noticed before leap out.
An ordinary suburban park becomes an extraordinary parallel world.
2942.I'm very happy with the area of Portland I live in, even if it's not the fashionable, Portlandiable part.
As a matter of fact, I think I'm happy with it because it's not fashionable.
Recently I took advantage of a view point that I'd actually not visited before. At SE 136th Avenue and Division Street in outer East Portland, there's a pedestrian overpass. Its south end is located square between the Dairy Queen on the corner and the Dutch Bros of which we have much custom. We had decided to go it rough, get our coffee from Da Broze and our lunch from the shabby but so very good Cruiser's Cafe and pack it off to Parklane Park and enjoy the sunshine and fresh air. The Wife™ handled the coffee-purchasing duties and I ascended to the apex of the overpass to catch the view.
It was so nice, the camera came out.
Division Street in Portland runs, from the river out through Gresham, and if you don't count the part calling itself SE Division Dr just beyond Gresham, about fifteen miles. That's a long, straight piece of pavement; when I was a kid and growing up in Silverton, Salem was fifteen miles down the road.
I've always been impressed with streets that run that long
The thing about Division is that it's unabashedly suburban. It's rode hard and put away wet and it's still got a sort of grace. In the above picture there, the little blue-gray apartment complex called the "Swan Court"? Back when this was how you got from city to city, that was a shabby little motel called the Swanee. That's been quite a while.
The division it's named after isn't obvious, but I've wrote of it before. This street runs parallel to, and exactly one mile south of, Stark Street, which is on the Willamette Base Line. Division Street is laid out along the first section line south of that base line; that's the division it refers to. It was, before it was urbanized, called Section Line Road.
It, of course, beckons one to Mount Hood, which is my other fetish.
The hood I speak of is perhaps a bit of a lazy coinage these days, and I'm a little sorry for it, but it's hard to avoid using it when speaking of the peak. I've lived in its shadow all my life, and it's kind of a lodestone for me. When I see it, I know I'm where I should be. Home ground.
The challenge with my meagre equipment is to frame and choose the perspectives. I don't have the luxury of attaching a telephoto lens when I want to get a perspective that highlights the way Mount Hood seems to loom on the horizon in subjective view; I have to stand and look and then crop the result.
I use in-camera effects.
But it's not entirely bad. I think it makes me work more creatively. When you don't have fancy devices to support your artistic vision, you have to be nimble. Still, I'm always surprised; Hood always comes out so much smaller in my photos than the impression I get simply looking at it.
Cities in Oregon usually impress the visitor because there are so many trees. I remember as a kid in Salem going up to the Chemeketa Parkade, that garage that overbounds Chemeketa Street; you look north and you can't see the city for the trees. Outer East Portland, with so much green, is the same way. As urbanized as it is, the urban gets lost in the urban forest pretty quickly.
And if I take another POV, I arrange more of humankind's works, such as they be, power towers and power lines and transformers and plastic signage and roofing and insurance offices in front of that great mountain and, well, it's something I've been able always to find some sort of odd beauty in.
2941.From the world of letters and diaries, we have this gem: the ledger of F. Scott Fitzgerald.
In a business ledger, between the years of 1919 and 1938, he laid it all out; what he earned since his leaving the Army, a record of his published fiction, the money he earned by other writings, a biographical "Outline of My Life", and the money Zelda earned from her writing.
It's fascinating to me because of two things it reveals; first, that a writer on their own is not necessarily a poor record-keeper, keeping track of some minutiae for their own records if not posterity, and, second, FSF was quite a neat penman, keeping orderly records in a meticulous hand.
2940.Who says good handwriting counts for nothing any more?
Whether you call it handwriting or the more archaic (and perhaps sexist) penmanship, handwriting seems to be a dying thing; we hear the dirges played constantly.
This is unfortunate. Not only does handwriting develop motor and reasoning skills that typing simply can't, it connects the author to the text in an indelibly undeniable way. Your writing becomes more you. I'm convinced that the more you write by hand the more you think about what you're saying; typing is speedy, and most people … at least it seems that way, by the writing I read … don't think much about what it is they're saying.
According to a story by the Associated Press posting on KOIN TV's website, though, gives hope, if only because there is at least one 6th-grader out there who takes the time to write the way we all used to have to.
It's here at http://www.koin.com/2013/06/10/wash-6th-grader-honored-for-her-handwriting/. It was promoted by Zaner-Bloser, and I've made my italic-over-cursive partisanship known by now I should hope, but still, it's nicer to see that there's adept cursive writers than to know that there's nobody who cares at all.
2939.There are some things that seem such commonplace verities that I at one time personally took them as read, permanent, non-changing, understood.
Like driving on the right. The rule of the road.
