Portland's Daily Drip

Good morning Daily Dripsters! Here we are bright and early, or at least early, on a Monday, October 16, 2017, with some dabs of sun along with clouds and fog, and highs of 68. Sunrise today’s at 7:28 AM. Sunset 6:22 PM. We’re now below eleven hours of daylight. Three more weeks, and we’re back on Standard Time.

First thing…my deepest respect to all women who are posting “me too” to come forward as victims of sexual assault, harassment, or any of the disgusting variations of that behavior by the likes of Harvey Weinstein, Bill O’Reilly, Roger Ailes, and the innumerable other cockroaches who haven’t been dragged into the sun’s light. Yet.

Well hiya! Here’s the Daily Deluge to wrap another week that we’ve survived somehow, so good for us! It’s Friday, October 13, 2017, and the weather…showers likely, mid 50’s, then a partly sunny and 60-ish weekend. Sunrise 7:24 AM, sunset 6:28 PM.

Hey that was quite the little tornado scare we had in our neighboring zip codes, from Aurora to Canby toward Mulino and Beavercreek. Weak little EF-0 that it was, it’s a bit concerning when the weather map shows a bright red box right over your house…Glad everybody’s OK. Somebody’s going to have to repair their old 1960 Cessna Skylark (I ran the N-number thru the FAA database) that flipped on a taxiway at the Aurora Airport. Imagine the Molalla High School students, sheltering in place, when they wanted to be getting ready for the homecoming game with Estacada. Oregon City’s homecoming parade started off in a break between showers….did it end up getting dunked? I dunno, but I hope a Dripster can fill us in…

Word from California is that the longtime home of “Peanuts” creator Charles Schulz is one of the many houses destroyed in the wildfires that have killed at least 31.

Ooof..this hits us in our state religion, to which our families adhere, just like yours: we’ve got a big recycling problem. China is no longer accepting mixed paper and plastic, and our local recycling industry is running out of capacity to sort this stuff out. So all kinds of recycling is piling up, and guess where it might have to go? Yup, the landfill.

With Congress whiffing on its long-promised repeal of the Affordable Care Act, President Trump is trying to do it bit by bit through executive orders creating cheaper plans with skimpier benefits, while wiping out federal subsidies that help folks pay for health care. Analysists say premiums will go down for healthy folks, and way up for the rest. This could spur Congress to work in an unaccustomed bipartisan way to fix things.

A Canadian-American family that was freed by the Taliban after five years in captivity is now on its way home.

Clackamas County’s EMS Chief Bill Conway has taught a lot of people to do CPR, and he put that skill to work the other day when somebody collapsed at a Grocery Outlet in Oak Grove. He heard a crash, saw the person on the floor, went to work, and saved a life.

Some of the pieces are coming into place for the holiday season, which is just around the corner…and doesn’t that sound good, right about now? UPS is hiring for temps…Amazon has 120,000 openings…

Cue the sports sounder! The Portland Thorns play North Carolina for the National Women’s Soccer League Championship Saturday at 1:30 on Lifetime TV. This team has a huge following here. The Timbers play DC United Sunday afternoon at Providence Park.

In the craziest game I’ve seen since I coached my daughter’s softball team, the Cubs managed to win against the Washington Nationals, whose poor catcher committed three blunders in a single inning. The Cubs get to play the Dodgers in the NLCS next; LA owned the best record in baseball, 104-58.

The Oregon Ducks (4-2) are at Stanford (4-2) at 8 PM (that’s right, really late) Saturday on FS1. Palo Alto’s breathing air is affected by the fires up north, though not to the same degree as San Francisco and Oakland. The Colorado Buffaloes are at Oregon State, at 1 PM. There are so many reasons now to root for the Beavers; they’ve been left for dead by their own coach. But all of the players and all of the assistants now running the show have a chance to show their guts and resilience. Winning a game would be a cause for joy.

Blazers play-by-play announcer Brian Wheeler is taking a few games off to attend to health matters. In to sub for him is longtime KEX-er Scott Lynn.

It’s Paul Simon’s birthday. He has an otherworldly gift for lyric and melody, and if you pick up a guitar from time to time and attempt to play his stuff, you know how incredibly good he is.

