Happy Monday! (And may not that be a contradiction in terms!) It’s October 7, 2019, and wasn’t that a peach of a weekend? Perfect weather, and wins for the Ducks, Beavers, and Timbers! Today starts out with an autumnal coolness–with temps in the 40s everywhere of the Cascades–and rain rolls in after lunch. Highs around 65. Sunrise 7:16 AM, sunset 6:39 PM. We have another month before we lapse back into Standard Time.
Farmers and firefighters from around the Valley teamed up to fight a hay fire that spontaneously erupted in a barn in St. Paul. They stopped it from spreading to another building full of livestock. Good moos!
Jimmy Carter took a fall at his home in Plains, GA, requiring 14 stitches on his head, but he and Rosalyn showed up in Nashville anyway for a Habitat for Humanity project named in their honor.
That victory for the Timbers brought joy to the Army in Providence Park, with Timber Joey slicing off three chunks from the log as clouds of green smoke erupted from the stands. And it put the lads into the playoffs for the fifth time in eight seasons; they will face Real Salt Lake in Round 1 of the MLS Cup playoffs in a couple of weeks.
Congrats to OSU QB Jake Luton, named national Player of the Week for his 6-TD performance against UCLA!
People seemed to like the new Portland Marathon course, which swept through 20 neighborhoods with families cheering from porches, and rolling hills but no steep climbs, on a bright Sunday. And nobody was stopped by a freight train, unlike last year. High-fives to our KGW friend Laurel Laural Porterr and her daughter for finishing the Half-Marathon! Likewise, congrats to Mayorr TedWheeler, who ran the full one in 4:16:52.41.
MAX is back between Gresham and Rockwood this morning. Folks in the eastern burbs have been trooping to work in a bus the last two weeks during a spiff job on the light rail system’s oldest stretch.
The Westside commuter may be a rough one as TV Hwy at the 178th and 185th Ave. intersections are down to one lane and controlled by flaggers.
It came as a big surprise to the local authorities in Eastern Oregon, but a new marijuana dispensary in the border town of Ontario celebrated their opening by bringing Snoop Dogg and Jim Belushi to town for a free block party that started at 4:20 Saturday afternoon.
Gov Brown has imposed a ban on the sale of flavored vapes for 6 months–but that’s short of the full vape-product moratorium that health officials believe is needed.
Oregon is watching closely as the US Supreme Court, beginning its fall term, hears arguments on a Louisiana law that allows prosecutors to win convictions even when the jury isn’t unanimous. Critics deride the law as silencing minority voices. Every other state requires unanimous juries for a guilty verdict. with the exception of Oregon.
The Portland-based ICE operation gets a deep dive in a New York Times piece about how “ICE Picks Its Targets in the Surveillance Age.” I found a completely unrelated and much happier story in the NYT that I link to in the TMSG segment below.
Cream’s Ginger Baker, one of the most revered drummers in rock history, if not the friendliest person on the planet–he famously punched out a reporter from Rolling Stone, who went on to write a laudatory story anyway– has died at the age of 80. He was one of rock’s founding drummers, taking percussion from its boom-ch-ch, boom-ch-ch routine to a much more complex melding of jazz and African influences that very few drummers could pull off.
The Winterhawks played at Calgary Sunday and fell 5-2. They’re on the road all week in Canada.
This was the first day of creation, under the Hebrew calendar of old, in the year 3761 BCE.
Hat tip to Garrison Keillor for this one: Today is the birthday of Desmond Tutu (1931), who said, “Peace comes when you talk to the guy you most hate…that’s where the courage of a leader comes.”
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An interesting collection of stories in the Cup o’ Good News today!
–“Secretly wealthy Wisconsin man leaves behind a small fortune…to be split evenly among everyone at his memorial”
–“Drug traffickers rescue police officers from sea after high-speed chase”
–“Deputy pulls over speeding car, delivers baby”
–“Superhero bus driver helps save a life for the third time in her career”
–“Let’s Meet Again in Five Years” (A must-read story in the New York Times)
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Let’s wrap it up, and dig into a Monday. What was the best thing that happened to you this weekend?
Portland's Daily Drip 