No, you can't get there from here

This mechanism shrinks when pulled
Veritasium

Curious stuff. Wikipedia has a page about Braess's Paradox. 

The video has an ad that runs from 12:20 to 14:15.

Via California Bob.

Cessna 206 Flap Control

 

Cessna Flap Indicator Cable

At lunch on Thursday, Marc related a mechanical horror tale. On some small airplanes, the flap controls are simple and straight forward. They'll have a lever, you pull on the lever to raise the flaps, and you push it down to lower the flaps. There is a mechanical linkage and you can observe the direct connection between the motion of the handle and the motion of the flaps.

However, somewhere lost in the mists of time (but likely in the 1970s), engineers were evidently getting bored because they were adding electric motors to everything. It started when they replaced the vacuum motors for windshield wipers and it has grown every year since. Anyway, somebody at Cessna decided they needed to operate the flaps on the 206 electrically. That's not too much of a problem, but they also wanted to be able to set the degree angle of the flaps, not just depend on the pilot eyeballing the flaps. So they devised a kind of a Rube Goldberg system to do this. They ran a push-pull cable from the flaps across the wing, down through the door post, out through the firewall, where it makes a U-turn in the engine compartment and then goes back through the firewall and thence to the flap control lever. 

At this point you could just connect that cable to an indicator dial. The pilot could look at the dial and see what angle the flaps were at, but that's not good enough. I mean we just went to the moon, we should be able to control the flaps automatically.

So what they did is create two parallel levers inside the dash, operating on a common pivot. One lever is connected to the flap control lever, the other is connected to the push-pull indicator cable. Here's the good part (or evil, depending on your viewpoint). The control lever has a protruding prong. The indicator lever has two microswitches. When you push the control lever down, the prong engages the microswitch that in turn activates the motor and lowers the flap. The indicator lever follows the motion of the flap and eventually it catches up with the control lever, the switch is released and the motor stops.

The problem Marc ran into with this old airplane is that the cable was not sliding smoothly, it moved in fits and starts. Solution is to replaced the cable with a new one that is super-non-sticky and guaranteed to be sticky free for the next millennia.

Simple, just replace the cable, except it has to be fished through this convoluted path. Makes trying to drain the AC on the wife's car look like a piece of cake.

Frantic Schoolgirls

OKP Cipher
Avantgardey - Topic

Several of these have popped up (above) recently. Then I found this (below). Somebody has too much energy. Or they are going insane. I dunno which.

OKP Cipher / Avantgardey【アバンギャルディ】
akanekikaku / avantgardey

Update August 2025 replaced missing short video with something similar.

Hatari

Scene from Hatari

Bestest movie ever! At least in 1962. Three years later my brothers and I were bouncing around the farm on an ancient Chevy pickup truck reenacting scenes from the movie.

Fubar - Netflix Trailer

Fubar Season 1 Trailer
Rotten Tomatoes TV

We started watching this last night, and hey, wait a minute, is that Arnold? Why, yes it is. Goofy, violent, action comedy, but the action is a little too grim, and the comedy is just medium. One episode was enough.

War Against the Machines

Working on the Car

From Hillbilly Elegy by J. D. Vance, page 107

Papaw was Gruff to the point of absurdity. To every suggestion or behavior he didn't like, Papaw had one reply: "bullshit." that was everyone's cue to shut the hell up. His hobby was cars: he loved buying, trading, and fixing them. One day not long after Papaw quit drinking, Uncle Jimmy came home to find him fixing an old automobile on the street. "He was cussing up a storm. 'These God damn Japanese cars, cheap pieces of shit. What a stupid motherfucker who made this part.' I just listened to him, not knowing a single person was around, and he just kept carrying on and complaining. I thought he sounded miserable." Uncle Jimmy had recently started working and was eager to spend his money to help his dad out. So he offered to take the car to a shop and get it fixed. The suggestion caught Papaw completely off guard. "What? Why?" He asked innocently. "I love fixing cars."

I've been there more times than I can count. When one gets involved in attempting to repair a broken machine, you are inevitably going to run into situations that you could swear were devised by some demon from hell. Bolts that won't turn, bolts that break off, bolts you can't reach because there is some totally unrelated collection of mechanical parts blocking your way. Some people, when they encounter these situations, give up. A dedicated gearhead will redouble his efforts. You want to get cross-wise with me, you useless piece of shit? I'll show you - this means war!

P. S. Goodreads lists like two dozen summaries of Hillbilly Elegy by J. D. Vance. What's up with that?

Fun with Plumbing

Garbage Disposal Bracket

A few days, maybe a week ago, my wife is cleaning strawberries in the kitchen and water starts pouring out of the cupboard and onto the floor. Not good. Investigating, I discover that the disposal is not perfectly vertical, it is slightly tilted. What gives? What gives is that only 2 of the three mounting hooks are engaged. You can see two of them on the ring at the bottom of the above image. There are three ramps on the flange that is sticking out of the hole in the bottom of the sink. You can see most of one and part of another in upper part of the image. These hooks do not just come undone, not without being hit by a car, bulldozer or similar implement. So what happened here?