Not that such things are unchangeable (I once thought national boundaries were set in stone as well, then started reading, as a neat thing, about the great World War 2) but they are glacially slow to change. And the rule of the road would be one. Americans drive on the right; Americans have always driven on the right.
Well, yes, and no. When America was a British colony, as it happens, the Rule of the Road was stay on the left. This was the rule until sometime in the 1780s. So, things do change, but I didn't think this happened in the modern times, and certainly not during my lifetime … but then, I just found out I was wrong about that, too. Up until September 1967, Swedes drove on the left - in contrast to their sister nations on the Scandinavian peninsula, which drove on the right, which tended to cause confusion and the occasional accident at Sweden's land borders with Finland and Norway.
I'll not at this time explore why the Swedes resisted the change for so long or whether or not this was an improvement in safety over historial ways; I'll leave that to someone else. Suffice it to say that it took four years of public relations and one memorable Sunday in late 1967 to synch Sweden with her neighbors. For what its worth, it happened, and the Kingdom exists today, still cranking out Volvos and bland Europop and whatever else it is that Swedes do. They seem fine. Cracked (strange to think that, in the latter day, I'd be learning my history from the website descended from the poor relation to Mad Magazine, but these are interesting times) displays the merry chaos on this page, which published a photo from the 3rd of September 1967, a day known as Dagen H. Dagen H translates to H-Day, and the H is short for Hogertrafikomlaggningen, or Swede for right-hand traffic driving. And, to communicate the change, a suitable logo - appearing on everything, reportedly, from t-shirts to coffee mugs to cute ladies' undies, went public. Here it is
This piece of clever design speaks for itself. The way the letter H is recast as a sort of expressway diagram I find particularly impressive. The date is expressed in the style we Americans have come to interpret as a typically European one: day-month-day, with a period delimiter rather than a slash (we would write that 9/3/1967, they, 3.9.1967).
The type is particularly beguiling, with a hand-constructed look to it.
It's a clear lesson in clever communication, and, as such things are wont to do, works on multiple levels without being too proud about it. Definitely a win.
(H/T to Scott Sanford who showed this to me over on the Book'o'Face)
2938.In missive the last I mentioned reading three books about keeping diaries or journals. I'll list those out now. I haven't completed them all; but I have a ver solid sense of the three. Either one of these three books will give an aspiring diarist the inspiration to start, but each speak with a slightly different voice, and one may speak to one louder or with more coherence than the other.
Thus said, to the shelf.
Samara O'Shea
The first one I read wasNote To Self: On Keeping A Journal and Other Dangerous Pursuits, by author and Huffington Post blogger Samara O'Shea. This is a very personal account of her diary-keeping over the years, and goes into such deep personal territory that at times I felt as though I were reading Into The Author's Bedroom With Gun And Camera. I'm torn about that. But she had a whole range of useful insights into starting, stopping, how frequent, inspriations, and sharing your diaries with others, and how to look into your own life for diary subjects - including hopes, aspirations, writing when happy as well as when sad, and, of course, sex. She specifically bares her journaling soul by including several excerpts from her various diaries as kept over the years, which are as small gems scattered throughout the book
This book, while well-done generally and thorough, spoke to me the least of all the others. The author gave me a valuable POV on her urban, sophisticated lifestyle, but at times I felt like I was out of place trying to make sense of her narrative. But then, she's the kind of writer who'd worked for magazines like O, Harpers Bazaar, and Esquire, whereas I'm more of a Parade, TV Guide, and Time sort, though I have Utne Reader pretensions. De gustibus non disputandum, and all that.
So, in short, upsides: Unafraid, frank, sophisticated, well-written. Downsides: A little too unafraid for the beginner, a little too urban for the non-HuffPo reader. If you're the fashionable sort, this would be a good starting book; if you're not the fashionable sort, this would be more of an advanced study.
Recommendation: Go in ready to be amused and a little surprised and a little unsettled, if you're a tyro.
I do indeed notice that O'Shea is also famous for trying to bring back the art of letter writing to a wide audience. As someone who used to write letters ceaselessly, I have some idea of what we've lost, so she's indeed doing the Lord's work here, so to speak.
Sheila Bender
Sheila's book is Keeping A Journal You Love. This, the most densely-written of the three books, dives right in with what she calles the 'Seven Sisters'; writing tactics that are writerly explorations of the world around you. This is a book rich in technique, expressed as a writing teacher might do it. This book supplants this with examples of the journaling and diary techniques of other diarists. The result is almost a manual, a shelf-reference that you can go to again and again, with ideas of how others do it so one can either copy a style until they find their own feet, or combine into something new or useful. Overall it encourages the sort of introspection that diaries are famous for being a laboratory for, with the writerly approach incredibly useful.
