Cedar chips for July 29

Musings from Little Beirut for a Tuesday...

• Environmental nutsies plan "acts of civil disobedience" to try and stop I-5 bridge from being built. Drivers, sick of being stuck in traffic for 2 hours to get to Washington to go buy frozen custard or El Pollo Loco, plan their own acts of civil disobedience: Rev your engine, expand your carbon footprint; provoking bicyclists; and idling with front tires on the draw span of I-5 bridge and back tires on the fixed span, keeping river traffic from passing by. (Trib)
• Man stumbles upon nude beach with kids and Taco Bell dogs, gets hit with 74-year-old nudist's expanding baton. Seriously. (KATU) (Perez Hilton)
• Democrats promise less partisan '09 session, forget that there are still Republicans who will do their best to make the majority sound as partisan as possible. (Big O)
• Radio hate jock says a certain political mindset is a mental disorder; members of certain religions should be banned; protestors should die… but dammit, don't be mean to our children! (SF Chron)
• Man stabbed at MAX station (Trib), so any day now the rich folks in the suburbs should be screaming with pitchforks that MAX is unsafe. This despite no adult being stabbed at a train station in the suburbs since approximately 1873, when Toothless Joe Duyck got in a tussle with Jellico Heynricxs about who was more Dutch on the Mt. Hood Railway's Gresham platform.
• OPB looks at Oregon open source community, fails to miss major connection — this is how we plan everything in Oregon. We get everybody together and say "you add whatever you want to project X." That way, when the proposal is finally finished, everyone can have something to hate. (See I-5 bridge for reference.) That, my friends, is open source government. (TOL)

Race War! Race War!

In the clip below, I want you to mentally make some substitutions.

Stan is a level-headed bicyclist.
Token is a motorist.
And Eric Cartman is the main stream media.



The attention on this cyclist-versus-motorist feud the last few weeks has been incredible. It started with the cutesey "Look, the drunk bicyclist went ape on a driver — and it turned out to be another bicyclist! Ho ho ho, isn't that funny?"

But then, like the Blob, it grew. First, with the video of the cyclist clinging to a windshield wiper. Then, with the pickup t-boned by a cyclist.

And most recently, the Critical Mass debacle in Seattle, where a gang of militant cyclists jumped a guy who was just trying to get to dinner. Now, all of the sudden, Newsweek is parachuting in and before you know it, the New York Times will be out here with their pretentious "Mr. Potter" this and "Mrs. Jones" that on second reference.

Is this the best we can do?

We're in the middle of an election year, tiptoeing (as a region, anyway) around a recession — for the first time anyone can remember, by the way, that Oregon wasn't thrown into the financial dunk tank first — and three incidents, all of which can be attributed to morons, constitute wall-to-wall coverage?

I don't think so. I think we're just inflaming motorists like myself (my first thought — if I was the guy in the Subaru up in Seattle, I would have been mobile the second someone jumped on my car, and I don't care who's in the way!) and inciting bicyclists who may buy into a mob mentality.

Instead of looking at the "new dynamic" between cyclists and motorists, how about we look at the psyches of these morons — the "Wait, did my windshield wiper grow a human-shaped tumor???" guy and our friends at Critical Mass — and expose the true idiocy that's brought these stories to the fore?

Contention rarely leads to consensus. Bicyclists have real needs, but unless the majority of motorists get on board with those needs, we'll never call those needs accomplishments.

Cedar chips for July 25

So let's say you live in a condo complex with a small parking garage underneath. In this garage, there's a big, metal garage door. It's creaky, it's got to be 100 years old and it's seriously slow and noisy.

You don't drive much, but it's a pain in the ass when you've got to use it. Still, it's getting to be time to replace the darn thing.

The question is this — you really don't have much use for the garage, but you've got some jackass neighbors who are constantly putting that thing up and down, up and down.

Do you teach them to not drive by disagreeing to fund it and offering to buy them a bus pass, instead?

Or do you bite the bullet and replace the garage door before the price goes up, up, up?

If you're Metro Councilor Robert Liberty, you sit in front of that garage door and force everyone to adhere to your way of life.

Liberty, who really aught to consider changing his last name to something more fitting, and his anti-bridge buddies want to have their cake and eat it too.

"Don't build the bridge!" they say. "It'll encourage people in that evil suburb of Vancouver to drive more!"

"Don't build the bridge!" they bleat. "It's a waste of money with gas prices going up because people will be driving less!"

"Build the damn bridge!" most Portlanders cry. "It takes too damn long to get anywhere these days!"

And so it has gone for the last decade or so, and so it will probably continue when Metro does its lands use analysis and finds that yes, there are still people in this country who want to have a back and front yard in a single family home.

And in Portland, those people move to Vancouver.  (Trib)


• 18,000-seat amphitheater broke, only drew 11,000 fans to largest concert last year. We're pretty sure the rest of them are still waiting to cross the I-5 bridge. (Columbian)
• One good way to keep you from forgetting your reusable grocery bag — charge you 20 cents when you don't bring them. (Big O) (Trib)
• Portland is now the second most liberal city on Earth. Thanks, Berlin! (WW)
• Developers lose Measure 49, turn thirsty lust for open space to make into mindless suburbia (why not Vancouver?) towards hapless golf course residents in the ag county. (Argus)
• Local Superfund magnate suggests we should drive 55 mph to keep the Earth healthy. (Pamplin) Arch-Republican ag county paper disagrees. (Argus)
• Vietnam Navy vets continue to overachieve. One's running for president, and one's kicking some major ignorant BiMart ass. (Times)
• Navel examiners at Oregonian suggest requiring calorie counts on food. (Big O) On that note, I'm off to drink beer, and don't tell me how many calories I'm consuming.

About Little Beirut

I moved to Portland some time ago, with rose-colored glasses about how wonderful of a place it is.

It's probably the best place, to borrow from Metro. But it's got a lot of growing up to do.

And thusly, I opine. Hopefully daily.

E-mail Little Beirut for advertising information. cedarrepublic@gmail.com.