cyclotram

Summer Lake

2009-11-30T01:19:00.000-08:00

View Larger Map

A few old photos from Summer Lake, in far SE Oregon. No, really, there's a lake out there somewhere. Unlike many lakes in the area, it doesn't quite dry up in the summer (hence the name, I think), but it does shrink substantially.

The ODFW Summer Lake Wildlife Area attracts birdwatchers in the spring, and hunters in the fall and winter. I happened to drive through in mid-summer, and as you can tell there wasn't much going on. The visitor center wasn't open, and I didn't see anyone else there. Apparently there are access roads that take you closer to the actual lake, but I didn't realize that at the time. Plus I was on my way to Fort Rock right then, so I'm not sure I'd have made the detour anyway. And please note that that almost all of the photos were taken from a moving vehicle.

What I'm trying to say is that I do realize these aren't the most breathtaking photos I've ever posted here. That's probably why I didn't post them back in 2007 when I took them. But I figure it's November in Oregon, and even rather bland and uncomposed photos of desert and blue sky still make for a pleasant change of pace. Well, I though so, at least.

Vegas: Luxor (yes, again)

2009-11-29T18:43:00.000-08:00

Vegas: Inside the Luxor

2009-11-29T18:40:00.000-08:00

SF: 560 Mission Street Plaza

2009-11-27T16:53:00.000-08:00

This is the fountain in front of the JPMorgan Chase tower in San Francisco's Financial District. Apparently this spot is fairly new. You don't see a lot of quasi-public spaces like this in the city, or at least this part of the city. I suppose it's like Tokyo in that way: Land is way too expensive to devote any to things that don't produce revenue. So on the rare occasions when you do stumble across a little park or plaza or fountain or something, you're experiencing a weird form of conspicuous consumption: "Look, we have so much money we can afford to buy land in San Francisco and not build on it". Or make it a playground for high-end designers and architects, as the case may be. Note that this went in mid-bubble, prior to the recent banking crisis.

I mean, it's owned by a monstrous too-big-to-fail conglomerated megabank, and naturally I'm going to impugn their motives and suspect the worst and generally strive for maximal cynicism. But whatever their reasons were, it still means there's a bit of open space where there otherwise wouldn't be, the local Yelp reviewers seem to like the place, for whatever that's worth.

Pettygrove Park

2009-11-27T12:23:00.000-08:00

View Larger Map

Downtown Portland's Pettygrove Park often gets overlooked. It's in the middle of the 60's urban renewal maze that is the South Auditorium district, and it's bordered by pedestrian trails rather than streets on all sides, so you aren't likely to run across it if you don't already know it's there. It would be bordered by 2nd & 3rd Avenues, and Montgomery & Mill Streets, if any of them existed. It also doesn't help that most of the other city parks in the area come with big flashy fountains, and Pettygrove doesn't. Instead it has a cluster of grass-covered earthen mounds and a bunch of trees, and at one corner a bronze sculpture in the center of a quiet pool.

I have less of an excuse for overlooking the place, since I walk right through it on my way to and from work. And yet I've never done a post about the place. I've posted individual photos from the park here, here, and here, plus photos of the Dreamer sculpture in the park's SE corner, and a small fountain in front of an adjacent building. But that's all.

So to remedy that, here's a slideshow about the place, with the photos of it that I've uploaded over time. They aren't exactly comprehensive and mostly focus on the art (which I'm rather fond of). I seem to have never posted any photos of the mounds, which is too bad. I'm not sure what their function is here, but they do break the space up and make the park seem a lot larger than it actually is. And to me they look a lot like ancient Celtic or Kurgan burial mounds or barrows. In one of those photo posts I made a crack about either hobbits or barrow-wights living here, come to think of it. Or possibly there's an enormous hoard of Scythian gold buried somewhere around here. Or leprechauns, or a few very small dragons.

Two sides of the park are bordered by condo towers, one completed this year, another converted from a 60's high rise apartment tower. They've had mixed success moving the condos, such that the new tower is being rented out as apartments for now, at least until the real estate market improves. You'd think that it would occur to the developers to spin the neighboring park as a magical land of mystery and magic (of the upscale variety, of course) to make the place stand out in the market, but that doesn't seem to have occurred to anyone except me. In fact, it's possible the entire real estate crisis could have been avoided if only everyone had come to me for advice, for a reasonable consulting fee. Since nobody ever did that, my claim can't be easily refuted, which is convenient.