I suspect that it has been that way since it was installed over a year ago at the tail end of the big remodeling project. Okay, that might have been, but why haven't we had a problem with water before? Stay tuned.

The next day the kitchen sink is backing up. (Think this might be related to yesterday's problem?) The drain must be clogged. Try the plunger, no help, but no leaks under the sink, so I reinstalled the disposal bracket correctly. Okay, let's try a snake. It goes in about 8 feet but then stops. No amount of spinning makes any difference, it's like we've run into a brick wall.

Drain King

I go looking for my Drain King, greatest drain unclogger ever invented. I know I had one, but it's been years since I needed it and it has evidently crawled off into the weeds. I drive over to Home Depot, expecting to find one there, but no dice. Whaaat? How can that be? Back home I check their web site and it is listed as Out of Stock - This item is currently unavailable. What's the deal, Home Depot? The place must have been taken over by commies.

Who else might have one? How about Ace Hardware? There's one here in Hillsboro, but they are out of stock, but the store in Forest Grove has one. I drive the five miles and they do indeed have one. Back home I hook it up to the garden hose and shove it down the drain pipe, turn on the water and wait five minutes. It makes the most god-awful racket, but maybe that means it's working. Turn off the water and by the time I get back inside the bladder has shrunk and been pushed out of the pipe and all the water that had gotten shoved into the pipe came running out and all over the floor.

I suspect that the drain from an upstairs sink intersects the drain from the kitchen sink, and the small stream of water that comes out of the business end of the Drain King was slowly filling that drain pipe. It didn't reach the upstairs sink so there wasn't more than about ten gallons of water, maybe only one, but it made a big mess when it got loose. Good thing we saved all those old bath towels.

It's getting on about five o'clock and I am at the end of my rope. I ask Migal, who's rebuilding a retaining wall in the backyard, if he knows a plumber, and he does. So about 6 or 7, Jesus (Hay-zoose) and his assistant come over and set to work. They have a TV camera on a snake which they use to take a look. They go after it hammer and tongs for like three hours with no luck. Decide we are going to need to cut the pipe down in the basement and work on it from the other end. We'll do that tomorrow.

The next day I run errands to pick up tools and pipe fittings. I'm looking for the old table lamps that used for work lights, but they too have evidently crawled off into the weeds. Hay-zoose cuts the kitchen drain (sawzall makes short work of that) and finds the pipe is broken where it connects to the drain.

T should connect kitchen drain

T does not connect kitchen drain

This is how we found them, just sitting next to each other

So not only was the disposal not connected to the sink, the drain wasn't connected to the sewer and it's all just been working fine, without a trace of a leak, since forever. I'm flabbergasted, I tell you, flabbergasted.

I mean, how did that pipe break? ABS sewer pipe is some tough stuff. The plumbing was redone about 20 years ago when we finished the basement, and there weren't any cars or bulldozers in the basement, so what the heck happened?

And what about that duck tape? I peeled off the duct tape to see if there was any damage to the T and there isn't. All I can imagine is that somebody hit this pipe with a sledge hammer and broke it and sent someone else into put duct tape on it, but the guy putting the tape on couldn't see the crack, so he just wrapped the tape around the big pipe. This is just spooky.

Anyway, Hay-zoos and his buddy got the pipes are reconnected and things are flowing smoothly. What clogged the drain so solidly, you might ask? Best we can tell is that it was egg shells. The drain from the kitchen runs about 20 feet with only about one foot of drop, so evidently a couple of drops of egg goo every day for umpteen years piles up. Drano on a regular basis from now on, my friends.

Electronic Water Meter
Shine a flashlight onto the meter's solar cells to power up the display.

That was last week. Yesterday I got a notice from the city that my water usage is above normal, so I go take a look, and huh, look at that. All the water lines are shut off but the meter shows I am still running about 10 gallons an hour, which will add up to a whole unit (100 cubic feet) over a month. So I got a leak in the pipe connecting the house to the meter. 3 Mountains Plumbing came out this morning and verified what I found. Their proposed solution is to run a new line of PEX piping which they could probably do tomorrow, for $10K. That's a chunk of change, so I called a leak detection service and they are going to come out Thursday and pin-point the leak for the nominal fee of $350.

We had a leak once before, I dunno, maybe 10 or 20 years ago. The line from the meter to irrigation system had been carelessly backfilled and the line had been depressed and eventually it cracked. I wonder if our repair was not up to snuff. If the leak is in the same place it should be a relatively easy matter to fix it. My only problem is, well, actually doing any of the work. I could do it but it would take me a month of Sundays. Maybe I can talk the boys into digging the hole. On the other hand my insurance agent assures me that my policy covers these kind of disasters, so maybe I should just tell 3 Mountains to go ahead. Still, it's a chunk of change to lay out on somebodies say so.

Brink of Disaster

Collapsed Bridge
Chuck Pergiel

Via Liberalguy

P. S. Another video. Yahoo has the story about the Houzi River Bridge collapse.

Is the Pope Catholic?