The Portland Fall Home and Garden Show is underway. A lot of things to discover…business cards to pick up….

It’s Friday the 13th. Does anybody give a rip? Sure. Many people suffer from irrational superstitions, including Stephen King. He counts steps when he climbs stairs and always skips number 13. When he’s reading or writing, he’ll never stop on page 13, or any page whose numbers add up to 13, like 94. And Dublin-based Ryanair never has a row 13…in spite of all the luck o’ the Irish.

Circling back to yesterday’s weather spasm..I want to say thank you to the Daily Drip community for the coverage. Readers posting updates and photos are why the DD’s highest purpose is served in breaking situations that could involve public safety. We’ll do that again and again in the winter to come. That’s also why the DD will always be anchored in social media, even though eventually we’ll add other platforms, to expand the offerings when time allows.

And now…off into the morning!

Let’s flip on the burner for the Daily Drip on this Thursday, October 12, 2017! Just one more day of these turbulent skies, with more thunderstorms and highs of 55, then a classic NW autumn weekend: fog fading to sun, and highs in the 60’s.

Anyone get caught in a downpour?…My puppy and I were playing ball in the meadow when the sky gave a loud, long grumble and she and I made eye contact and together made a beeline up the trail, a man and his dog, running for shelter….All across town multiple rainbows speared the ground. And three waterspouts give a swirly to the waters off the Washington coast. I bet flying in or out of PDX was a mite hairy, too.

Heading south….

A boiling river of wine..the worst air quality in San Francisco history…hellish images from the fires in the North Bay counties..200 folks missing and 23 dead now, including a 100-year old WWII veteran and his 98-year old wife, trapped in their burning home….Oregon has now mobilized ten strike teams to send to our friends in the wine country, providing their exhausted firefighters some relief. Some have worked 80 hours straight through. Jeff Cowan, fire chief in Keizer, and a valued Dripster, texts to say that fifty Oregon fire engines are heading south, and they go with our very best wishes.

Gratitude in the Gorge….where on Monday a $46,140 check will be presented to the Hood River County Sheriff’s Department Search and Rescue Division for their heroic work in helping a large group of trapped hikers escape the onset of the Eagle Creek Fire. The money was gathered in an online effort by Friends of the Columbia Gorge, with 525 people chipping in. Still, for the record, no charges against the youth who created this disaster.

No school tomorrow! That’s an in-service day in Portland and Vancouver and most everywhere else..which means a three-day weekend, and the Friday Night Lights will be blazing on a Thursday.

Ed Secretary Betsy DeVos declared herself “extremely impressed” after sitting in on some AP history and literature classes at McMinnville High School, where reporters may have outnumbered students, then touring the Evergreen Space Museum, where the high school’s aerospace and engineering pathway classes meet. She saw demonstrators, too, from both sides of the Trump divide.

Several protestors were arrested for taping themselves and blocking ICE headquarters in SW Portland. Hoods and earmuffs were placed them over them to protect their vision and hearing from the saws used to separate them.

President Trump, amping up his assault on the press, grumbled aloud about reporters being able to “write what they want,” saying “people should look into that,” and threatening to revoke the broadcast licenses of the networks, although networks don’t have licenses, individual stations do. And cable networks don’t need broadcast licenses at all. Nebraska Republican Senator Ben Sasse asked the serious question of whether this president is recanting his oath to protect the Constitution.

New York authorities are reopening their investigation of allegations against Hollywood pariah Harvey Weinstein. There is no statute of limitations for rape in New York. By the way, despite reports that he’s flown to Europe–potentially pulling a Polanski–other reports put him at a rehab facility in Arizona.

A man in the Marion County town of Gervais tells this odd story: a coyote walked up to him, sniffed him, and bit him on the leg, so he pulled out a gun and shot him, or a friend did, and anyway the dead coyote was dragged to the vet where it tested positive for rabies, which is pretty rare, and now the man has to get those awful shots.

I have no idea why, but some guy detonated a hand-held explosive when he was pulled over by a cop on NW 185th in Rock Creek. Both he and the officer were injured, but will be OK.

