- It got a lot of play during Superstorm Sandy, but don't forget about this great wind map of the US! By the way, isn't it great that climate change gives us new vocabulary words like "superstorm"?
- A lot of states don't use the federal money that is available to them for public transit.
- Mary Miller has now joined Videogum. Her Tumblr, Rats Off!, is pretty great. Also from Videogum:
- Corey Feldman and Teddy Ruxpin (I totally forgot about the terrible 4-frames-per-second Teddy Ruxpin cartoon)
- This week in TV shows
- This week in GIFs
- This week in movie trailers (I watched half of one trailer before I got bored of looking at these.)
- Some outtake from the local news about - I have no idea what this is about.
- Gabe's thoughts on Liz & Dick and Lindsay Lohan.
- And finally, a registered sex offender who teaches you how to cook using a microwave (working link for the video here).
- The headline tells you all you really need to know, but on average the Rolling Stones are older than the Supreme Court.
- From Vintage Portland, here's a view of SE Grand and Morrison from 1919, a 1975 photo of John's Landing, and an absolutely fantastic 1963 aerial view of downtown.
- Here's an xkcd chart about Christmas music. I'm a fan of this guy's charts and graphs, but I don't care for his comics at all.
- The new tax on landlines passed unanimously at City Hall despite robocalls from anti-tax activists. This is the tax I referenced back in this post - it's a very, very small tax, so it's kind of fascinating to see the amount of energy that Tea Party types put into trying to defeat it.
- In completely unsurprising news, we could safely close down Guatanamo Bay and relocate the prisoners to stateside prisons. Which totally won't happen because of all the fear-mongering that Republicans will do about it.
- Some details on the city's plans to be the earliest adopter of electric vehicles. I went out to the Washington Square Mall last week (I was out near there getting a pre-employment drug screening and I was killing time waiting for a bus), and they had a showroom with a couple of Tesla Model S's on display, and - as a guy who is not into cars - I have to say that those are some slick looking vehicles. And super-expensive.
- Via @ArmbrustCo, I learn of OpaqueStrategies, an online version of Eno's Oblique Strategies.
- A story about the Mayor's facial hair. Remember back when Tom Potter grew a Saddam Hussein beard during the end of his term in office?
- Via @OrHist, a picture of NW 23rd and Burnside from 1888.
- Somebody from the Mercury went to a taping of The Price is Right.
- It's that time of year when we start seeing top 10 albums of the year lists.
- If you never ever want your website to go down, Netflix has the library for you.
- A historian comments on the historical accuracy of Lincoln and whether it matters or not that all of the details are right. As someone that makes art that deals with history, I think about this stuff a lot, and it's important to me. My personal feeling is that while I am more of an artist than a historian, it is important to get as many of the historical details and the general nuance as correct as you possibly can and that it's important not to tweak the narrative or introduce non-existent or composite characters for storytelling purposes. I also think about this stuff to the point of inaction - I've only finished two pages of the graphic novel that I've been working on for seven years...
- I get Glen Campbell confused with Glenn Miller a lot. After reading that link, I had to go play "Wichita Lineman" and "Rhinestone Cowboy" really quick. [Update from ten hours later: "Rhinestone Cowboy" is stuck in my head.]
- Some people got bent out of shape because this TV newscaster went to "Geek Trivia" and was condescending towards the audience. I thought he just seemed more out of touch, like all TV newscasters, except for when he referred to the entire audience as "losers". And here he is being out of touch at a Mark Russell and David Walker signing.
- On the Retronaut, Bauhaus stage costumes. Bauhaus the art movement not the goth band.
- Minnesota has its own online encyclopedia, and here's a resource listing the other state and territorial encyclopedias (I'm surprised there were so few - I thought every state would have one).
- LAIKA is hiring.
- They found the unicorn lair in North Korea, guys.
- Paul Krugman is not that much of a Decemberists fan.
- Drones everywhere all the time. I had no idea that there was such a thing as the "drone caucus" in the US House.
- A new version of Wordpress is going to be released this week and I made it 35 seconds into this video before I closed the tab.
- Via @_lucky, a brief history of Anton LaVey's house. And another link to the same story.
- Bike Portland reprints an ODOT press release about the high number of pedestrian traffic fatalities there have been this year. I read the original press release the other day and was really bothered by the focus on tips for pedestrians rather than motorists. I was trying to think of how to articulate my feelings about this, but then I read the comment "It's always struck me how similar the attitude there is between these kind of pedestrian safety ideas and the stop-rape-by-dressing-less-sexy camp" and that pretty much sums it up perfectly.
- Here's a computer and projector that screws into a light socket and converts the display area into an AR canvas. This is one of those ideas that seem really obvious after someone has put it out there - I can see all sorts of uses for something like this.
- CHEETAH CUBS!!
- BABY ELEPHANT!!
- And some bummer Oregon Zoo news: Coco has been euthanized.
- Dungeons & Dragons news.
- LIDAR and Crater Lake.
- From Oregon State Archives: a cool old Wanted poster and a picture of the Oregon Pony, the first locomotive in the Northwest. The Oregon Pony used to be parked outside of Union Station, and it's featured in a drawing that's hanging out in my dining room. It lives in Cascade Locks these days. (Facebook links)
- Police blotter:
- An endangered man goes missing from OHSU.
- A couple of robberies happened on Lombard. Then they caught the robber. It was a lady robber!
- Cops arrested a vandal in my neighborhood. Check out the crybaby's mugshot.
- Here's a surveillance photo of a guy who robbed a Kohl's back in October.
- A guy held up a movie theater.
- A tweaker is arrested after a car chase and subsequent crash.
- An armed robbery in the city's most desolate neighborhood, South Waterfront.
- Some guy is going around to elementary schools and stealing computers.
- Some asshole has vandalized statues at the Grotto.
- Someone was stabbed under mysterious circumstances.
Postscript: I spent so much time on the Internet today that I neglected my homework! I was putting it off anyway and probably wouldn't have done it, but my public service message to you is: don't put off things in order to look at the Internet, because it will be there tomorrow (except if you live in Syria or had an Internet outage like I did last night).
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