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Lileks today:

Parenthood: driving by yourself, you see a VW, and you say “Slug bug.” Out loud.

This is something we do as a family all the time. The Boy is the all time points leader only because he’s not driving and thus concentrating on not getting us all killed. It won’t last. He’ll be driving next year and I predict his point total to drop significantly as he concentrates on driving fast and racking up speeding tickets rather than spotting Beetles.

Of course the Wife and I both say “Slug Bug” when we’re driving alone and see one. How can we not. At this point, it’s Pavlovian.

Larry Elder on why he won’t vote for Obama

Thomas Sowell on why imitation is NOT the sincerest form of flattery, especially when it comes to Europe, part one, part two, part three.

Glenn Beck is a bit bombastic at times, but I like what he wrote here.

Portland is such a nice place to live, what with the emphasis on sustainability, green living, public transportation, not to mention all of the cool outdoorsy things right in front of you like the Willamette river, the hiking trails in Forest Park, the Columbia Gorge a short 30 minutes east of the city.

Even the weather is cooperating with a beautiful sunny 75 degree day forecast, finally here in the middle of June.

So you can imagine my joy when a city and an area that has already given me so much to be grateful for went that extra step and offered up a free buzz while walking to work.

A new MAX line has been in construction along 5th and 6th streets for the past year. Since my office is on 5th, I’ve had a ring side seat as the street was torn up and rebuilt with shiny new rail lines, the curbs reshaped and the intersections redone with spiffy new brick work in an oh so Urban chic herringbone pattern.

Last week they finished installing the pole supports for the power lines and stringing those lines. This week, they’ve been painting those poles a nice, unobtrusive institutional gray. You can smell it from two blocks away. It’s some sort of industrial strength paint designed to bond with metal. The first whiffs don’t really do more than warn you of what to expect but as you walk further into the invisible zone around a pole, your nose wants to pack its bags and run home to momma, without so much as a forwarding address. But you press on because you’re already committed to heading in that direction. Besides its only this one right here you need to pass. You get closer and the astringent smell fills your head with its strangely cloying sweetness, so much so that it feels like that’s all that’s in your head, this smell. For a few seconds you feel heavy, then you feel a slight rush in your arms and you’re past the pole, out of the chemical zone and in fresh air again.

So thanks, Portland. You go above and beyond.

This past Memorial Weekend the Great Prognosticators of Weather had predicted partly sunny days, which is the same as partly cloudy in parts of the country where it doesn’t rain as much as it does here. You see the allusion, it rains SO MUCH that when the clouds finally do part, it’s partly sunny. There’s no point in calling it partly cloudy when fully cloudy is the default behavior.

Not that it mattered, the Weather Prognosticators were WRONG WRONG WRONG. It stayed fully cloudy all that weekend and into that Monday, but by Sunday, after a hundred or so years of the clouds and rain, we decided to bid a hearty “Fuck You” to the weather and the oh so smug Weather Prognosticators and GET OUT OF THE HOUSE.

So we did. I’ve been to the Oregon Zoo, briefly, and wasn’t too impressed. It a zoo, after all, and unless you have a hard on for listless African beasts laying around in enclosures faked to look like natural habitat, once you seen one zoo, you’ve seen them all. The cool thing about the Oregon Zoo, though, is where it’s at, namely Washington Park, which has a lot of other cool places to visit, too.

So we went to the Japanese Gardens.

Maybe it was the cloudy weather laying down a mellow atmosphere, maybe it was the fact that we drove a mile or so into Washington Park on a winding road through some beautiful, primeval forest, thereby losing, or at least temporarily suspending, our connection to the modern, hectic, world, but the vibe at the gardens was one of peace and tranquility.

Where the city is one big knot of humanity moving as fast as possible, as loud as possible, the gardens were still and silent. The moment I stepped through the gates, I felt all my tension and stress leave my body. There is just no way a person can be angry, or sustain any negative emotions for any length of time while in the gardens. The beauty of the place just overwhelms you and makes you happy to know such a jewel can exist in the middle of a major metropolitan area.

My photos do not do the place justice, but I am inspired to improve so that I can better convey the awesomeness of it.