Upsides: Thoroughly written, wide-angle field of vision provides for a range of viewpoints and inputs for inspiration, encouraging a writerly approach to the diary. Downsides: might encourage too much introspection, the multiplicity of voices could encourage too much copying and masking of one's own voice.
Recommendation: Better for the absolute tyro than the O'Shea work, but might come off as too dry and intimidating for the newbie. Good to go with as a beginner, but one might find oneself working a bit too hard to find ones own voice amongst all the excellent examples.
Alexandra Johnson
Lastly we come to the humbly-titled Leaving A Trace: The Art of Transforming A Life Into Stories, by Alexandra Johnson. This takes a seriously deep approach to the art of the diary by drilling down, finding patterns hidden in all journals, and identifying what she calls the 'through line' to your life. The objective is to coax a story from your life, and is useful if you're the kind of journal writer, as I am, who fancies themselves a fiction writer.
The book draws several lines that I'm deeply impressed with. It draws the line between brief and thorough between short and containing multitudes, and between direct and gentle. It delivers techniques with a breezy air that is still informational, an easy read with a definite message. The techniques come quickly but are friendly, and one can apply them quickly.
Upsides: to me, this book is all upside. Small yet large, simply-written yet informative, it gifts the reader with tactics to create a diary or journal that goes just as far as you want it. If you want to keep it introspective you could; if you want to knit a narrative out of your life and use the lessons to create a more compleat writer out of yourself, it'll take you there too. Downsides: I love this book! I've not stumbled on a real downside yet.
Recommendation: This is the book you should start with if you want to really come up with a diary that will mean something to you. The above two are good, but they're the sort that I think the experienced diarist will want to use to kick it up to the next level. This book is the beginner's book of the three.
2937.I'm currently reading (or have gone through) three books on diary writing by three different authors. I have nothing to say about the now, but will anon.
In the meantime, here's a nifty article by Marie at the blog Presents of Mind that tells of her obsession with collecting notebooks, which is something I do, just a little, myself. A taste:
Three hand-made notebooks. The one on the left is bound with real leaves with a wooden spine and hand-made paper. The other two have covers made of waxed, brown paper shopping bags and ordinary bond copy paper. You can see the name of the market bleeding through its cover. The one on the right is decorated with pen and ink filigree. I bought it at a street fair, then went home and duplicated the process. Different and fun to use and only costs pennies to make.
2936.In the previous missive, the remark was remarked that Plus3 should be sellin' them Dept of War Math graphics as posters. Unless you were a very silly person, you agreed with me.
Well, Brad Clark and Plus3 have heard and delivered.
2935.
So there's a trending topic these days (that I hope does more than trend), and its name is survivorship bias. You'll all want to write that down, because it'll become a serious bit of discussion in the months to come … or should. If it doesn't, that'll be unjust, and I think I'll be coming back to it here.
Surviviorship bias. Learn about it, courtesy of David McRaney, at the blog You Are Not So Smart.
But it started me on this road, a great riff on a classic style. And it has to do with the wartime Department of War Math.
War Math?
A little-known, unsung department that helped us carry the great World War II?
Well, yes … and no. It's like this:
During the war, math and science played a very large role, of course, and a role that extended into things like the post-war Race for Space and the very large role also that scientists played in giving us the shiny technological world to follow.
But during the early 1940s the USA was running up against problems requiring extensive mathematical modeling … and the computers that could do that modeling didn't really exist yet. The most powerful number-crunchers of the time, as the article says, ran on toast and coffee.
There was a time that 'calculator' was a human job title, do take note.
The Applied Mathematics Panel, made up of groups of human mainframes ensconced in various spaces hither and yon, was, or should have been, our Department of War Math. Commanders in the field brought them problems, and they solved them. Pretty much just like that. They came up with a way to figure out how to best fire torpedoes based solely the ripple pattern left behind by a ship … if it turns, you see, the ripples are different in a way, and if they're cruising evasively, you can't predict which way they're going to turn, but if you analyze the waves, you didn't have to.
McRaney's article on survivorship bias goes into great detail about how these amazing people would not only use their technical knowledge but superior analytical and logical minds to finesse the unobvious but crucial details out of any situation. He went to Dave Clark, of the video and animation design studio Plus3, who brought the notional Department of War Math to virtual life, with pitch-perfect propaganda graphics. This one is my favorite:
Illustration by Brad Clark of Plus3. Used with permission.
The heroic math geek spirits the downed Allied pilot away from the crashed plane. "Carry the one?" Indeed. Containing clever wordplay with a multiple meaning, pitched with just the right patriotic enthusiasm - and a deft eye for the war-poster style, we have a completely convincing poster for a war department that wasn't - but it should have been.