In any case, there is an amusing reality-based aspect to the place. The two sides of the park that aren't bordered by condo towers face the offices of a large health insurance company. They have signs posted outside their buildings letting everyone know it's a smoke-free campus, which I guess makes sense being a health insurer and all. But since this is a public park and not part of the campus, it effectively serves as the corporate smokers' lounge. And as such it's very, very popular. So every morning I get to walk through a bunch of sullen (and often kind of chunky) chainsmoking office drones, all of them (it seems) griping nonstop about their miserable lives and careers.

So next time your insurance claim gets denied, just know that the faceless bureaucrats who did it subsist on nothing but Snackwells, Virginia Slims, cheap gin, and Prozac. They're far less healthy than you are, and simply can't understand what you've got to complain about: "You think you're sick, huh? Let me tell you about my gout, and my dang bunions..."

Yecchhh.

SF: Bay Bridge

2009-11-25T02:23:00.000-08:00

A couple of mediocre photos of the Bay Bridge, which I wouldn't bother posting if I had any others to share. But I don't, unless you count some ancient film ones I haven't gotten around to scanning. Seriously, I really did only take these two photos you see here. But in my defense, when I took these I'd only had the new DSLR for a week or two and didn't have the hang of it yet, and I hadn't clued in that you can take a ginormous raft of photos without running out of space or juice. Although I've found that having too many photos can be a real problem too.

The Wikipedia article linked to above informs us that the bridge is officially called "The James 'Sunny Jim' Rolph Bridge". Huh. Can't imagine why that name never caught on.

Another thing I didn't realize is that there's currently no pedestrian or bike access across the bridge, although there's an ongoing discussion about maybe someday fixing that. In general, it wouldn't be very feasible to do the equivalent of my ongoing bridge project in the Bay Area. You can walk across the Golden Gate and Dumbarton bridges, and it's strictly forbidden to walk or bike the San Mateo or Richmond-San Rafael bridges, or the old abandoned Dumbarton railroad bridge for that matter. According to this page a couple more bridges in outlying areas are accessible too, but the general rule across the Bay Area is "Motorized Vehicles Only". Which is rather surprising and disappointing. Oh well.

SF: Wood & Steel

2009-11-25T01:30:00.000-08:00

SF: Marine Firemens Union

2009-11-25T01:27:00.000-08:00

A couple of pics of the San Francisco Marine Firemens Union building, at 240 2nd St.

The union has a website here -- their history page is very detailed and interesting. The sad thing many people don't realize is that modern commercial shipping almost always relies on cheap labor from places like Bangladesh and the Philippines, and there are very few US jobs in the industry anymore, union or otherwise. Going by the wage tables at the union site, it looks like many of the remaining jobs involve government contract work, where using US labor is required by law. For a poignant and fascinating look at what remains of the industry (circa 1990), you'll want to read John McPhee's Looking for a Ship, which is a good read even if you have zero interest in this sort of thing.

This beautiful Art Deco union hall harks back to an earlier age, before the jobs literally went overseas. If I was in this union, the building would make me proud and sad at the same time. It appears they now share the space with a few other unions, including IATSE Local 16 (mostly the TV & movie industry) and CWA Local 9410 (mostly ex-Bell System telcos).

My passing involvement with another branch of the latter union is mentioned, a bit, here, although the body of the post is mostly just griping about the company, which doesn't seem as interesting now as when I wrote it. That was written over a decade ago, so maybe I was just more excitable way back then, I dunno.

pile

2009-11-24T02:40:00.000-08:00

A few photos of "Pile", one of the new public artworks on the revamped transit mall in downtown Portland. I'm not sure how I feel about this one. It's kind of whimsical, and isn't overly large (which is nice, for a change). The bit with the crow standing on the pigeon's face is a little odd, but I suppose that's one of those things where you're an uncultured mouth-breathing barbarian if you spend too much time trying to figure out what (if anything) it's supposed to mean. So I'll just speculate that it may work better in a gallery setting than it does on city streets. Which isn't a bad thing, necessarily.