You’ll see an assortment of fighter jets roaring off the runways at Portland International, as the Oregon Air National Guard engage in advanced aerial combat training with F-16’s out of an Air Force base in Arizona. Most of this Top Gun stuff happens off the coast.

John Denver lost his life twenty years ago today. He was an accomplished pilot, but his plane ran out of gas, and the lever for the backup tank was so awkwardly located that he couldn’t reach it before his craft came down into Monterey Bay. As a Coloradan, it was an honor to interact with him on multiple occasions. KATU anchor Julie Emry and I together introduced him at what turned out to be his last concert in Portland. My wife Cheryl and I spent some of that evening backstage with him and his band; he couldn’t have been more gracious, more intelligent, and more serious about the causes he cared about: the earth’s environment, and the life of America’s rural people.

Big news for the Boy Scouts: girls can join Cub Scouts–and eventually become Eagle Scouts, a high achievement indeed. Steven Spielberg was an Eagle Scout. Neil Armstrong. Ross Perot. The Girl Scouts, however, are quite unhappy about this, and point out that they too offer STEM, outdoor adventures, and other valuable experiences–in a girl-friendly environment

This is the day 525 years ago Christopher Columbus “discovered” the Bahamas, though they were already inhabited. He never set foot in North America.

Today is the 55th anniversary of 1962’s Columbus Day Storm, the Category 3 extratropical remnant of Typhoon Freda that raked the Northwest, leaving a billion dollars in damage and indelible memories in a traumatized populace.

Thanksgiving is six weeks from today.

The Yankees eliminated Cleveland from the AL playoffs last night; the Cubs and the Nationals play their decisive game today.

There’s the Daily Drip for today. Sometimes I squeeze the good-news sponge and not much drips out, you know? Today’s better than yesterday, which is always the goal around here, right?

Good morning! Here’s the first shuffle of the news deck for a Wednesday, October 11, 2017. It’s fall, we feel it, the showers are familiar and they’re OK, sweetened up by sunbreaks and rainbows, but chilly; high today 55. We’re rummaging around and finding clothes we haven’t thought of over the hot smokey months; my “Get Lucky” hoody is back in rotation. The winter snowpack is starting to make its bed in the Cascades, with perhaps two feet of accumulation at Timberline over the next few days. Sunrise 7:22 AM, sunset 6:31 PM.

We’re thinking about our neighbors just south who are living through a fearsome time, as fires driven by winds are destroying so much of what makes the California wine country such a special place. The Oregon Department of Forestry has a team of firefighters on the way. At this writing, seventeen are known dead, 180 unaccounted for, and 2000 buildings are lost. One Santa Rosa neighborhood is nothing but chimneys. It’s fascinating to hear from Daily Drip readers with close friends and kin down there, the stories of their peril came up frequently in yesterday’s Comments, and I hope to see updates today. We care and wish them the best. They must feel like we did when we watched the Columbia Gorge burn. Makes me think of Don Henley’s closing words of the last cut on the “Hotel California” album…”You call someplace paradise….kiss it goodbye.”

Puerto Rico is still 85% in the dark. People are beginning to die from water-borne diseases.

A pedestrian was hit by a car at SW 10th and Mill on the PSU campus–then pulled out a gun and fired at the car. Apparently missed.

An overnight crash has caused a power outage affecting almost 2000 customers near SE 122nd and Powell.

The driver who killed those people in a head-on crash near Salem had a blood alcohol level of .318. Multiple repeat offender.

Salt Lake City police have fired the detective who arrested and manhandled a nurse for doing her job by refusing to draw blood from a suspect without a warrant.

Ugh…I just read The New Yorker…and heard the audio tape…detailing just a few of the deeds of that predatory Hollywood creep Harvey Weinstein, the latest pig to be hauled squealing into the daylight, and how he was protected for years by a sycophantic system, like others of his boorish ilk, with victims in such legitimate fear for their livelihoods that they dared not call them out for their crimes. I hope we learn something. I hope more rats are dragged into the sun.

