Thursday, January 18, 2018

And now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome John E. and the Dripsters! OK, just trying out new ways of getting into this thing, other than, Hiya! It’s Thursday, January 18, 2018. How’s the weather? Well, lemme tell ya…it was not a night you want to be a ship at sea…they measured 37-foot seas off the mouth of the Columbia, where the buoys are… today will bring showers and 48, with a coastal flood warning, mountainous waves, and snow in the Cascade passes. Sunrise 7:44 AM, sunset 4:57 PM.

Weird clouds yesterday! Looked like angry marshmallows painted by Van Gogh. They have a name: “Asperitas.” which sounds like a Harry Potter spell. “Asperitas!”

The wrecked truck is out of the river, but ODOT has a football field’s worth of guardrail to replace along I-84 in the Columbia Gorge, and they’ll do it today. They managed to get the cargo out, too, without a catastrophic spill of rolled oats.

Wolves are back on Mt. Hood. Wildlife experts say hikers and campers should fear not. They’re naturally afraid of people, having watched the news.

Friends, sad to say the time has come: the final season of “Portlandia” begins tonight. It’s the show that showed to the world a picturesque city with darling good citizens to the point of being really annoying. I never realized its reach until we were in Berlin, and a tour guide asked for his flock’s hometowns, and when I told him ours, he grinned wide and said, I LUFF Portlandia! One contribution to our culture this year will be the creation of traffic lanes just for twins wearing identical outfits.

The real Portland City Council, whose meetings are sometimes indistinguishable from the show, gave its vigorous approval to a 20% cut in the speed limit on residential streets. It’s effective as soon as the thousands of signs are painted (who says there are no jobs for artists?), which officials imagine will be in April. The council leaned on a state legislator in attendance to give the city the power to cut speeds on arterials as well. And Commissioner Nick Fish imagined the day when technology will allow electronic readerboards to address errant drivers by name–“Hey, Nick, you’re going too fast!–and email them a nice fat ticket by the time they come home.

Oregon’s unemployment rate wrapped up the old year at a slim 4.1%, which Governor Kate Brown is proud to tout, matching the national rate, for which President Trump is happy to take credit.

Big news from Apple, as the company is seizing the windfall under the new tax law to build a second campus, location TBA, hire 20,000 workers, and bring back to the US the quarter of a trillion dollars it has squirreled away overseas. But they’ll still build the iPhone in China.

The Dow is opening above 26,000 today, as money managers hop aboard before the elevator hits the top.

President Trump released his “Highly Anticipated 2017 Fake News Awards.” They were primarily 1) errors that had been corrected, 2) opinion pieces, not news, and 3) the general category of Russian interference, for which investigations are very active.  The rebuke from Republican Sen. Jeff Flake: “When a figure in power reflexively calls any press that doesn’t suit him ‘fake news,’ it is that person who should be the figure of suspicion, not the press.”

Headline in the Washington Post: “Trump hotel reviews now flooded with a certain expletive on Yelp.”

Icy weather in the south and east caused trouble and danger on the roads, and look who came to the rescue of spun-out motorists in North Carolina: NASCAR superstar Dale Earnhardt, Jr, who then slid his own car right into a tree.

It’s Kevin Costner’s birthday. I think his best movies are baseball movies. Quote from him: “Field of Dreams is probably our generation’s It’s A Wonderful Life.”

The late engineer Ray Dolby was born in Portland 85 years ago today. He founded Dolby Laboratories, improving movie sound since 1971 (“A Clockwork Orange”).

Comedian Danny Kaye (“The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”) was born on this date in 1913. He was a familiar face in Portland…because for a long time he co-owned KXL.

It was two years ago today that Glen Frey of the Eagles died.

Paul Simon dropped out of law school on this day in 1965, to spend more time on his other job. Quote: “Why am I so soft in the middle when the rest of my life is so hard?”

Today’s headlines to put you in a better mood than I’m in now, having overslept:

–“Man Gives The Boots Off His Feet To A Homeless Man On The Subway”

–“Stranger On A Train Pays Distraught Woman’s Electric Bill Over The Phone”

–“Restaurant says it is “extremely happy” after finding envelope under its door from group of customers who walked out on $326 bill over weekend”

–“Students cheer when electricity finally restored to a school in Puerto Rico months after Hurricane Maria”

–“Koreas to carry single Olympic flag”

–“Pet saves lady from bullet”

–“UK appoints minister to combat loneliness”

(By the way: many of you know that K103 does “Tell Me Something Good” at 8 AM every weekday. As of this week we’ve added a replay…at 5:30 the next morning).

Oh! I alluded to this yesterday…the next Dripstock! Yes indeed, there’s one in the works, and I’ll have the 411 on everything including the date when it’s all nailed down. (Worry not, it’ll be free).