The artist's website shows a few of her other works, as does the local gallery representing her. And here are two articles on recent shows of hers. But what you really want to do is read this entertaining interview that gives a better idea of where she's coming from, with a few more photos of other works. And let me just say, the guinea pig wrecking ball is awesome.

Rooftops of San Francisco

2009-11-24T00:44:00.000-08:00

A few photos from one of our less successful vacations, in which we learned why February is considered the off season in San Francisco, tourist-wise (i.e. it's cold and damp, just like Portland, but far more expensive), and why there are plenty of rooms available in the Financial District on weekends (i.e. everything's closed and there's surprisingly little to do.) When all else fails (which will happen sooner or later), you can always fall back on taking photos from your hotel window, which is where these came from.

I have a complicated relationship with San Francisco. Or it might be more accurate to say the city has a complicated relationship with me. When I'm there, tourists always mistake me for a local and ask me for directions. And what's worse, I can usually give them useful directions, because my sense of direction is weirdly attuned to the place. Apparently I cannot get seriously lost within city limits no matter how hard I try. I should point out that my only experience living there was when I was six years old, and we lived elsewhere in the bay area, for less than a year.

Also, during this most recent visit, we were in the museum store at SFMOMA and I noticed that they were featuring a line of wallets made by a Portland designer, and I happened to have an identical one in my back pocket. A few hours later, I was in a shop buying something, and the cashier was moved to marvel at length at my wondrous wallet. If I believed in fate, which I don't, these things would seem like signs.

In short, the city keeps beckoning to me and trying to lure me in. Which might work, if only the city didn't aggravate the hell out of me when I spend more than a day or two there. It feels like everyone you meet desperately needs to be told how extremely special and unique they are, all day, every day, everywhere you go. It rapidly gets exhausting. Apparently everyone's supposed to take a turn at this, and it mystifies people if you don't try to explain who you are and give them a chance to shower you with approval. Or pretend-approval. I'm not sure anyone can tell the difference anymore.

So I've concluded it's a relationship without a future, unless a.) I get my own personal cloaking device, so I can tolerate the locals; b.) I somehow become a multi-trillionaire, so I can afford to live there; and c.) global warming fixes the rather tragic climate, so the place might be habitable (or at least visible) during months not named "October".

Now watch me not hold my breath.

In any case, enjoy the photos...

pumice desert, crater lake

2009-11-21T23:23:00.000-08:00

A few more old mini-roadtrip photos, this time from the Pumice Desert area in Crater Lake National Park. As this article explains, the sparse vegetation is due to poor soil (that would be the pumice part), rather than low precipitation. So I suppose this isn't technically a real desert, although it certainly looks like one. Either way, it's quite a peculiar landscape.

Strength of America

2009-11-20T02:58:00.000-08:00

View Larger Map

At the corner of 35th & Belmont, in inner SE Portland, is an old historic fire station that now serves as a firefighting museum. And on the streetcorner in front of the museum is this monumentally craptacular statue called "Strength of America", which is supposed to be a 9/11 memorial. I bet you didn't realize we already had one of those, did you?

Portland Public Art describes it with an extra helping of snark:

As a nation we’ll look back on our response to 9/11 in a decade with chagrin, I expect. So many decisions made from fear instead of facts; and some of these were aesthetic as well.

This Doc Savage mock up has his hands full, holding an enormous snake with one hand, and a kerosene lamp in the other. Adjoining him is a US flag and an eagle, wings out swept. For some reason he is shirtless, dressed in jeans and tiny work boots. Surrounding the base are roughed Plexi blocks with names of people killed on 9/11, and the lord’s prayer written in childish script and signed by Caswell.

It’s a blink and a silent WTF? Damn, you’ll say, that’s incongruous for Sunnyside. Then you’ll shift it into the context of 9/11 and list it within that long list of other bad decisions our nation made afterward, we as individuals made.

One quick quibble with that: The words in childish script are actually not the Lord's Prayer, they're lyrics to "God Bless America". You know, the song Kate Smith used to sing before every Flyers riot, er, game.

Nitpicking aside, it really is a very weird statue. Note how it entertains fanciful notions about male anatomy. Look at that moobage, with man-nipples an inch or so too low. And the abs, which stretch all the way up to the moobage, with no intervening rib cage or anything. And the hands, oddly long and skinny fingers all about the same length.

