This Space for Rent

Three Thousand

(via the Iraq Coalition Casualty Count)

—orc Sun Dec 31 12:51:22 2006

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Cute baby picture of the day

The best got a new garbage can for christmas, and when it arrived yesterday it included a couple of *free* cardboard boxes. Russell has been reading a lot of the best comic strip ever, so what do you think he'd want to do with those boxes?

This transmogrifier doesn't actually seem to work. Just as well, since I don't think the house is big enough for the dinosaur they have planned.

—orc Sat Dec 30 19:30:37 2006

Friday Dust Mite Blogging™

Is this a vicious fight to the death between a wild cat and a Dust Mite, or is Leo just being his usual super-tolerant self?

—orc Fri Dec 29 23:58:04 2006

Heads for sale, heads for sale, 50¢ a head!

One thing that makes it a lot easier to integrate the mini-fig collection is that the Lego group, for some inexplicable reason, appears to have decided to phase out the traditional smiley lego head in favor of a large variety of bearded, moustached, and stubbly manly-men™

Personally, I've got nothing against manly men (alas, the dread monogamy virus strikes again), but scowling non-androgynous minifigs get really old really fast. So out they go, to be replaced with some of the less-offensive "girly" minifig heads and the traditional smiley lego heads in reddish-brown. After discarding these 66 heads, I'll be down to about 10 bearded men, another dozen or so heads with glasses and/or eyebrows (which are androgynous enough to switch gender by the simple application of a ponytail or butch hairpiece,) and wayyyy too many traditional smiley lego heads in peach, yellow, and reddish-brown.

—orc Fri Dec 29 23:00:48 2006

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Volcano picture of the day

When I was coming home for lunch today, the previously sunny day had turned cloudy as the next round of stormclouds rolled in to rain themselves out on the Willamette river valley. But when the bus approached the Ross Island bridge, it became very obvious that they hadn't reached the local stratovolcano. Yes, there are some reflections from the bus window. The picture is worth it.

—orc Fri Dec 29 22:29:13 2006

Whiny liberal disease

It's now about 2 months after the Democratic Party took the Evil Party to the woodshed and whipped them severely for being greedy, corrupt, and generally evil scumbuckets. The new session of congress hasn't begun yet, so they've not had the opportunity to prove one thing or another about how they'll actually govern, but there are some people -- and these are not Evil Party supporters who I'm talking about -- who have already tried and convicted the Stupid Party for "betraying" the electorate.

I ran, shrieking, from the Stupid Party when they wouldn't even try to filibuster the B*sh's torture amendment, so I'm not exactly what you'd call a Stupid Party sympathiser, but I'll keep my mouth shut about any betrayals until they've had a chance to happen! If the Democratic Party is planning to disappoint me, I can wait to be disappointed, and I won't while away the days building elaborate straw men, whacking them with a broom, then blaming the Democratic Party for the resulting cloud of chaff.

Yes, if the Democratic Party betrays me on same-sex marriage and torture, I'll be more than happy to insult them up and down the block. Ditto for taxes, getting the fuck out of Iraq (and Afghanistan; we've lost that war already, notwithstanding Mini-Me's leaping up and committing Canada to the sort of imperial atrocities that the United States has suddenly become infamous for), and trying the entire B*sh junta for high treason. But, you know, they haven't betrayed me yet, so I'll STFU until they do.

I wonder how many of the "the Democrats have betrayed us!!" people voted for Ralph Nader in 2000?

—orc Thu Dec 28 23:54:52 2006

Zoo Lights

We didn't get to ride it (it was cold up there, and when we got to the line it was already 3-400 meters long and the staff was cheerfully saying it would be at least a 45 minute wait until we could get on the train) but I did, for once, bring (a) my camera, (b) my f1.4 prime lens, and (c) a tripod, so the pictures I took in place of riding actually turned out.

—orc Wed Dec 27 22:10:32 2006

1 comment

Oh, lovely

And, of course, there's still no sign of Mr. Bin Laden, who most sentient people suspect was the person who ordered the a la carte destruction of the WTC.

But, hey, with the wave of a pen the United States has forged new frontiers in international treachery, destroyed a stable secular islamic state (and replaced it with hell on earth *and* a huge new fundamentalist movement,) AND found many ways to shame and debase the formerly good name of the country.

