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Football season

Practice starts tomorrow. Here’s a look at last year, a fine photo gallery put together by Oregon Live before their Ducks faced Auburn in the BCS Championship game.

Thirty-something days and counting …

In professional camps, Cam Newton is getting positive early reviews with the Panthers. As always on a sports post, read the comments at your own risk.

There’s other stuff, too, National Night Out, where our neighborhood said “Dude. This is August,” and just recalled that they met people last year. Even the police didn’t bother to cruise through the neighborhood handing out the campaign literature. Now, if someone had been out offering ‘Smores and lemonade …

Speaking of lemonade, there’s the intent of the law and then there’s the intent of the law, and you can add this to your list of communities to avoid — or flock to, as you like — when reading this story:

Police closed down a lemonade stand in Coralville last week, telling its 4-year-old operator and her dad that she didn’t have a permit.

An officer told Abigail Krutsinger’s father Friday that she couldn’t run the stand as RAGBRAI bicyclers poured into Coralville.

And here’s another one, same town:

A mother of six also said her kids had their lemonade stand on 18th Avenue shut down after just 20 minutes.

Bobbie Nelson said she laughed when a police officer told her that a permit to sell lemonade would cost $400.

“The kids were devastated,” Nelson said. “They just cried and didn’t understand why.”

[…]

Mitch Gross, a member of the Coralville City Council, said he believes the city will learn a lesson from this. Gross said he expects future ordinances to apply only for vendors who set out to “make a profit.”

“It was never our intent to shut down kid’s lemonade stands,” Gross said. “We never really thought about it.”

That’s refreshing of the councilman, who admitted openly that he and his colleagues did not think through the two-day ordinance they passed in order to capitalize on a visiting bike tour’s tourist influx. Err. I mean looking out for people. So which is it? Money-hungry or nanny statism? So hard to choose sides somedays, isn’t it?

Do read those comments, where the people are throwing lemons back at the city.

And, finally, what space shuttles and horses have in common:

When we see a Space Shuttle sitting on the launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are the solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. The SRBs are made by Thiokol at a factory in Utah. The engineers who designed the SRBs might have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site.

The railroad from the factory runs through a tunnel in the mountains. The SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than a railroad track …

That’s as fun a tongue-in-cheek mini-essay as you can read today.

That’s enough for one sitting. Try to stay cool out there. The heat index here today was 102.

adventures / history / iPhone / Monday / photo — Comments Off
25
Jul 11

Writing retreat, Day Three

That rather looked something like a jail cell, didn’t it? It shouldn’t even have appeared monastic, honestly. We’re on the lovely Lewis & Clark campus. Small liberal arts college, some very nice scenery, though we are mostly stuck in the one building, Smith Hall.

We took a little afternoon walk to a nearby circle, sat on a bench and chatted for a minute, just to break up the reading and thinking.

trees

Nearby is the 35-room Tudor-style Frank Manor House, built in the 1920s for Lloyd Frank, of the Meier & Frank department store family. I’m told he donated the land to the college, and today his former home houses the administrative offices.

FrankManorHouse

Elsewhere, I’m writing a literature review. And that’s day three of my writing retreat.

adventures / Friday / history / iPhone / photo — Comments Off
22
Jul 11

Oregon pictures, Day Three

Hit the beach!

The first white person here is believed to be William Clark — who did not lose a bet to Meriwether Lewis, really what happened was they Googled themselves, found a small accounting firm in the northeast named Clark and Lewis LLP and decided on their own brand. He and his team crossed what they texted back to Jefferson as “OMG, Worst. Mountain. EVAR.” before seeing the ocean and finding natives processing a beached whale.

Clark did not use AT&T, who’s coverage is somewhere down in the Five Bars and Lousy range in this region.

So they traded with the locals for whale oil and blubber, turned around and noticed there were suddenly condos everywhere. Such is beach life.

Cannon Beach was originally named Ecola, which was borrowed from the local stream. Ecola, not E. coli. We ate lunch today at a place named Ecola. They have their own boat and bring in their own catch from the Pacific which, I don’t know about the depth of your experience, is the way to go.