The snake's cool though. I think the snake's supposed to symbolize the Evildoers, slithering about and deviously doing evil with their Weapons of Mass Constriction. Or something. Whatever it represents, the man-n-snake combo invites comparison with other person-n-snake-themed artworks down through the ages -- "Laocoön and His Sons", for example, and who can forget the famous Nastassja Kinski photo with the python?.

The eagle's not bad either, although it's kind of smiling, which is weird. And it's stealing our hero's flag, which eagles aren't known to do in the wild. Maybe if you took the flag, dunked it in fish innards, and wrapped it around a live salmon, then eagles might take an interest. Except then you've defiled the flag and you're supposed to burn it, because them's the rules, fish innards and all, and that would be really stinky. So let's agree that the bit with the eagle isn't modeled on real life.

Call me a minimalist if you like, but all in all I think the memorial would've been more effective with just the rubble and the fire helmet, and maybe the tablets with the names.

One thing that surprised me is the size of the thing. The photos I saw made it look bigger than it actually is. In reality it's only maybe 2/3 or 3/4 life size, if that, and like all the other photos I've seen of it, my photos fail to convey this small scale. I'm actually kind of disappointed by the whole thing. With subject matter like this, you naturally expect something a bit more imposing. Our hero here would be Paul Bunyan sized, and the flag-thieving eagle would be about pterodactyl sized.

Based on my limited and biased experience in this area, I'm working on a set of guidelines to help you, the Gentle Reader, determine whether something constitutes Bad Art. Here are the rules so far, as they apply to statues. Abstract art will likely need its own set of guidelines.

If a statue is painted, it's Bad Art. It's a sign the artist may not have a lot of confidence in their command of their chosen medium.
If it's a grouping with more than one person, it's often a sign of badness. In particular, if there are more people than strictly necessary, two or six when one would've done just fine, it indicates the artist doesn't know when to stop piling it on. Also, if people are depicted talking or looking at each other, that's surprisingly hard to get right. They tend to come out looking like brainless idiots, badly sculpted. Whereas if your people are working together (say, raising the flag over Iwo Jima) or just standing in a group (say, riding an elevator), often that can be fine.
A similar situation applies when there's at least one person, plus one or more animals. Equestrian statues generally excepted, as they can turn out ok.
It's also generally bad if one or more children is present, regardless of whatever else is there. Sculptures of children tend to turn out looking kind of weird and creepy, especially if they're smiling. Almost as creepy as 19th century painted portraits of kids, come to think of it.
If any books are present, and their titles are visible, typically it's bad art. If you're meant to see the books (Bible, Das Kapital, Kerouac, etc.), typically a heavy-handed message is intended, and the artist wasn't able to make the art speak for itself.
Similarly, if the art comes with a long explanatory plaque or artist's statement, it's usually bad. The art should either speak for itself, or STFU.
If the artist bungles basic human anatomy, it's automatically bad, even if none of the other guidelines are met.
If the art dates from before, oh.... say 1800 or so, it gets a free pass, as the product of another culture and another age.

The 1800 cutoff is needed because as it turns out, the aforementioned "Laocoön" clearly breaks the multiple-person and person-and-animal rules, and it's long been speculated that the ancient Greeks painted their statues, which would break another rule. And the two sons, well, they look old enough to escape the no-kids rule. At least nobody's carrying any books. So, in short, make of these guidelines what you will.

Some people might go, wait a minute, the last time you really bashed something for being Bad Art was "The Promised Land" (the crappy pioneer sculpture in the Plaza Blocks), and like "Strength of America" it's conservative Bad Art. Isn't this Good vs. Bad yardstick just your ideological biases showing? Actually no, that's not it. Or that's not completely it anyway. I do have another Bad Art post in the works, this time about a local example of liberal bad art that just might be the most supremely craptastic statue of them all. Here in town, I mean. Any guesses?

Kvinneakt

2009-11-17T10:25:00.000-08:00

Yep, the famous "Expose Yourself To Art" statue has finally returned to city streets, after an extended absence due to MAX construction. I posted about it when she was first removed, way back in November 2006, and at the time I speculated she might not be coming back, and might end up in the Pearl District or someone's private collection or something. It occurred to me later that she might not be asked back due to the whole nekkidness thing, so as not to alarm children and suburbanites. But here she is, and this time they've moved her to the corner 6th and Morrison, right next to Pioneer Courthouse Square, I suppose so the tourists can find her more easily. I do wonder what would've happened if she wasn't famous, though.