Not that I expect that this causes the B*sh junta any sleepless nights. Their buddy Osama is safely out of the spotlight, well-connected imperial friends are raking in money faster than they could print it, and the United States is plunging down an arc of social equality that will end with (pre-Chavez) Venezuela looking like a paragon of social equality and justice. It's all roses if you're a super-rich conservative who doesn't give a fuck about the United States of America, stable markets, or, well, anything except from being able to sneer at hoi polloi.

The soldiers, resistance fighters, and civilians who've bled out their lives on the floor of hell itself, well, they don't count; if they were smart, they'd have rich parents who believed in having other people die to preserve their golden ricebowls.

—orc Mon Dec 25 23:04:12 2006

avant le déluge

In approximately 3 hours, the bears will awaken and charge downstairs to destroy this peaceful little scene. And approximately 20 minutes after that, the sounds of destruction will awaken the so-called adults, who will realize, too late, that the bears have reached the huge supplies of christmas candy and have gone into a sugar fueled unwrapping frenzy.

—orc Mon Dec 25 01:41:37 2006

It’s Spidermas Eve!

The bears caught a little (by Australian standards; by North American standards it was a pretty big spider) wolf spider, trapped it in a Santa box, and brought it to me for inspection. So I had to take a picture or two.

—orc Sun Dec 24 19:22:25 2006

Special “Spirit of Christmas” Dust Mite Blogging™

So, you want your reason for the season, eh? Well, I've got the true meaning of Christmas right here:

click, if you dare!

No, there's no need to thank me. The screams of terror are thanks enough.

(via the best and the bears)

—orc Sun Dec 24 12:19:50 2006

Sigh

After several cloudy to really cloudy weekends, the forecast for this afternoon was that it would gradually clear up. Since ex-SP&S #700 was supposed to be running some excursions today, I decided I'd walk down towards Oaks Bottom to see if I could get some pictures. As I walked down towards Oaks Bottom, the clouds pulled back, the sun came out, and it would have been perfect trainspotting weather, except for one teeny little problem...

Note the smoke from the 700 is going directly up into the air, as if it was just sitting there. Well, yes, it was just sitting there, because it derailed on the very first run of the day.

It's possible that the 700 is a little bit too heavy for this track. This is the second year in a row where the 700 has ended up on the ground during the winter Portland Traction excursions.

—orc Sat Dec 23 16:01:23 2006

Friday Dust Mite Blogging™

Dust Mite returns from the emergency room.

—orc Fri Dec 22 22:54:29 2006

1 comment

Ooops

Atrios's joint has been looking like this for about eight hours now. That's one spiffy weblog conversion tool the people at googlesoft have made up.

—orc Wed Dec 20 20:01:52 2006

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It’s the apocolypse

I went into the doctor's office yesterday to check on some routine middle-aged ailment and as part of the routine checkup they took my blood pressure. It struck me as a little bit unusual when the nurse blanched and retreated from the room, and as even more unusual when the nurse came back and re-took my blood pressure, just in case.

Apparently a 140/102 blood pressure is kind of high, as in "you need to come in so that we can look you over and get you onto high blood pressure medicine" kind of high.

The alternative is, apparently, to radically modify my diet to a less fatty, salty, and sugary one. And to "reduce stress."

Hmm. None of these are particularly compatable with being a computer programmer, particularly the last one (I've been fighting with trying to get Linux working on a collection of new IBM core dual(tm) servers, including one that doesn't bother to attach the PCIe interrupt line to the PIC on the box. This last one is fun because it's really hard to boot off a PCIe scsi card when our (UP boot kernel, just like the one that R*dh*t ships for this allegedly "server-proven" piece of hardware) Linux never gets any IO interrupts from it.) And it's not as if things are likely to get any better, because we do esoteric things (like, um, booting off a storage network. I highly recommend this, by the way -- if your server lets magic smoke out, it's simply a matter of moving a fiber channel cable and waiting 3 hours for the fsck to finish) that apparently nobody else in the world does.

But I digress. Even though it doesn't appear that there's any negative effect, even when you've already got hypertension, of "moderate" tea or coffee consumption, there's still the teeny trouble that absolutely nothing in my job description makes it easy (or even possible) to reduce stress, and since it's computing, we're located close to junkfood but far away from non-junk food (it's one of those health and safety requirements for programming jobs), so I need to go a long ways out of the way to get to food that won't kill me. Oh, and apparently "moderate" tea consumption is about what I drink by 10am on a good day. Ooops.