Do you think Sarah Huckabee Sanders, whose fate is to be the White House press secretary doing the daily briefings, is binge-watching “The West Wing?” I could see her trying to emulate CJ Cregg when she explained to the media her boss’s idea of putting his IQ up against Rex Tillerson’s: “He was making a joke. Maybe you guys oughta get a sense of humor and try it sometimes.” Because that’s so easy during these days. She also invited the press to bring their kids to the White House Halloween party, “so we can sugar them up and send ’em home with you.” Great. Lighten up. Let’s just dial back the nuclear threat a little.

On this day in 2002, our 39th President Jimmy Carter won the Nobel Peace Prize “for his untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.” Ironically on that very same day fifteen years ago, the Congress authorized American military action against Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein’s supposed weapons of a mass destruction, resulting in a war that we’re trying to figure our way out of.

The US Men’s Soccer Team has failed to qualify for next World Cup for the first time since 1986. They were beaten by Trinidad and Tobago 2-1.

Jeez…I just read the Drip so far..pretty grim, no? Let’s see if we can channel our Chaka Khan and tell you something good.

Women in Saudi Arabia who were recently given the right to drive had a secret ally in lobbying for that change: Uber. The company helped persuade the Saudi government that mobility for everybody is a huge economic plus, and has created a training center to teach Saudi women to drive–including for Uber, if they choose.

It’s high time we start thinking about Halloween costumes this year. The floor is now open for nominations. Fox News ran a piece that accomplished the dual goals of stirring up a Foxlike harrumph at marginally inappropriate costumery….while showing rather delightful pictures of it.

Ummm, that’s all’s I’ve got. We’re having a planning meeting for our December 15th Christmas broadcast, so I’m wearing the bright red shirt that I always wear to these meetings. I am told, by the way, that I need a tuba. Anyone have a spare tuba?

It’ll be good to hear updates from Driplandians who are traveling, or have friends in the California fire zone, or are having challenges and adventures, or just want to stay warm!

Hello there, Dripsters, visitors, and those who’ve found the secret beta site! It’s Tuesday, October 10, 2017. You can tell it’s fall when you turn the porch light on for the kids coming home from practice. The weather is taking a bend toward the dark times as well, with rain arriving around lunch, maybe, and highs of 60. We didn’t get anywhere close to 70 yesterday, as they were promising on TV. Just 66. Soon that will seem the epitome of balm. We’ll get snow on the passes tomorrow. Sunrise 7:20 AM, sunset 6:33 PM

Some findings from KGW’s excellent “Tent City USA” investigative report, and props to The Ocho for doing the work: A near-unanimous majority of people living in tents–89%, in fact–say that if they had a choice between a tent and a shelter, a tent is where they want to be. And: most of the tent people are not new to Portland, as we imagine. And: tent-dwelling is a fairly new phenomenon: 37% of the 100 campers who filled out KGW’s questionnaire had been sheltering that way for a year or less. Seems like Mayor Charlie Hales’ tent amnesty backfired. Also, and this breaks my heart, a lot of the campers are mature adults whose grown kids have no idea that’s how they’re living.

Out of the blue we learn that Education Secretary Betsy DeVos will drop into McMinnville High School on Wednesday. She’s not coming to give a speech, but is here specifically to check out the school’s Engineering and Aerospace Science Academy. McMinnville HS Principal Tony Vicknair, as a professional public educator, owns up to mixed feelings, and protests are quickly organizing, but Vicknair made this point on the school’s Facebook page: When our students walk across the stage, they must be able to have a civil discussion with those they disagree with, “honor and evaluate multiple perspectives,” and in the end, let “evidence and logic” rule the day. Keep an open mind. Let it all hang out.

The Diablo winds are blowing an apocalyptic firestorm across hundreds of thousands of acres in the California wine country. So far ten people have been killed and 100 injured, but we’re finding out that in these suddenly frequent extreme events, early numbers are unreliable. Thousands of homes and commercial buildings are gone. A large chunk of Santa Rosa is evacuated, and the fire’s hit the Hilton, the Trader Joes, the Luther Bank concert hall. The town of Redwood Valley was caught off-guard, with no time to evacuate; the number of people trapped in their homes is unknown. Hundreds of people in the wine country are in hospitals with burns and smoke inhalation. Some hospitals have been evacuated, with patients being rolled out on gurneys against a hellish background of smoke and flame. Explosions are heard few five minutes; those are gas lines blowing up. Sometimes ammunition. The fate of the animals in a small zoo is unknown. Employees at hilltop wineries were plucked from the vineyards by helicopter. Cannabis growers will see their crop go up in smoke.

