Blogdom

After I installed a counter on my blog I eventually realized that my readership is very small. So I decided I would go out into the blogosphere and see what other people are writing. A lot of it holds no interest for me. A lot is involved in arguing for nothing more than arguments sake. A few sites have something interesting to say. One of my favorites is dustbury.com from Oklahoma. I have also come across a few sites written by right wing wackos who occasionally have something intelligent to say, which goes to show that even a blind pig finds an acorn once in a while:

• view from the porch
• AnarchAngel
• BabyTrollBlog

This guy is not quite so prolific, but he posts some fairly esoteric stuff.

This one is a collection of links to other web sites which gets updated daily, some of which are pretty cool.

Most of these sites I found by following links from dustbury.com.

Sauvie Island Bridge

Friday afternoon my wife and I drove downtown to the Wicke's warehouse to pick up a piece of furniture. While we are waiting for warehouseman, I am looking around outside and I see this bridge where there should not be a bridge. Okay, so maybe I don't get downtown that often, or maybe it's a bridge I've forgotten about. Portland has a bunch of bridges over the Willamette River that runs through downtown, but is certainly odd that there is a bridge there.

I read the paper this morning and it turns out that it is the new Sauvie Island Bridge. They built it at an industrial site just North of downtown. It is now finished and they have jacked it up fifty feet in the air and they are going to haul it down river on a barge and set it in place. Except the wind was a little high today, so maybe they will do it tomorrow.

Sauvie Island Bridge being barged underneath the Burlington Northern Railroad Bridge

Map showing Wicke's warehouse, the Willamette River, Terminal 2, where the bridge was being built, and the location of the old Sauvie Island Bridge where the new one will be installed.


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Update September 2016 replaced missing picture, added photo of bridge being transported, deleted dead stuff.

Storage

I have always wanted one of those complicated Chinese opium chests. They are old and dark and have all these little doors and compartments for storing stuff, but I have never found one that really looked like it could be useful. They were more like storage chests you could put stuff in that you didn't need, stuff you would keep just because you might need it someday. And they were always a little expensive. Hard to justify buying one that you do not really have a good use for.

For Christmas I got a little plastic three drawer storage box. It sits on the one foot of kitchen counter that is reserved for my junk. It is wonderful in all aspects except it's appearance. The pile of stuff that had accumulated on the counter and in my little cupboard all went easily into this little box of drawers. I can now find anything I need quickly and easily. It is really a dramatic improvement. The only problem is that it doesn't look like an antique Chinese opium chest.

Update December 2016 replaced missing pictures.

"The Kingdom"

When I first heard about the "The Kingdom", I thought I would like to see it. Later I heard some hype that really put me off. It sounded like a really cheesy thriller, kind of like "24", whose target audience must be twelve year olds. It's out on DVD now, and my wife and I like thrillers, so we rented it at the local video store.

Turns out it was pretty good. There were a couple of corny bits, but most of it agreed with my view of reality.

• Big shot politicians interfering with police work? Check.
  
• Big shot politician sounding like a complete fool? Hmm, a little corny, or maybe not.
  
• Terrorists bombing US installations in Saudi Arabia? Check and double check. Photos of one blast site I found on the web look very similar to the scene in the movie.
  
• Small group of FBI agents sent to investigate the bombing? Check.
  
• Totally incompetent Saudi Arabian police work? Perhaps not quite as close to the mark as we would like to believe.
• Fabulous palaces? Check.
• Bureaucratic interference? Check.
• Home grown (Saudi) terrorists? Check.
• Four FBI agents taking out a couple of dozen terrorists in the firefight. Arguable. We hear stories about agents muffing a gunfight, and for people who have never been in one, I can understand that. But put four combat experienced, trained agents against a bunch of fanatical amateurs, and I will bet on the agents any day.
  

There were other things though, that I would to like to know about, one way or the other.

• Was the convoy technique realistic? That is, four black Suburbans tailgating each other at 100 MPH down the freeway.
• Was there a firefight when they finally tracked down the mastermind of the attack? Was it is a big as it was portrayed?

Then there were some other items that I doubt actually happened and were probably just added to make a better story. These did not bother me, and they did make it a better movie.

• Having a woman on the FBI team allowed the movie makers to show what kind of problems they would encounter if there had been one. Besides, I enjoy watching Jennifer Garner. I used to be a big fan of "Alias", at least before it got turned into a soap opera.
  