Thus it's the apocolypse. It is theoretically possible to juggle computer work, eating non-junky food, and not consuming caffeine-bearing substances while helping (in my pitiful way) to herd a flock of babies, but it's not something that strikes me as particularly easy or, um, nonstressful.

Perhaps I'll win the lottery. Time to buy a lottery ticket.

—orc Tue Dec 19 22:04:56 2006

One trolley picture is not enough.

The best and I went downtown to shop for more christmas presents for the bears, and after collecting a few we decided to go to Good Dog/Bad Dog for a snausage or two. Unfortunately, Good Dog/Bad Dog has gone to gentrification heaven, so we had to turn around and go to the pasta restaurant that sits on Morrison St between 11th and 12th. We reached 11th just as RedBlue pulled across Morrison, so I had to stop and get a few pictures before proceeding on to our noon repast.

—orc Tue Dec 19 20:32:29 2006

A trolley of a different color

Tri-Met Bombardier/BN #132, wearing a shocking green advertising livery, pauses at 11th St station.

—orc Tue Dec 19 20:25:06 2006

A not-so-yellow train at Milwaukie and Powell

When I was coming back from lunch today, I ended up changing busses at Milwaukie and Powell. I usually don't bother to have my camera ready, because after a while the Yellow Menace SD70ms and AC44ws just sort of blur into each other, but I happened to be looking east when a P&W train hurled over the Powell bridge. The train was just moving slowly enough so I could pull my camera out of my purse and run over to Milwaukie so I could photograph the engines as they whizzed past the Milwaukie/11th-12th crossing.

I've seen the green and yellow paint scheme before, but I'm not sure where. Some Canadian railroad, perhaps?

—orc Mon Dec 18 16:39:24 2006

Finally in operation

South carries a load of passengers up to OHSU.

—orc Mon Dec 18 16:11:29 2006

Silas at the park

We had a really nasty stormfront roll through a few days ago, and the little pine (or douglas hyphen fir) forest at Sellwood Park shed an amazing number of branches into the rest of the park. Only one of the trees actually fell down; one of the smallest pines (or dhf's) had a rotted trunk and was being held up by its bark and one 3x10 chunk of good wood. I guess the 60+ mph wind managed to stress it enough to put it into a drinking straw failure (and, unlike plastic, tree bark and wood isn't that good at bending without breaking.)

—orc Mon Dec 18 00:19:36 2006

The point where city living starts to lose its charm

It's not the first electric leafblower, operated by a homeowner who would rather spend 45 minutes aiming it at a single stubborn leaf instead of getting a rake and cleaning it up, and it's not the second one, but it's the third, so I get to listen to first one homeowner spending a hour and a half blowing the leaves out of their 15x40 front lawn, then the second homeowner, and finally the third.

At 6:30pm on December 17th. It's cold and it's dark, yet this stupid excuse for a human being is just standing there, in the freezing dark, slowly blowing a single leaf back and forth across his lawn.

Aaaaaarrrrrrrrggghhh! Get a rake, goddamn it!

—orc Sun Dec 17 18:41:24 2006

2 comments

An embarrassment of riches, steam locomotive style

This year, the Polar Express excursions were set up for two different Eng!s on two different weekends; last weekend was powered by Portland's own E-1, and this weekend was powered by Portland's own GS-4. Last weekend used up the bears's tolerance for trainspotting (and last night's train chasing didn't help matters any), so I didn't get the chance to get down to Oaks Park to see the Eng! up close. But since Russell and the best were out for the afternoon, I managed to convince Silas to try to combine some trainspotting with a trip to Sellwood Park.

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Unexpected nighttime trainspotting.

When the best was out trying to mail off a bunch of care packages to the troops in Iraq, she spotted a plume of smoke rising from the tracks behind Union Station, and upon investigation discovered that the smoke was coming from SP&S #700, which was just sitting there on one of the tracks waiting for something to happen. One thing lead to another, and she didn't get back home until around 5pm, so we didn't get out of the house and into the Prius headed towards Union Station until close to 5:30, when it was no longer getting dark. As we drove over the 99e viaduct of doom, I spotted a train heading south and said "ooops, that probably means that the 700 will be on its way momentarily", but was proven wrong when we pulled up at the south end of Union Station to see #700 sitting there steaming quietly to itself.

