Places I Visited on the Internet Today #15

A couple of years ago, I had a couple of months where I wasn't working and I decided to catalog everything that I looked at on the Internet during the day. I always had a lot of fun making and sharing these posts and now that I've got a few days off around Thanksgiving, I thought it would be fun to do it again:

• Tomorrow is Thanksgiving and I'm making mashed potatoes and gravy. Maybe deviled eggs if I get around to it/if anyone I'm having dinner with is interested.
• Here's an exciting link: www.gcbalance.com [I had a gift card to Fred Meyer's and I checked the balance.]
• I remember enjoying the movie Popeye, but I don't know, maybe this clip reminds me that it really wasn't that good?
• Have you noticed houses in your neighborhood being demolished and then replaced by bigger houses? It's an ugly practice that doesn't increase housing density, wastes resources and generally results in less energy-efficient buildings, and is something that the city code totally allows. There are different building code revisions being considered, and here's a Restore Oregon post discussing the current options being proposed.
• Bill Cosby is a rapist.
• I thought that this article titled "The Masculine Mistake" was going to be a much more in-depth exploration of why dudes are so shitty in our culture, but it was more of an overview of dudes being shitty that essentially concluded with "because our culture".
• Here's all the Ferguson grand jury evidence in one place. Have you read that Darren Wilson transcript? Jesus fucking Christ.

  So Brown just pauses in the middle of beating up Wilson & hands Johnson the smokes? "Hey man, hold these." Sure.
  — khrissoden (@khrissoden) November 25, 2014

• On a related note, Michael Brown's parents also think the Darren Wilson story is bullshit. (via @sherradewing) It seems like the National Bar Association agrees.

• Just found a new app that that tells you which one of your friends are racist. It's called Facebook. #FergusonDecision
  — Chris Rock (@ozchrisrock) November 26, 2014

• The Washington Post briefly covers the incompetent procedures of the Ferguson PD.
• Break from the heavy stuff for a second: the latest Clients from Hell post.
• Hey, what's Jian Ghomeshi been up to lately?
• The Thanksgiving recipes googled in every state led me to googling the recipe listed for my state. Ultimately decided to go with original gravy recipe, but added some mushrooms. (Also, looking at some of those listings, WTF is wrong with people? "For dinner tonight, we are having 'frog eye salad', 'cookie salad, 'snicker salad', 'dirt pudding' and 'pig pickin cake'. Yay! We are adult human beings.")
• Portland police links:
• Cold case homicide of Jamie Brock.
• The folks who were arrested during last night's protests.
• Some terrible person is going back to jail.
• Geez, is some asshole poisoning crows?
• I looked at a preview of the new comic book Steve Lieber's drawing for. I really like his work on Superior Foes of Spiderman, but without Nick Spencer writing this one, I will probably pass.
• A Tom Tomorrow comic about Uber.
• Photos of the 1967 Detroit riots. Some of these photos look like they could have been from two days ago, others seem like many generations ago.
• "Hey Step Back with the Riot Shaming" written right after the original Ferguson protests after Mike Brown's death. Also this video linked from the article that shows a guy talking about why businesses are attacked.
• I had to do some Thanksgiving grocery shopping today, so here's what I googled in the produce section: "chives vs green onions" It took me a while to finally find the chives.
• "In Defense of Looting"
• A school board member is forced to resign after she makes a dumb joke.
• Finally, a Thanksgiving comic.

Places I Visited on the Internet Today #14

Another day of catching up on the Internet has been recorded:

• I was back on the Buckman Historic Association website, doing more work on it. Anyone need to have a website built/updated/maintained? Get in touch with me, I may be able to help you out for cheap.
• browsershots.org is a website that will give you screenshots of your website as seen through different browsers. It's pretty handy.
• A guy has a really big problem with theaters that do "Tweet Seats" promotions in which they section off a part of the audience to allow them to be on their phone during the production. I'm not sure if I agree or disagree with his stance (maybe I have no opinion on it?), but I do know that "Tweet Seats" is a really terrible name. (via @barryjohnson)
• After the Oregonian's article on TriMet driver fatigue, TriMet's board of directors are committed to making changes. The Mercury notes that another significant part of this story was TriMet's stonewalling on providing public records.
• Here's a site with statistics on TriMet overtime. The author claims "the following charts explain themselves", but I couldn't make heads or tails of them.
• Here's a Flight of the Concords sketch. That's a show I never watched. (via @sonyabysonya)
• I have a Pinterest account that I never use or look at, although I did compile some photos of cute animals.
• I'm pretty excited about the Oregon Historical Society's upcoming Oregon Black History Series.
• Speaking of the Oregon Historical Society, they're hiring.
• Bob Dylan's 50th Anniversary Collection: The Copyright Extension Collection, Volume 1 is some seriously cynical bullshit cooked up by music industry suits.  
• I always get really annoyed when someone on the television or radio or real life says,"we have the best health care system in the world" because we don't, and even 15 seconds of Googling will tell you that we don't. It's a jingoistic nonsensical thing to say. If you don't believe me, just read this article.
• I'm interested in seeing a mileage-based road-use tax instead of a flat gas tax, although I didn't consider until now how it "punishes" more fuel-efficient drivers. Still, makes sense to me.
• The Advocate's highly subjective list of gayest cities in America. Portland doesn't make the cut, although Tacoma, Salem and Eugene all do.
• If I had an alligator, I would also have named him Mr Teeth.
• The Bureau of Internal Business Services warns that the city is not spending enough to maintain the current stock of buildings that it owns. 
• Someone's indie game called Famaze. I really like video games a lot, but I don't play them very often.
• I went to tvguide.com because I was wondering what time the Golden Globes were on.
• Amtrak has lost the least amount of money in the past year since 1975, and are adding newer electric trains and expanding service. 
• 1000 Friends of Oregon's report on the high cost of sprawl.
• There's been some talk of putting a freeway out in the Hillsboro area, but it looks like the governor may have set those plans back a bit.
• An HOA for a condo in the Pearl are being dumb jerks about bike parking.
• You know what? If you're a neighborhood activist, maybe you can - regardless of how angry you are - not say that your neighborhood is being "raped". For Pete's sake, this person is talking about a loss of on-street parking spaces. Cry me a river.
• Illinois' public pension system is operating on a $17 million-dollar-a-day deficit.
• The Willamette Week has some background info on the yahoo that wandered around Sellwood with an assault rifle the other day. Here's some of the 911 calls that came in on account of these dummies.
• Milton-Freewater is working on preserving their downtown.
• Vintage Portland has a 1924 industrial map of the city. Swan Island is still an island and Ross Island hasn't been hollowed out yet.
• The Mercury's review of Zero Dark Thirty, a movie that I have no interest in watching, but think that it's really funny that Chris Pratt is in it.
• This article about superfrogs isn't as interesting as I was hoping.
• Bad jokes that can be found on Wikipedia. (via +Chris Higgins)
• Bike Portland has a short round-up of different factions who are organizing the opposition to the Columbia River Crossing.
• The Northwest History Network has microfunding grants available! I might need to get in on this.
• Mental Floss has 11 weird and dangerous things that you could order from the 1902 Sears catalog.
• The Dill Pickle Club's Kickstarter for their next Oregon History Comic - go give them some loot!
• GIFs of the week. (via @_lucky)
• To watch later: the 1962 report "Pollution in Paradise".
• More on the planning of the Zidell Yards from Portland Architecture.
• "The Formulaic Nature of Contemporary Album Cover Art"
• Lance Armstrong will admit to Oprah Winfrey that he used performance enhancing drugs. Not because he is ashamed and regretful, but because he is a jerk and admitting this will allow him to pursue his personal goals.
• Quora question pages I looked at:
• What is it like to be exposed to new technology after a 20+ year prison sentence?
• What is the most bizarre job interview you have been party to?
• What is it like to talk with a serial killer?
• Why don't web browsers render the same content identically?
• From the Retronaut:
• The Mad Potter of Biloxi
• Polluted America, 1971 - 1977
• Autogyros
• Wikipedia pages I went to:
• List of inventors killed by their own inventions (via @mightythylacine)
• CSS Hunley
• Karel Soucek
• AVE Mizar (a flying Ford Pinto!)
• Boardman, Oregon
• George E Ohr (the Mad Potter of Biloxi)

Places I Visited on the Internet Today #13

I was sick for a good portion of this week, and as a result I didn't spend too much time looking at the Internet (I was too dizzy for reading). Today I caught up on it:

