Skull / Bones

I passed by the Planned Parenthood construction site on MLK Day … Friday?  I saw that horde of protesters, waving signs showing fetuses, chanting about The Hands of Death and the Signs of Satan and the Love of Jesus.  And I saw a young woman bicycle past, and stick out her middle finger, sort of leaning over as far as she could without falling down.

A couple of thoughts occured to me.  #1:  This will receive news coverage shortly, for one reason or another — sure enough, it has because one of the contractors pulled out or something.  #2:  There will be some quotation from one of the protesters saying that Planned Parenthood is building here because they want to kill black babies.  Sure enough, there is.

I saw a woman  with low-cut jeans (hip-huggers, renamed something else a few years ago) and thong underwear peaking up above the jeans.  It struck me as two things: #1: An incredibly stupid look, and the uncomfortably unsexy while seeming to be meant to be sexy (and in this case it was by a skinny woman who theoretically was someone who, quote in quote “could wear it”, but it still just looks awful).  #2:  A fashion which we passed through around 2002 and perhaps tapering off for a couple years from there which I had thought as it tapered away we were done with, and I could avoid seeing it for at least another decade when perhaps some retro-look of 00 fashion will come back to vogue.  But, no … there it was.

But viewing the fashion palette, it strikes me that we’re cycling through the 1980s and will hit some stuff from the 1990s fairly shortly.  Which is interesting, because the 1980s is a collection of retro 1950s on to 1960s fashion and the 1990s ends up being retro 1960s on to 1970s fashion.  When we get to retro 00 fashion, it will be retro 00 retro 80s retro 60s fashion, and our collective heads will just explode… along with our peaking up above our pants thong underwear, which I guess will be worn by men in our famously gender=confused and bending future.

PRUNE After First Bloom
FRENCH AND ENGLISH ROSES

I don’t know which free newspaper box she stuck this one in, and once again the effect ends up being fairly sad.

WHO WAS Hypatia?  Pythagoras?

The words are written all on a page with a political cartoon — an anti-war message that’s reverberated over the years and has been copied to the point of cliche: a loudmouth shouts out a whole batch of missiles.  A smaller person has a horn to his ear.

MARTHA ON T.V. Says Don’t Prune French or ENGLISH ROSES Until After BLOOM

All a very odd obsession, and I don’t get it.  But next comes the biographical tidbit of what she thinks she is doing here:

I SAY WHERE ARE MY 3 SONS.  3 SONs?!  I Have not SEEN OR Heard from them in 12 Yrs!
HERSTORY

I imagine I’ll stumble past the same place one year from now and see much the same message, just as I did a year ago.

The headline for The Oregonian’s sports related “Grab everyone’s attention who walks by the boxed containers” front page yesterday was “Celtics Pierce Lakers”, obviously a play on the name of the Celtics star who had a big game, um…  I’m not much of a sports fan or particularly basketball fan, so … is it… Franklin Pierce?

Anyway, I asked someone who doesn’t follow sports”
“See The Oregonian’s front page headline?”
“No.  What did it say?”
“Celtics Pierce Lakers.  Guess who the big star of the game was?”
“Was it… Pierce?”
“Yep!”
“Lucky guess, I suppose.”
“What you need to do is show off to the next basketball fan you see by saying ‘Wow!  Did you see what Pierce did to the Lakers last night?”
“I’ll be sure not to do that.”

I quit shopping at Safeway a while ago, roughly because I resented having to swipe my purchases into a database of shopping knowledge in order to get a preferable price and roughly because I had moved to a location where two Fred Meyers were located closer to any Safeway.  For their part, Fred Meyers introduced their own piece of crock “Loyalty Card”, which “offers money back” for accumulated purchase, and I guess probably ends up just swallowing up money otherwise I would have “saved” if I had done what I generally do in clipping coupons.  It is, at the very least, less obnoxious than Safeway’s.  The terms of agreement of what the store demands for their “Loyalty Card”, and my desire not to have one, makes me loyal to Fred Meyers over Safeway.

But I had reason to shop at a Safeway this weekend.  I purchased some junk food item of ill health, quite frankly, which cost $1.39, $1.25 with the “Loyalty Card”.  I wait in line.  And the cashier cheerfully scans the object.

“Card?” she asks, as I lay out the buck and forty cents.
“No,” I said.
She looks at me confused.  “Do you… want to sign up for one?”
“No,” I said.
At which point she looks at me confused once again, and I smile weakly.  14 cents, into the ether.  I am confident that the cashier’s reaction can be extrapulated into some meaning for society in general, but I cannot quite articulate what that would be.

“TVs are made out of human blood.”

“What does that mean?”

“Plasma tvs.”

“Hm. Okay. The future, Today.”

“I’ll look it up on wikipedia.”

“There’s no way it can be the same plasma.”

tap tap tap.  “This isn’t as sensational as I thought it might be.”

“Well, you can just believe it.”

“Sure.”

“His first stop was in Medford.  That’s the Meth Capital of the Northwest.  There’s something in that.”