Russell didn't want to get out of the car, so the best let me out so she could loop around and meet me after I took a few pictures. I took a couple of pictures from the ground, then headed up to the little footbridge so I could take another couple of pictures from above, then turned and started heading back to the car so we could continue on with our errands. At least that was the plan; the 700 rudely interrupted it by blasting its whistle and starting to move south out of the station.

I *bolted* down the bridge stairs and sprinted south to the old tower that sits next to where the Red Electric line split off from the mainline to go down 4th Ave, turned around, and started taking pictures. Did I have my tripod? No. So I cranked the aperture as wide open as I could and hoped the Pentax could get anything resembling pictures as the 700 moved noisily towards me.

As the 700 went by, I turned to walk back to the car, only to discover that I wasn't the only person to hear the 700's whistle -- the Prius was right there, so I hopped in and we scooted off towards the Steel Bridge to see if we could get another picture. When we reached the other side, I leapt out of the car and ran down to the footbridge that leads to the eastbank esplanade, plunked the camera down on a post, and started taking pictures again as the #700 came across the bridge.

The 700 swept by (you don't have very many chances to sit on an bridge while a steam engine goes underneath these days, so I take advantage of the opportunity every chance I get,) and I scampered back to the car so we could drive south and try yet another place to take pictures. The 700 wasn't moving that quickly, so even with having to deal with every stoplight along Grand Ave, we managed to make it to the Division St. underpass before the 700 appeared.

The first two locations had handy fenceposts that I could rest the camera on, but there wasn't anything like that at Division St, so this picture comes with extra added middle-aged shakiness. It was still a pretty impressive show, even though it was pitch black and we had complaining children in the car.

—orc Sat Dec 16 23:58:24 2006

2 comments

Friday Dust Mite Blogging™

I'm in ur clothez

warmin mah toez

—orc Fri Dec 15 23:26:30 2006

Too. Cute. (pt 2)

Both of the bears grown awfully fond of Bob the Angry Flower, and spend a lot of time poring over the (slowly disintegrating) copies of the BtAF books I've got here at home. Today, Silas decided that it was time to do a fan drawing of Bob, carrying, as so many of their lego guys carry, a lightsaber. Bob doesn't have much in the petal department, but it does have the Bob essence.

—orc Wed Dec 13 23:58:33 2006

2 comments

Too. Cute.

Russell has watched me count up the lego people, and decided to do one of his own counts during one of those brief periods when most of the lego minifigs were all attached to each other.

For those of you who don't have first graders, here's a Russell to US english dictionary:

—orc Wed Dec 13 23:39:11 2006

1 comment

It looks like someone hasn’t been suitably respectful of St. McCain

So how about some crippling restrictions against weblogs? After all, if they're the wave of the future™, one can't have them running higgly-piggly all over the place reporting any old news and being (shock! horror!) disrespectful of their betters in Washington.

Not quite the dumbest legislation ever, but it certainly has the smell of someone getting in a tizzy because people are making fun of him. I can just imagine the civil liberties lawsuits flying if this turkey ever makes it out of committee and is signed into law.

(hilariously funny news via thinkprogress)

—orc Wed Dec 13 22:58:00 2006

Fun with photoshop

Saturday's 4pm Polar Express has an unfortunate run-in with photoshop.

—orc Tue Dec 12 00:10:30 2006

I’d like to say I’m surprised, but, no, this is pretty much what I expected (pt 2)

When the State Department recently asked the CIA for names of Iranians who could be sanctioned for their involvement in a clandestine nuclear weapons program, the agency refused, citing a large workload and a desire to protect its sources and tradecraft.

Frustrated, the State Department assigned a junior Foreign Service officer to find the names another way -- by using Google. Those with the most hits under search terms such as "Iran and nuclear," three officials said, became targets for international rebuke Friday when a sanctions resolution circulated at the United Nations.

(via Suburban Guerrilla)

—orc Mon Dec 11 11:17:48 2006

1 comment

Spooky trains at night (Polar express edition)

Ex-SP&S 700 pushes the 7:00pm Polar Express towards downtown Portland.

—orc Sun Dec 10 19:59:45 2006

Is it possible to have too many locomotive pictures?