The new prominent location is probably also so we can flaunt just how openminded we like to think we are. I have to say, though, that when I was taking these photos more than one person looked at me funny, like I was freakin' Larry Flynt or something. I mean, I'm used to attracting a little attention when taking photos of art downtown. The usual reaction is to look at me, puzzled, and then look at the art with a startled expression as though they'd never noticed it before, and then keep on walking. Generally I like to believe I'm performing a valuable public service by doing this, drawing people's attention to things they've walked past a zillion times without ever really looking at. Drawing people's attention to their tax dollars at work, that sort of thing. And generally I like to believe I'm entitled to massive government grants and subsidies for performing this valuable public service, although not once has anyone from city hall ever called to offer me money, the freakin' ingrates.

But in this particular case I'm not so sure. It occurred to me later that I could've played with the situation a little, talking to the statue like it was a model shoot -- you know, the usual "work it baby, yeah, that's it, a little to the right". If I was more of a ham and actually wanted the attention, that might've been entertaining, I guess.

Another idle concern is whether nekkid art affects how web-filtering services rate this humble blog. I really don't know how that works, since I don't think they explain their methods in any detail. I think it tends to involve a room full of people paid to look at photos all day and categorize them on an "I know it when I see it" basis. So it's a real crapshoot, I guess. I mean, I'm not going to refuse to cover something out of fear that people in Utah (for example) can't get to it at work. But I do think it would be kind of a shame if that happened. And think of the irony -- it would be safe for city streets, apparently, but not safe on the internet. Weird.

Anyway, it occurred to me (and I was mildly annoyed at this point) that if passers-by are going to look at me like a perv for taking these photos, I might as well get a shot of the feet, so here they are:

I haven't taken the time to gather an extensive "stuff from the interwebs" section this time, and there does seem to be less out there about it than you'd expect. Here are the few items I've cobbled together:

The recent remake of the classic poster, this time starring the Vera Katz statue on the Eastbank Esplanade.
three Flickr photos
two articles mentioning her in passing.

Capitalism (the fountain)

2009-11-16T22:30:00.000-08:00

View Larger Map

A few photos of the Capitalism fountain at the Lloyd Center mall, near the corner of NE 9th & Multnomah, just outside the Nordstrom store. The Smithsonian's art inventory page for it is here, and the artist who created it has a website here, although it doesn't seem to mention this fountain anywhere.

The fountain / sculpture was installed in 1991 when the mall was completely renovated, but in spirit it couldn't be more 80's, all postmodern and money-mad and pompous and giddy all at once. It's a real period piece, in its own way similar to the groovy 70's abstract whatzits scattered around the downtown transit mall. If you stare at it too long, music starts to run through your head: "Li-ving-in-a-ma-te-ri-al-world, Li-ving-in-a-ma-te-ri-al-world", and so on. Or maybe that was just my iPod. Sometimes it can be hard to tell.

I'm finding it hard to do my usual schtick and play amateur art critic about the fountain, since it's such an utterly 80's artifact. It would be like debating whether Nagel prints are good or bad art. The fountain just isn't amenable to this sort of question.

The Lloyd Center mall first opened in 1960 as an open-air shopping center (which has always puzzled me, since I've never heard that the climate was better here back then). It's hard to tell by looking at it now, due to all the renovations and updates over the years, but Lloyd Center was one of the nation's very first modern shopping malls, and when it opened it was the world's largest. Yes, the world's biggest mall, right here in little old Stumptown. In September 1960, the mall's ice rink hosted a campaign stop by then-VP Richard Nixon, who supposedly proclaimed the mall "America's answer to communism". Golly. I suppose that would be the flip side of how Moscow's vast GUM department store was supposed to be communism's answer to the West's decadent, bourgeois consumerism.

Although these excerpted remarks from Nixon's speech don't seem to include that claim, so it may or may not be precisely accurate. Either way, it makes for an interesting bit of local trivia.

And as an extra fun twist, many of the hits that come up when you search for "lloyd center" and "capitalism" are mentions of the recent Michael Moore film, which screened at one of the Lloyd Center theaters earlier this year.