“Really?  Medford?  Meth Capital?”

“Yep.  You know what the Pot capital is?

“Yeah, Eugene of course.”

“Yeah that’s some really good weed from there.”

“Don’t like that town otherwise.”

“Well, it’s basically a college town.”

“Hm.  So, what’s Portland?”

“I dunno.”  Several seconds of silence.  “The thing is.  He lies alot.  The first lie I heard from him was the one where he said that he has slept with Hillary.”

The trend that is sweeping this city of mine, as well probably any number of cities with the same cosmopolitan-yearning demographic is…

Bottled fungi-marionetted water.  Apparently a man in Los Angeles has cornered this market, so buy some up and help the man build his empire.

Also, marionetting your own water with this fungi in a musky jar placed in some corner or other of your home.  I figure this substance is a sort of once every fifteen year fad which breezes through, leaves a mark, and than vanishes to plot its return.

I note that an “I Anonymous” gretting was recently published in The Portland Mercury which focused venom on the perils of a Kombucha Tea.  And I note that radio host Rick Emerson alluded to his hippy-ish wife growing it.  The cultural zeitgist of this city has officially picked it up.

I feel as though I am in on some bizarre in-joke.  The back of the bottled Kombucha Tea says it is native to some spot in the Himalyans, and I assume this to be the case.  It is also native, as I have said before, to a place in the middle of Siberi, probably far less exotic to name drop than the Himalyans.  I note that a google search for “Kombucha Tea” brings it as 100 times more popular than “Kargasok Tea” — where it sits at #1 suggesting that I am as big a lynch-pin as any to the task of keeping the phrase “Kargasok Tea” in the popular domain — and this phrase edges out “Manchurian Mushroom Tea”.

I also note a note placed next to the stock in the cafe in Powell’s which says it all.  “It’s supposed to taste like that.”  An acquired taste with supposed health benefits.  Hm.  I occasionally news-check ”Kargasok” (a place I was in for, like, 2 days with my parents, and which is nothing one can possibly reference in any conversation) — the residents of the area do indeed experience health problems, meaning the Wonder Cure for Every Known and Unknown maladay has not solved everything.

Which means I will not partake of it.  Unless I find myself in any place in the Himalyans which claim it as their own.  Or back in Kargasok.

Speaking of which, more fun:  Travel up the Ob River and re-create the journey to far-flung Gulags!  Weee.  (I’ll plug it in later.)

Passing by the protest yesterday, held in the shadow of heavy rain — which is to say, light rain that will turn heavy any minute now — I look over the gathering crowds and what little booths have been put up.  I see three political candidates — first I saw Steve Novick’s campaign, which meant to me that just around the bend, but never next to him, I would see Jeff Merkley’s.  Before I saw Jeff Merkley’s, I saw Ron Paul supporters had set up their little shin-dig — a bit of ideological diversity, I suppose.  I am a little bit annoyed — it seems a little tacky for politicians to set up shop in these things, crassly shifting about for votes.

A group of about a dozen O-PIRGers had gathered into what looked like a prayer circle.  Maybe, in a way, it was.  But they threw out a peppy slogan at the end, and I guess you can say were in good spirits.  A smattering of Women in Pink — indicating Code Pink — were here and there.

A ways away there is a memorial, on the edge of PSU, several grassy knolls of white flags representing dead Iraqis, after a handful of rows of red flags representing American dead.  If I find a photograph of it online, I will post it.

Walking around the bend, I see a man with a black handkerchief over his mouth, handing out fliers.  Pretty interesting — this is the infamous “Black Blocks” of these marches.  Or so you think.  I take a flier, look down on it, and see that he was mildly co-opting the situation – and there was a large troupe of Scientology critics waving signs aimed at the downtown Scientology Center.  A fat and well dressed man stood at the door-way of the Scientology Center, staring at the crowd, waving signs “Keep the Faith.  Lose the Corporation”; “Remember Lisa McPhearson”; “I Like Science Fiction Too — But I wouldn’t–”, et al.  It was … interesting.

I overheard a conversation on the MAX the other day which ran the gambit from Dungeons and Dragons to World of Warcraft.  The conversation was just as geeky as you will imagine.  The person I was sitting next to made some snarky comments that I was supposed to share, and felt compelled to jump off the Max at an early stop to get away from it.

The co-creator of Dungeons and Dragons died the other day, a man who I guess created a whole sub-culture of complicated and intense fantasy games for to lose oneself in.  The one thing that I found odd was a fascination some people, roughly around middle school, — outcasts drifting toward dressing in black — had with multi-sided dice.  20 sides!  They seemed to think it was very cool, in and of itself, outside any game sphere (and mind you, at this point Dungeons and Dragons wouldn’t be much played… we’re in the world of “Magic: the Gathering” — and if it relies on multi-sided dice, feel free to correct me and tell me so).  I failed to see the magic — not in the “Hipper than thou” model (Clearly I was and am not), but I tend to see a cube of 6 sides as symmetrically wondrous, and anything beyond that as awkward and bumbling — it does not role to a side.