We were planning to go out and get a tree today, and we found ourselves shuffling towards the door at about 1:45. I helpfully mentioned that if we went out the door at 1:45, we could swing by Sellwood Riverfront Park and see the 2pm Polar Express run south to the Spokane St. crossing before heading north towards OMSI (I don't know why they head south first, but I suspect that running the 700 up the hill has something to do with it.

At this time of year there is considerably more light at 2pm than there is at 4pm, and the sun was flirting with the clouds, so the detour was considerably more productive from a foamer's viewpoint than yesterday's train-spotting trip.

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I smell a rat

(guest post by the best)

Gordon Smith is being given some credit for criticizing the horror we've created in Iraq. But it's worth noting that Smith is probably testing a line for Saint John McCain (™ Atrios), in addition to sensing (as I believe somebody on Daily Kos said) The Ghost of the Future Lincoln Chafee hovering.

The line is that what we SHOULD do is make more progress in whatever the heck we're doing there, which we COULD do if the Right People were in charge, but regrettably, they aren't, so we'll just have to bail and face disaster unless we hand over power to the Right People in 2008.

The idea is that anti-war voters (like those in Oregon who may or may not reelect Smith in 2008) will hear, "We should bail," and war financiers will hear, "We should spend even more lives and money and the great reward will come, at least for those of us who matter."

From his floor speech: "To fight an insurgency often takes a decade or more. It takes more troops than we have committed. It takes clearing, holding, and building so that the people there see the value of what we are doing... [But we] have cleared and left, and the insurgents have come back.... I believe we need to figure out how to fight the war on terror and to do it right. So either we clear and hold and build, or let's go home... So let's cut and run, or cut and walk, or let us fight the war on terror more intelligently than we have... I will be looking for every opportunity to clear, build, hold, and win or how to bring our troops home."

—julie Sun Dec 10 13:43:57 2006

I’m trying to give the incoming democratic majority the benefit of the doubt, but…

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The head of the House Democrats' campaign committee, Rep. Rahm Emanuel, had heard of former Rep. Mark Foley's inappropriate e-mails to a former male page a year before they became public, a campaign committee aide told CNN.

... this sort of stunt is not the sort of thing that fills me with a feeling that it's going to be a new era of Congressional integrity.

Mr. Emanuel could have asked some other Democrat to do this CNN interview, been a little bit more Clintonian when carefully constructing his answer, or said that he'd heard vague rumors when asked if he'd known about this, but that would have been an intelligent thing to do. And, as has been proven over and over again, the Democratic Party post 1992 has not exactly been a font of wisdom, even when compared to the infamously corrupt and immoral Evil Party.

—orc Sun Dec 10 10:11:14 2006

Three snapshots of the Portland Christmas Fleet

It gets dark pretty early in the middle of winter. These boats came by at about 5:30pm, and even though it wasn't quite as dark as the pictures seem to indicate, it was still pretty dark. Thank goodness for a fast lens; what I lose in depth of field I get back in light vacuuming.

—orc Sat Dec 9 23:32:18 2006

Polar express ‘06 (low light edition)

Waiting to start

charging up the ramp to Spokane street

And backing down towards OMSI

And after the steam locomotive, it's time for a gaggle of speeders!

These pictures are sort of like a dancing bear. It's not so much the quality of the pictures that's interesting, but the fact that they exist at all. I was using my 50mm f1.4 lens, which is really good at sucking up light at 4:10pm in the middle of december, but my photo retouching skills are not quite good enough to make up for the resulting low-contrast results.

Perhaps I'll try to do some more pictures tomorrow, when the ratio of sunlight to stygian darkness is a little bit higher.

—orc Sat Dec 9 20:27:21 2006

Friday Dust Mite Blogging™

Dust Mite has, once again, gone walkabout for the day. However, after a long talent search, we've managed to round up some replacement dust mites for this evening's picture.

Three dust mites¹ gather around their evening dinner.

1: Dramatic re-enactment. These are not actual dust mites.

—orc Fri Dec 8 23:47:26 2006

Integration, Lego-style

The last time I commented on the lego situation, the family minifig collection was overwhelmingly male (~90 lego guys, ~10 lego women), with none of them being any color darker than legoguy yellow. Neither of these situations were acceptable -- we might live in a pasty white city in a pasty white section of the world, but (a) the ratio of women to men in the real world is just a wee bit better than 1:10, and it's just not acceptable to have a lego world where everyone is the lego-equivalent of white.

