Seen on Hawthorne Blvd. in Portland:
Cello player busking on Hawthorne Blvd. in Portland
Rocking Frog Cafe, Belmont – Sunnyside District, Portalnd, OR
Some of the photos taken last Friday at the Rocking Frog Cafe on Belmont Street in the Sunnyside District of Portland.
Detail of the lovely “Countressa”, with some interesting names for sandwiches on the chalkboard.
View of Mt. Hood from Mt. Tabor
Took another photo safari this afternoon. This time I took a walk in Mt. Tabor Park
…
I took a lot of shots of Mt. Hood (click for larger photo),
which is somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 to 50 miles in the distance
Although it appears that this photo was taken from a pristine mountain wilderness, it was actually taken well within Portland City Limits.
There are more photos from the Mt. Tabor neighborhood in THIS photo album.
NW Portland – Yuppietown
Woke up early (for me) to a warm & sunny day, so I decided to hop on the 15-Belmont bus line heading East, just to see where it would take me. The route took me across the Morrison Street Bridge over the Willamette River, across the City Center (didn’t see it. must have blinked…), then North along NW 23rd Avenue. Since I’ve moved to Portland, I’ve notices a notable (and welcome) absence of Yuppies in Portland– even some of the upscale areas. Well, as soon as I started seeing Starbucks every three blocks or so, I knew I had arrived!
Another thing I’ve noticed is, although Portland is very nice– it isn’t fabulous! That’s actually one reason I like the place. There is a lot of *ahem* Civic Boosterism, bordering on the sort of chauvinism displayed by natives of Chicago, America’s “Second City” in relation to New York. Which is why I view THIS sort of sign
with dismay. …
I arrived at the top of the hill (on the 15 bus line, anyway) and began to walk back toward the downtown. What I found was a sort of catchy-all theme park of Yuppiedom. First were some apartments, which could have been somewhere in conservative upper-middle class Contra Costa County, California.
As I was walking along this stretch, two thirty-somethings (whatevers) were calling to each other across the street, talking about, what?
Golf, natch…
Then came the New Age block, complete with Holistic Health practitioners, Tibetan flags, tsotchkes. incense, jewelry, Aura Channelers, high-colonics (OK, I’m not sure I saw those last two. But I didn’t make those up: they DO exist…).
They even had the obligatory Jesus impersonator– long hair, tastefully-cropped full beard, serious face and even a flowing white garment of some sort, noodling major scales on a violin to the backing of (I’m assuming) sampled harp tracks run through a sequencer, controlled by a stomp-box which he controlled with one foot.
There was also this very cool house with portico and lush green foliage:
I walked through other neighborhoods as well. The complete photo album (still in progress) for this trek can be found HERE…
Hardcore HTML: PDX Web & Design Meetup at Webtrends, Portland
Bad Q. Blogger made his Portland social debut yesterday at the Hardcore HTML
at Webtrends Corporate Headquarters
located on the 16th floor of the Pacific Center in Portland, Oregon
Nice view…
Until a couple / three years ago, I prided myself on my near-encyclopedic knowledge of the bleeding-edge of the HTML/XHTML (xhtml?) and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) standards. The HTML standard, based on Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), while changing steadily, had not fundamentally changed in over a decade. Ever since the latter half of the 1990s, the World-Wide Web Consortium (W3C) had been trying to extricate the web from the perversions of the standard that came about as a result of the battle for Cyberspace between competing Microsoft and Netscape proprietary browser implementations.
During the last couple years, while I’ve been busy with other matters, web standards and practices have taken a drastic turn, with Content Management Systems (CMS) such as Drupal and, more recently, WordPress (which I have–for mostly arbitrary reasons— chosen as my CMS of choice); javascript libraries (such as jQuery), and most baffling of all (to me at least)– HTML5. I didn’t know where to start to get myself back on top of the Web Development game.
This meetup, Hardcore HTML (kudos to Eric Redmond for the presentation) delved into the history and semantic structure of the new HTML5 standard in a way that helped me understand the new standard, as well as the reasoning behing the changes.
All in all, one of the most… constructive evenings I’ve had in quite awhile.
Thanks Eric!
Portland, Oregon
I’m starting a photo album for assorted photos of Portland.
