Hello, Dripsters and visitors and folks just passing by! It’s Thursday, July 19, 2018, and Portland is noticeably cooler today, morning clouds from the coast, followed by sun and highs of 78. The AM clouds squirted out some drizzle over the coast yesterday, and could again today. Hot weather returns next week, with 100 possible on Monday. Sunrise 5:40 AM, sunset 8:52 PM.
That wildfire in the wheatfields and high desert outside The Dalles has killed a man who was fighting it on a tractor, forced the evacuations of Grass Valley and Moro, destroyed a famously-photogenic old farmhouse that stood for over a century, and jumped the Deschutes River. It’s covered 50,000 acres, and fierce winds are pushing it farther. Air quality is unhealthy from Pendleton to LaGrande. By the way, it’s called the Substation fire, because it started near a power facility…but BPA says none of its equipment involved. They are temporarily de-energizing some transmission lines for the safety of fire crews.
People in Kelso, Washington are under a water conservation plea, as measly river flows on the Cowlitz are causing potential shortages. There will be a voluntary even-odd watering schedule for the next month at least.
The NY Times reports that two weeks before his inauguration, Donald Trump was shown highly classified intelligence proving that Vladimir Putin had personally ordered cyberattacks to sway the 2016 election. But even as Trump gives contradictory answers on whether or not he accepts the intelligence, a young Russian woman remains jailed on charges that she was a secret agent in a covert operation to influence American politics.
Opinions are flying over a Portland art gallery’s display of a violent rendering of Trump. Internet comments on the Portland Subreddit range from “Disgusting and wrong” to “This is how you legitimize the alt-right’s righteous indignation” to “It’s an expression of a lot of the frustration many of us feel from having a treasonous president who is a Russian puppet. It’s art.” Either way, it’s been taken down.
Portland looks pretty rosy in an honesty test carried out by a YouTuber name Mark Rober, who arranged for ten wallets to be dropped in each of twenty cities, then tracked the rate of return. Detroit fared the worst with just 3 of the wallets returned…Seattle not much better at 5…but Portland was near the top at 9. Chicago and Salt Lake scored best with 100%. Mark had a couple of observations: it’s a good idea to write your number on a piece of paper and put it in your wallet, like, right now. And also: if you find a wallet that doesn’t have a number, pop it in a mailbox, and it will be delivered to the address on the driver’s license.
The buzz on the Mountain is that the folks who own Timberline have bought the tiny Summit Ski Area in Government Camp, and are tinkering with the idea of running a gondola from there all the way up to the Lodge.
An unusually low tide has uncovered an expanse of snags and stumps, all part of the fabled Ghost Forest on the Oregon Coast at Neskowin. The majestic Sitka spruces, two millennia old, were buried by a subduction zone earthquake way back in the prehistoric mists.
Speaking of ghosts: the Riders in the Sky 40th Anniversary tour–just off an appearance at the Bonnaroo music festival in Tennessee–is in Oregon this week. A generation of Millenials know their songs from Toy Story 2, plus these singing comedic cowboys have two Grammy awards. They’re at the Aladdin Theater tonight, Winston tomorrow, then The Dalles and Bend over the weekend. And for those with different tastes, the Portland Opera’s La Cenerentola–written in 3-weeks by a 25-year-old Rossini, yet considered among his greatest works–opens tonight at the Keller.
TMSG…and then…something different.
–“Thailand Cave Boys Say They Want To Be Navy SEAL Divers”
–“Black Teen reported for selling hotdogs… so city health department helped get him licensed”
–“This Gas Station Clerk Saved the Life of a Kidnapping Victim…By Locking Her in the Bathroom”
–“Anonymous donor pays tuition for entire University of Houston College of Medicine first class”
OK! Dripsters have requested more wisdom! I want to play with this a little. Some days, I’ll post something by Ghandi or Churchill or Harriet Tubman. And somedays, I’ll post something from someone completely different, and sometimes, like today. we’ll play Stump the Dripster. We’ll see if you can guess who it is. Today, it’s a 70s TV character:
“My Pappy always said that if God liked money, he would have given it to a better class of people.”
And:
“Well, before you take a bite out of something, you make sure it’s something that won’t bite you back.”
And:
“We’re all scared to death. I guess that’s the penalty we pay for living in a world where all the price tags end in 99 cents, and they sell mortuary plots on billboards next to the freeway. What you do is … is keep laughing.”
Who’s that?
Portland's Daily Drip 