Vernon Ross Veterans Memorial

2009-11-16T03:00:00.000-08:00

View Larger Map

At the corner of NE Sandy, Thompson, and 48th Avenue, out in the Hollywood District, is Portland's Vernon Ross Veterans Memorial, a small monument with a very tall flagpole. I'd never heard of it until I ran across a brief mention of it in this brief document from the Parks Bureau, in which we learn when they did maintenance of some sort on various obscure spots around town. I was actually looking for info on the park at Hall & 14th, and the doc didn't tell me anything useful about that place, but it's full of other places I haven't covered yet. When I saw there was some sort of obscure memorial in town that I'd never heard of, I knew I had to track it down.

Or at least I started out by assuming it was obscure, since I'd never heard of it before. But as it turns out, it has a fairly prominent role once a year. Every year, Portland's Veterans Day parade winds through the Hollywood District and ends up right here, and the flagpole serves as the backdrop for speeches by various dignitaries and elected officials, generally including the mayor. This year marked the 35th edition of Portland's parade, the first coming in 1974 -- coincidentally when the Vernon Ross memorial was dedicated. As for the identity of Mr. Ross, the plaque here indicates he was the instigator of the memorial, rather than its subject as I originally assumed. The memorial itself doesn't explain who Vernon E. Ross was or why he was involved, but right across the street is the Ross Hollywood Chapel funeral home, which happens to be the longtime primary sponsor of the Veterans Day Parade. So I think that answers that question.

KATU has a short video clip of this year's parade, and there's an article with a photo slideshow at Salem-news.com, although neither piece shows the memorial.

One of the questions I often try to answer about various places is "Who owns it, and who runs it?" Ok, maybe that counts as two questions. Anyway, a few references around the net (like this one) refer to the place as the "Ross Hollywood Chapel Veterans Memorial Flag Pole", but the tiny triangle of land actually belongs to the city. Although my guess is that someone comes over from next door rather than from city hall when it's time to raise or lower the flag here, or tend to the roses. That might explain why the city barely mentions it anywhere on their website. The Parks Bureau doesn't list it in their inventory, for one thing. Also, a few years ago there was a proposal to erect a new war memorial on Mt. Tabor, and as part of the process the city compiled an extensive list of existing veterans memorials across Oregon. It mentions small monuments in the far corners of the state, but fails to mention this one. So we can assume the place isn't exactly on everyone's radar at city hall. Not that veterans monuments are the city's cup of tea, really. The monument, you may note, went up in 1974, at the tail end of Vietnam, and I wonder if it went up in part as a way of shaking a fist at the dirty hippies or something. And then the dirty hippies went on to take over the city and they've been running it ever since. Also, since January we've had a mayor who'd be quickly booted out of the military on account of being gay, and despite that it's still part of his job to put in appearances at events like this. His official blog doesn't mention the event at all, so I don't know how he felt about it, but it must've been deeply weird.

In any case, PortlandMaps knows the place as R259400, 48 square feet of land officially owned by the City Auditor's office. (Although I think that's just a way of saying it's general city-owned land not belonging to any particular department, or they just haven't bothered to record which department it belongs to.) In any case, 48 square feet is pretty tiny, but it still comes to 6912 square inches, compared to 452 square inches of Mill Ends Park. That's 15.3 times bigger. FWIW.

an ex-tulip

2009-11-15T03:31:00.000-08:00

Taken at Riverplace, downtown Portland, late April '09.

Also featuring a second, soon-to-be-ex tulip:

renyming and other miscellany

2009-11-15T02:37:00.000-08:00

If a.) you read this blog on a recurring basis (unlikely) and b.) you pay attention to the man behind the curtain (more unlikely), you might notice that the green profile box on the right has changed. The big deal is that I finally dumped the annoying old "atul666" nym, after mulling it over for quite a while. I recently realized I could just change the display nym, without having to figure out how to switch Blogger accounts or anything ugly like that. So it's done, and something similar has been done on the Flickr side of the house too. Its replacement is a bit, well, generic, and at some point I may tweak it again to make it more distinctive, just in case someone ever needs to refer to me by name.