This next one is a rather darker, but none the less on-target:
Illustration by Brad Clark of Plus3. Used with permission.
That Nazi swastika never saw it coming. With a palette that reminds me of those sinister, silhouetted "Hun comin' to get ya" posters, the heroes work unseen in the background, Mentating an Allied victory for sure. That compass means business, man! And again the adroit multiple-meaning word play; We're counting on you goes more than one direction, when it comes to the math the sharp pencil brains at the Dept of War Math did.
If I were them, I'd be selling posters of this. Great satire like this comes along so infrequently.
I'm starting to think this recombinant-this, GMO-that food thing is getting a little out of hand.
Now, The Wife™prefers I eat fewer bacon bits because they're a nutritional (or lack thereunto) hit. I'm eat less of them because I don't like food that introduces itself
"IM BACON BITS"
Well, hello, bacon bits, I'm Sam. Nothing personal, but I'll just hang out with the cauliflower for a few, okay?
"IM BACON BITS"
Why, yes, yes you are. And adorable too. Honey? Do we still have visitation rights with the Parmesan cheese?
2932.This one came in over the transom a little while ago and we put it aside until … well, whenever.
Seeking something somehow, it was decided that the time was ripe to rebrand the company that lords over the great studio 20th Century Fox (as well as other properties that we shant mention here). To be sure, seeing the tag line A News Corporation Company over the classic title card design of that movie studios logo was always a bit dissonant; even if I admired News Corp, the dryness of the name against the lush history of the 20th logo sounded a discordant note.
So, with this presumably in mind, and things being what they are in the industry, and with the news companies due to be split off from the entertainment companies (sounds nice, but considering the source we don't expect much improvement) Mr Murdoch commissioned a mission to updated the News Corp's image. Money was spent; hours were burnt, gods and men were born on the boardroom table, but mostly, money was spent. And what do we get in return?
We see what you did there. Now will you switch off the klieg lights so I can go back to sleep?
We note that this is going to be the name of the new holding company for 20th Century Fox. They are not changing the studio's name, which would be foolish really.
2931.Just stumbled on this delightful thing that sadly didn't get the attention it needed or they'd still probably be putting things up: it's a blog called The Burnsider, published by a couple of folks who walked across the Burnside Bridge to go and come from whereever it was they were to wherever it was they were going in the day.
It published only four months, during the year of May 2005-May 2006. But there are these clever little glimpses there. Here's one I hope they don't mind me using:
… which proves they have the eye for the long view.
As blogging has evolved over the past half-decade or so, the proliferation of local photoblogs have been less proliferious. I am sad for this.
http://burnsider.blogspot.com. Go there; surprise 'em. Leave a comment or two. Imagine the delight as they check the inbox.
2930.About three weeks ago, on the 27th of April, there was a delightful thing … a parade of SE 82nd Avenue.
The real thing. Classic cars, happy people, politicos, even a float or two. Marching bands. Free slices of pizza. Marching bands. Goth-y majorettes. Asian dragons and lions and wonderful, colorful native American display.
Yeah, that's Portland … the one we love, after all, out here on the Heavy Eastside, the part that Portlandia-watchers think is the edge of Gresham. We have a lot to say about being Portland, but that's all for another channel and time; in the meantime, look at what happens when we Heavy Eastsiders throw down and party.
We ourselves kind of stumbled on the event. The Wife™ and The Lodger™ were out along SE 82nd Avenue the evening before and saw that 82nd between Division and Holgate was going to be closed for a parade from 10 AM to Noon the next day (Sunday AM quarterbacking: they could have promoted that a little better).
So it was that Saturday morning, a few hours after getting off my overnight-shift job, we find ourselves near 82nd and Powell, in the old Powell Street Station shopping center, parked with the old Subaru nose-out under the center's sign, and happily unpacking our chairs.
It was a damn' fine time. We didn't actually sit down. The Papa Murphy's at 82nd and Powell were giving away free half-slices of pizza. They didn't have to sell us, we love Papa Murphy's; but still, the free pizza sample was most welcome.
One of the reasons it's taken so long to get a posting up about this is there are so dang many pictures I took! The best I can do here is bring you a 'best-of' … there was much to see and much to drink in. It was, in every way, a good-old-fashioned American parade, Portland-style, and all that this implies.
This next photo is for those of you cozy-catastrophe fans. This is something you'll never see, I can guarantee you if you're any sort of 82nder; The Avenue of Roses, looking north from Powell Blvd toward Division Street, the top of that far rise, about a mile away, devoid of traffic.
Set Omega Mannish Chuck Heston racing down the Ave in a permanently-borrowed sports car, and you'll have it just about right.