San Francisco, in the meantime, is checking the same EPA air quality web site that you and I consulted during the worst of the fire in the Columbia Gorge. It’s ranged from yellow to purple; moderate to very unhealthy. And Bay Area folks, as we did a month ago, are waking up to find ash on their cars.

To the south, the Santa Ana’s are whipping wildfires in the Anaheim Hills as well, casting the southern California skies an ominous orange.

The head of the EPA, Scott Pruitt from the oil-and-gas state of Oklahoma, and a nonbeliever in the science of climate change, today will nullify the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, which imposed strict limits on carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants. Pruitt says “The war on coal is over.”

Meantime, from the Trump twitter account this morning: “Since Congress can’t get its act together on HealthCare, I will be using the power of the pen to give great HealthCare to many people – FAST.”

Late yesterday the Attorney General of Washington filed suit against the administration’s rollback of the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that health insurance plans cover birth control. The Trump travel ban hits the Supreme Court today. Oregon and Washington are among the states hoping to shoot it down.

Portland’s pristinish Bull Run water just had another sample test positive for Cryptosporidium. Until early this year, we’d gone years without a trace. The microorganism can cause disease, which is why the city is planning to spend half a billion for a filtration plant. The Water Bureau is confident that Bull Run water is safe to drink, but if someone in the family has a badly compromised immune system, they really should check with the doc.

Vancouver police are initiating a crackdown on the common practice of licensing cars in Oregon, because it’s cheaper. They say that as many as one in ten do it. The strategy begins with volunteers patrolling neighborhoods and planting helpful leaflets on windshields of cars with suspicious tags–and subsequent followup by the PD.

A wrong-way collision on I-5 near Salmon Creek took a life last night.

A dump truck, rumbling the streets of Cornelius with the bed sticking up in the air, took out five utility poles.

What kind of a college football program parts ways with a coach before the World Series even begins? One that’s hit bottom; it can only get better for Oregon State.

American Jazz pianist Thelonious Monk was born 100 years ago today. Highly original and hugely influential talent (idolized by John Coltrane, for one) with weird gifts–like playing different dynamics with each finger–forte with one, pianissimo with another; and he’d intentionally drop notes out of chords, like the third and the fifth from a major seventh…so what remained was a chord that sounded dissonant and yet exactly right at the same time. That, plus his strange behavior, like getting up from the piano and dancing in the middle of a song, or wandering away altogether, were chalked up to drugs; but not the illegal kind. Biographers learned they were medications crudely prescribed for a condition not yet understood–probably bipolarism.

Today is Leif Erikson Day, commemorating the Norse explorer’s landing on the northern tip of Newfoundland in about 1000 AD, perhaps the first European to arrive in the New World, though some other guys who were blown off course may have beaten him to the punch, or mead, in their case. Whatever those guys did over here didn’t stick the way Columbus did. There is a statue of Erikson in Reykjavik. There’s another Erickson who’s similarly motionless right now, but I’d better get it in gear and roll into the radio station for another morning’s merriment on the mighty 103, with half an eye on what’s happening right here on the DD!

Good morning, and happy Indigenous Peoples’ Day! We’re grinding up the Daily Drip for a Monday, October 9, 2017. Portland’s weather is sparkling, with abundant autumn sun and a high of 68. Sunrise 7:19 AM, sunset 6:35 PM. It had the feel of a deepening fall last evening when the creamy orange peak of Mt. Hood quickly turned dark silver, and my hand felt numb around my IPA.

The sun’s coming up on a quieter downtown Portland than we saw yesterday, where the day began with the running of a thankfully screwup-free Portland Marathon, and ended with a small but clamorous rematch of the Patriot Prayer and Antifa crowds, with their dueling noisemakers, bullhorns, and most of all, throats. One man was arrested for toting a gun on Federal property; he was in the news last summer for defending the alleged MAX knifer. As for the Marathon, everyone seemed pleased with the out-and-back course, nobody was accidentally channeled running into an extra half-mile like last year, and there were porta-potties aplenty.

