Visitors

Its that time of year again, time for hoosier visitors. That eerie silence you might be hearing around here is because my old friend Wet Dog is coming to town for a week. He would almost be here by now, but due to a 4 hour delay in Indianpolis (they had to fly in a part to fix his plane) he won't be arriving until later this evening. Oh well, at least I get one full day of work in this week.
So, if I don't manage to post much this week, don't worry, I'm sure there will be many pictures and adventures in the following days.

Cute Video

Makes me giggle a little bit.

Thanks to my friend The Big Lacuna, for that one, and also for still having an obscure Ad Council PSA CD that he "borrowed" from the radio station where we were once employeed so many years ago.

At work

Unlike those punk ass street pallets that Oregarus found, I thought I should show the world that there are still some good skids out there. Look at these proud pallets, working hard to hold up those grates. Their work is even more important because they're holding up the grates that go around trees planted along the sidewalk. It doesn't get much more noble than that. Somewhere, John Denver is smiling. (Maybe even Eddie Albert, Lloyd Bridges, and our ol' buddy Heston.)

Portland Pride

I'm a couple days late on this one. Just now getting to going through some pics I took at the parade on Sunday.
It was a good time, we were down on Naito at the end of the route. Portland's pride festivities just seem a lot different than the ones I've been to in other cities. The fence and "suggested donation" kept me out of the main area last year. This year I probably wouldn't have gone in if Jill Sobule hadn't been playing. I'd always wanted to see her live and couldn't miss her while she was within walking distance.
I like my gay festivals un-fenced. I don't know why the fence is such a big deal to me, but someting about it just pisses me off. Once inside, it just felt like any other festival I've been to on the waterfront, brew fest, bite of Oregon, blues fest, etc. Everything seemed so...not gay. I only saw one dude in assless chaps without jeans, and he had a scarf covering his bum. "I like my beer cold, my TV loud, and my homosexuals flaming!" (Simpson, Homer) Well, not usually, but its pride. Can't we gay it up a little more?
Portland pride is just a little more family friendly than I'm used to, and I don't think that's a bad thing. I think its a good reflection of our culture in the city. Even Stark st (vaseline alley by the way is my favorite name for a gay district ever!) seems to be getting quieter as the queers feel comfortable going almost anywhere, we can branch out from thumping bass and waify boy cock on a video screen, into other parts of the city and do whatever the hell we want with whoever we want because we're not in "beffert inda-ana" or whatever backwater you're from. We're in a city where people have better things to do than care about strangers.










Gay rugby and square dancing? Check it out.

Thanks Jill

Thanks for coming to Portland. Check out some tracks from her website.

Recycled Bridge

This is the day the current Bunrside bridge opened in 1926, it replaced the first Burnside Bridge of 1894 which consisted of three spans, a fixed span on each end with a middle swing span.



The old Burnside wasn't just scrapped though, it was re-used. The larger of these two bridges below was one of the original spans over the Willamette, In 1926 it was dismantled and moved here to the Bull Run area, where Portland's drinking water comes from. That little guy beside it was there first, in 1893, built to carry the drinking water across the Sandy River and down into Portland.






















This picture of the little ship's wheel shape is actually on from other span, a few miles up the road, but both bridges have this detail.











I'm not sure which one I like more. There's a lot of historical signifigance to the old Burnside, but I'm more in love with the concept of a bridge built to carry water across water. The Water Works bridge provided a clean and plentiful water supply to the city, the Burnside provided a major transportation link between the newly joined Portland and East Portland. Which was more important to the growth of the city? I don't know, but I do know the little bridge is cooler, just for those Victorian spikey things, oh, and its a bridge that carries water across water, did I mention that?
Read the whole story of Bull Run over at PDX History.

Blockin' out the scenery

All from this week's favorite street

I thought we had something?

PIG

This place needs some cutenin' up!




That's Cedric, aka "the pig." He eats spinach.



















Check out these pics from the DPR. This picture is the Pyongyang skyline. You gotta go through seven pages of comments and stuff, but keep going, there's lots of really cool pics.

Artemii Lebedev's Trip to North Korea

Roll you up into my life

I was tipped off to this by a friend who's a Katamari Damacy superfan. I'm not quite there yet, mainly due to the lack of a gaming machine, but I do consider it my favorite videogame ever. Even cooler than the original NES Zelda or that 007 N64 game that I spent hours upon bong hit filled hours playing in college. Anyway, I thought this comic was cute.

Mac Hall (From the archives

The Garden Set

This post was a link to my Flickr set of pics that I took for the family back in BF Indiana to look at, but then I started to get paranoid. Things like, "shit, my house number is visible in that one pic," and "now some bastard can come to my garden and violate my Zinnias." You know, paranoid shit along those lines. So I took down the link. I know Oregarus saw them, but he can violate my Zinnias anytime he wants. Its the rest of ya'll that I'm not so sure about.

Tonight is my final "free pizza wednesday" as I have come to call it. G's wednesday night class is over as of tonight, and he always buys me pizza before he has to go to class since we don't have time for a proper dinner. Aww, how sweet. Guess I'll have to find another way to cop a free slice, oh, wait, I know...

rose parade

We decided that during the parade was the perfect time to go downtown and get a haircut, we were right. Didn't have to wait at all.

On the way, we walked up Interstate through where the parade assembles. I was entertained by the Franz Bakery float. I'm a sucker for the spinning loaf of bread. (it was spinning just like the one on their building, you can't quite tell from the picture) Too bad there wasn't the spinning carton of milk from the dairy just down the street from Franz in the "Giant Spinning Food District."

Sim-Sidewalk

My favorite sidewalk in Portland. Always reminds me of Sim City.

walk

I made it out after all. The rain stopped before it got too dark, so I slipped out into the evening and snapped a few pics.