One of the first acts to cross our field of vision was a group of drum-n-bugle corps types out for one last go-round. They were quite delightful and casual about it, out for a good time. They looked like seasoned veterans.
There were a couple of acts that verged on actual flotation. This display, from the David Douglas Historical Society, speaks to our two biggest crops that are grown east of 82nd: trees, and active volcanoes.
No trees were apparently injured in the construction of this, and the active volcano behaved. But it's lurking out there, beyond the easternmost part of Gresham, and would just like you to know that it's ready to get busy if it has to.
It doesn't want to go all Harry Truman on us. And we all know how that turned out.
Next, a float sponsored by George Morlan Plumbing, the Water Heater King. Because plumbing, crowned lions, and elephants.
I see no possible hidden meaning other than that. Nice work, tho.
An interesting and vibrant east Asian culture is starting to spring up along 82nd in this area. Despite the demise of the pagoda'd Legin Restaurant (which was, at one time, called Lung Fung East), there are any number of Asian businesses, groceries, retail, and restaurants up and down 82nd from about Washington Street to Powell Blvd and beyond. The original Hung Far Low, once at the corner of NW 4th and Couch and whose sign still remains a Chinatown landmark, is now in the building on the NE corner of SE 82nd and Division.
The Wisdom Arts Academy carried a banner:
… and not long after, a dragon sauntered down the boulevard …
… chasing a flame, but never catching it …
… and, just like that, was gone, still at that Sisyphean task.
More in the "but, of course, this is Portland, after all" dept: The Last Regiment, a 'syncopated drum' marching corps:
… and the flag girls, appropriately inked and attired in tank tops, short skirts, and net hose. Like I said, to steal Ian Karmel's Portland Mercury column title, this is as Portland as f#ck.
Okay, I don't have a tight snappy comment for this next one, so I'll leave it to you all: Jesus-preaching Christian church using a monkey to convince onlookers (who, I presume, haven't been to church) to trust Jesus.
Discuss.
Colorful flags and Scottish pipers. A welcome and delightful fixture at any parade. Seriously. I love that stuff.
An unexpected blast from the past: Lonnie Burr, one of the first class of Mousketeers from the original Mickey Mouse Club. Vintage television royalty.
The Scooby Gang was apparently there, but, as luck would have it, I did not get to flirt with Velma. Still have three wishes to go. KITT rode honor guard, as you can see.
Short, shameful confession: I have no idea which tribe this wonderfully-costumed bunch belongs to. But aren't they a feast for the eyes?
They are fearsome looking … but were quite friendly.
And, once again, because this is Portland … custom muscled-up … hearses.
Also got a few minutes of video complete with Lion, Dragon, Charlie Hales, and Amanda Fritz. Also the most adorable little girl.
This was 82nd Avenue, Saturday, April 27th, 2013. We had little-kid fun. We were well pleased.
2929.From designer Aleksander Tsatskin comes a pretty effective cheat-sheet for all the keyboard shortcuts that, if you take the time to learn them, should elevate your Gmail exprience.
Everyone knows what keyboard shortcuts are. Every pulldown has a staccato list of symbols to the right of the commands; these key combos connect you directly to the function without having to mouse, click, drop, click.
The problem with keyboard shortcuts is that they require discipline and practice. It also might be more comforting just to find and read the command in your pulldown menu. It takes a little courage; you have to know what you're going for. But who doesn't, if you use any Word-like program to assemble your documents, know what the key combo for Italic, Bold, or underline? It's even here in the Blogger interface, which saves a ton of time.
I first learned the mad savings in effort that keyboard shortcuts when learning QuarkXPress. There were a group my instructor called the 'Fab Four', and indeed I used them all the time. The keyboard shortcut, CMD-SHIFT-OPT < or >, for instance, increased the size of highlighted type by one point up or down respectively. Saved a lot of mousing and clicking.
The infographic delivers just what's needful, and that's why it's good. Graphic elements are greatly simplified but very recognizable, and the visual grammar translates instantly.
A very effective use of color, style, line and shape; green is the color of the keys, yellow are the simplified instructions. Simple lines and shapes tell the visual story.
Here's the whole thing, via a link; if you use Gmail as your primary email interface, as far as cheat-sheets one could very easily do worse.
2928.April 22nd, upon which eve this missive is being prepared, is recognized worldwide as Earth Day. And, in this era when ecological conditions seem more dear than ever, what with the state of the Arctic icecap (I hear there are projections that the Arctic will be ice-free in summer by the year 2025) and the rather depressing staccato stutter-step of I think it's some achievement hat Earth Day is being taken seriously as a day of awareness for all rather than just something 'hippies' celebrate (as I recall was its reputation upon incarnation).