Wearing the horns of chagrin today are a dozen or so members of the Clackamas County Sheriffs Department who grinned and preened in a midnight nude calendar shoot inside the county courthouse as a very special gift for a retiring deputy. These guys, and they’re all guys, are sprawled around posing in provocative ways, with their naughty bits concealed except for the occasional moon. The sheriff is taking this all “very seriously,” in contrast to the rest of the world, which will laugh up its sleeve as this story spreads.

Portland’s KGW-TV is pre-empting its 6 PM news hour today for an investigative documentary on homelessness with a title that’s stung City Hall. “Tent City USA” reports that a third of the city’s population would consider leaving town because of the ubiquitous proliferation of unhoused people. Seeing this coming, Mayor Ted Wheeler called a news conference Friday seeking to refute the show’s title, amid the perception that no progress is being made. It’s not just a Portland problem, he pointed out. Nevertheless, it is a Portland problem, and it’ll be interesting to see what KGW shows us.

Columbus Day is celebrated in many cities, today, although not in Portland, which recognizes today as Indigenous Peoples’ Day in honor of those who were swept from the path of Columbus and those who followed. It’s not a day off for most of us, and the meters do require feeding. But you’ll get an echo if you shout into your mailbox today.

President Trump laid down his conditions for protecting the 800,000 DACA people who were brought illegally to the US by their parents. Chief among them is The Wall. Trump also tweeted congratulations to himself for the recovery work in Puerto Rico…”Nobody could have done what I’ve done for Puerto Rico with so little appreciation. So much work!” And he engaged in a twitter war with Republican Sen. Bob Corker, who uncorked right back, saying that the White House “has become an adult daycare, and somebody missed their shift.”

VP Mike Pence racked up a lot of miles over the weekend, flying to Las Vegas to honor first responders, then flying to Indianapolis to walk out of the Colts/49ers game after some San Francisco players took a knee during the National Anthem, then flying to Los Angeles. That was the lead story on the BBC last night.

The Dove soap company has apologized and yanked an ad which showed an African-American woman pulling off her brown shirt…and revealing a white-shirted red head underneath, as though that’s what soap does.

Harvey Weinstein, recently exposed as a serial sexual harasser, been fired by the Weinstein Company.

John Lennon was born October 9, 1940; his and Yoko’s son Sean arrived on his Dad’s 35th birthday. Lennon always said that 9 was his lucky number.

Dentists say they’re seeing a rise in the number of chipped teeth and other problems associated with munching on popcorn–which people are choosing as a healthy alternative to fried chips and such.

The highest of high fives to the Portland Thorns, who will play North Carolina this Saturday for the championship of the National Women’s Soccer League. The Thorns, and I love that name, are the sister franchise to the Portland Timbers. Rip City is representing!

Seahawks win…Blazers win…Yankees and Red Sox stay alive in the playoffs…Tigard stunned West Linn with a shutout in HS football…

It is my duty to report that this year’s Golden Spurtle, at the World Porridge Championship in Scotland, was won by a Swedish woman, dethroning Bob Moore, the founder of Bob’s Red Mill in Clackamas, where the porridge is nonetheless very fine indeed.

President Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on this date in 2009. He accepted it, saying he hoped someday to deserve it. I hope we all deserve it, through our thoughts and deeds, but for right now, let there be coffee on earth. Let it begin with me.

It’s Friday, do you feel it? Welcome to October 6, 2017. Weather’s taking a turn, but wasn’t that a spectacular evening to gaze skyward? The Harvest Moon popping up orange with the International Space Station zipping by….anyway, today’s fine, sunny, and 70, and then weekend showers show up around midnight. Sunrise 7:15 AM….sunset 6:40 PM.

Fall harvest is underway at the Willamette Valley’s hundreds of vineyards. The growing season got a late start because of spring rains. What I didn’t know until I talked to the winemaker at Duck Pond: many of the growers do their harvesting at night. And they’ve had lots of moonlight all week!

