I tend to think of human beings as huge, rubbery test tubes, too, with chemical reactions seething inside. … So it is a big temptation to me, when I create a character for a novel, to say that he is what he is because of faulty wiring, or because of microscopic amounts of chemicals which he ate or failed to eat on that particular day.
- Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions
Not only are the terrorism policies of the GOPresidency defeatist, but the political, commercial, and media establishments’ participation assists in giving the terrorists what they want.
Several days ago, I lamented my experience, or indeed my non-experience of baseball this week. Amongst the list was the fact that I had to miss An Evening of 1860s Vintage Base Ball up at Fort Vancouver.
Well, according to the AP, officially announced earlier today was the Vintage Base Ball Federation which “will play by 19th century rules” and lead to a “vintage” World Series in August of next year.
Since no one wants to submit photos for consideration to fill the eight slots I have as the final redesign element before I can bring Portland Stories back online, we’ll try something else.
The site includes eight geographical sections — citywide, downtown, in transit, north, northeast, northwest, southeast, southwest. What locations or objects to you represent each of those areas? With people’s choices for that, I can go searching for photographs that might be available for use.
Addendum: So far, looking through photographs on Flickr that have Creative Commons licensing requiring only attribution, I’ve found a shot of the St. Johns Bridge for north, and a shot of the Hollywood Theater for northeast. I’m thinking southeast should be the Mt. Tabor reservoirs, but all the best ones appear to not be licensed properly.
Addendum: Nevermind. All necessary photos located and in place. Re-launch of the redesigned and currently-dormant Portland Stories is imminent.
Okay, here’s the deal. Part of the redesign of Portland Stories is a purely decorative sidebar consisting of eight photographs — each depicting one of the site’s eight geographical categories.
I’d like people with photographs they’ve taken of Portland to submit ones reflective of any or each of those eight categories — citywide, downtown, in transit, north, northeast, northwest, southeast, and southwest. Then I’ll pick which ones I want to represent each category in the sidebar, and provide proper credit to each photographer on the site.
If you have something you’d like to be considered for one of the eight slots, please email me via the contact link at the bottom of this site with a URL to the photograph(s) in question.
Thanks in advance to anyone interested in helping me fill out this last design element. Once it’s in place, the site will be ready for re-launch.
I’ve just discovered the single most elite domain in the entire decades-long history of the series of tubes known as the Internets.
Things may slow down around here for a bit, as I’m closing in on my redesign for the still-offline Portland Stories. It’s getting close, and I’m just about at the point where I need to bring the design into the content management system itself and start updating templates and testing if and how it functions under live conditions.
The policies of the GOPresidency when it comes to the so-called war on terrorism are defeatist.
This is the thought which occured to me sitting here at work, where I’m having a difficult time packing a copy of Whose Freedom? by George Lakoff because I keep reading just a couple more pages, and then just a couple more pages.
Translated into plain language, its policies are something like the following. The terrorists, it says, hate us because of our freedom. So much so that they want to kill us because of it. To fight them, we must curtail the freedom which they hate so much and over which they want to kill us. Only by so curtailing our freedom can we be safe. Not only that, but it’s also the only way for us to be free.
You can see the myriad fundamental flaws in the policy.
For one thing, it suggests that if we just curtail our freedom, since that’s allegedly why the terrorists want to kill us, they will stop wanting to kill us. For another thing, it suggests that by giving the terrorists what they allegedly want — an end to our freedom — they will be satisfied.
In other words, it’s not only a nonsensical policy, not only an Orwellian policy, not only a defeatist policy, it’s also one of capitulation to what the GOPresidency claims is the terrorists’ grievance with us. “We had to destroy freedom,” it argues, “in order to save it”