The Return of the Prodigal Son - Rembrandt

Just so you know where I am coming from, I'll tell you that I am nominally a Christian, but I'm not Catholic. I do follow a couple of Catholic bloggers, mostly because they write good posts. Anyway, I came across this post by Prof. Dr. Kai-Alexander Schlevogt on RT today and it is pretty amazing. I'm very short on sleep today, so most of what passes for news holds no interest, but the way this guy writes just sucked me in. I read about half of it before my eyes failed me. He uses some fancy words, but Google is at your beck and call, so just ask for an explanation.

Old Man Of The Mountain

Betty Boop - The Old Man Of The Mountain - 1933 HD
Betty Boop HD

JMSmith is talking about the Old Man of the Mountain, and that sparks a vague memory of old cartoons and YouTube delivers this one featuring Betty Boop. Here's the intro to JMSmith's post:

Notes on Assassination
 

“The extirpation of the Assassins or Ismaelians of Persia may be considered as a service to mankind.” - Edward Gibbon, History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776)

Ismaleans are the largest branch of Shia Islam.  Shia Islam itself is in some respects comparable to Catholic Christianity, at least insofar as it grants great authority to Imams, who are honored as successors to Mohammed, the Prophet, much as Catholic Christians grant great authority to Popes, who are honored as successors to Jesus, the Christ.   Sunni Islam on the other hand is in some respects comparable to Protestant Christianity because it is grounded on the scripture of the Koran and hadith.

The Order of Assassins to whom Gibbon refers was an Ismaelian sect that flourished in the twelfth and thirteenth century.  Although dispersed throughout Syria and Persia (Iran), the Order of Assassins operated with the discipline and policy of an organized state.  Its capital was a mountaintop fortress known as Alamut Castle, located north of Tehran, wherein dwelt a dictator known to West as the Old Man of the Mountain.  This Old Man did not, however, give law to a large territory, but rather to  a large network that spread through neighboring states, much as veins of blue mold spread through cheese.  There were “knots” in this network—minor fortresses subordinate to Alamut—and the whole might be likened without originality to a spider’s web.

The Order of Assassins (or Nizari Ismaili state) is of course best remembered for eschewing open battle and employing the stealthy strategy of targeted assassination, a word that is derived either from the first Old Man of the Mountain, Hassan-I Sabbah, or from their rumored use of hashish.  So, as Gibbon goes on to say,

“Among the hills south of the Caspian, these odious sectaries had reigned with impunity above an hundred and sixty years; and their prince, or imam, established his lieutenant to lead and govern the colony of mount Libanus [that is to say Mount Lebanon, on the Syrian coast] . . . . With the fanaticism of the Koran, the Ishmaelians had blended the Indian transmigration, and the visions of their own prophets: and it was their first duty to devote their souls and bodies in blind obedience to the vicar of God.  The daggers of his missionaries were felt both in the East and West: the Christians and the Moslems enumerate, and perhaps multiply, the illustrious victims that were sacrificed to the zeal, avarice, or resentment, of the old man (as he was corruptly styled) of the mountain.”

He goes on to talk about assassination and Israel's recent targeting of Iran's nuclear scientists. 

Which reminds me of an old story about a man going to visit a scientist at his home. The scientist is working on building some fearsome new weapon. The man tries to dissuade the scientist from completing his weapon, as the leader to whom the new weapon will be entrusted is seriously deranged. The scientist refuses on the basis that he is not responsible for what fearless leader does. While the scientist is distracted, the man slips into the scientist's imbecile child's room and places a loaded revolver in the kids bed. He then leaves. The scientist discovers the gun and asks 'what kind of lunatic would give a loaded gun to a imbecile?'

Meanwhile, France denied Israel permission to participate in their air show, and here's Israel's response:

Israel Defense Industries

Iran has been stirring up shit in the mideast ever since their last revolution. It's time somebody smacked them down.

Dept. Q - Netflix Series

Dept. Q | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix

Another squad of misfits set up to look into old cases, much like Graveyard, except this one is in set in Scotland, not Turkey. Funny how both groups get office space in a creepy old basement, full of old stuff that no one cares about.

The show gets off to a horrific start when our hero, Morck, and his partner visit a crime scene and are ambushed by a gunman, who kills the patrolman, and seriously wounds Morck and his partner before escaping. Morck hates everybody in the cop shop and everybody hates him, he's basically an asshole.

Meanwhile, in the courtroom, Moira, the prosecutor, is trying to convict Graham Finch of killing his wife by pushing her down the stairs. Except it wasn't meanwhile, it was four years ago. Moira disappeared shortly thereafter.

Merritt Lingard is the boss of the cop shop. I was confused at first because I thought Moira and Merritt were the same person. I thought they looked alike, my wife doesn't understand how I could not tell them apart.

Akram is the first person to join Morck's team. He is devout Muslim would used to do police work in Syria, whatever that means. Like all good immigrants he is willing to do all the scut work without complaining.

The missing Moira becomes the first cold case for our brand new Department Q to investigate.

The show has the usual Netflix complement of folks from the fringes: guy with mental problems, smart gal stifled in tedious administrative busy work, brown immigrant who works hard, a cripple, and I'm pretty sure there are several gays. None of that matters because the main story is intriguing. They keep giving the audience clues. How the devil is this group of misfit toys going to figure this out?