The water is chilly. The beach isn’t dirty, but the sand is darker than I’m accustomed to seeing. There are great rock formations to enjoy at the coastline and dramatic rolling hills rushing down into the sand. This is a beautiful spot.

Later, on the advice of someone who lives in Portland, we set out for the quiet Oswald West beach. You park on one side of the road and then take a path beneath it and through these woods:

This is a stream that is escaping into the ocean at Oswald:

Some people love the ocean, others find their home in the mountains or feel natural on a plain or a steppe, but I could stay in spots like this forever:

Here’s Oswald, in panorama. Click to open in a new window and magnify:

This is a shallow cove and a favorite of the surfers. It feels primitive and unspoiled and perfect. I brought a few round stones home, thinking I’ll put them in my office, so I can remember that sun and those waves and part of an afternoon walking over driftwood.

I shot it in my free iPhone app Panorama which isn’t perfect, but is very free. This one didn’t work very well because I stood in shade and shot sun-shade-sun. Now, though, the finished product — stitched by the app — looks wonderfully dramatic.

We went south for the next town, thinking we would find dinner, but nothing inspired us. On the way, though, we found this terrific view:

You see that and begin to wonder “How spoiled are these people?”

So we came back up to Cannon Beach for dinner, found some family-owned chain where the menu said “Not much has changed since the 1950s.” And to see the dishes, you’d think Yeah, my grandmother ate this. Even the pictures of the food on the menu looked dated. How does one make lemon slices and broiled shrimp look dated? The apathy of the staff was incredible. We ate there because of the view of those giant rocks on the shoreline and because we wanted to see the sunset on the beach. Our waiter, who was a little too old and just a few hits away from a Grateful Dead concert in his head, was only too happy to hold us up, but we just did make it.

If you’re curious and you know the area, here’s your hint:

More importantly, the sunset:

Those big haystack rocks. In fact one of them is called Haystack, but I believe that one is farther up the beach:

Those are my best cell phone pics of the day. The following are some of my D-SLR photographs. There are lots of kites on Cannon Beach. Some of them will find their way into my trip video.

Wild berries in macro at Oswald Beach West:

Need a hiding place?

The Yankee enjoys the side of Oswald Beach:

There’s sand in the center, separated by a wooded estuary feeding into the ocean. The beach, which is probably less than 250 yards, is framed by woods on one side and a rock face on the other side. Whomever donated or sold this land to the state did not understand what they could have done with this real estate, but generations are lucky they did share it.

Walking Cannon Beach at sunset:

The Yankee wraps up her day in style:

Tomorrow we go back to work.

adventures / history / iPhone / photo / Wednesday — Comments Off
20
Jul 11

Oregon pictures, Day One

Just half an hour outside of downtown Portland you’ll find the 611-foot-tall Multnomah Falls:

This is the second part of the two-stage falls. Rainwater, an underground spring and snow melt feed the falls through all four seasons. This is the tallest waterfall in Oregon:

Here’s the top of the falls, and part of that long, first drop, which measures 542 feet. We walked 1.25 miles to get to the top:

Also, there’s a tunnel carved out of a nearby hill:

This is another waterfall that stems from the same sources. Both are restive places, but this one, much smaller, gets a lot less traffic:

We ate dinner here, just sandwiches because everything was outrageously expensive. They offered a macaroni and cheese — like Mom used to make — for $15. I don’t know about your mom, but that dish didn’t set mine back like that. The cheese must be fresh from France, and flown in first class on silken made oriental rugs.

Our waiter, who was a nice guy willing to chat since we caught them at an off time, was talking up their barbecue night to his one other customer. The Yankee said, “Yeah, bring that over. Let’s try that.”

We’ve turned her into a proper barbecue snob. I’m so proud:

We didn’t eat here, but I had to stop and take a picture of the sign:

The locals needed a road paralleling the Columbia River in the mid-19th century. Sam Hill was a railroad attorney and a big fan of good roads. In 1913 he gathered people of means, met right here at Chanticleer Point and outlined his plan for a scenic highway. The setting worked. They were conducting surveys in a matter of weeks. They called it the “king of roads” in the 1920s. But most people were paying attention to what they saw outside their windows:

The Yankee enjoys the Columbia River:

Back to Multnomah — the above pictures were from my phone. These are from my camera. This is the top of the falls once again:

Being on the top of a big waterfall, making a big long walk up a tall hill, seeing a wide river and ancient trees, they all make you realize the size of beauty and the smallness of the viewer. And so you take a look at the macros:

This is the stream supplying the falls. This goes around one bend and then into a little pool and down the cliff face. I’m not sure I’m supposed to be here:

In that pedestrian tunnel, where The Yankee did her cartwheels.