Morrison Bridge over the Willamette River (click on image HERE to magnify)
New Camera: Before & After
Old photo, looking East on Hawthorne Blvd. toward Mt. Tabor, taken with my Huwaie POS 86 SUXX:
Same view (more or less) taken today with my brand new Canon SX150 IS:
New Camera!
It’s still just a point ‘n’ shoot, but it’s better than that stupid phone camera…
Shaggadelic
For the uninitiated, I give a brief introduction to the Immaculate Phenomenon that is the Shaggs’ œuvre:
The [all too kind] STORY, from Wikipedia:
The Shaggs were an American all-female rock group formed in Fremont, New Hampshire in 1968. The band was composed of sisters Dorothy “Dot” Wiggin (vocals/lead guitar), Betty Wiggin (vocals/rhythm guitar), Helen Wiggin (drums) and, later, Rachel Wiggin (bass).
The Shaggs were formed by Dot, Betty and Helen in 1968, on the insistence of their father, Austin Wiggin, who believed that his mother foresaw the band’s rise to stardom. The band’s only studio album, Philosophy of the World, was released in 1969. The album failed to garner attention, though the band continued to exist as a locally popular live act. The Shaggs disbanded in 1975 after the death of Austin. …
The band is primarily notable today for their perceived ineptitude at playing conventional rock music; the band was described in one Rolling Stone article as “…sounding like lobotomized Trapp Family singers.”[3] As the obscure LP achieved recognition among collectors, the band was praised for their raw, intuitive composition style and lyrical honesty.[citation needed] Philosophy of the World was lauded as a work of art brut, and was later reissued, followed by a compilation album, Shaggs’ Own Thing, in 1982.[/QUOTE]
This music, being far too tuneless & arrhythmic for the capacities of mere mortals, was widely considered to be a hoax, perhaps the work of some disgruntled out-of-work “Loft Jazz” musicians from New York.
As Susan Orlean puts it, on her site “Meet the Shaggs“:
Depending on whom you ask, the Shaggs were either the best band of all time or the worst. Frank Zappa is said to have proclaimed that the Shaggs were “better than the Beatles.”
I believe he was being ironic here. This was back before you could find irony in Wal ★ Mart’s clearance aisle.
More recently, though, a music fan who claimed to be in “the fetal position, writhing in pain,” declared on the Internet that the Shaggs were “hauntingly bad,” and added, “I would walk across the desert while eating charcoal briquettes soaked in Tabasco for forty days and forty nights not to ever have to listen to anything Shagg-related ever again.” Such a divergence of opinion confuses the mind. Listening to the Shaggs’ album ‘Philosophy of the World’ will further confound.
Something is sort of wrong with the tempo, and the melodies are squashed and bent, nasal, deadpan.Are the Shaggs referencing the heptatonic, angular microtones of Chinese ya-yueh court music and the atonal note clusters of Ornette Coleman, or are they just a bunch of kids playing badly on cheap, out-of-tune guitars? And what about their homely, blunt lyrics? Consider the song ‘Things I Wonder’:
There are many things I wonder
There are many things I don’t
It seems as though the things I wonder most
Are the things I never find outIs this the colloquial ease and dislocated syntax of a James Schuyler poem or the awkward innermost thoughts of a speechless teen-ager?
ENJOY! (click on blank empty space if object is not visible)
footnote [3]: from missioncreep.com Expresso Tilt:
…proclaimed The Rolling Stone, “. . . like a lobotomized Trapp Family Singers.” The late Lester Bangs called The Shaggs an “anti-power trio” and claimed that Philosophy of the World was “a landmark in rock and roll history.” He also expressed his surprise that the sisters were not junkies.
This Weekend Only! (or Wait for another 26,000 years) Annular Eclipse over Western United States!
In January of 1979, I took off from College of the Redwoods to head to the High Desert of the Oregon/Idaho borderlands to view the Last Total Eclipse of the Millennia™ over North America(™?). There would not be another such eclipse until 2012.
Who'da thunk the Earth would still be in existence at this late date?
Well, it's HERE! The path (shown HERE on NASA's website) runs from the coastal Oregon/California border to the base of the Texas Panhandle this Sunday evening.
…