Edinburgh International Climbing Arena. Edinburgh, Scotland

There are a couple of unusual sets. One is large rock climbing gym. 

Hyperbaric Diving Chamber Interior

The other is a diving chamber like the ones used by deep sea divers working for extended periods deep underwater.

P. S. Nina Metz of the Chicago Tribune wrote a review of this same show and it showed up in Sunday's Oregonian.

Fire Season

Rowena Fire - Leslie Lamb

Iowa man has moved to Bingen, Washington. It's across the river from Hood River.

Hood River, Bingen, Rowen Fire, The Dalles

He reports:

Sitting waiting for Angie’s orthopedic consult. Both of us have bum left knees. My xray was yesterday, my consult in September after pt.

Then later today up to the mountain to haul gear for Stephen, our 72 hippy ski bum friend who is going to self build his forever cabin on 15 wilderness acres.  He has a bum knee too. Angie’s bro-in-law, 68, is soon to have both knees replaced. The year of the knee!

Being laid up dampened my plans for exploring on mc, biking, hiking…but there is nice.

Two forest fires either side of us, fortunately no smoke at house. One 50 acres, the other 2500 stage 3 evacuations. I think they are out.  

Our 72 yo ski friend Steven bought 20 acres (cheap) of eastern Oregon sparsely treed dry land, zero population nearby.  Rough road along a dry creek to the no-utility lot, passing a couple of  long disused and deteriorated camper RVs.   

His plan is to build a cabin for off-ski season use,  stay with friends near the ski slopes in the winter (not us).

To this end he has so far had a shipping container placed into a hillside.  He plans on sharing a neighbor's wood mizer (mile away) in exchange for 50% of the cut lumber, sourced from his 20 acres.

He drives a 15 yo Ford Escape, hoping to upgrade to a Ford PU soon.

Fun to visit.  Stephen seems happy but I would want something on the grid and less dry,  it was crackling tinder dry.

On the way home we detoured around the Rowena fire, 3200 acres, 40+ homes destroyed.

Container in hillside

Digging Equipment

Hillbilly Elegy

In that same bookshop where I read that bit about baseball errors, there was also a box of free books for 'burning or your rage room'. Well, I gotta see what we have here, and what do I find? Several copies of J. D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy along with several Harry Potter books. Remember this is northwest Portland, a very deep blue corner in a very blue state. I picked up Hillbilly Elegy and took it with me. We already have all the Harry Potter books.

I am about half way through, and so far it's been his life growing up amongst the hill folk, and a rough bunch they are. It's kind of amazing that he amounted to anything, much less Vice President of the United States.

Anyway, on page 58 I came across this little bit that I thought was entertaining. I mean, I thought I was a math whiz:

Alongside these conflicting norms about the value of blue-
collar work existed a massive ignorance about how to achieve
white-collar work. We didn't know that all across the country -
and even in our hometown - other kids had already started a
competition to get ahead in life. During first grade, we played a
game every morning: The teacher would announce the number of
the day, and we'd go person by person and announce a math equa-
tion that produced the number. So if the number of the day was
four, you could announce "two plus two" and claim a prize, usu-
ally a small piece of candy. One day the number was thirty. The
students in in front of me went through the easy answers - "twenty-
nine plus one," "twenty-eight plus two," "fifteen plus fifteen." I
was better than that. I was going to blow the teacher away.

When my turn came. I proudly announced. "Fifty minus
twenty" The teacher gushed, and I receive: two pieces of candy
for my foray into subtraction, a skill we'd learned only days
before. A few moments later, while I beamed over my brilliance,
another student announced, "Ten times three." I had no idea what
that even meant. Times? Who was this guy?

Tales from the Fringe

Where are they now? 5!
Fire Department Chronicles

I frequently see entertaining short videos from this guy. Usually they are just short ones, but this one gives a little more information, and it's pretty entertaining.

Baseball

Charles Schwab Field Omaha
Why are there four different fonts in this sign?

We've been watching Oregon State in the playoffs. First we had three games against Florida State in the Super Regionals in Corvallis. They won two out of three, so they moved on to the Men's College World Series in Omaha. They won their first game there against Louisville, but the next game was against Coastal Carolina University who were on 55 game winning streak. How do you even do that? Oregon lost this one. I expect there will be another game soon.

Ran into a couple of weird takes on baseball. I stopped in a bookstore in northwest Portland the other day, picked up a book and read a couple pages, see if it's going to grab me. We've got a kid going to play in a baseball game with his dad. The old man is a bit of a baseball fanatic, the kid not so much. If you ever watch baseball you may know that the scoreboard often shows Runs, Hits and Errors. The kid doesn't like errors. He points out that no other sports have 'errors', or at least they don't count them. Doesn't like being told he made an error, or something. Baffles me why anyone would be bothered by this. Of course, when I played baseball as a kid, everything I did was probably an error, but nobody bothered counting. Still don't really know what counts as an error, but then my old man wasn't a baseball fanatic.

Then while my wife and I are watching the Oregon State game, it comes out that she doesn't like playing baseball because she doesn't like being called 'out'. People are just funny.