At that second, smaller waterfall. This is where I decided to shoot a lot of video of this trip. I’ll show some of that at the conclusion of our adventures.

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17
Jul 11

Sport, sport, sport, steak, ice cream

We are watching the 1989 Iron Bowl, it is like giving an education, really. The Yankee, you see, was up north and not yet interested in football. When she moved to the South she said her allegiance was for sale. Whatever big time football game someone took her to first would be the team she’d cheer for.

I took her to an Auburn game, and she was hooked.

Here’s Carl Stephens with some of the best words in the world. I recorded that at the game that night. We sat in the upper deck, on the west side over the 20 yard line. As we’d only been dating a few short months by that time I was trying to play it cool and not sound too overwhelming, but there’s so many things you have to know about this place. How Auburn played that night wasn’t one of them, as the Tigers came out flat in their season opener. But that was 2005.

This is about 1989. For some lovely reason the local television stations have taken to filling weekend programming with old Auburn football games this summer. This is brilliant television, really, and there’s no better choice than the first Iron Bowl in Auburn. Pat Dye called it the most emotional moment in school history. David Housel, who’s never been shy about bad historical hyperbole, likened it to reaching the promised land. The players that played there that day said the place has never been louder or more crazed or desperately intense.

Take it away, Jim Nantz:

Is it football season yet?

So we’ve watched the first three quarters, and it is great to see Reggie Slack — who’s selling insurance these days after a cup of coffee in the NFL and a Grey Cup appearance in the CFL. The third play of the game:

It is nice to see Keith McCants again, who was just an incredibly talented, scary good football player.

He’s had some legal problems, but by all accounts is the guy you root for. And he’s lobbying, on his Facebook page, to be on the next season of Dances With the Stars. Seems that his career is now mostly Retired Star Football player, but becoming a star in the South may let you do that. The best part is just hearing the crowd and the marching bands, before the stadium was filled with piped in music. You can forget the original atmosphere if you aren’t careful.

Haven’t shown her this yet:

Seriously. Can it be football season now?

Rode 38.5 miles on the bike today. Felt very nice and the sun only came out late in the journey. Saw this:

It is like they are saying “A payphone! Use me!” This now costs $.50. I couldn’t tell you the last time I used a pay phone, so this $.15 increase was a novel surprise. Perhaps the calls should get cheaper as demand has gone down …

I would say pay phones, perhaps like pawn shops and check cashing stores, should be a status indicator, but that phone was at a nice gas station in a fine part of town. We got Gatorade there and pedaled on.

Great soccer game today. The U.S. women’s side was quite good, but not great. The Japanese played solid, but not spectacular. The Americans couldn’t close the deal and the Japanese ladies would not quit, coming from behind twice to force penalty kicks. And from there the sense of inevitability gave way to a little disbelief. But the Japanese were great and deserving winners.

More to the point, that was 120 minutes of great, clean sport, played well by two teams. It was wonderful see a contest about the game, not about some scandal or overwrought subtext — the healing of Japan thing got overplayed, but that was unavoidable. This was 11 a side playing hard and, for the most part, playing very well. Great experience, even if the other team won.

Now if only the spectators and media would be more interested prior to the Big Game, but perhaps one of these days. What was intriguing was how the narrative for the Americans was not about gender or equality, but about sport and competition. There’s a subtle shift that started taking place in the televised coverage that is worth noting.

Steaks on the grill tonight. We low-grilled the meat, baked potatoes and fried some okra. After dinner we commemoration National Ice Cream Day by buying a pint on a cone at Bruster’s. They close at 10. They aren’t really amused when you show up at 9:45, but we got the obligatory ice cream celebration in just under the gun.

It is a tough life, I tell you.