So I've been shopping on the lego aftermarket (mainly Bricklink; I've looked on the online auction sites, but they have nothing), buying Bespin®™© guard heads and "woman-styled" hair pieces, and have finally started to move the racial and gender ratios up to a level that I'm happier with. Of the 90 lego figures shown here (I'm not counting the 15-20 other figures floating around; 7-8 of those figures are women, two of them are reddish brown, and one is peach):

30 are yellow lego guys,
14 are reddish brown lego guys,
15 are reddish brown lego women,
21 are yellow lego women,
3 are peach lego guys,
1 is a peach lego woman, and
4 are skeleton guys.

There are still more yellow lego guys than any other type, but they're now just a plurality instead of being a majority. I'm up to about 25% reddish brown and 35% female, which even if it's not perfect (particularly the guy:girl ratio) it's at least good enough so it's not a complete embarrassment.

We'd have more lego women, except that Russell wanted a "lego birthday" this year, and we're giving away lego people as part of the lego kits we made up for goody bags. While we were in the throes of making up the kit, someone (either Russell or the best) suggested that we put a woman into each lego kit.

The peach-colo(u)red lego heads are a bit strange. Apparently Lego has decided to make all of their movie tie-in minifigs look more caucasian, and all of the St*r W*rs, Too Much Coffee Man (more commonly known as Batman), H*rry P*tt*r, and other random TV and movie tie-ins are now being delivered with peach-colo(u)red head pieces. It's too bad that this decision has come in after the Teen Titans anime started to lose popularity, because I would have loved to see the more, um, realistic colors for Teen Titans minifigs [update: I'm not claiming that Lego actually made Teen Titans minifigs. I'd like to see them produced, but Lego, for some reason, doesn't pay any attention to my desires] (I'm sure the clothing style would be appalling, but I'd love to get my mitts on an orange Starfire, a grey Raven or a green Beast Boy (there's already a Too Much Coffee Boy (aka Robin) minifig, and I'm afraid that Cyborg would simply be a printed torso and a variant of the existing robot headpieces.))

—orc Fri Dec 8 16:28:17 2006

2 comments

Toot! Toot!

On a day like today, when the wind is right, I can hear Portland's own steam locomotives (SP&S 700 and SP 4449) from my office in downtown Portland, and it reminds me that the latest edition of the Polar Express excursions are going on this weekend and next weekend.

I need to go down to Oaks Park and see if we can pick up tickets directly from the ORHF people instead of going through the nasty ticketmaster clone organization that's doing the online ticket sales for them this year.

—orc Fri Dec 8 15:33:51 2006

2 comments

Not a surprise, but still satisfying

The Tories just held their long-awaited vote to "reopen" the same-sex marriage debate, and, as expected, it went down in flames. I know that they just held the vote to get the faithful worked into a frothing frenzy (what is it about the christopaths, anyway? The anointed heads of the free world can go on an orgy of barbarism and they'll hardly blink, but if Bill and Henry down the street want to put on the iron fetters of matrimony, it's like a 5-alarm 20-car clown explosion. And the so-called prohibition against homosexuality shows up, um, once (In a section of the bible that's chockablock full of various prohibitions that nobody ever pays the slightest attention to,) while you have trouble turning a page without tripping over a love thy neighbor or turn the other cheek (and the christopaths don't have the slightest problem ignoring that pesky requirement,)) but it's still quite satisfying to see the horrid proposal losing by 52 votes (175-123.)

No, no, of course this didn't happen in the United States. Unlike our neighbor to the north, the "if we kill all the gay people maybe I won't be attracted to them" crowd controls electoral politics (with the assistance of the Democratic Party, which prior to August of this year showed the moral fortitude of an overcooked noodle. Perhaps they'll develop a backbone now that they control one of the three branches of government?), so you're not likely to see much movement in the way of common human decency and equal rights in the near future.

So, yay! for Canada.

And *grumbles* for the United States.

—orc Thu Dec 7 22:18:17 2006

It’s a bird? It’s a plane? No, it’s just an aerial tramway (pt 2)

North and South were parked halfway up the aerial tramway, which, by happy coincidence, is just barely to the east of Front Ave/Naito Pkwy. When the bus came across the bridge after lunch, I saw that North and South were out on the line, so when I got off the bus I hustled up to the overpass by (ex-)Failing School and took a few almost-into-the-sun pictures through the chain link fence the city has inconsiderately put there.