• My pal Drew Anderson is looking for work, and has an online portfolio that you can check out. Drop him a line if you know of anything! Through Drew I learned about this online resource for designers, but I haven't taken the time to really check it out much.
• A photo of a piece of work by Diana Al-Hadid. I like it, it reminds me of Chandra Bocci's installation work, which is the best. (via @RGBurrell)
• The AV Club's list of worst films of 2012. I went to a lot of the original movie reviews linked on the list, and also read their review of Atlas Shrugged: Part 1 because I tried watching it for a laugh while I was sick the other day, but stopped after a half-hour because it was too terrible and boring. I finished up by reading the reviews for Parental Guidance and Jack Reacher because I like reading reviews of bad movies. Did you know that Tom Cruise's real name is Thomas Cruise Mapother IV? Ha ha!
• Rob Reiner on IMDB.
• Ubuntu will be available as an OS on smartphones in the near future, apparently.
• The vaporware of 2012.
• A silver lining of the Great Recession is that it may have struck a fatal blow against the exurbs.
• A short article about a no longer extant church in Oak Grove. (via @LostOregon)
• Here's a NYT article about the development of facilities to capture carbon dioxide directly from the air. The bigger shocker for me in that article is that the average passenger vehicle emits five tons of carbon dioxide annually. Holy shit. (via @SherrardEwing)
• A selection of album covers from the Kitten Covers - you should probably just go straight to the original source, since its great. Of the selected covers, though, my favorites are Lou Reed's Transformer and The Cure's Disintegration.
• Avis bought Zipcar, and someone analyzes the deal.
• Katie Lane's Work Made for Hire Blog, which is a great resource for freelancers.
• Here's a quick seven question survey about Multnomah County Library's hours and services that you should take. 
• Ever wondered where the Soviet Union would have thrown 500 or 2000 nuclear missiles at if the Cold War really went South? Well, here's your answer!
• A Steve Duin piece on the difficulty of finding housing for homeless veterans.
• A use for Kickstarter that I hadn't seen before: getting funding to place a bench in a public park.
• I finally got around to seeing New Year's Eve with Jamie Kennedy.
• I actually read the NYT piece about Apollo Robbins, professional pickpocket, in this blog post yesterday, but I'm including it in today's list of links because I found it so fascinating. Typically I'd just link straight to the NYT piece, but the blog post contains some links to videos of him in action. I watched some of his moves multiple times, and can't detect the moments that he's doing his tricks.
• The Dill Pickle Club is going to be putting out a comic about Governor Tom McCall. More info here.
• Here's an article about the political machinations in Clark County as it relates to C-Tran and the CRC. 
• I'd let myself briefly forget about the depressing news that Republicans are blocking the renewal of the Violence Against Women Act.
• Go watch some giraffes smash each other with their necks. It's crazy.
• I thought this article on Bike Portland was going to be about how cops were considering starting to patrol the Springwater Corridor, but it's actually about them thinking of doing a traffic crackdown on bicyclists near Oaks Park.
• The Oregon State Archives has a couple of photos (Facebook link) of the Wolf Creek Highway (now the Sunset) being built during the 30s. They've been posting a lot of photos from this project lately. They also posted a very 1987 photo of Barbara Roberts and Norma Paulus.
• The former Weiderhorn mansion in Raleigh Hills can be yours for the low price of just $6.9 million.
• From the Retronaut, General Electric's 1967 human exoskeleton. Had no idea that this concept existed as far back as this. Also on the Retronaut, wacky "headless" portraits made by jokers in the 1800s (take a look at the very first photo of the series - maybe someone should have cracked a bit of a smile in that one, because as it is it looks pretty grim).
• A picture of Governor Kitzhaber playing the 1980s fighter jet game After Burner at Ground Kontrol.
• Here's someone's open letter of complaint to Car2Go. I haven't used the service, but outside my window today I watched someone spend six and a half minutes (I timed it) trying to get their card to let them in the car before they gave up and walked away. 
• The pictures of this baby tapir playing in the snow and messing around with a capybara are great!
• "Nine strange new laws for 2013"
• A story of a rape conviction in California being reversed because the victim wasn't pregnant.
• The Willamette Week reports that baby elephant Lily is now owned by the sketchy elephant trainers of Have Trunk Will Travel, which is kind of non-news since the paper had made such a huge issue of this a month ago already. My prediction is that with Mayor Adams out of office, the Willamette is going to start in on the Oregon Zoo as their favorite target for their practice of creating non-scandals.
• An speaking of old media organizations creating non-scandals, I bet that the Oregonian editorial board is going to go on bitching about Mayor Adams all throughout Mayor Hales tenure. They're going to be the conservative version of that old hippy dude you know who still can't stop telling you about all of Bush's war crimes. Anyway, exhibit A for this might be this editorial about Hales' options regarding the Department of Transportation.
• Politifact Oregon's "Truth-o-meter" on Mayor Adams? It looks like it's a wash.
• From Vintage Portland, here's a pretty interesting aerial photograph of Portland from 1965.
• I went to historicbuckman.org today to check a couple of things out (I designed and built this site pro bono for the Buckman Historic Association).
• "Six questions with a Civil War material culture scholar" - you're either really excited about that link, or it sounds like the absolute most boring thing in the world. There is no middle ground there.
• The wiki for the D&D games that I run.
• From the police blotter:
• 01/02/13: a carjacking.
• 01/02/13: firefighters trying to help someone suffering an overdose are interfered with by some weirdo. There's probably a sad/creepy compelling story going on here.
• 01/03/13: a medically endangered man and his puppy were missing! But they were found and they were okay. (Sorry, the link does not contain photos of the puppy.) 
• 01/03/13: people at a drug house got arrested.
• 01/03/13: someone vandalized a bank as an act of protest. You know what: if you're going to damage physical property as a political statement, and you're planning on alerting the media, maybe you should make your act a little more hazardous and compelling than throwing a rock through a window.
• 01/03/13: the cops arrested a serial armed robbery suspect. They probably recognized him because of his distinctive hairstyle.
• 01/03/13: the cops arrested this really creepy looking guy for murdering a woman on Christmas day.
• 01/04/13: The cold case team solved a murder that happened in 2002, but the murderer has already died.
• 01/05/13: An armed bank robbery happened in Montavilla.
• 01/05/13: A body was found in Johnson Creek.
• 01/05/13: The police are hoping that you can find this guy that disappeared after the night of the 22nd.
• 01/06/13: a barfight ends with someone firing a gun. No one was hurt, and they caught the person with the gun.
• 01/06/13: and another fight that ends with a gunshot. Again, no one was hurt, but they didn't find the person with the gun. Remember when Mayor Adams (RIP, jk) enacted some sensible gun laws and all the right-wingers came out of the woodwork to bitch about how he was taking everyone's rights? Man, one thing that I can guarantee is that Mayor Hales is never going to have half the troll problems that Sam did.
• Wikipedia pages:
• Diana Al-Hadid (this page could use some additional editors, because its current content is too promotional.)
• McGufffin
• CD+G
• Pedagogy

Places I Visited on the Internet Today #12

There's a lot of stuff on the Internet. Here's what I got around to looking at today:

• A brief article on the history of cartography and errors in mapping. I had to go put the author's book "On the Map" onto my "Too Read" list on GoodReads.
• An article on Civil War cartography that sounded like it would be interesting, but then turned out to have very little actual information.
• The Portland Tribune profiles the guy who does Portland Transport has put together some homebrew transit trackers for different locations. They refer to these as "inventions", which sounds quaint and out-of-touch.
• Speaking of out-of-touch, the Oregonian kicks off an article about the Portland Art Museum digitizing their archives by putting the word digitizing in scare quotes. 
• The National Parks Service restored some graffiti that was created during the Native American occupation of Alcatraz Island, which is something that I had completely forgotten about.
• There are plans to build a Walmart-sized retail store on the site of the ruins of the Thunderbird Motel. The Fire Bureau has declared that the fire that destroyed the motel was "suspicious". I'd thought that the Mayor had proposed that the site be turned into a public park as part of his West Hayden Island plan, but maybe that fell through when I wasn't paying attention. 
• If you were wondering what the structure being built at the East side of the Hawthorne Bridge is, here's your answer.
• Somebody thought the reflection of light's inside an airplane's cabin was a UFO, so they filmed it.
• Shillapoo Wildlife Area is just across the Columbia from Sauvie's Island. I was checking it out because one of my themes for 2013 is exploring Washington.
• Dave's Killer Bread has traded in half its ownership to an equity firm. I prefer Franz, myself.
• This squirrel.
• The BBC does a year in review about archaeological discoveries. I followed the link about the discovery of King Richard III's body, since I'd only heard about that in passing.
• Portland Afoot has an article about someone making their first grocery shopping trip by bike. I read it and just felt bad for the cashier.
• Shawn Levy has a pretty great Tumblr.
• Paul Krugman writes about the people who fear budget deficits.
• "Paperwork studies".
• A bunch of state parks are having group hikes on January 1st.
• A Salon article briefly explores women and gun control/gun ownership.
• A bunch of photos from the early 1900s depicting different parades in Astoria.
• Bob Stacey is adjusting his tactics in combating the Columbia River Crossing. 
• We were considering going to the Grotto's Festival of Lights (because it has a petting zoo, duh) but then I saw that admission was nine bucks.
• Wikipedia links:
• Ridgefield National Wilderness Refuge (Heather and I went here today - it was really nice!)
• Great Egret
• Cooper's Hawk
• Nutria (I'd never heard of a nutria until around 2002, and back then I wasn't too sure if they were real. I saw a bunch of them today.)
• Ridgefield, Washington
• Red-Tailed Hawk
• Stork
• Felida, Washington

Places I Visited on the Internet Today #11

Another day spent reading the everything that I can on the Internet. Here's all the places that I went to:

• I started my morning off by watching this GIF for a full minute. It's a lady's head revealing Arnold Schwartznegger and I think it's from Total Recall and it's ridiculous and hypnotic. (via @_lucky)
• Tiger cubs at the Minnesota Zoo get a bubble machine! I really wish that there was a video of this!
• Yesterday, I remarked that I didn't like the xkcd comics, although I like the guy's charts. Here's one of his comics.
• If there is some sort of stupid Gen X nostalgia show on TV, I bet that this sequence from the pill addiction episode of Saved By the Bell is part of its opening credits. 
• Beverly Cleary school gets a mosaic for one of its entrances.
• The Old Church needs an interior paint job, and as part of its fundraising efforts, you can get your picture taken with a "Victorian Santa". 
• More info on Map-21's treatment of city streets as highways, and what this means for non-automotive transportation.
• New research indicates that early detection of Alzheimer's disease may be possible.
• I'm embarassed about these "Liz & Dick" related links I went to, but here they are anyway:
• Salon comments on the "movie".
• The most memorable parts of the show.
• Another review - why did I waste my time reading this stuff??
• I've read the play of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf", but I've never gotten around to seeing the movie. I did watch this clip and this clip, though.
• Reading stupid "Liz & Dick" stuff led to me reading about the 2007 MTV Video Music Awards. You know, so I can stay current with what's going on in the world. And then I watched that Brittney Spears performance but had to stop after 45 seconds because I forgot how truly terrible it was.
• A review of "Killing Them Softly", which sounds like a lot better of a movie than I had expected.
• Carson and Colin will be signing copies of Under Wildwood at Reading Frenzy's Portland Bazaar booth next weekend!
• The Department of the Interior designates 27 new National Landmarks.
• Burgerville.
• The Oregon Encyclopedia's entry on the Salvation Army in Portland, written by @alderllc.
• Going to university is growing increasingly unaffordable.
• Someone freaks out when a couple of whales come hang out with their canoe. I want to hang out with a couple of whales! I won't even hyperventilate.
• Some reminiscing about the Nirvana era of Sub Pop records.
• Baby elephant video!!
• "House of Circles" by Mr Gnome. I am not as impressed as Ned Lannaman; it may be that it's just not my aesthetic.
• This blog post is called "No More Indiana Jones Warehouses" and I was intrigued, but it is just an article encouraging historians to get involved in digital humanities. It did, however, lead me to the Urban Simulator Team's virtual representation of the 1893 Columbian Exposition, and this project where a class mapped the movements of the characters in Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf.
• An article about a program that allows foreign real estate investors to get green cards through investing a bunch of money.
• The New York Times reports that tax rates are lower now than they were back in 1980 (except for the poor), and then talks to a bunch of crybabies who don't want to have any taxes raised (except for the one rich guy who thinks the poor should pay even more taxes).
• Bike Portland has a list of transportation grants that the ODOT is applying for.
• Walk Score now has a pretty cool setting where you can see a map of the places that you can travel within a certain amount of time.
• An article on NYC's version of bus rapid transit that isn't that great.
• A positive review of The Ethics of Big Data, written by @KordDavis.
• Acorn Host - I was providing someone with advice on Internet hosting, and I really like this company.
• Jerry Saltz buys a couple of knock-off Gerhard Richters. And then I read another article he wrote about Glenn Beck "making art" by putting an Obama figurine in a jar of urine, which just sounds like something that was too crazy to actually happen but I guess it did. Oh, and here is his top 10 art picks for the year.
• A cool series of turn-of-the-century photos of pubs in London.
• A recap of this week's episode of The Office.
• Police blotter:
• When your Green or Yellow-line MAX train is out of commission for the next couple of days, you can thank this drunk-driving chump. Of COURSE he was driving a Hummer.
• Here's how to get arrested: grab some weed, open a drink, drive to 82nd and Sandy and fire a gun from your car. Bonus points for not having a valid license or insurance.
• Police recover stolen head of baby Jesus. I really want to know what kind of an asshole goes out of their way to vandalize religious statuary.
• The cops need help on a cold case from 2010.
• Questions on Quora:
• Why hasn't Microsoft been able to solve the problem of Windows getting so slow after about a year of use?,
• What are some tips, tricks, and gotchas when using KnockoutJS?
• Why does Superman wear red underwear over his costume?
• Wikipedia pages:
• A Confederacy of Dunces
• Steele Mackaye (I was looking for information on the Spectatorium.)
• Andres Serrano
• Piss Christ
• Chris Ofili
• 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America
• Knoxville Unitarian Universalist church shooting
• The King's Speech
• Colin Firth

Places I Visited on the Internet Today #10

I started a new job this week and, as a result, spent very little time on the Internet over the past five days. Thank goodness for Saturdays that allow you to catch up on everything:

• 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).