Quote of the Day

Ahhh, there's nothing quite like the smell of freshly brewed, magical, psychotic rage stabilizing elixir in the morning. - The Village Hemorrhoid

Down by the River

Chris Farley living in a Van Gogh down by the river

You might remember Chris's skit on Saturday Night Live about a zillion years ago.

Lottery

Oregon Lottery

Just completed a phone survey about gambling. It was kind of obnoxious. The lady claimed she needed to read all of the questions in order to maintain the validity of the survey, or something. There were a few questions about me, but the bulk of the questions were about gambling, and most of those questions were about the Oregon Lottery, which apparently has about a zillion different ways to suck money out of your wallet. The lady asks about each game individually and after we've gone through umpteen games I was getting a little annoyed at having to keep answering 'no'. I was also a little bemused that there were so many games. I'm a little curious as to who was conducting the survey, but right now I think it was part of an advertising campaign for the Oregon Lottery. I mean, gee wilikers, look at all these games they have! You should play one.

R. I. A. R.

The machine [from the movie Contact]
gvg908

I was talking earlier about how stuff accumulates and how it is a constant battle to keep from getting buried by all your stuff.

Now we come to my Dad's papers. We lived in Seattle up until I was in the 6th grade. Dad was an aerospace engineer working Boeing. He worked on inertial guidance systems, which made use of gyroscopes. Gyroscopes bothered my Dad, it really bugged him the way a gyro could apparently defy gravity by only being supported on one end. It bugged him so much that he convinced himself you ought to be able to make a machine that could completely defy gravity, if you just did the right things with some rotating weights. 

He called the machine RIAR for Radial Impulse something something. The basic idea was that you could swing a weight on a long radius in an overhead arc and that would generate an impulse in the upward direction, and then at the end of the arc, the radius would become very much shorter so it would return upward much quicker than the first arc, so the downward impulse would be much shorter. Since the upward arc was longer than the downward arc, the upward force would be larger and if would lift itself into the air, i.e. you would fly. 

Problem is that while shorter radius means quicker turnaround is also means more centrifugal force. So depending on how you looked at the problem, and how you finessed the trajectory of the weight, you could convince yourself that it should work. Or you could be stuck in the Newtonian physics box and conclude that it wouldn't work. My Dad built one model, and while it did move, it didn't fly and wasn't convincing. I bought some materials like 40 years ago with the intention of building my own model, but I never got a round toit. It wouldn't be too tough, all it would take is a bottle git-it-done.

Anyway, my Dad left behind a couple of boxes of papers covered with diagrams, drawings, equations and notes. I've sort of been meaning to sit down and look through them, but it would take getting my head in the right space to deal with it. I feel like I should at least look through the papers, see if there is anything that looks like it is worth preserving. I suspect most of it is just chicken scratches, notes made while he was thinking. And it has the potential to suck me in and I'll end up spending days going through them. Gaah! Meanwhile the two boxes are riding around in the trunk of my car. We are full up inside.

Save It

StorQuest Self Storage

Save it! It's valuable! has been my sarcastic response any time there is a question about whether we should save some bit of paper that the has potential to be valuable, like receipts, instruction manuals or warranty cards. Problem with that approach is you end up with a heap of papers, most of which are absolutely worthless. Taking the time to evaluate whether a piece of paper really has any value requires thinking, and thinking about stuff that doesn't interest you is work. So the piece of paper gets added to the heap.

I suspect that saving stuff is a common affliction. Just look at the proliferation of storage lockers. These things are turning into giant compounds. I have enough stuff that renting a storage locker and moving some of that stuff into it would give me a little more room in my house. But you know what would happen: I would just accumulate more stuff and pretty soon I would be back to thinking I could use a little more storage space. However, I have a severe dislike for paying rent. It's bad enough paying property taxes, but at least I get something for them. 

The problem I have is that I am an American and stuff accumulates. In order to avoid becoming a hoarder, you have to diligently and repeatedly purge your house of excess stuff. What a pain. The alternative is dying a tabloid worthy death when a pile of papers (valuable! Save it!) topples over on top of you and you suffocate. 

My wife and I both work pretty diligently at getting rid of stuff we don't use. I have half a dozen items that I think might we worth enough to make posting them on Ebay worthwhile, but they've been sitting there for at least a month and I haven't made a single move in that direction. I might make enough to pay for lunch for a week, so I should do it. Of course, the longer I wait, the higher the price will go (because of inflation), but any dollars I do get will also be worth less (because of inflation), so that's basically a wash. More likely the stuff will be worth less because it is getting older by the day.

Then I got a notice from Google that my Google Drive was 3/4 full, and would I like to rent some more space? No thank you, but Google gives you 15 gigabytes. What all have I stored in there that's taking up ten gigabytes of space? So I started taking a look. I've been dumping files in there for 15 years, and there are a bunch. There are hundreds of rinky dink little spreadsheets, but these are only a few kilobytes each. There are some documents, maybe hundreds, but still, only a few kilobytes each. I suspect I started storing photos there. I probably ought to hook up my big hard drive and work on getting all my photos loaded onto it.