—orc Thu Dec 7 14:20:06 2006

Trolley picture of the day

A Tri-Met SD600 approaches the westbound platform of the Pioneer Place station in downtown Portland.

—orc Tue Dec 5 23:58:26 2006

A shining beacon of liberty. Not.

In an effort to gain Mr. Padilla’s “dependency and trust,” he was tortured for nearly the entire three years and eight months of his unlawful detention. The torture took myriad forms, each designed to cause pain, anguish, depression, and, ultimately, the lost of will to live. The base ingredient in Mr. Padilla’s torture was stark isolation for a substantial portion of his captivity. For nearly two years – from June 9, 2002 until March 2, 2004, when the Department of Defense permitted Mr. Padilla to have contact with his lawyers – Mr. Padilla was in complete isolation. Even after he was permitted contact with counsel, his conditions of confinement remained essentially the same. He was kept in a unit comprising sixteen individual cells, eight on the upper level and eight on the lower level where Mr. Padilla’s cell was located. No other calls in the unit were occupied. His cell was electronically monitored twenty-four hours a day, eliminating the need for a guard to patrol his unit. His only contact with another person was when a guard would deliver and retrieve trays of food and when the government desired to interrogate him.

His isolation, furthermore, was aggravated by the efforts of his captors to maintain complete sensory deprivation. His tiny cell – nine feet by seven feet – had no view to the outside world. The door to his cell had a window, however it was covered by a magnetic sticker, depriving Mr. Padilla of even a view into the hallway and adjacent common areas of his unit. He was not given a clock or a watch and for most of the time of his captivity, he was unaware whether it was day or night, or what time of year or day it was.

–From United States of America vs. Jose Padilla (motion to dismiss…)

Michael Froomkin helpfully points out that Jose Padilla is a US citizen, that he was arrested in the United States, and at the time of these abuses he had not been charged with any crime.

Mr. Padilla’s lawyers helpfully quote part of 18 U.S.C. § 2340, which is one of those apparently-useless regulations that criminalizes torture. Torture is defined as:

1. “torture” means an act committed by a person or acting under the color of law specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions) upon another person within his custody or physical control;

2. “severe mental pain or suffering” means the prolonged mental harm caused by or resulting from-

   • the intentional infliction or threatened infliction of severe physical pain or suffering;
   • the administration or application, or threatened administration or application, of mind-altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality;
   • the threat on imminent death; or
   • the threat that another person will imminently be subjected to death, severe physical pain or suffering, or the administration or application of mindaltering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or personality.

Remember that Mr. Padilla is a US citizen. Remember that he was arrested in the United States. Remember that at the time of the alleged abuses he had not been charged with any crime.

–(link to the “motion to dismiss…” via Michael Froomkin)

—orc Mon Dec 4 16:26:16 2006

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It’s wintertime, so I’ll take whatever railroad pictures I can find.

A Yellow Menace C44W scoots by OMSI at ~3pm on Sunday, Dec 3 2006.

—orc Sun Dec 3 20:42:02 2006

Two lego spaceships

A month or so ago, I built a little survey ship for Darth Tiffany, so she could have something to do as a good guy. The bears were not content with this ship, and wanted a different ship of their own, so I went back to the legobins and built them a bigger survey ship. This ship has not been played with very much -- they appear to be more interested in asking me to reconstruct various parts of it (it's been stretched twice, the keel has been extended, and I redid the front of the ship to move the bridge up to the second deck and the mess hall into the space that used to be the computer/nav room.

This morning, Russell was working away on something which, due to lack of tea related complete cerebral shutdown, I didn't actually notice (even after he tried to show it to me.) Eventually the tea kicked in and I did notice.

He'd made a model of the spaceship I made, complete with a removable shuttle and roof. And even though it took me a couple of day to build the big shuttle ship, it didn't take him more than about a hour to build his 1/3rd scale model.

­ ­ ­

—orc Sun Dec 3 20:27:00 2006

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Clean your monitor

—orc Sat Dec 2 11:21:35 2006

Friday Dust Mite Blogging™

Big boobies on a Dust Mite!

-- h/t wOOt!, who used to provide boobie pictures at Atrios's joint

—orc Fri Dec 1 23:31:07 2006

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