orange pants day

Well, regarding the last post... it was so la la.

Yesterday, however, saw one called "The Secrets" which was the best I'd seen so far....
It involved religion, an all-female seminary school, sadomasochism, art, rituals, and the intellectual vs. emotional. One of those films that makes one want to try to become Jewish. Two girls. A seminary school. A murdereress. Disease and hospital scenes. Purification rituals. Girls in bed. A realistic ending. I'd endorse that film. After that was a spot of dancing. It's funny here, well it happens all the time but I still find it funny... how everyone knows everyone else somehow.

Today was orange pants day, for moving stuff and then sorting it out and hooking things up to other things. Then a six-mile walk in the woods on a multi-use trail... a peachy sunset through the trees.... I heard the trees are all red, orange, and gold in CO... aha, now I know what season it is. They're all green here. Green and lush and rainforesty... but in the pacific northwest, one notices the markings of changing seasons by the arrival of the pumpkin spice latte, I have come to believe. Every so often, there was a rustle in the underbrush as though a snake thought about venturing onto the multi-use trail, before its ancestral imprintings warned it away; I am quite certain that many snakes have been smashed by bike tires there. That's where all the nutsoid bicyclists go past in flashes of spandex, but taper off into the evening. It is, however, still possible to envision oneself in a different country at a different time while traipsing along.

My theory is that the new baby elephant, Samudra, has two moms. I looked it up, and supposedly a full 45% of sexual behavior among asian elephants in zoos is homosexual behavior... one part may be that the elephants of different genders are kept in different places. Well, okay, that's according to Wikipedia's "homosexuality in animals" article. Samudra's mother, Rose, spends most of her time with Chendra, and the three of them make such a sweet, protective family together. Chendra seems to have taken on many childcare tasks. They run around in a little pod together in which Samudra is completely esconced from the public eye. And there certianly is a public eye to be had: one must wait in a line filled with screaming, wandering, bumping-into, ceaselessly questioning, small children with their parents. Then one has about 10 minutes to see the elephants before the appointed elephant guards usher one away. The zoo here has some other good animals, I have not been to one in about 15 years and it was interesting to go. But I would never ever ever go again on a Saturday.

At times, I've had the sense that sometimes professors like to play shakespearean games... for example, the game of the witches who pass the eye around. So that when one goes other places, or other countries, they passed the eye from one to the next to keep an eye on one, before passing it over to the next one. Auge auf, gut aufgepasst. Samudra must sometimes feel like a watched pot with these three female elephants paying such close attention to him, but much better that than the media, I think.

events

It could be good, it could be bad, and it could be.... ?

http://www.plgff.org/2008Festival/schedule.html

only one way to find out.

more views from here: the birds

last weekend, after hiking, the beach and gulls.

the swifts flying into the chimney

the chimney, before the swifts descended

views from here

The above picture is one I took at an art event by Siren Nation. It was my favorite picture of the evening.

The interior of the main Portland downtown library.

On a hike I took.
Me, hiking.
Also along the path.....

the swifts

first, a correction: the national hurricane center has an arbirtrary list of names to assign the hurricanes, and Gustav's number was up when the hurricane formed.

Now, the better stuff:
tonight went to see the swifts. They looked like this:



This took place during sunset, it reminded me of Prague. The people I was with were nice and brought picnic food, some had attended the event for years.

As they were finally flying into the chimney, what the audubon society (who had a table set up) said was a peregrine (it was truly hard to tell) flew in twice to get an unsuspecting swift as it was trying to go to bed. There were still some swifts lingering outside of the chimney when all the others were safely esconced, and my theory is that they had experienced some sort of chimney trauma at some point... I can't imagine how so many can fit in that space without anyone getting hurt somehow. Miraculous.

current events

First of all, what's with naming a hurricane "Gustav"? Is that supposed to evoke Mahler's music? I think it's just another thing used to scare U.S.A. people of those destructive, stormy, foreign, complicated, educated influences. The connotation is almost, "those degenerate hurricanes and forces of nature will be our downfall as a nation."

Second of all. Palin. She doesn't even care about the endangered polar bears, she wants to drill oil and destroy national park/forest/refuge to do so, and the whole snowmobile and mooseburger thing. I find her completely and totally problematic, for any number of reasons and from pretty much every angle. A friend wondered why she gave all her kids dog names. Okay, sex education was in some ways useless to me, as it pretty much excluded the dental dam, so I may be biased about its usefulness or applicability. If she's elected after I vote, I'll have a good reason to leave the U.S. again.