Long ago and not so very far away, a family night out would be a fifteen-mile drive up U.S. 101 on the Oregon Coast, past Cannon Beach and Ecola State Park to the A&W drive-in just as the highway entered Seaside. The A&W featured car service, so our two young daughters could enjoy their burgers in the comfort of the back seat.
The Seaside A&W is long gone. A McDonald’s thrives nearby, testament to effective advertising and rigid uniformity. A&W restaurants are still around, but fewer than half as many as there were in the seventies. Continue reading “100 Years of A & W Root Beer”
Dan Smith built a fence around the Mercedes 250 parked on the apartment property he manages in the congested Queen Anne neighborhood of Seattle. The vehicle bears the logo of the car-sharing company car2go. Smith says the car is parked illegally.
“The devices and platforms that made Silicon Valley famous were created… by entrepreneurs who risked their investors’ capital, not their lives. It’s not really an underdog story…”
Some parts of the country, mostly in the South, are agonizing over monuments erected to honor and celebrate the Confederacy and its treasonous heroes. Some of that some are taking direct action, removing statues, most of which were put up in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Their purpose was to deliver a message to former slaves and their offspring that Reconstruction was over and Jim Crow ruled.
Meanwhile, out west, the San Jose City Council is pondering a proposal to install a monument in a city park celebrating the impact Silicon Valley has had on the world, if not on ethnic nor gender employment diversity. If the proposal passes an international competition will ensue for design of a suitably-grandiose sculpture.
The leader of the drive thinks $150 million is a reasonable amount for Silicon Valley’s monument to itself. Others are less than enthusiastic.
David Horsey, editorial cartoonist and political gadfly does not mince words:
“But the technological revolution has not been completely beneficial to civilized life. Hackers working for foreign powers threaten our security and democracy. Internet scammers and criminals steal our money and our identities. Social media distract us, mislead us and intensify outrage, division and extremism. Online pornography has opened a new frontier of misogyny and exploitation to any child who can log onto a computer.”
If you are really old, you may remember Olympia Beer and the tagline “It’s the Water.” Paul Newman, Dustin Hoffman and Clint Eastwood are a few of the stars who were pictured onscreen drinking Olympia. It also was my Uncle Roger’s favorite beverage. The brewery advertised its product as being brewed using water from artesian wells.
Olympia and Rainer breweries both shut down long ago.
A wet spring has forecasters predicting a less-than-normal fire season in New England. Same in Colorado; they’re hoping the heavy winter snowpack will slow wildfires this summer. The outlook for the West Coast, which also had a wet spring and record snowpack, is not so optimistic. The National Interagency Fire Center issued its report which said precipitation in the Pacific Northwest and California resulted a heavy crop of grasses and other vegetation that will likely be dried out by summer, providing fuel for wildfires.
On cue, a week after the report was released, a wildfire in Central Oregon destroyed a home in La Pine and damaged another. Oh, and 145,000 acres are burning right now in eastern Russia.
Although the stable genius is on record that climate change is a hoax, state government authorities, including Colorado, are planning and budgeting for longer and more severe fire seasons as the new normal. Meanwhile, in Santa Rosa California, where more than 5,000 homes burned in 2017, rebuilding is underway. The certainty of another fire is not stopping property owners from rebuilding their McMansions on the hills of Fountaingrove overlooking the city. (A fire of almost the exact same dimensions burned the area in 1964, before any homes were there.)
Our esteemed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo won’t use the words “climate change,” but he recently did state that melting Arctic ice was a good thing: “Steady reductions in sea ice are opening new naval passageways and new opportunities for trade, potentially slashing the time it takes for ships to travel between Asia and the West by 20 days. Arctic sea lanes could become the 21st century’s Suez and Panama Canals.” He also didn’t mention how the changing climate has made subsistence farming near-to-impossible in Guatemala, resulting in the caravans of people headed our way.
Perhaps less devastating, unless you’re a third-generation family farmer or not a fan of high-fructose corn syrup, is the declining maple syrup production, a result of shorter winters.
