No, Thursday's Out....

Merriam-Webster has created “ Time Traveler ”, a list of words that “first appeared in print” in a given year (or, if you go way back, a given century, or a given era).   The definition of “first appeared in print” is a little shaky, and can be found on the site, if you want to quibble. (For just one instance, I’m guessing “capelllini” probably appeared in print in Italian cookbooks a long time before it showed up in a trendy recipe in English - in 1950). Also, it’s not a list of every single word that appeared for the first time in the year in question. It’s a list of some that made it into Merriam-Webster at some point (maybe in their tenth year, when they became common). But do try to leap over the quibbling opportunities, if you can! As a sort of Rorschach (1927), it’s great fun to see which words first appeared the year you were born (or maybe the year you turned 13 – pick any seminal year you want). Here are ten I handpicked (wow, 1831!) from the bounty of  1955...

New Seasons has taken all the “one way” stickers off their aisles. A young man stocking produce said to me, whispering behind his hand, “People weren’t doing it anyway.” True. Also, if you go at 7 am, there’s hardly anyone meandering the aisles in any direction. Low Occupancy ,  one of the magic conditions, as that pretty red, yellow, and green chart illustrated so well a few posts back. Meanwhile, Rick returned from a visit to Malheur County, over on the Idaho border, the only part of Oregon that was showing up in bright red on the COVID case maps.  At the grocery store, he was the only masked shopper. The owner of the store said, jovially, that OSHA had come by to enforce the mask mandate, but they hadn’t fined him “much,” so … (shrug). Face Coverings , another magic condition. (Okay, here's the chart again. I am very fond of the chart.) Today, Malheur County has gone from cherry red to just regular red. So there's that. And I daho hospitals are nearing capacity, so contemp...

OPB had a poll this morning where locals were asked about Portland's most important problem. The orange line shows answers from denizens of  Portland proper, while blue represents those who live in the surrounding tri-county Portland metro area.  Only 1,000 people were polled, and the picture is pretty striking, but I have to say it feels true. Portlanders are enormously concerned about things we witness every day - homelessness/lack of affordable housing, racism, protests and policing and law enforcement. The question was the most important problem facing PORTLAND , and we are so concerned with certain issues that we've had to backburner other problems. It's not that they aren't important. It's that our bandwidth is full.   It's clear that some of these items are related, but the two that stand out to me are about halfway down. One is violence and crime, which is of more concern to our suburban neighbors; the next is police violence, which is of more concern to...

Traffic suddenly gummed up on me the other day, and it turned out we were all slowing down because people were hopping out of their cars to put their ballots in the drop box outside of the Multnomah County Elections building. It's okay, traffic! Gum up all you like!  The next day, I took a glamour shot of my VoteForward letters, and then went down to the Post Office to put them into one of the giant outdoor mailboxes.  I could have posted them in any post box, or left them for my beleaguered local letter carrier, but she has suffered enough during the recent Post Office nonsense from Trump and DeJoy. Also, I really wanted to go to the PO and see them safely into a great big mailbox. I was hoping I'd run into other folks with VoteForward stashes, and that happened.  I later realized that because we have 100% vote by mail in Oregon, dropping my letters off was as close as I was going to get to standing in line to vote, like all those determined people in states where the li...

My friends went to France  a few years ago for a lighting-arts festival, and I saw their photos.  Also, I've been to the Portland Winter Light Festival a few times.  So I guess I knew there were such things as "projection artists."  I just didn't know the term. (If you'd asked me, I would have said, "Oh, you mean the people who always say, 'I'm not mad, YOU'RE mad?'")   But now I'm very much into projection art, thanks to Robin Bell , who has been projecting topical comments onto the Trump International Hotel for the past few months.   Here's one from last night, which made me gasp, in its breathtaking simplicity: And here's another favorite: And here are a few other pictures of lighting art, because they are cool, and our long winter nights are on their way: (Some projection art from Lumieres a Beaune) (Not projection art from February in Portland. Only February. 2020!)

The Oregon Historical Society is housed in a building with the biggest trompe l’oeil mural I have ever seen. It’s so much better in real life, but I’m giving you a photo, and what you need to know, when you look at this building, is that the wall of the tower facing you is flat. You can see it easily if you look at the top, where the sky doesn’t match. But the collonades don’t curve out, further down, and there isn’t a recessed set of windows going up the center. It’s just flat. I  completely love this mural because it trompes the oeil so very well, and I have never really troubled myself much about the somewhat cartoonish figures in front of the façade. The façade is amazing! Forget the figures in front. But I stood and stared at tthose figures for a while yesterday, because the wall had been defaced and I wanted to see why someone had taken against it. In front of the fake façade, you can see Lewis and Clark, and Sacagawea and her baby, and York, Clark’s enslaved Black “body ...

It’s been a rough stretch for Portland public art. I drove downtown today to check on an elk statue and an enormous mural. Elk report herewith, mural report to follow.   In midsummer, the historic Thompson Elk  was removed from its pedestal down near the Justice Center, for safekeeping, a wise move.   Until July, when you drove into downtown Portland across the Hawthorne Bridge, you drove past the Thompson Elk, which was given to the city by former Mayor David Thompson in 1900. It was nine feet high, way up on a pedestal, “literally in the middle of Main Street.”   (This is true; Main splits and goes around the pedestal.   I love the way the newscaster says it on the video here , because he seems so bowled over about the middle of the street bit, and yet it’s one of those times when “literally” literally means “literally,” a rare and notable occurrence.) The elk (variously described as “a plain old elk,” or as “a monstrosity of art” by the Exalte...