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I’ve always looked at protests, those crowds of unwashed humanity snaking their way through downtown shouting and holding incoherent banners, as completely useless in solving/ending whatever or whoever is being protested. A protest isn’t for the thing being protested about, it’s for the protesters. The protest makes the protesters feel good, feel like they’ve accomplished something tangible when in reality the protest itself is just Chinese food, an hour later you’re hungry again and no progress has been made toward solving the problem.

As far as I’m concerned this is a blanket statement that applies to anyone or any group staging a protest, although generally speaking I’ve only seen leftist and left-leaning groups protesting. This says a lot about how ineffectual the left is in getting their point across. Rather than digging in and getting their hands dirty doing the work to come to a solution, which would be much more satisfying in the long run, they would rather whine and bitch about it in public. It’s a painful thing to watch and leaves me feeling dirty, like I’ve just burst in on my grandparents doing the nasty. Intellectually, I know they can and frequently probably do, but that doesn’t mean I want to see it.

Sigmund, Carl and Alfred has a slightly more nuanced take:

The left needs war and strife, because without war and strife, they would have to make actual contributions to benefit others. Bitching about democracies and freedom does not contribute to the benefit of anyone but the frauds doing the bitching. In every case, bitching is a lot easier than actually working and contributing- and if you bitch loud enough, you can convince yourself you are more relevant than you really are.

Obama is getting pissy:

In an interview aired today on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” Obama said, “The GOP, should I be the nominee, can say whatever they want to say about me, my track record. If they think that they’re going to try to make Michelle an issue in this campaign, they should be careful because that I find unacceptable, the notion that you start attacking my wife or my family.”

If you don’t want the other side to ‘attack’ your wife, tell her to keep her piehole shut. She stopped being a non-combatant when she started making speeches for your campaign.

Pure genius.

This is just sad. And funny. Sad and funny.

McCain had the balls to use this in his campaign. Maybe some of the Congressional contenders.

It would be great if he would prove me wrong.

This winter and spring has been a Costco-sized can of Suck. This is the Pacific Northwest, so rain in April is normal. Hell, rain in June is normal. Just not really cold rain. We should be having Spring rain. Rain that is, of course, wet, but not cold. What we’ve been having lately is winter rain. Rain that is wet AND cold. I never thought I’d ever be in a position to categorize rain, but there it is. Pacific Northwest rain has different characteristics depending on the time of year. It doesn’t just come down and make everything wet, it BEHAVES differently in different seasons and right now, in the LATTER HALF OF APRIL, it should be ACTING like Spring rain.

Last night, the Fetching Mrs. Bixby and I were soaking in the hot tub, keeping our heads as close to the surface as possible, like Japanese Snow Monkeys, because the wind blowing through the backyard was straight from the end of January. I looked at her and said, “So much for Global Warming, ” and she laughed, spraying warm water into my face and instantly melting the little icicles growing from my beard.

Today I’m surfing the intertubes and come across an article about the impending ice age. The same blog post which linked that article also linked this article about melting Arctic sea ice and how we’re ALL DOOMED to drown unless we move to Kansas.

Comparing the two articles, I find them both to be similar in that “Oh God!, We’re all going to DIE!” motif the Left has perfected when it comes to the climate. In contrast, the first is grounded in facts and the second is grounded in opinion.

Last weekend was stunningly beautiful, a cruel, heart-ripping tease of jaw-dropping good weather before Mother Nature bitch-slapped us with more clouds and rain the rest of the week, culminating in a time-warp back to early February and daytime temperatures in the 30s with a chance of snow down to 500 feet for this weekend.

Mother Nature is a cruel, heartless bitch.

To remind us of what we have to look forward to, what can be taken away from us so easily with a well-placed pocket of low pressure and a jet stream in on the scam, I present pictures of the tulip festival in Woodburn, Oregon. We drove there via quiet, country back roads. The three of us happy for no discernible reason other than we were wearing shorts and a kilt and could drive with the top down on the Mustang and let the sun kiss our pale skin.

The new voyages are cool. I’ve watched bits of the first episode and found it entertaining. The production quality is damned good. It speaks well for them that they’re able to get Walter Koenig and George Takei to guest star in some episodes.

CBS has put the original Star Trek episodes online.

Fifteen years ago, my sister joined the Star Trek video club and was getting a two-episode VHS cassette every other month for 19.95 or whatever it was back then. Now, she can watch them all for free and save the shelf space.

These are the days of miracles and wonders.

I’ll just let you watch this video of Harry Reid explain why we have a voluntary tax system.