Good morning and happy Tuesday! It’s November 21, 2017, a day that will bring half an inch of rain and highs near 60. The shortest day of the year is a month from today. Daytime seem so brief now, just over nine hours, and we have half an hour yet to lose before it turns around. Sunrise today’s at 7:18 and sunset at 4:34.
It’s the last day of school for Portland students before the Thanksgiving holiday. The airport is doing fine, flights are on time and there’s plenty of parking…the snow level in the mountains is well above the highways for the next few days, but it’ll be back down to pass level on Friday.
You can bet a buck that we’ll be paying tolls on Portland interstate highways before the decade is out. That’s the vibe we get from the meeting of the Portland Area Value Pricing Advisory Committee which the DD reported yesterday. This was a big room full of smart people from varied interests ranging from AAA to the Oregon Truckers Association to the Mayor of Vancouver. Congestion pricing is common on the West Coast and around the world. Evergreen Point Bridge. Golden Gate Bridge. London, Stockholm, Milan. The upshot of the PAVPAC confab is that everyone’s peeved about traffic and this is something we can do about it.
So now it’s Charlie Rose, respected gentleman in that old avuncular CBS mode, who’s doing the ritual of rich and famous men who’ve been caught with their pants down. Rose’s apology professed great embarrassment, and added this sad sentiment: “I always thought I was pursuing shared feelings, even though I now realize I was mistaken.” Representative John Conyers looks like he’s next, with reports that he paid a staffer to settle a complaint. We have to go through this, so guys have it drilled into them that before they make a move that will fall anywhere on the sexual harassment spectrum, they are risking everything.
Nine men, ages 21 to 66, have been arrested in a child sex sting operation conducted by the Clackamas County Sheriffs Department. These guys were making dates with young teens on apps like Snapchat, Kik, and Musical.ly, and were most surprised, when they showed up at the meeting site, to find they’d been chatting up a bald cop.
GQ is running what it says is the true story behind a neighbor’s attack on Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, which left him with six broken ribs. It comes down to lawn maintenance. The Senator, the story goes, mowed his grass to the nub, while the neighbor kept his several precise and luxurious inches high. And whenever Paul would mow, the clippings were sprayed on the neighbor’s grass. The story says that neither man is well-liked in the gated community, where one neighbor said they’re “both a couple of little ****’s.”
Portland cops were called to a downtown location on a report of “a man losing a fight with a trash can.”
It’s Civil War Week, and what could be more important for interim head coach Cory Hall of the Oregon State Beavers? This: he and his wife Sarah yesterday became the parents of a son, Isaiah Bernard Hall.
Making the rounds in media media is the video of The Weather Channel’s really bad day at yesterday’s implosion of the Georgia Dome. They had the perfect location for the live shot–and just when the countdown hit zero, a huge bus pulled in front and blocked the whole thing. Pulled away when it was done. The bleeped expletives from the camera crew were as loud as the blast itself.
A whale-watching tour off the coast of Monterey, California hit the mother lode yesterday–spotting an unbelievable 64 blue whales, breaching and spewing and gamboling in the deep. Texas hold ’em, I think.
The Seahawks lost on Monday Night Football last night because their field goal kicker fell just short on a 52-yarder as time ran out. These guys are paid to make that kick.
Here’s a Thanksgiving fun fact: the whole idea of putting marshmallows on sweet potatoes owes its existence to a 1915 advertising campaign for the budding marshmallow industry. Originally marshmallows were a French delicacy made by elite chefs from the sap of the mallow plant. Then some guy in Rochester had the idea of using gelatin instead of mallow sap, and poof! A sweet, cheap, and fluffy product was born. Cookbooks started rolling out suggesting many uses for this confection, such as mousse, baked apples, and a really spongy sponge cake. But the recipe for candied sweet potatoes is the one that sticks to this day. All over our cookware, plates, forks, and teeth.
Thomas Edison unveiled the phonograph on this day in 1887. I think Craig and I started playing records on KGW the next day. Hey! We’re playing our Christmas records on K103! We played a cut yesterday that I swear was on a compilation that my parents got every from…a tire company? Goodyear, Firestone?
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