Well dang…¡Oba! Restaurante has suddenly shut down. It had been a mainstay in the Pearl for two decades, though we haven’t been there since I got in a beef with a guy over a parking spot. The owner abruptly clammed up his Beaverton seafood spot, Hall Street Bar and Grill, earlier this year.

The Nobel Peace Prize is awarded to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, a Geneva-based coalition of non-government organizations around the world.

President Trump made an odd comment to the press pool covering a White House photo shoot with military commanders and their spouses. Said he, “It’s the calm before the storm.” Meaning? “You’ll find out.”

Elon Musk is offering to have Tesla rebuild the Puerto Rico power grid.

PTSD is a terrible thing…a 35-year old vet at JBLM near Tacoma threatened to commit a Las Vegas-style killing, tried to ram the MP’s who chased him, then sped south on I-5 up to 100 MPH swerving around bumping cars and trucks, and ended up wiping out up against the BNSF tracks just south of Kalama in Cowlitz County. No serious injuries in any of this, amazingly. He’s locked up in jail.

A Multnomah County Health Department employee found a sticker in a break room advocating violence against Muslims. The county government is dealing with multiple instances of racism in the ranks, and its leaders have vowed to change the culture.

The NRA has made the rare move of agreeing to a gun control measure–a clampdown on those conversion kits that make machine guns out of semiautomatic weapons.

Gun-rights people are steamed after their failure to collect enough signatures to force a repeal vote on a new Oregon gun law, which allows a court to deny a gun to anyone deemed at risk of hurting themselves or someone else. They say Governor Brown waited until the last possible minute to sign the bill, depriving them of enough time to round up signatures by the deadline.

Harvey Weinstein was one of Hollywood’s biggest moguls, producing armloads of Oscar-winners like The English Patient, Chicago, The Lord of the Rings, Good Will Hunting, Shakespeare in Love, and on and on. But now he’s been exposed as a decades-long sexual harasser and creator of a toxic work environment at Miramax and other companies that have paid out settlements for his creepy behavior eight times over the years. He’s apologized and says he’ll take a sabbatical and work with a therapist. And sue the New York Times for doing the story.

Local media in New Hampshire report that a fireball crashed into a mountainside, touching off a wildfire–and the military immediately sealed off the area.

Tomorrow is Vladimir Putin’s 65th birthday. Think he’s about to retire? No way. It’s just getting good for him.

Howard Stern moved to satellite radio on this date in 2004. He’s got the maturity of a 9-year old, but he’s one of the best interviewers on the air.

McDonalds has absolutely no comment about an incident in the UK, where fifteen people dressed as Ronald McDonald marched into a Burger King chanting, “You’re s*** and you know you are.” The BK employees took it well, mostly ignoring them, and shaking hands with them when they left.

A woman in South Carolina ordered a yoga mat…and was delivered 20,000 oxycodone tablets from Mexico.

Three cheers for Charlie Svato of Iowa, who won $25,000 a year for life from the state lottery. Thing is…he’s 92.

Tomorrow’s the day of the international porridge competition in Carrbridge, Scotland. The winner of the Golden Spurtle (that’s a porridge-stirrer) last year was Bob Moore, the founder of Bob’s Red Mill in Clackamas, Oregon. He’s there again, trying to keep the Golden Spurtle.

Big day for the Blazers’ superstar Damian Lillard: today his second rap album, “Confirmed,” is released…as well as his line of Adidas shoes.

Football! Cougars at Ducks…5 PM Saturday at Autzen on FOX. The Beavers take on the USC Trojans at 1 PM at LA Memorial Coliseum. And the Portland Thorns play the Orlando Pride in the NWSL semifinals at 12:30 PM at Providence Park. Of the people in my little group, the team that seems to draw the most interest and attendance…is the Thorns.

So we’ve been through another week together! The concept of this space is holding strong, a reality-based and friendly hangout for perhaps somewhat shy people with a Portland interest or connection. I’m toying with adding an audio option, because the nice folks at iHeart have created a channel on the iHeartRadio app for me to use, creatively dubbed the John Erickson Channel. I think that’s what we called the annually flooded crawl space at the old house. Anyway, we might do something with that. Meantime let’s have no mean time, y’know?