The I-5 bridge between Portland, Oregon and Vancouver, Washington is an antique. They've been talking about replacing since forever, but all the talk has gotten nowhere. Maybe we should consider a tunnel. At the least.
Willamette Week has a few words to say on the subject:
How e-Bikes are Killing Motorcycles - Aniioki A9 Pro Max Review
FortNine
I fully expect the government to weigh in on high-power electric bikes any day now.
The Janus Halcyon 250 is Dangerous and Wonderful
FortNine
Weird combination of custom throw-back and economy import. It's like a 1930's bike made with modern manufacturing techniques.
The government is legally required to drive you over this bridge*
Chris Spargo and Evan Edinger
We've got bike lanes all over Washington County, but you'll see a zillion cars before you see a bicycle, and that's good, because I hate seeing bicycles in the bike lane next to traffic flying by at 50 MPH.
Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix
It's got the look and feel of nice, classic murder mystery, but the story is a bit clumsy. We do have a cute girl playing the lead, and she drives a cool old car, a Lagonda:
This car looks a whole lot like the one in the show, though it's a little tough to tell, it only shows up on screen for a few seconds at a time. Ask Google to identify the car from a screenshot and it says it's a Blower Bently, i.e. James Bond's original car. I had a bit of a time sorting it out. In some scenes you see that the driver's door is cut down, but when you see the other side of the car the door full height. Nobody actually built cars, with different size doors, did they? As you can see from the photos, they did. Anyway, it's not the correct car for the story, the show is set in 1920-25 and this one is from 1932.
There are a bunch of guns in this show. We have one scene where the swells, both men and women, are out shooting pheasants with shotguns, and they all seem to be competent enough. But then somebody gets killed (not by shotgun) and now one of the kids sends his butler out to procure a pistol. What kind of pistol does he want? 'One that shoots bullets with alacrity and has a stylish handle', just so we know the caliber of the people we are working with.
The story is that a man from Cameroon has invented a process that makes steel very much stronger, and all the European powers are competing for the rights to his patent. Seems unlikely, but history is full of such unlikely stories, so I went looking for one that might be the basis for this. Found a variety of African-American inventors, and a couple from Cameroon, but nothing that sounded like it might have been earth-shaking, which is what we need for this story.
Badminton House is the stand-in for the fictional Chimneys. This is also where we got badminton:
Whether or not the sport of badminton was re-introduced from British India or was invented during the hard winter of 1863 by the children of the eighth duke in the Great Hall (where the featherweight shuttlecock would not mar the life-size portraits of horses by John Wootton, as the tradition of the house has it), it was popularised at the house, hence the sport's name.
There is a big river that goes through Shanghai, the Yangtze, but this bridge doesn't cross it. It crosses the much smaller Huangpu River that runs through downtown.
I went to Google Earth to get this map. Google Earth can give you grid lines, which are kind of important when you are looking at large areas. Since this part of the world seems to be a hot bed of hostility, I want to remind myself of the relative positions of these players. Of course all that hostility might just be something the media hype because it gets them more eyeballs, and we all know that more eyeballs means more advertising dollars, which is the real reason they are in business. Makes me wonder if any of this purported hostility is real, I mean there's still a zillion dollars worth of trade going on with all these countries, well, except for North Korea. Russia seems to be the only ones doing business with them.
Google Earth crashed twice while I was trying to get the view I wanted.
On our way down we noticed a couple of elk standing in a field. Then we noticed a bunch of lumps sticking up out of the grass. They were the heads of elk that were bedded down in the grass. There must have been a couple of dozen of them. Very cool.
Part of our journey took us on US Highway 101 along the Oregon coast. Much of the road was nice, straight two lane blacktop in good condition. There were patches though that had suffered from subsidence. They had been repaired, but pavement now had slumps and small hills. Since there are like 8,000 miles of two lane blacktop in Oregon so I suspect the road crews are kept busy. Our tax dollars at work.
Somewhere along the way we went through a tunnel. I spent a couple of hours examining the map without finding one. Through happenstance I stumbled over the the Elkton creek tunnel, which is not on the coast, but we did go through there on the way down. Since it seems to be only tunnel on our route, it must be the one, which is weird since I could have sworn it was on the coast.
While I was looking for the tunnel, I recorded every bridge I noticed. Most of them are small, simple bridges over creeks, but there are four big, impressive ones, all designed by Conde McCullough.
Continuing to read Kingdom of Shadows by Alan Furst. Nicholas Morath, our hero, take the night train to Budapest where he visits the Arizona night club. It's kind of a wild place.
Around the corner in the magnificent green-tiled building at Nagymezo utca 20 you come to the Hungarian House of Photography. The first-floor shop displays the depth of Hungary's photographic tradition (think of Kertesz, Brassai and Moholy-Nagy) and the temporary exhibitions are usually worth a look. Before the Second World War, the building housed the Arizona Club, which wowed Patrick Leigh Fermor when he visited. But in 1944 The Arizona's owners were killed in the Holocaust – a reminder that the wartime ghetto was not far away on the other side of Andrassy ut.
India just opened the highest bridge in the world. It's in Kashmir, basically the foothills of the Himalaya Mountains where India & Pakistan have been fighting since forever.
This ANCIENT ELEVATOR makes you STOP on the FREEWAY
Road Guy Rob
Interstate 5 between Washington and Interstate 84 slows to a crawl during morning and evening rush hour. There are periods outside of those times when it can be clear sailing.
Part of the problem is that Oregon has income tax and Washington doesn't, so a fair number of people live in Washington and commute to Oregon over this bridge. Blame the Oregon reactionaries who are adamantly opposed to sales tax. The commies in Washington run on their 6.5% sales tax.
