Me
I'm numb at the news that Tower Records is going out of business. When I was in high school, the first thing I would do with each weekly paycheck was spend part of it at Tower Records in Concord. I still have 12-inch singles with 1986 Tower
Life
I have been out of town visiting parents for 12 of the last 14 days, first on the Big Island and then on Lake Chelan. In rough order, here is how I spent my time: Sleeping, reading, chatting, watching television, walking/sightseeing, putting together a jigsaw puzzle. My only regret?
Me
I was at KBOO all afternoon and evening working on the election night coverage, and I have to go to the airport at dawn, so I decided to stay up all night. (One advantage to being decaffeinated: Coffee is highly effective when I do drink it.) And I wonder now
Politics
Dear Senator Smith, this assessment "The modern GOP -- or, more specifically, the axis of '70s campus Republicans now running it -- really is just a criminal enterprise disguised as a political party. "Dirty tricks, large and small, are a sorry fact of life in American politics, but what
Portland
My housemates and I were jolted last night by a 2.6-magnitude earthquake. Not a very big earthquake, true, but you can really feel it when the epicenter (18th and Taylor) is only a mile away.
Miscellany
I was at a conference at the University of Portland a few weeks ago, and several of the sessions were held in Franz Hall, the campus' relatively new classroom building. The building and its classrooms have an attractively modern and stylish look. Nothing has been broken, and none of
Miscellany
Last year, Sudoku was the big rage among casual puzzle-solvers. At the Deadhead Fred yesterday, I saw a book of "Kakuro" puzzles. The latest new thing. Except that such puzzles already have an unexotic English-language name: Cross Sums. And I did my first one almost 30
Life
Yesterday was both wet and cold, rather than the usual one or the other. I went out to get the mail at 3:45, and was greeted by a damp, yowling Snubby. I couldn't let her in because one of my housemates is allergic to cats. But I
Food
After several test runs, I successfully made an omelette today for the first time. Then I grabbed some garlic, oregano, pepper, salsa, and cheese, and turned it into a pizza: It was good...
Intellect
A self-described leftist writing in to Andrew Sullivan summed it up well: [Y]ou see classic conservatism as the defense of liberty from brutality through doubt, caution, common sense and rigorous self-examination[.]
Politics
The right wing in America is stuck with the paradox of holding a philosophy of "conserving" and an actual order it does not want to conserve. It keeps trying to create something new it might think worthy, someday, of conserving. Confessions of a Conservative
Politics
There is a Multnomah County library levy on this year's November ballot. When a library levy was last on the ballot (November 2002), there was a decided split in who supported it. In the ten precincts that would be John Kerry's best two years later, 73.