Our ecology is important; it's the most beautiful world in the world. I couldn't be happy without you.
There was a symbol, created in the 70s by cartoonist Ron Cobb, which attempts to give ecology an icon. I remember it from then. It looked (and still does look) like this:
It looks kind of like the Greek letter theta, and like many such symbols, is invested with meaning. It can be seen as a minuscule 'e', a letter which stands for many positive things; Earth, environment, ecosystem, &c, &c. The crossbar is framed by an oval with a narrowing stroke at the top and the bottom; that the narrow parts are on the vertical axis renders a minuscule 'o' shape that we typographers call 'unstressed'. This gives two silhouettes; an ellipse along the exterior (a very natural shape, planetary orbits do this) and a circle interior (we live and socially relate in circles, there's a circle of life, and to the eye the Earth from space is approximately circular in shape.
The website PeaceButtons has a delightfully wonderful graphic that explores the various meanings; enlightenment thuswise can be found at http://peacebuttons.info/E-News/ecologysymbol.htm. They even tie the square shape in.
It was also designed by Ron Cobb. It features the Ecology glyph in yellow in a green union with green stripes. The resemblance to the US flag is obvious, and appropriate as I think, with our awesome technical prowess and national drive, if only we could summon it, the USA could lead the world in cleaning up the mess that was made. One might point out that it's also appropriate in as much as the USA led the way in making a great deal of that mess, but I'm not necessarily here to point fingers.
There is another official Earth Day flag, complete with ™ and all. Nothing personal, but I like the above better. I like the symbolism in the Ecology glyph, and I like the color green. I am an Oregonian after all, and green is what we try to do here.
Think of it as you go through Earth Day. What we do affects everyone else. And, with 7 billion of us on this shrinking blue marble, now, more than ever, we are our brother's (and sister's) keeper.
At least we can be a good neighbor.
And so it goes.
(Since Ron Cobb's website is just a front page right now, here's his Wikipedia entry. He's been places, yo.)
2927.In a previous post, I wrote about how I was viewing eventually upgrading to OS X Lion with some trepidation because FontLab Studio 5, where I play glyph games, is PowerPC and requires Rosetta to run.
FontLab is good to its users. The company has a free upgrade that transmogrifies FLS5 from a PPC application to a Universal application.
2926.In case one did not know, representation amongst the states in Congress is based on the idea of the district, a sort of an atom of representation below which no further divisions can be made. The United States is, as you ought to know, overlaid with a highly-irregular grid of 435 Congressional districts which are based on population as determined at the last (2010, in this case) National Census.
Being based on population makes area irrelevant, and the number of districts in each state are highly variable. Here in Oregon, there are 5 Congressional districts, based on population; the last Census showed a trend toward a 6th District, but we didn't quite make it. The population metric makes for some highly amusing borders. Prior to the reapportionment, this is what the 3rd looked like:
I live very near the dot marked Hazelwood. Fully three quarters of the city of Portland lived in the 3rd up to 2012, just the southwest part of town and part of the northwest being in the 1st District (currently Bonamici, formerly the ill-starred Wu). As of reapportionment last year, this is what the 3rd looks like:
The 3rd gained the west side of Portland and parts of Clackamas County, but lost the extreme NW panhandle of Multnomah County. Sauvie Island is now part of the 1st. At present, one Congressional district equals approximately 600,000 citizens. It has to be a more-or-less thing, of course; some Procrustean beds just can't be layed in.
The reason I told you all that was to tell you about this. You want to take a a crack at apportionment? Well, the congressional map is said and done and settled, but there is the city council of – appropriately – the Nation's capital, Washington, DC. The District is a unique animal as it has to be; politically independent of any state, the geographical size of a large city, with a population about that of a Congressional district, ruled essentially by the US Congress but with local control devolved to a twelve-member City Council which legislates for the community (the Congress still has the right to stick its nose in where it deems appropriate). Every so often the District has to do the same thing that the nation has to do, so this is kind of a microcosm.
This is the territory of the District of Columbia, divided into census tracts. The button on the right allows you to go into the main game if you don't live in the District or you do, but don't want The Man to know where you're spinning your nefarious plans from. Click that button, and you go here:
Now, we're down to business. These are Washington's 8 wards, which you might otherwise think of as Congressional districts in a State, only these have only about 70-80,000 citizens each. On the right there is a color coded list of Wards, populations, and whether the ward is too small, too large, or just right.