Another part of the problem is that a replacement bridge would need to be something similar to the Fremont Bridge, which is a massive structure.
The Nine Arch Bridge . . . is a viaduct bridge in Sri Lanka and is one of the best examples of colonial-era railway construction in the nation. - Wikipedia
This puzzle was pretty tough. The bridge and the train were easy enough, but the trees were almost impossible, probably because there are 300 pieces. Setting the number of pieces to a smaller number would likely have made it easier, but where's the fun in that?
Carnival Panorama arriving at the Portland drydock
KetAwesomeness / Ketner Mizée
Older son noticed there was a cruise ship docked at Swan Island. He noticed it because he could see a water slide poking up above the warehouses. Swan Island is an industrial district, full of warehouses, train tracks and shipyards, so a water slide was definitely out of place.
The water slide is perched on top of a cruise ship that has come to Portland for repairs. We were driving around down there Saturday morning and every so often you could catch a glimpse of it, but nowhere could you get a good view of it.
Near as I can make out, this ship operates out of Long Beach, California. They had some engine trouble and decided to send it to the Vigor Shipyard in Portland for repair. Vigor has only drydock on the west coast that is big enough to accommodate this ship.
Before they could come here they first had to stop at Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, to have the top part of the funnel removed so the ship could sail under the bridges on the way up the Columbia River to Portland.
In the last episode of Sky High: The Series, our gang flies to Lagos, Nigeria for a meeting with a bunch of other gangsters. It opens with the above shot of the Third Mainland Bridge across Lagos Lagoon. It's kind of a weird bridge, it follows the shore line due north from Lagos Island, the essential center of the city and the government.
We also get some street scenes that look like you might expect Lagos to look. Here our gang has bailed out of a tuk-tuk and are hustling to the airport terminal. That building in the background looks very distinctive, and it is:
It was a little hard to track down because there are at least three mosques with that name in Lagos, and Google Maps doesn't know where all of them are. Even given the address, it isn't sure. The Streetview hasn't recorded the street it's on, but I was able to get a couple of shots from nearby streets:
Then there's the hotel. It seems plausible that it's in Lagos. The performance by the 'native dancers' was a little over the top. I dunno, maybe that's what fancy hotels in Africa do.
Hotel*
I was able to pick out the name of the hotel from a couple of scenes: NAU Hotels & Resorts. They are in Algarve, the southernmost province of Portugal. Problem is there are several of them, however with a little pointing and clicking I was able to find it:
From FlightAware, this plane operates mostly in eastern Europe. Then I got to wondering - could it even fly all the way from Madrid to Lagos? Not quite. It's 2,400 miles and the PC-12 only has a range of about 2,100 miles. Stopping in Morocco for fuel would knock 400 miles off the trip, so Morocco to Lagos would only be 2,000 miles, which would be doable. The PC-12 cruises at 325 MPH so it would take about eight hours. There is no restroom, so you might want to make a couple of pit stops. Me, I wouldn't survive.
* images are screen shots from Netflix. Looking over this post I noticed all the screenshots have a yellow tint. I wondered if maybe that was Google's doing, but no, that's just the way the show looks, though I didn't notice it while we were watching it.
So I go to Google Maps and look at St. Petersburg and I see there are a couple of very long bridges across the bay (Gulf of Finland). So I go looking for the story about how they came to be. Not finding much, I go to B1M, where I don't find much except a video about BIM (Building Information Modeling) in Russia and a view of this statue appears. I think that's the weirdest statue I've ever seen. Also very cool. Naturally there are a bunch of ignorant fools who don't like it, but that's always the way it is whenever anybody does anything cool.
The Interstate Bridge is a pair of nearly identical steel vertical-lift bridges that carry Interstate 5 traffic over the Columbia River between Vancouver, Washington and Portland, Oregon in the United States.
The bridge opened to traffic in 1917 as a single bridge carrying two-way traffic. A second, twin bridge opened in 1958 with each bridge carrying one-way traffic. As of 2006, the bridge pair handles around 130,000 vehicles daily. The 3,500 foot long bridge carries traffic over three northbound lanes and three southbound lanes. - excerpt from Wikipedia
24 hours times 60 minutes per hour times 6 lanes equals 8,640 lane-minutes per day. 130,000 vehicles divided by 8,640 comes to 4 cars per minute, or one every 15 seconds. That would imply smooth sailing, but that is only if the traffic was evenly distributed over the course of the day, but of course it isn't. During rush hour morning and evening it is freaking jammed up and backed for miles. Pity the poor sods who spend hours of their life creeping and crawling over this aging erector set.
Business Tribune is talking about a plan to replace the Interstate Bridge. The Feds have allocated a boat load of money to this project, but Washington and Oregon have to get their act together and get a plan in motion if they want to make use of this money. You might think this would be a straight-forward engineering project, but this is Portland, land of the morons, so we have this little bit of crap right in the middle of the discussion:
We learned last month that the program anticipates it will require approximately $6 billion to achieve equitable and climate-conscious multimodal infrastructure through the program corridor.
This kind of bullshit practically guarantees that the time to completion will double and the cost will balloon by a factor of ten, but hey, that's okay because the Feds are picking up the bulk of it, right?
Portland and Vancouver are at opposite ends of the bridge. Portland is in Oregon and Vancouver is in Washington and these two states have radically different tax structures. Oregon has income tax but no sales tax. Washington has sales tax but no income tax. So we have a bunch of people who live in Vancouver but work and shop in Portland. A change in tax laws might eventually result in a change in traffic patterns, but I doubt that will ever happen. Both states are too entrenched in their ways.