If I turn my head I can see my bookcase. It's mostly been taken over with medicine and stuff. There is only a handful of books and maybe one shelf's worth of 3 ring notebooks. My first desk when we moved to Oregon was a big old Steelcase unit I bought used. It had three file drawers, and I filled them with valuable papers. But I eventually found (like after 20 years) that I was only using a small subsection of one drawer. The rest were just sitting there, turning to dust. Something happened that caused a major reorganization and the Steelcase desk was replaced by a spare, wood veneer table from somewhere, Dania maybe? So a bunch of paper went to the recycler and a bunch went in the shredder. That was a pain. I remember that - sitting there patiently feeding a thousand sheets of paper into the shredder two or three at a time. The shredder earned it's pay that day.

Anyway, I probably ought to look in those notebooks. Most haven't been opened for years.

Go Play in Traffic Kid

Space Age Quik Mart

Drove to the airport to pick up dangerous daughter this afternoon. Google Maps tells me traffic is going to be bad, so I opt to take Germantown Road over to St. Johns and thence Colombia Boulevard east to the airport. Things were going along swimmingly until I got about halfway down the far side of Forest Park and then traffic came to a halt. It was creepy crawly until the bottom of the hill. 

Often, at the bottom of the hill there are a dozen or so cars backed up waiting to turn onto the ramp for the St. Johns Bridge, but this time it was about a mile, so it took a little while to get through that. Get to the bottom of the hill and there is no sign of any problem. However, go up the ramp and onto the bridge and we find that a car had broken down there. A tow truck had just shown up when I drove by. At least the plug hadn't been on the road coming down the hill. I'd probably still be there in that case. The rest of the way to the airport was smooth sailing.

Coming back I wanted to turn left on MLK, but there was a honking big gas truck trying to pull into the Space Mart station there. He was blocking two lanes of traffic, so the opposing traffic ended up having to use my left turn lane to get around him. Yeah, with all this traffic I'm not making a left turn here, which means taking Vancouver which is a drag because it's loaded with speed bumps. 

These days, I often find myself driving down streets I've never been on before. Call me Chuck, the intrepid street explorer.

P. S. I have written a dozen or posts that mention Germantown Road. 

Mercy For None - Netflix Series

Mercy For None | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix

Korean John Wick wades through an army of thugs using his fists, knives, broken glass, actually anything that comes to hand. You know the shits about to go down when he puts on his gloves. Sometimes he'll pick up a knife in the middle of one of his killing sprees and we get even more blood splashed on the screen. For the main event, he has a special bat made. It's a metal bat and looks like there is a five pound weight wrapped around the big end. It makes a great sound when he drags it across the concrete floor.

Unlike John Wick, it's not about his dog, it's about his brother. The useless son of an allied chief gangster ordered the hit. Half way through the show, our guy gets his revenge. Think this might trigger an even bigger bloodbath? Well, we've still got three episodes to go. Somehow I don't think they're going to sitting around drinking tea and crumpets and discussing their philosophy of revenge.

The Watching the Detectives label is there to let you know this show is about criminals. However, we've only seen one cop so far, and he wasn't doing much detecting. He was being interrogated by a mob boss.

Russophobia

Attack Of The Savage Division On The Austrian Infantry - Viktor Viketyevich Masurovsky

Terry Cowan is talking about Russophobia in a post on New Notes from a Commonplace Book. He seems to be as confused as I am by the hatred for Russia evidenced by most of the leaders of Western Europe. An excerpt:

So that brings us today, and the real subject of this post. As bad as we are, we are not in the same league with the British. Lindsey Graham cannot hold a candle to Keir Starmer or David Lammy when it comes to Russophobia. We have been their eager students, but they remain the Masters. A recent piece has highlighted the historical roots of this psychosis. A former Canadian diplomat in Russia in Anti-Russia Through the Years writes of the long history of Russophobia, finding it in full blossom 170 years ago. He’s an old Russian hand, and I highly recommend his site.

I suspect Russophobia is a religious belief, passed down from one generation the next, and nurtured for their entire life, and as such is impossible to discuss in a rational manner.

I am beginning to suspect that people have an innate need for a certain amount of violence in their lives. Whenever things are too quiet and peaceful for too long, some people will start to boil and violence will erupt.

The Survivors - Netflix Series

The Survivors | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix

Murder mystery set in the fictional town of Evelyn Bay, Tasmania. Very stupid show, could have been written by Harlan Coben. It could be realistic, I mean the world is full of stupid people, doing stupid, emotional driven stuff, so yeah, realistic, and fine if you want to get drug through all that. I was ready to bail, but the boss enjoys this kind of stuff, and what am I gonna do? Go play solitaire? I do enough of that already. So we got through it, well she sailed through, I slogged. There was one funny bit somewhere in the middle where we have a memorial rugby match and a couple of people in the audience got into recriminations over 15 year old events. The commotion spreads and pretty soon we've got everyone involved.

Tasman Arch. Matty Eaton

There are some great shots of the spectacular coastal rock formations near Eagle Neck, which is just across the bay from Hobart. 

Hobart, Tasmania

Looking at a map of Hobart, the coastline is extremely twisted, much like Norway's, and very much unlike our nice straight coast here in Oregon.