The profile image has changed too. The new photo is of a Cyclotram, a fictional but very swoopy mole machine from the 1951 SF movie "Unknown World" (and this humble blog's namesake, obviously). I've wanted to use it here in some capacity, and since I was tweaking my profile anyway, I figured I'd just make it my new profile image. Although it comes out smaller than I'd prefer this way. And now there isn't a splash of yellow-orange in the upper right corner like there was with Evil Bendy.

Another item on my TODO list has been to move with the times and update this blog to a New Blogger template. I've held off so far because I've tweaked my current template rather extensively and don't want to lose my precious, precious changes. So what I just decided to do was create a shiny new New Blogger blog and tweak it to look as much like this humble blog as I can. Once I'm happy with the result, I'll do the upgrade on the "real" blog here and use the template from the test blog. So you probably aren't interested in looking at the test blog, and I don't intend for it to ever be very interesting, but it lives over at "cyclotram beta" in case anyone's curious.

A second experiment has a more uncertain future. I've long thought that the chronological view of things that Blogger gives you isn't the most useful format sometimes. In my case, it would often be more helpful to have posts displayed on a map instead. I've attempted to create just such a map via Google Maps, known simply as the cyclotram map, but it's still not quite what I have in mind. Maintaining it is a pain, and I still haven't added all my old posts to it yet. And, more importantly, it's all backwards. By which I mean, it's a map with points plotted on it, most of which target posts here. When what I'd really like is to have the posts themselves geotagged individually, and then be able to generate a map based on that geotag data. Blogger In Draft has a geotag feature that doesn't quite work yet, and maybe an auto-generated map will be doable once they've got the geotag thing sorted out. In the meantime, enjoy the tedious gruntwork version of the map for this blog. And if you don't see an entry for somewhere that you know I've covered already, I can only say that I'll get to it later, maybe, if I feel like it at some point. I mean, I guess you could always mail me and complain and see if that helps, but I'll probably just think it's weird if someone does that.

infrapink

2009-11-13T02:55:00.000-08:00

as seen on the interwebs

2009-11-13T02:38:00.000-08:00

A fun thing about putting your photos under a Creative Commons license is that you never know where they'll show up out on the Series of Tubes. You don't automatically know when this happens, so it's nice when people email you about it, but that's not required. And when that doesn't happen, tracking photo usage becomes a question of Google-Fu, and maybe Bing-Fu for the sake of completeness. I admit there's an element of vanity here along with the pure idle curiosity, and as a result I sort of feel the need to share what I've dredged up, not that anyone other than myself is likely to be even remotely curious. In any case, here's what I've found so far:

three flagpoles

2009-11-11T23:40:00.000-08:00

giant enemy crab

2009-11-11T23:38:00.000-08:00

Looks more like a lobster actually, but then it wouldn't be a slightly-out-of-date interweb meme, would it?

If I was slightly more cynical, I'd announce this was the Virgin Mary (possibly wielding the little-known Holy Crab Claw of Righteousness), and let pareidolia and Fox News do the rest. And soon I would have all the money, mwhahahaha...

The Revenge of "Next Blog"...

2009-11-11T19:03:00.000-08:00

Way back in the mists of time, Google/Blogger used to do a thing where, when someone arrived at this humble blog via the "Next Blog" button (see the very top of this page, toward the left side), you'd get a chunk of referrer info so you could see where the visitor was at just before they came here. So over time you end up with an appealingly random list of other blogs out there, things you'd probably never run across otherwise. After a while, something changed either with Blogger or possibly with Sitemeter, and the Next Blog hits eventually dried up.

So just a couple of days ago the trickle of Next Blog visitors started up again. I'll probably never know why, or why it stopped earlier for that matter. But I do have a nice new list of referrers to pass along. So without further ado, and for good or ill, here's the list so far:

Updated: Actually it turns out here's the reason. They decided to make "Next Blog" nonrandom, supposedly, although the list here seems fairly random to me. They argue the change was needed because "your randomly chosen next blog could have been focused on sports, and written in Tagalog", as if that was a bad thing. I thought the whole idea was to pull you out of your comfy corner of the interwebs and show you something completely different. I dunno. Maybe I just appreciate randomness more than most people do. In any case, here's the list:

blue heron, westmoreland park

2009-11-07T15:38:00.000-08:00

july infrared

2009-11-07T10:57:00.000-08:00

august infrared

2009-11-07T10:49:00.000-08:00