Game play from here on out is rather simple. Clicking on each census tract will display a small window giving you the population of that tract and buttons for each ward that you can assign that tract to. Naturally, you can't transfer a tract from deep within a ward to another ward; wards are contiguous, and outliers such as enclaves or exclaves are not allowed … no gerrymandering now! The population list live-updates as you callously toss populations back and fort, and when everything's acceptable, you'll know right away. Then, you click the done button to share and boast of your Solomanic apportioning wisdom. This is what I came up with:
In order to balance things out, I took a piece of Ward 2 (green) and give it to Ward 1 (Orange); a piece of Ward 6 (pale blue), just west of the Capitol and containing mostly a bit of freeway, to Ward 2, balancing out those two districts. Wards 7 and 8, on the east point there, required a bit more finesse. I
have three pieces of Ward 5 (the dusky pink section along the NE edge (or consult that little map I have right because I'm still sucky at giving suggestive names to colors (when The Wife™ comes along and reads this, she'll proofread me, I'm hoping, because she's awesome at that)) to Ward 7 (buff, at the extreme eastern point). This overpopulated Ward 7, however, giving Ward 8 two small pieces of Ward 7 solved this problem. With those two adjustments, my map was in balance, God was in his Heaven, and civic peace reigns in the District.
Here's a link to my map which will give a better view (the swapped tracts are in a heavy outline:
So, give it a try yourself. No smoke filled rooms now (computers hate that), or Machine politics (at least as far as I can tell, but maybe you can role play with some members of your family you don't like so much and threaten to pull funding on something or other (which DC Home Rule doesn't allow, but this is your game so, hey, play it up.
2925.I've cowboy'd up, put on my big-boy pants, got up the gumption, and finally upgraded my iMac to … Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.
Stop laughing.
Seriously, there were a lot of potential pitfalls here. Before I was working with this machine, I was working (most of the time very happily) with a PowerMac G4 from 2004. That was one sweet machine, and stylish, too. And I've always loved Mac OS X, not because it was Apple, so much, but because it was Unix (Darwin, so to say) at its heart.
Despite unnerving years of experience with Windows, I still have no clear idea of what's going on under the hood there. It's a scary place.
But still, as I said, there were pitfalls. For one, the vintage of my current machine. Not the oldest out there, but a Mid-2007 (built the third week of August, to be as precise as I need to), which is supposed to support up to Mountain Lion. Still, I worried. I seem to be a little snakebit on such things; I have known failure on things that were guaranteed to work. Or maybe it's just my 'worst case scenario' way of thinking; I was sure that, since it was me we were talking about, despite having a machine that was nominally supposed to support it, I would spend the 20 bucks on getting Snow Leopard only to have it spit the DVD-ROM right back out.
It ain't easy bein' me.
I also heard many reports about how Creative Suite 4 didn't run completely well under Snow Leopard. I don't use those apps as often as I want to, but when I need them I need them. In some phases of my life, I guess you'd call them mission critical.
But when your OS is about 4 versions back on the type of Firefox it'll support, it's clearly time to do something. So I ordered.
It sure is cheaper than it used to be. A lot of the upgrade experience is moving away from the monumental thing it used to be, and I guess here is where I show of that I'm moving into the sort of person who feels his POV is a bit 'old fashioned'. I remember getting OS X 10.3, Panther, and it was in a big box typical of what I expected computer software to be in. You had something to hold. The upgrade to 10.4 (Tiger) was in a much smaller box but still had some heft. Upgrading to 10.5 (Leopard) happened because it came installed on the computer I bought from PowerMax. Now it's 10.6 time.
Man, that box is small. I mean, it could hold a box set of The Essential Starland Vocal Band and have room left over for the The Essential Terry Jacks. Yeah. That's small. And I know it's getting smaller yet; you don't even have any boxes to hold when you get 10.7 and 10.8, but … no, not yet.
At least you aren't paying $100 a pop for a complete OS. That's something.
So, I put in the disk and we go to work. Whoop … cancel the install. Almost forgot to put in Rosetta. No Rosetta, no FontLab Studio 5, no Photoshop droplets (isn't that strange).
An hour later (the computer did not spit out the disk, yay!), we're upgraded. Even that experience is attenuated … just a progress bar. No status messages. Just "yeah, it's working. Chill." And, at the end of that hour, I'm logging into my iMac and I'm running 10.6.3 and it's pretty sweet. Though the first runs of the apps under the new regime take a hella long time to initiate. After that, though, pretty smooth.
I'd say the neatest thing about 10.6 is the thing they call "Grand Central Dispatch", which finally makes efficient use of the Intel Core Duo 2 processor. I keep an Activity Monitor live icon in the dock with CPU performance graphs. I've never seen them more equally-loaded. I've noticed better performance. All my apps run. I'm so far satisfied.
10.7 is down the road a bit. Loss of Rosetta means I'll have to give up using apps that I'm not ready to give up yet. But 10.6 is doing for me what I need it to do; keeping me connected and using all the stuff I want to use, and allowing me to use updated browsers and Flash content. So, now, I'm happy.