Greater Hobart

The location might be the most interesting part of the show. None of the characters in the first episode stood out as anything more than annoying, well, except maybe for Bronte, the investigating journalist, on account of she turned up dead.

Funnies

Big Idea

A great idea: 

Mike Lee Proposes Constitutional Amendment to Oust Congress When Deficit is Too High

Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) has proposed a constitutional amendment that would make all members of Congress ineligible to run for reelection “whenever inflation exceeds 3%” or when the deficit exceeds 3% of gross domestic product (GDP).

The proposal revives an idea first suggested by Warren Buffett more than 10 years ago in which Buffett suggested he could “end the deficit in five minutes” by disqualifying lawmakers based on the nation’s economic health.

In a post on X, Lee wrote, “It’s better to disqualify politicians than for an entire nation to suffer under the yoke of inflation.”

Great idea, but you know it doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell of becoming law.

 

 

A Striking Encounter

A Striking Encounter by Paul Charles Chocarne-Moreau

Introduction from Rehs Galleries biography of M. Chocarne-Moreau:

Perhaps to the surprise of many, the iconic images of the fascinating and mischievously comical lives of young boys and girls imagined by Norman Rockwell during the early 1900s, were neither a wholly American invention, nor were they the first to treat the subject of children in such a humorous and anecdotal manner.  Prefiguring the immensely popular imagery of Rockwell, Paul-Charles Chocarne-Moreau introduced the French public to the secret scenes of young boys at play, recalling for his audiences the playful deceptiveness that characterized the age of youth.  Interest in children and their development had been increasing throughout the nineteenth century and Chocarne-Moreau harnessed this interest to create images that both capitalized upon and popularized this preoccupation.

Sectarian Strife

Musk vs. Trump

Once a big organization achieves some success, there are going to be conflicting factions. I don't know what they are arguing about and I don't want to know. I am willing to wait and see how this all plays out. I like the idea that they are cutting waste and fraud, but as I understand it, even though waste and fraud amounts to zillions of dollars, it is a miniscule portion of the federal budget. If we are ever going to rein in inflation, the budget will need to be cut, but that is going to be very tough to accomplish. There are too many powerful people with their noses in the trough, and they are not going to like being put on an allowance.

When FDR led us to victory in World War 2, he set the stage for the phenomenal economic boom of the 1950s. Never mind the details, the big picture is what I'm thinking about. FDR and his propaganda machine fostered a belief in the minds of many people that we were doing the right thing by going to war and spending zillions of dollars on building weapons of war. Basically, he built a religion.

But by the 1960s, people began to see that there were problems in paradise. So for the next 40 odd years we kind of staggered along, sort of fighting wars and trying various programs to try and fix the problems at home. Then Barack Obama came along and he sold the people a new religion. The upshot of this new religion is that it enriched his loyal supporters instead of the Military-Industrial complex. The thing about just giving money to your friends instead of actually buying stuff, is that different groups of people get the money. Your friends are going to either spend it on parties and useless junk, or invest it in the stock market, which might be why the stock market keeps going up. When you buy stuff, the company that makes it hires people, so the money gets spread around more and isn't so concentrated.

Big Pink

U. S. Bancorp Tower - aka Big Pink

I get a newsletter from a realtor I know. We've bought and sold several houses in the 30-odd years we've lived here. He's not perfect, we didn't get as much money for one house as I thought we should, to the tune of a few thousand dollars. On the other hand, one house that I bought without him, I overpaid like a hundred grand. Well, in hindsight it seems that way. But that might just be my own internal criticism. I looked at the house and I could see there were some problems, but I thought they could be easily fixed. Conceptually they were, but it took a heck of a lot more work and money than I imagined. The upshot of all this is that having someone that you trust, tell you that you're looking at a fair price, that is invaluable.

Anyway, this newsletter pointed to this story from KATU:

Sale of Portland's iconic 'Big Pink' could spur city's recovery, economist says

PORTLAND, Ore. (KATU) — The advertised sale of Portland's largest office building has the Rose City back in the national news. However, an economist says the transaction could spark the city’s recovery.

The Unico/US Bancorp Tower building last sold for a little more than $370 million in 2015 and is expected to fetch a fraction of that if and when it sells. But, despite some people viewing the sale as proof of Portland’s fall, Mike Wilkerson said the possible sale marks a turning point.

“This will be individuals, institutional investors putting tens of millions of dollars into Portland [and] saying, ‘We believe in the future of the city, and we're willing to invest at this rate,' and from there, that's how the growth cycle starts. We've been stuck at the bottom because we needed this activity. This will be the beginning of the recovery,” Wilkerson, director of Economic Research at ECOnorthwest, said.

Wilkerson said the bad news is the possible impact the reduced market value of the property has on property tax collections for the city of Portland and Multnomah County.

A previous KATU investigation found many of Portland’s largest office buildings have lost hundreds of millions of dollars in combined market value, contributing to budget deficits in both local governments.

The advertised sale of Portland’s largest office building has the Rose City back in the national news. However – an economist says the transaction could spark the city’s recovery.

“The good news far outweighs any of that bad news damage because, effectively, what it's doing is saying, ‘Let's reset Portland as a place that is on a trajectory for upward investment,’” Wilkerson said.