Places I Visited on the Internet Today #9

Today I started a new job, one where I cannot look at the Internet, so this list will be shorter than earlier ones. There's always the weekend.

• Another Monday brings the question, "Was this your weekend?" (via @IncubateBlog)
• Vintage Portland has a picture of the St. Louis Hotel in the 1930s. This is one of the few blogs where you should read the comments. Great community detective work.
• On ZooBorns, there are some cute lion twins. I love the pictures of them with their Pop.
• From Retronaut, Lyle Stuart drawings of puberty/sexuality. I didn't Google him too closely, but I think that he was probably the same artist that illustrated the book of the "birds and the bees" that my parents shared with me when I was a little kid. It was a great book because it didn't shy away from sex and just presented it as something that adults do. What you could communicate with kids in the 70s would get you arrested today. In any case, this illustrator is my immediate reference when I think about the late 70s. The style was appropriated in a more crude fashion in the 80s, but that's a whole post to itself.
• http://www.horriblelogos.com/ - thanks to @welshkaren for the reminder. The link is exactly what you would expect. 
• Police blotter:
• There was a sexual assault near PSU.
• Bank robberies are never as sexy as they are in movies.
• This lady was murdered a few years ago, and the cops need help on the cold case. Side note: regardless of how terrible our city's cops are regarding minorities and the mentally ill, they are pretty awesome when it comes to cold cases. A lot of it has to do with new technologies, but the rest of it is due to retried detectives that keep on cases. I'm too lazy to Google the shit now, but seriously.
• Cops are going to do a sting for bad drivers at NE 78th and Glisan on Wednesday. If you drive in that area, behave yourself. But really, behave yourself anyway.

Wikipedia pages:

• Lyle Stuart

Something that I don't include in these listings are images that I can view within Twitter, and I guess that I should make mention of that. Technically, I am viewing other websites when I do this sort of thing, but it's exhausting to chronical the photos on Twitter or the links to Instagram. Just imagine that you are looking at a lot of pictures of food, sunsets and bikes, and you will be fulfilled.

Also, something that I referenced in an earlier post that I am having a hard time tracking down now was this article in the New York Times about "hipsters". I popped it open and read through the whole thing and want to make a serious response to it - something that is outside the scope of my link postings. For now, all that matters is that I looked at it today as well.

Places I Visited on the Internet Today #8

Here's what I was looking at on the Internet today:

• I had no idea, but there's still a few ninjas left.
• A cute lion cub on ZooBorns.
• I started reading this Vanity Fair cover story on Kate Moss until I paused to ask myself, "Why am I reading this?"
• "3 Great UX Resources" that I didn't find to be great. 
• A very short article profiling a few microeconomists who work in online commerce. I wish that this was a more in-depth article, because this felt like a very brief and basic overview of an interesting subject.
• Newcastle, England, is cutting all of its funding to arts and culture. It seems like dismantling government is in vogue throughout a lot of the world right now, with it being done in the name of "austerity" due to economic circumstances, but it feels like a sham to me. There's been this big push to reduce government debt over the past couple of years, even though most economists say that reducing debt during a period of unsteady recovery is a bad idea. I think that this is occurring because conservatives have been able to push the narrative that it is somehow government debt that is keeping people from having jobs. So now that conservatives are controlling that message, government spending is being cut, and - conveniently - the things that conservatives don't like (arts and culture, social services) are the first things that get the ax. Of course, the irony of cutting government spending is that it puts people out of work rather than creating jobs. Excuse me now while I go look up "Feudalism" "Plutocracy" on Wikipedia. (BBC link via @barryjohnson)
• From Wired, a fascinating article about cracking the cryptography of a 250-year-old secret society.
• An opinion piece on micro-apartments. In cataloging all of the links that I visit, I am starting to see a real pattern of articles/posts that are so brief and half-formed as to be negligible. This article is like the one on microeconomists above - it doesn't feel complete. Maybe this pattern only exists for "micro" subjects.
• Here's a book review of Jeff Speck's "Walkable City", which sounds like it may be worth going to Powell's and flipping through if not buying. I really need to read Jane Jacobs' "Life and Death of American Cities" in the near future.
• http://transportationtown.com/
• High transit corridors create more real estate demand. 
• Refreshingly, there are still parts of the world where they believe in public transit and making the rich pay their share. 
• CSS Zen Garden, because I was listening to this podcast with the creator of the site. I only listened to the first half of the podcast because it kept cutting out on me.
• "We are in full apostasy boogie." And, oh boy, from the same source: Obama got re-elected because women love George Clooney.
• CAT AND FOX BUDDIES.
• @PortlandAfoot shared this link where he defines his mission statement in response to some crank in the comment sections.

