Category: What the…?

Five years and eleven months to the day after we first saw smart cars in Amsterdam; after waiting for a variety of failed attempts to bring them to the US market that finally bore some fruit last year; and waiting for a Portland-area dealership to carry them; Oswego Luxury was the first to actually get them in stock, and they’ve got a lotful. We stopped by on our way to Phillip Kerman‘s house, and sat in one for the first time. It it hadn’t been for the torrential rain and the fact that Barbara couldn’t fit her purse into the model in the showroom, we’d have taken them up on their offer to take it out for a spin, but we’ll be back.

This month marks my 20th year in Portland. I moved here to go back to school five years after I dropped out of Lane Community College when the economy in Eugene hit a low in the early 1980s. Reed College used to have something called the Eliot Scholars Program, for students 25 years of age and older who hadn’t finished their undergraduate degree, and they accepted my application, due in no small part to the recommendation letter of my younger brother. Also, there was Barbara.

I’ve only had two homes here in Portland. One was the rental house Barbara was living in when I first moved, the other is the house we’ve lived in since 1990. They’re only about four blocks apart. With the exception of a two-month summer course at NYU, I’ve never been away from Portland for longer than a couple of weeks of vacation since I got here.

That’s the subhed from the BBC’s report of the World Cup title match.

Which makes this passage from Jeffrey Toobin’s article on the World Cup in last week’s (3 July) New Yorker in which he discusses the US’s second-round match against Italy very prescient:

These days, Italians play a style known as catenaccio–door bolt–which focuses more on preventing goals than on scoring them. This defensive approach frequently leads to unattractive behavior, such as de Rossi’s assault on McBride, and, as a consequence, Italian players are also famous for making operatic complaints to referees, who are especially important in their games. Italian teams often rely for goals on free kicks and penalties, which only referees can award.

Toobin goes on to mention that this has led to a number of scandals.

Driving home last night, I’m making the turn onto the Glenn Jackson (I205) Bridge going south from Washington SR14 when I’m joined on the ramp by this thing merging onto the bridge coming the other way (from Vancouver). Hard to tell exactly how big it was (I know from the car behind it it was “OVERSIZE”) but it looked about 75 feet long. It may be hard to tell from the photo I snapped on my cell phone while I drove past it (shouldn’t that be illegal?) but it’s a blade from a wind turbine, apparently headed out to the wilds of Eastern Oregon.

In two hours, I’m going to be sitting down for my third shot at getting on JEOPARDY! The first time was almost exactly ten years ago, and I didn’t make it past the first screening, but they were still holding the tests in the studio where the show’s taped. A couple of years back — during the Ken Jennings reign — I tried again and made it to the second round, but was never called to be on the show. The tests that time were held in a hotel in LA. This time, they had an online first round, and the second rounds (where you actually play a mock game) are being held around the country; in my case, Portland, in a hotel right across the street from where I used to have an office.

For my family, 2001 is memorable for an entirely different reason than it is for most other Americans, and 6/11 is an earlier date we’ll keep in our memory. Because that’s the day a guy against whom police had refused to enforce a restraining order broke into the house of my 83-year-old grandmother’s caretaker, dragged her from her bed, and killed her with a shotgun. Her name was Margaret Baker.

Barbara and I were down in San Francisco the other weekend to visit Eric and Annie for Eric’s 40th birthday. On our last day, we wandered around Grant Avenue in Chinatown picking up gee-gaws. I just got around to going through the receipts; apparently one of the shops we visited was called Sophia’s Choice.

On 12 December 2002, two months to the day after a fall from a stepladder broke my leg and ankle, and about a week after my 41st birthday, I was making my way down the stairs at my office to where my wife was waiting for me with the car. At the bottom of the stairs (thankfully) I passed out. Barbara managed to get me to the emergency room, where several doctors and nurses spent 45 minutes trying to find veins for IVs (never easy on me under the best of circumstances), where I got a CAT scan, a sonocardiogram, and spent the night in the ICU after they’d confirmed that I had suffered a pulmonary embolism. More specifically, multiple embolisms, because I had a number of blood clots in both lungs. A week in the pulmonary ward, a year of blood thinner treatment, and I’d be good as new.

This photo’s from the Lone Fir Pioneer Cemetery in Southeast Portland, where Barbara and I bought a cremation plot last month. That brown patch under my feet is our spot (the marker is not ours), which is just few steps from the plot of Oregon Gov. W.W. Thayer (1878-82).

Peter Sylwester passes on a fun (if bloody) piece of 3D animation from France: SuperMonks!

My web provider’s server statistics page lists search queries from referrer data in both full and individual word versions, and I check them out every now and again to see how people are getting to my site. Back in the early days of my moshplant.com site, it was kind of scary to look at, because I’d written an article about my search to find out what happened to the royalties for Mein Kampf, and adolf hitler usually topped the list. Close behind was a page containing a Quicktime movie from the 1996 Macromedia User Conference showing a number of the top Director developers sitting in close proximity which I’d titled “Hand Grenade,” on the basis of a remark that a single hand grenade could have taken most of the well-known names in the field out. Often, it seemed as if the people looking for the first term were close behind with a search for grenade.

So I was looking through just todays’s top search terms, and I see things like flash 8 video alpha flame movie, actionscript code geometric shapes drawing, and actionscript code geometric shapes drawing, all of which I can understand, because the first is something I wrote about for MAX and I have mentioned ActionScript and game development in a number of posts. director rss lingo, otoy, hunter s thompson and pictures? All easily understandable. The top search was for nate sassaman, and since I’ve mentioned the Lt. Col. from Aloha a couple of times, that’s completely comprehensible.

But when I saw the second most common search term on the list was the british army in their treatment of our unfortunate brethren I really had to step back and think for a moment. That didn’t work, so I tried Google, and ended up in a post I’d written back in June of last year, not too many weeks after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, which quoted George Washington on the treatment of prisoners (quoted in The New York Review of Books from Washington’s Crossing by David Hackett Fischer).

“…treat them with humanity, and let them have no reason to Complain of our Copying the brutal example of the British army in their Treatment of our unfortunate brethren.”