Desire of Ages...

This Jesus is going to do bad things to you...

And that is about all I can really say about the book "The Desire of Ages." I think it is supposed to be a children's bible, but it was too creepy to tell.

Note this was in the "classics" section...

When in Estacada...

The thing that is great about going to Estacada is that practically everything is planned out for you. For example, if you can't figure out where to meet your friends, you can go to the official meeting spot marked by a sign simply stating "Meet Here."

Since I showed up with friends in Estacada and hadn't planned on meeting people there, me standing in front of the meeting spot was an exercise in futility. But if I had waiting more than five minute, instead of the 15 seconds it took to take this picture, I probably would have met some Estacada residetns.

Amazing how small town planning works.

Repeating Images: Prisons within Prisons

Today's repeating image is of the jail within the Amache Internment camp. This concrete structure is one of the only remaining intact buildings from the internment era. It actually served as a dual purpose structure as a cold storage locker for the general store and a small time lock-up for odd incidents when residents of the camp became unruly, typically of evenings when men would become intoxicated on contraband sake or other alcohol.

At the site of the Tule Lake internment camp, one lone, concrete structure still stands in the barren land. This too was a jail for the camp. However, it held more serious "criminals;" dissidents who eventually were taken to the county jail in Alturas, California, before facing more serious charges for being unwilling to pledge allegiance to America and fight in its military and to disavow any loyalty to Japan.

Imprisonment within imprisonment. Kind of funny to think about. 

Your Savage Cabbage Leaves

Last weekend was the Scappoose Sauerkraut Festival. I love sauerkraut, but dedicating a festival to the what amounts to rotting cabbage that, by some fluke of nature and macrobiotics, tastes good is just one of those things that is just special. 

Although I believe the advent of isn't like my imaginings, here is how I picture town elders deciding how to put together a Sauerkraut Festival.

Town Elder A: "We have a might harvest of cabbage this year."

Town Elder B: "That we do."

Town Elder A: "We should have a 'Harvest Festival' to celebrate God's bounty."

Town Elder B: "But we are in Oregon and you know we won't get our act together for a harvest festival in time. All our cabbages will rot and ferment."

Town Elder A: "Perhaps that is our solution, we shall celebrate our laziness and fermented cabbage."

Town Elder B: Will you do the planning?

Of note is the book, Sauerkraut's Incredible Fascinations.  I am not certain if this refers to a certain type of sauerkraut that has gained sentience and now has set its limited intelligence on being intrigued with the world or whether sauerkraut is just a fascinating object.

But who cares. There was a giant, goddamned trout. Seriously, big ass trout! That was enough to make the Sauerkraut Festival cool.

Inter-sex Arithmetic

While algebra has never been my strong suit nor one of my interests, this is pretty cool.

You see, certain mathmagicians figured out that if you add up certain letters you get funny shaped inter-sex homuniculi as illustrated below. It all comes ancient Kabbalist tradition of creating golems, but instead of writing sacred Hebrew letters on the forehead of clay figures, simple algebraic formulas representing the X axis, Y axis, and the null point 0 are combined to make real live people with ambiguous sexual features.

This is science people. And it is magic.

Welcome to the Land of Frustration

Today I present the easiest road map for a man to understand, the arduous yet short trip down the road to sexual frustration. Why is this path so easy to understand? Well, every path you choose leads directly to yourself. It's kind of like a mirror to the soul, but with less introspection and more woeful masturbation.

Fear of inadequacy? Straight path to you and your sexual frustration. Deep seated emotional conflicts; Another direct express way to you. We could go on ad infinitum until your inner being and all self confidence is chiseled away the you grind your teeth at night in anguish reduces your mouth is reduced to soft pulpy masses. Ahem...You see if you get lost on this path, all the arrows point directly to the direction of your problems and the direction to where you will turn your sexual frustrations...yourself.

Squab: The Tastier Flying Rat

Old government pamphlets amaze me for their dedication to boring and archaic topics. For example, the lost art of squab husbandry. While a select few foodies might pine for pigeon on a menu at some fancy French restaurant menu, finding squab anywhere raised commercially is pretty much a lost cause...probably because they were bored to death after reading this educational missive.

People, more than likely, tired of the ever present rat-with-wings-that-wasn't-a-bat found in every city. They spread disease, poop on your car and on the occasional rock band, and they take over your parks and city streets like that one Hitchcock movie, Jaws.

However, I found the damned thing amusing. And so, just to preserve the proud tradition of raising pigeons to take to market. So here, everything you wanted to know about squab but were afraid to ask.

Flamingoes and Portland

Taking the OHSU Tram is one of those silly little luxuries of Portland that makes little sense unless you are a student, faculty member, or a staff member of the complex of interconnected hospitals of Pill Hill. You travel down a giant metal suppository strung on a zipline over a freeway to see some unattractive real-estate. Overall the trip is pretty unspectacular.  Why people find this to be a tourist destination of any sorts amuses me quite a bit. The only real thrill is the opportunity to see someone paint a profanity on their rooftop or possibly sun naked from a deck, but given the cold weather as of late, the latter is unlikely to occur.

So when I hit the base of the tram the other day and saw a makeshift flock of plastic flamingoes, I realized that someone else has some sense of kitschy novelty to this whole ordeal. With all the yuppie refinement and desire for progress this city yearns for, there will always be a tacky plastic element to it just under the surface. 

Simply put, Portland's newest "neighborhood" doesn't have a grocery store, stoops where people can gather to smoke and talk, or even a bar. But it does have plastic lawn ornaments...cheap plastic lawn ornaments.

Now in 3-D

Recently I have an old fascination with stereoscopic images has been rekindled. When I was a child a family friend gave me a couple of boxed filled with Viewmaster reels from the 1950s, I looked at them through an old bakelite viewer not really knowing the value of the collection until much older.

This stereoscope card is a strange one. I know little of the context from which it was made or of its origins. A friend gave it to me a few years ago because it had "Something Japanese and of the war on it." If anything, this one stereoscope card contrasts the collection of kitschy images of the 1950s Viewmaster reels' idealized America of tourist attractions, national monuments, and cartoon characters. 

Skunk

My grandmother sent me this postcard when I was about four years old. At this age, I wanted a pet skunk. While other kids wanted dogs, cats, gerbils, guinea pigs, or hamsters, I wanted an animal with a reputation of being repugnant.

I remember what made me think that having a skunk would be a wonderful pet. I had a early reader type book on raising wild animals. Somewhere, in my parents' house, the book is tucked away on a bookshelf in all of its seventies-era paperback glory. If memory serves, it showed a picture of a young boy in a flannel shirt holding a baby bottle to a pet skunk. The defensive glands having been safely removed to prevent any mishaps in spraying.

While wild animal husbandry was ultimately not the life for me, I kept this postcard tacked to a cork board in my bedroom all through childhood. My grandmother passed away before I turned six, so I really didn't get to know her. Just the little message that she wrote to me about my grandfather smelling a skunk when he was driving back from the hunting cabin. 

Kind of stinks, but the damned thing is cute...isn't it?