Welcome to 2009, my mid-2007 iMac. Nice to be here.
2924.Mundane life gives us its bounty of treasure and travail.
Now, typically, our style of landscaping and yard work is what I and The Wife™ tend to call "casual" and what our neighbors call "don't look, dear God, don't look!".
I understand that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
But one thing we do do is mow the lawn. It's the dark side of the American dream; sure, you get to own your house and punch as many holes in the walls as you want to, but when you need the landlord, hey, fellah, you're it, and I've never been very nice to my landlord. But that's another story, one which shall never be told, not if I have anything to do with it.
Anyway. The Lawn. It's lawn mowing season as anyone with a lawn will well be aware. In Oregon, that portends travail; you tend to get it done between rainshowers. Lawns are mowed in an almost lyrical staccato throughout Way Out East Portland, but they get done, except when they don't. Which was the state around our house for a couple extra weeks. Because carburetor.
Our lawn mower, a 4.5 hp hulking beastie, lives in a state of benign neglect. We've had it for over a decade and only recently have I added any motor oil to it. And we use gasoline from last season until it's gone; I have recently found that gasoline is perishable (still burns and does the 'splodey thing, which seems unfair somehow, like a mail-order product that the part that counts breaks on the third use but the rest of it stays around for years), mostly by putting that gas into the tank and trying to get started … and about three seconds after, it dies.
Now, the lawn mower engine is a startlingly simple thing, you learn when start actually studying one. One cylinder. Two strokes. One absurdly simple carburetor. On ours, it's on the left hand side of the engine (as you face front), underneath that little rubber nipple you used to stimulate prime the carburetor (dammit, but sex sells). There's a little thing that looks like a tiny reserve tank that hangs down from there. And there, as it turns out, was where our problem was.
There is a little nut (not one of our cats) which is at the bottom of this little tank-thingy, and it's creatively crafted so it has venturi jets all built in. Things can get clogged there and that's one thing that can bollix it up; old gas is another. When we were diagnosing the thing, we found this video on the Internettubes, that shows that a complete overhaul of this sort of carburetor is something that just about anyone can do, even if your most proficient technical skill is writing your own name down. Check this out (It's about 14 minutes, an education in itself):
The most complicated thing is replacing the gaskets, I swear.
Now, my The Wife™ has surprised me in many ways over the years. She's always been more adept at mechanical stuff than I have; she can fix the car, where as I can fix it – for good. And in High School, she said, she had taken a small engines repair class where, apparently, she'd gotten more than one engine running. But still, we faced a task ahead of us as we fact-found and info-gathered; we found that a full tune-up at a nearby mower shop was going to be over $100, because they're not going to do just the one thing; ethical, but expensive. We considered buying the parts to do our own overhaul: my spouse was certainly not intimidated by this prospect. In the meantime we set to finding possibilities for the loan of someone else's mower, a research that was met with no clear success.
Last night, in a burst of 'let's get on with it already'-ness, The Wife™, who was on something of a tear that day, took the mower out to perform an experiment; remove the nozzle bolt, clean it out (a bit of wire was all that was needed), reinstall and see if that would do the trick. I was there for moral support (not technical support, as was mentioned before). She sat there for about a half-hour or so while rain threatened and gasoline dribbled out the now-open hole in the bottom of the carburetor.
Re-install the nozzle. Give it a try? Sure, why not. Crank the engine, it starts …
… and it keeps going. It's about 8:00 PM on a night where sprinkles are now happening, but don't worry about the rain. I was, after all, born in Oregon. What you hear about us Oregonians is true in the 'little bit of rain' regard.
With The Wife™ dancing about, proud of her OGness when it comes to small-engine repair, which is absolutest truth. I couldn't have got this done.
And so it was, on a damp night in April, 2013, that my spouse did the smart bit, and I did the brawny-guy bit, and the front lawn is finally mowed.
2923.I've gone on and on about our favorite art-supply sources. I get silly. Sorry about that, but being smitten, you get silly in public.
Our faves are faves for slightly different reasons. I've Been Framed's superpower is getting castoffs and closeouts. When you walk into the friendly storefront on SE Foster Rd just off Powell Blvd, you know what you're walking into, but you can never be completely certain as to what you'll walk out with.
Like this, today:
This, my friends, is retired stationery from KKRZ - Z100. It's nostalgic. It comes from not too long ago, the age when Portland radio didn't suck, back when you could find more than conservatalk and Yet Another New Groundbreaking Country Station.
Now I'm crying softly inside. Wait … okay. Bettah now.
Anyway, I've Been Framed.
You guys know the place. Go there, or you just have some issues, I tell you.