The challenge for a buyer is what to do with the building after buying it. An advertisement for its sale indicated the building is 55% vacant; it has more vacant space than some entire office buildings downtown.

That vacancy level outpaces the vacancy rate of Class A properties in downtown Portland, roughly 35%, according to market research that real estate broker Colliers shared with KATU.

Wilkerson said even the possibility of selling the property, along with PacWest, which is also for sale, shows buyers and sellers starting to discuss what downtown properties are worth.

“Once you have two of the largest buildings transacting, the market now will have confidence that, OK, if it's selling at $100 a square foot or $70 a square foot or $50 a square foot, everyone in the rest of the market will say, ‘OK, now as a seller you're realistic in what that building is worth,’ versus holding out hope that it's worth closer to what you purchased it for five, 10 years ago,” Wilkerson said.

“What kind of impact do [sales like this] have on the economic recovery of a city,” KATU asked Wilkerson.

“Massive. What we need as a city is economic development or growth, and that starts with dollars coming into the region that don't exist here today,” Wilkerson said. “So, for us as a region, attracting that scale of capital flows all the way downstream into jobs, into income, into growth, and so these are some of the most crucial steps that we need to facilitate a recovery.”

Asked Google what it costs to build a skyscraper and this was the reply:

The cost to build a skyscraper can vary widely, but generally ranges from $300 to $600 per square foot in major urban areas.

If the price per square foot drops to $50 or $100, it might make it worthwhile to turn all this office space into living spaces, like apartments or condos. Talking to eldest son about this and he pointed out that just cutting up the floor with new partitions wouldn't cut it, you'd have to rework all the plumbing and all the wiring. Reworking the plumbing might be done more easily if you could raise the floor by one or two feet. That would depend on whether the ceilings are tall enough. And you might have to do something with the windows, like replace all of them. In any case, you would need some clever people to figure out the details and how to get it done without breaking the bank.

Thinking about all this, I am beginning to understand why what-look-like-perfectly-good buildings get knocked down to make room for a new ones.

Quote of the Day

The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson. On page 214 they're talking about upcoming election for the mayor of Chicago, and Patrick Pendergast is thinking he's in the cat bird's seat:

He had read extensively into law and politics and understood that political machines operated on a first principle of power: if you work to advance the interests of the machine, the machine paid you back. Harrison was in his debt.

Integrating Nature & Machine

Fire Hydrant

Saw this while I was out walking around somewhere in northwest Portland.

Sara: Woman in the Shadows - Official Trailer | Netflix

Sara: Woman in the Shadows - Official Trailer | Netflix
MVSRS

Sara is a former member of some kind of Italian secret police. The group is charged with looking for terrorists and preventing terrorist attacks.

The story starts off with Sara's adult son getting hit & killed  by a car while crossing the street. Sara has been estranged from her son since she ran off to be with her boss. Now, 20 or 30 years later, her boss is dead, she is retired, and she's curious, so she starts looking into his death. She works with an ambitious regular police detective (Prado), the woman (Teresa) who replaced her boss with the secret police and with her dead son's wife (Viola), who is eight months pregnant. The more they dig, the more odd connections they find.

Teresa has a driver who works for Tarello, a politician who is running for governor of Campania. Vigilante, a mysterious big shot, is staging street crime incidents to support Tarello, who is running a campaign of 'more security means more freedom'. Things are going well for him and then the anti-nuke campaigners start to have an impact. Vigalante doesn't like that, because, well, he's a big shot and he wants to build some nuclear power plants, and if a half dozen little people get squished, well that's no skin off his nose.

We've a got a couple of people here who are very good at picking up information in situations where any normal person would be at a complete loss.

Sara is a lip-reader extrodinaire. She can watch people having a conversation across the street and she can tell you what they are saying. It's not just lip reading though, it's more like whole-body reading, she picks up clues from the way they are standing and the way they move. It's pretty extraordinary what she is able to pick up. If I ran into someone who claimed they were able to do this, I would be very skeptical. Then again there are all kinds of people running around loose in this world who have all kinds of amazing skills. Just spend a few minutes on YouTube. Plus it's fiction, so who knows?

A guy who was working for a big shot politician is found dead alongside a dead mechanic. The mechanic called his wife just before he died and left a message. Sara asks the blind man to listen to the recording and he tells her that the  dead man was driving down a road in the country and ran over a manhole, which happens to describe the place where he was found perfectly. The blind man used to work with Sara in the Italian secret service, and he really doesn't like Sara because Sara stole his crush  (her boss) just as he was about to reveal his feelings for him.

Hotel Garibaldi Naples Italy

Sara is staying at Hotel Garibaldi in Naples Italy. It's a real place. Sara's replacement in the Secret Service visits her there and calls the place a dump. I dunno, it had a mini-bar. Maybe all hotels, even low rent ones, have mini-bars in the rooms now?

Red herrings? There are a few, here's one:

The man who killed Sara's son is a doctor who happens to be her son's ex-girlfriend's father. The girlfriend is an officer in the Italian Air Force and is dying of cancer. The ex-girlfriend broke off with the son when she found out about the cancer. That was at least a year before the son met his wife and got married.