Wikipedia pages:

• Mortal Kombat
• Devils Lake
• D River
• Feudalism
• Plutocracy

Places I Visited on the Internet Today #7

I had a lot of Internet to catch up on:

• This 1963 view of the Burnside Bridge on Vintage Portland is just great. Looking at the part of inner Southeast that is visible, you can see Fishel's, which is still located there in the Buckman Building; Thorp's Restaurant, which later became La Casita (24 hours!) before the building was torn down sometime in the last ten years; an old house still hanging on at Ankeny and MLK JR (then Union Avenue); the Wentworth Chevytown sign was then Fields Chevytown; and the Lloyd Hotel, which has been replaced by a Plaid Pantry. Also from VP, a 1917 advertisement for Thanksgiving dinner at the Multnomah Hotel, and the long-gone Speedball Cafe in 1939.
• On Retronaut, outtakes from the Seargent Peppers album cover photo shoot. Also, a few cool pictures of London in 1899.
• Here's an interesting article about the wreck of the Great Republic out on the Columbia Bar. How great would it be to see it exposed?!
• Ryan North (of Dinosaur Comics) is making a Hamlet Choose-Your-Own Adventure novel.
• Paula Abdul and MC Skat Cat have finally reunited.
• I like the new bike lanes on NE Multnomah, but I'm really confused about the color choice for the buffer zones.
• Archaeology and concentration camps.
• A State Highway Safety Director in Massachusetts has resigned after being in many traffic accidents.
• A collection of depressing climate change maps.
• I haven't read Axe Cop in a very long time.
• Earl Blumenauer on the "Fiscal Cliff".
• Here's some hypnotic looping GIFs.
• Reruns of WKRP in Cincinnatti are used as an example of the inherent absurdity in the details of copyright law.
• The future: storing unimaginably large amounts of data in DNA. Awesome.
• Here's a generic National Weather Service link in order to represent all of the flood warnings that I've looked at over the past week. (I haven't included them in these link lists because they are generally temporary links.)
• From the Oregon State Archives: weird photo of a plane flying above a mule train, an aerial photo of Rocky Butte in the 30s or 40s (that's the old Hill Military Academy in the foreground), and a 1916 photo of the Oneonta Tunnel on the old Columbia Gorge highway. (Facebook links)
• A decade ago I could not even begin to imagine 6-story buildings on Williams Avenue.
• The results of a survey that the people that make Fallen London did. Fallen London is a pretty fun browser game that I don't play very often. 
• It's very cool that Portland will be home to a professional women's soccer team, but all I really want to know is what the team's name will be?
• A man beat a monkey to death at the Boise Zoo. Don't read the article; it is too depressing.
• The guy who does the comic The Oatmeal is the subject of another frivolous lawsuit. Unrelated, but I really, really dislike that guy's comics.
• Sometimes I look at the road cameras on Trip Check just for fun. I live a wild life!
• TriMet statistics!
• An article regarding the future of the Multnomah County Courthouse. 
• Every year, Heather and I discuss going to ZooLights and then we never get around to doing it. Will this year be different?
• Here's just one reason why you should never by anything from Walmart: the Walton's personal wealth is greater than the combined wealth of 40% of Americans. 
• Here's an air horn sample on YouTube. Thankfully, I had the sound off on my computer when I clicked on it.
• The hyper violent 8-bit game Hotline Miami is on sale for $5 right now. I kind of want to buy it, but I'm sure that I won't.
• A link that will lead to the Tumblr portion of "Yo, Is This Racist?" And a link to Wednesday's podcast.
• A TLDR post by a guy who supports height limits on buildings in Washington DC.
• Here's a really uninformative review of Hitchcock that isn't worth reading. 
• A breakdown of how different precincts in NYC voted in the Presidential elections. 
• Detectives in Clackamas have re-opened the 66-year-old case of a woman who was dismembered and tossed into the Willamette. 
• An island exists on all of the world's maps, but apparently does not really exist.
• Police Blotter:
• That the fire at Mack & Dub's Excellent Chicken & Waffles might be a hate crime is super-depressing news. Here's some additional reporting from Willamette Week.
• Someone robbed a theater with a gun.
• Sadly, the woman that was hit by a car out on SE 108th and Washington died from her wounds.
• Some cowboy thought that he could get away with a bank robbery and carjacking.
• Someone got stabbed out in far Southeast.
• There was an Occupy Portland protest at Walmart on Thanksgiving. There was also another protest on Black Friday.
• Unfortunately, it appears that the police officer attacked by the tree on Hayden Island is paralyzed from the waist down.
• A robbery in Glenfair including a casual mention of the suspect climbing into a woman's car and asking her to help him find crack cocaine.

Wikipedia pages:

• USS Plainview
• Muskox
• Joseph Bruce (general gross dude and half of Insane Clown Posse)

Places I Visited on the Internet Thanksgiving Edition

There's a lot of stuff to see and read on the Internet, but it's no substitute for real life, especially when real life involves travel and food and relatives that you don't see all of the time. With that said, here are the few places that I went to on the Internet during the last three days:

