Hark! It’s twelve days til Christmas! Welcome to this Thursday, December 13, 2018. Portland’s weather is in a peaceful lull, with some hit-and-miss rain and highs near 55. For our northerly friends, a vigorous storm with a subtropical tap is aiming at the Olympic Peninsula and then Seattle, where 50 MPH wind gusts could harvest some trees and douse some lights today. The southern periphery of that could bring sharp rises to rivers on the south Washington coast like the Grays and Willapa. There are high surf warnings and wind watches on the Oregon coast. Sunrise today 7:42 AM, and sunset’s stuck at 4:27 PM for three more days.
First…cheers rang through the hills as three missing people were brought out alive from an abandoned West Virginia coal mine where they were trapped for four days. The state’s Governor said afterward, “We didn’t quit, and we found them.” The two women and one man are believed to have entered the mine illegally in search of copper they could re-sell.
The community is being called on to help an Oregon City family who, in the midst of a home purchase, lost all of their money to a scammer, who tricked them into wiring the sale proceeds from their old home to a phony email address posing as a title company. The FBI tells them the money is not recoverable. They’re out over $123K, which was to be the down payment on their new house, and now they have nowhere to go. They have to be out of their old house on December 23. KGW’s got a link to a Go Fund Me for them, with a goal of $150,000. It’s raised about 7 K so far.
A Portland couple came home from a trip to Seattle find their door was wide open, their home was ransacked, toys they’d received from the Portland Fire Toy and Joymakers for their 11-year-old-son were stolen, ornaments were swiped from the tree…and then the thieves wrote on the bathroom mirror, ‘Happy Hollidays.” Misspelled. But KOIN reports their son said, “‘Presents aren’t everything, Mom. It can all be replaced.”
The first powder day of the ski season turned into a true adventure for more than 150 skiers at a very crowded Mt. Hood Meadows, after a power problem stranded them in mid-air on the Blue chairlift. The skiers were calmly and methodically evacuated by ski patrollers and others who teamed up and safely lowered the skiers to the ground one-by-one.
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People are reacting with sadness to the news that a survivor of the Holocaust, who made his home in the Portland area and spoke hundreds of times at schools across the region, lost his life Tuesday night when he was hit by a car in Hillsboro. His name was Alter Wiener, and he was 92 years old was he was struck while crossing Century Boulevard at Brighton Street. Police say the driver cooperated, and no citations or charges will be filed. Wiener was 15 when German troops overran his hometown in Poland. He was 18 when he was freed from a labor camp in May 1945. He lost over 100 family members in the Holocaust, and saw horrible things, and spent the last sixteen years speaking publicly on behalf of the Oregon Holocaust Resource Center. He summed up his message this way: “All the problems that we have in the world today come from the same root of prejudice. It’s senseless. Prejudice and stereotyping are absurd. We are all God’s children.”
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Michael Cohen reports to prison in March to begin a three-year sentence for a smorgasbord of crimes he says he committed to cover up “President Trump’s dirty deeds.” The National Enquirer flipped on Trump, too, promising to tell everything it knows, in return for avoiding prosecution for campaign finance law violations.
Theresa May retains her perch as Prime Minister of Britain, but she clearly lacks the vote in Parliament to pass her Brexit deal with the EU, and the EU says it’s not budging.
Looks like Nancy Pelosi has made a deal with young dissident Democrats to return as Speaker when the House turns blue in January; she’s promised to limit her term to four more years, and maybe two.
Oregon is getting colorful new drivers licenses featuring holographic images of Mt. Hood and other iconic scenes and a vertical orientation for drivers under 21, so people checking ID can easily see they’re under age. They’re designed to be much more difficult to duplicate. But they’re still not compatible with the federal Real ID act.
Sesame Street is debuting a Muppet named Lily who is homeless, who will help kids understand what homelessness is.
This is the day in 1577 Sir Francis Drake set sail from Plymouth, England on a round-the-world voyage that some people are sure brought him to the Oregon Coast. It’s in dispute. Drake wrote of dropping anchor in a place he called “Nova Albion”–and the map his crew drew of it looks an awful lot like Whale Cove, south of Depoe Bay. But about 20 other spots up and down the west coast make the same claim, and Drake isn’t talking.
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Yikes, do we need some good news out there!
–“Rescue personnel pull submerged car from icy Klamath river, surprised to find driver alive inside, surviving in an air pocket for 5 hours”
–“‘Mowgli girl’ who survived alone aged 4 in bear infested wild for 12 nights becomes young ballerina”
–“Melbourne gave 70,000 trees email addresses so people could report on their condition. But instead people are writing love letters, existential queries and sometimes just bad puns.”
–“They Make Killer Bread…but Dave’s also turns lives around, starting here in Portland.”
–“He’s run the same story for four days in a row, but Radio Daddio persists in spreading the word about Saturday health care deadline”
Details and links in the Coffee Cup, the first item in the Comments section on my Facebook page.
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Tomorrow’s the day of K103’s Christmas Broadcast, and I believe we still have room. I’ll link to the signup page on my Facebook so you can put your name on the guest list. We’re on the air for next week as well, so we’ll have more time for festivities. Perhaps we’ll add some live ukuleles to the playlist, who knows? But tomorrow will be something special. If you can’t be there, you’ll love it on the radio!
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