• Having the FBI in on the firefight.
• Having one of the FBI agents kidnapped.

One thing that I do not understand is why the FBI insists on calling all of their agents "Special". I mean we never hear about ordinary agents. Is this some kind of secret self esteem program the FBI is working on?

We do not hear much about why Osama (bin Laden) has declared war against us. As near as I can tell his biggest complaint is that we support the Saudi government, a government that is essentially a corrupt tyranny. Of course, we support the Saudis because they supply a large fraction the oil we consume. Some people complain about the amount of money we spend on our effort in Iraq, but it is roughly the same amount of money we send to Saudi Arabia for oil. Any time you have that much money concentrated in that few hands, you are going to have trouble.

It's interesting that the oil business does not seem to cause as much corruption here as the drug trade, even though the oil business is several orders of magnitude larger. I mean you do hear about high level corruption, but you don't have people running up and down the street shooting each other over a tank of gasoline. In oil producing countries in the Middle East, you do, but the tanks of gasoline they are fighting over are much bigger: the tankers that hold a million gallons of oil for shipment to the US.

I suspect Osama is secretly pleased that the US invaded Iraq and took out Saddam. I wonder if he is really attached to his Jihad, or whether he is only really interested in changing the government of Saudi Arabia.

There is one positive aspect to the war in Iraq, and that is a few more people in the US are aware of something beyond our borders. Without the war, I doubt whether this movie would have been made.

Sierra Glass

Originally posted July 12, 2007. Now with pictures.

Took a couple of window screens in for repair this morning. While I was there I asked them to fix the side view mirror on the van. They had replaced it several years ago when the original had fallen off. It took them about fifteen minutes, but the next day the silver backing in the center of the mirror became discolored. It looked like the glue had reacted with the mirror coating.

It was ugly, but it still worked, so I didn't bother to get it fixed. But when I was there this morning I thought I might as well get it fixed. When the old mirror was pulled off we were surprised to see that the glue had been applied all around the outside of the mirror, but that the center where the silver backing had been damaged was completely clear of glue. Matter of fact, the glue defined the boundary around the damaged area.

However, the glue did not go all the way to the edge of the mirror, and the uncovered area around the outside was undamaged. Best we could figure was that the fumes from the glue were trapped by the glue all around it and the fumes are what caused the damage. Around the outside the fumes were free to escape, so there was no damage. How about where the glue actually contacted the mirror? Well, that is a puzzle. They used silicon glue, which is the wrong kind of glue to use for this application. This time they used glass mastic, whatever that is. Still only took about fifteen minutes, and there was no charge. Very nice.

Update December 2016 replaced missing pictures.

Good Book or Lunch with Gang?

I missed lunch with my gang today. I got caught up reading "The Lonely Silver Rain" by John D. McDonald. I was enjoying myself too much to break away. I had been reading "The Embezzler" by James Mallahan Cain. It had promised to be a good story, after all this is same guy who wrote "Double Indemnity", which is a famous movie, and as I recall, a pretty good story. But "The Embezzler" has been slow going. I wish I could tell what the problem was. It might be that the guy is captivated by the girl. I do not know if you could call it love, but he has fallen for her and will do anything for her, even stuff that is patently a bad idea. Or maybe the story line does not ring true. Everything else about the story is told with a certain detachment, but then he does something out of character and his actions get blamed on his infatuation with the girl. It is all being told in the past tense, by an older and perhaps wiser protagonist, and maybe that is the problem. The passion that would impel him to engage in those foolish actions is missing. Just saying that someone is passionate about something is not convincing enough to make it believable.

"The Lonely Silver Rain" was written in 1985 and touches on the cocaine trade in South Florida. There are a couple of very good passages that explain the situation a lot better than you will ever get from popular media. I have a few things to say about this myself, but it will have to wait for another post.

Foodscapes

I was out wandering around on the internet one day and I stumbled across this web page which has a bunch of amazing landscape pictures. Turns out the pictures were made by Carl Warner. Carl has his own web site and so I could not easily find a direct link to the pictures, but you can get there by clicking on the box labeled "Fotographics" and then on the briefcase that is labeled "Foodscapes". The labels on the boxes are hidden until you mouse over them.