• Via @Armbrustco, here's a really 1990s video of Thurston Moore interviewing Beck on 120 Minutes. She also provided a link to some choice 80s hiphop.
• ancientportland reveals the etymology of Tri-Met. (via @PortlandAfoot)
• A couple of links from the Retronaut: the very groovy Apple Boutique in 1967 London, and  - in what is bound to be one of my very favorite links of the day - color(ized?) photos of Paris in 1914.
• Police blotter: a "cutting" machete attack under the Burnside Bridge, and an all-too-familiar instance of a vehicle-versus-pedestrian(s) in East Portland. Hopefully, that lady is able to recover. 
• The Moberi food cart uses an exercise bike to power the blender for making smoothies. Wacky? Ingenious? Twee? One of those things that make conservative people angry when they hear about it? It's on the Oregonian's website, so I'm sure that there will be a bunch of cranks weighing in on it by the end of the day.
• "Obama's Moment" by Thomas Friedman in the NYT. This is one of those opinion pieces that has one specific pet subject that it is focusing on - the idea that very high-speed Internet connections would be great economic booms for urban areas (I agree!) - but then wedges it into the "bigger picture", whether it is an appropriate fit or not. Paragraphs 3 and 4 of this piece are so broad that you could follow it up with pretty much whatever you wanted. The Newsweek blowhard Niall Ferguson is kind of my poster child for these opinion pieces; he could find a certain type of vegetable unappealing to his personal tastes and work that into a narrative of Obama causing hyperinflation because of a willingness to work with China. Ferguson would probably also title his piece "Obama's Moment". 
• From Portland Architecture, a person writes about how they are happy that they moved here. Any where on the coast that is not Los Angeles is better than Los Angeles.
• After driving and walking around Bellingham, I used Google Maps to look at all of the places that we didn't have a chance to explore.

Wikipedia pages:

• Newsweek
• Niall Ferguson
• Bellingham
• History of Bellingham
• T.G Richards and Company Store

Places I Visited on the Internet Today #4

Boy, have I looked at a bunch of stuff on the Internet today. Some of it was interesting and some of it was not. Here's a list of all of it:

• Here's a picture (Facebook link) of Eagle Fern Creek from the 1950s. Have you ever been there? It's really nice.
• On Videogum, there is a preview of Killer Karaoke. That does not look like a show I would want to watch! (Although I do love how nonchalant the skunk in the cage is. I'd watch a whole show of that little guy.)
• Today's episode of the "Yo, Is This Racist?" podcast.
• There's a new shop on Supportland. I've never heard of this place; I'll have to go check it out.
• I spent a lot of time using Google Translate this morning because my Dutch isn't good enough for me to read the tweets of the Dutch folks I follow. They were having a lot of fun with Google Trends today.
• H&M website. (I got a job, so I need some new office clothes!)
• I am having a hard time deciding how I feel about Joseph Pierce's art, aside from that it makes me feel uncomfortable.
• Here's a survey relating to the SW Corridor plan (the future transit route - possibly MAX line - out towards the Tualitin area). I didn't take the survey, because I don't really ever go out that way and don't have any opinions on it. (via @alex_zee)
• Police blotter: a tree on Hayden Island attacked a police officer on an ATV. Cops pull over a jaywalker who runs, is captured, and then is run over by an unoccupied police cruiser. The Oregonian has the same story, but with a bonus fun quote from a police spokesperson.
• You've probably already seen the fun "This is what an atheist looks like" graffiti.
• You can't drop off your children at Mall of America during Black Friday. (File under: Why did I read this?)
• Some guy wearing a shawl.
• "The White Negro" by Norman Mailer.
• Really creepy old Disney character costumes on Retronaut!
• It's been a wet week! Here's a list of the city's rain gauges.
• Here's a free-ish font that I'm not sure if I kind-of like or kind-of don't like.
• Today's Vintage Portland is a great old aerial view of the Hollywood District.
• A former mayor's house in Lake Oswego gets listed on the National Register.
• Photos of men heading towards the Yukon goldfields, also on Retronaut.
• Rocco Landesman is stepping down from the NEA.
• Something something #8 bus line something Woodlawn.
• I thought that this was going to be an article about finding organic molecules on Mars, but it is an article about how they might announce that they found organic molecules on Mars.
• Here's a review of Portlandia the book by someone that doesn't like Portlandia the show.
• Drawings of venture capitalists as packaged action figures.
• Willamette Week makes a post about an actual article (versus a "post") about Zach Randolph on Grantland. This is about as close as I come to reading about sports.
• You can learn to kayak at Milo McIver State Park!
• A press release from the Dill Pickle Club about their "Don't Move Out!" poster.
• Resilient masonry buildings!
• Neuromorphic engineering still has a ways to go.
• Reported on Bike Portland: 600 miles of city streets are now under the jurisdiction of the National Highway System, which impacts the design requirements of the streets and could have a negative effect on bike and pedestrian projects.

Cute animals department: 

• A baby Colobus monkey with an adorable face!
• Pretty much everything a red panda does is the best, including being startled.

Political stuff:

• Chris Christie, Republican pariah.
• Big surprise that the Oregonian editorial board is against the incredibly small amount of tax being raised on the companies that provide landline service. In the article, they frame it as a tax on the elderly, which: sure, but they fail to mention that the tax would amount to something like an extra $4.20 annually. Also, there is some really weird anti-tax/"just tax everybody" logic going on in that article. Remember when the Oregonian used to be a good newspaper without a conservative/anti-tax/anti-bike bias? I wonder if everyone on their editorial board lives in Vancouver.
• There's finally a plan to do... something? with Veterans Memorial Coliseum.

Coding links:

• php.net - I keep avoiding doing all of the server-side programming that I want to do, and today I decided that I'd better work on it.

iPhone apps I installed today:

• HERE Maps - It's no Google Maps.
• Allrecipes.com Dinner Spinner - I had this app before, but it got deleted during an iOS update. I think I'll spend the $3 to upgrade it so I have access to my recipes from that site.

Wikipedia pages:

• Veterans Memorial Coliseum

Places I Visited on the Internet Today #3

I'm a real citizen of the Internet. Here's all of the places I went to on the Internet today:

• After a two week hiatus, one of my favorite websites, Vintage Portland, is back! This post is my favorite kind - where they don't know where the photo's location is, and everyone in the comments works to figure it out.
• Here's a short photo essay about the destruction from Sandy that has occurred to a cable vault owned by Verizon. As @webframp, who I got this link from, says: "Just reminds me how fragile the infrastructure really is."
• My buddies at the Dutch festival Incubate run a blog with a regular Monday feature called "Was This Your Weekend?" It's not always SFW by American standards, but this week's installment is just a picture of a guy and his sweet pigeon tattoo. 
• Over at ZooBorns (a site I go to daily), they have thirteen minutes of video of the four new baby lions up at Seattle's Woodland Park zoo. I have not watched the whole video - yet. Also: baby giant otters! They will get up to six feet in length as adults!
• In other animal baby news, Rose-Tu (an Asian elephant) is expected to give birth to her second calf any day now!
• I ended up at "The Movie Cliches List" for a minute, then used the Wayback Machine to confirm that the site has not had a design update since it debuted back in 1999. (Apparently, it became a USA Today "Hot Site" back in March of 2000!) (via @nonobody)
• So I guess we had an earthquake right before I woke up this morning?
• Here's a photo of Vice President Richard Nixon at the 1959 Oregon Centennial Exposition. And here's an early 20th century photo of a woman steering an experimental personal paddle boat. Looks fun. (Facebook links)
• Hey, if you live in the Metro (Multnomah, Washington, Clackamas counties) area, you should take this survey about a possible 5-year parks and natural areas levy that Metro is considering.
• Al Gore's blog always has rosy news about our warming future.
• Geez, I've got a lot of bummer links in my browsing history today. Here's a depressing article about the civets that they cage in order to make civet coffee. "Civet coffee". (via @welshkaren)
• Today's "Yo, Is This Racist?" podcast. It's pretty much the only podcast I really listen to. I also listened to Episode 22 and Episode 23, since I didn't listen to them last week. So after I listened to that last one, I went and watched "The Lone Ranger" trailer, and yep, Johnny Depp in Magical Indian face looks pretty racist. Then, since i was already at IMDB, I watched the "Iron Man 3" trailer.
• OSPIRG is accused of union-busting.

Obligatory links to Huffington Post articles that were harvested from someone else's work:

• Sarah Palin 2016. After reading a few sentences of the HP piece, I went to the original editorial arguing in favor of Palin 2016, and, oh boy. The writer argues that Palin would do better than Hillary Clinton because she is hotter than Clinton (then she makes an ad hominem attack on Hil's hairstyle); suggests that Palin could get the gay vote because there are some gay people out there that like her (presumably this would be the same logic that she could apply to racial minorities?); and that general voters are blue-collar dummies that don't pay attention to current affairs and care about the ''tugs on their emotions, fears, revulsions and heart strings provided by hours and hours of uninterrupted television watching." The piece ends with a biographical blurb about the author who "writes frequently about feminism, politics, and religion." Lotsa big YIKES and GROSSes in that editorial. 
• Marco Rubio will not tell you that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old. Y'know what? I'm fine with this dude not outright agreeing to science. He has a base of crazy-ass people, and in the respect that he has political ambitions, this is the sort of thing that he has to say. I'm pretty sure that there's some places in Florida where they'll put burning crosses on your lawn if you admit that you believe in science. This is kind of like if someone asked Mayor-elect Charlie Hales if he should Keep Portland Weird.

Pop culture/celebrity links:

• "Lana Del Ray, the joke's on us" - I read four paragraphs, and then I became really bored with it and that I really don't go for articles like this. (Also, I am an old person who gets confused and cranky by current pop culture?) (link via @_lucky)
• Penn Jillette writing about being on "Celebrity Apprentice". The article's title states "Donald Trump is a whack job", which, yes, sure, but the actual article is more about a guy trying to explain why everyone acts like an idiot on reality television, then attempting to provide a justification for acting like an idiot on reality television.
• Videogum's recap of this weekend's SNL, which was not very good (I only made it up through Weekend Update when we were watching it). Watching SNL on Saturday is when I was reminded that Jeremy Renner and Liam Neeson are not the same person.
• Also, Videogum's Thursday night TV recap. I come for the GIFs.

Links about people who have recently taken their own lives:

• Bike Portland remembers Justin Drawbert, a bike racer who committed suicide.
• Here's a brief Willamette Week article covering the memorial for "Working" Kirk Reeves. It includes a link to the fundraiser to put some kind of permanent remembrance to him at his old station on the Hawthorne Bridge.
• Reading those two articles made me want to link to this page to Multnomah County's Mental Health Crisis resources. The county has a 24-hour crisis number and a walk-in clinic that is open until 10:30pm everyday. 

iPhone apps that I briefly considered downloading but did not:

• Attachments.me (Free)
• Cue (Free)
• Day One - Journal ($4.99)
• CloudOn (Free)
• Paperless: Lists & Checklists ($2.99)

Links I went to that I wasn't interested in, but you might be interested in:

• Here's something that indie developers who make games for the Wii might be interested in, I guess? I was 0.5% interested in the contents of this article.
• I was going to read this NYT article about hipsters or irony or something, and I didn't even make it past the opening illustration. I managed to read the two paragraphs included in the Mercury's link to the article, and just: ugh. I'll have to go back and read this article sometime when I feel up to dissecting why this sort of article is so wrong in its thinking.
• Okay, I am done reading the Hostess bankruptcy post-mortems.
• Sometimes I just click on links because I don't know what they are. http://stupidtwittertricks.com/

Wikipedia Pages:

• Cambodian Campaign
• Watergate Scandal
• Angels in America