Places – Page 6 – GEORGE ROTHERT

Another Reason to Not Like Mark Zuckerberg

In its race for world domination, Facebook tried to get ahead of Google, Amazon and Apple by connecting Asia and North America with an undersea fiber-optic cable. The high-speed cable was to emerge from the Pacific Ocean at Tierra del Mar.

Tierra del Mar is a community of about two-hundred homes on the Oregon Coast, about twenty miles south of Tillamook. Homeowners opposed the project from the beginning, saying it would change the area’s character and lead to more non-residential projects.

The cable would connect Facebook’s large server installation in Prineville, a small town in Central Oregon with Japan and the Philippines. Locals were not pleased to see the contractor (a Facebook subsidiary) strip trees, grass and other vegetation from a large lot adjacent to homes and replace it with gravel and concrete and heavy equipment for the project’s staging area.

But now folks are really angry. The project, drilling under the beach and seabed to bring the cable to its landing site onshore, was supposed to take a few weeks. Oops, a drill pipe snapped under the seabed and Facebook closed down the operation. Eleven-hundred feet of pipe, sixty-five-hundred gallons of drilling fluid, drills and other equipment have been abandoned under the seabed.

Facebook waited seven weeks to tell anyone about it. They told the neighbors not to worry, because they did an “environmental assessment” and leaving all that stuff fifty feet below the sea floor is not a problem. Besides, they say they might begin work again sometime next year, maybe January.

What could go wrong?

Seagulls in the Pandemic

Major League Baseball teams are playing sixty-game schedules for the 2020 season. Games are played in empty ball parks, no spectators in attendance.

The San Francisco Giants, and many other teams, are filling the ball park seats with life-size photograph cutouts. For $99, a Giants fan can have a photo representation of her or his self occupying a seat in the grandstand. A purchaser has the option of requesting a seat near a famous Giant (Willie Mays or Willie McCovey, anyone?) or other Bay Area celebrity (Jerry Rice or Jerry Garcia, for examples).

Every other year, fans attending San Francisco Giants night games at ~~PacBell~~ ~~SBC~~ ~~AT&T~~ Oracle Park could always count on the late-inning arrival of hungry seagulls swooping around just above the ball field, anxious for the crowd to leave so they could attack the left-behind food detritus.

No more. The gulls quickly realized no fans means no food and that presumedly are looking elsewhere for gourmet gull food. With no live people or birds, Giants management has done the only sensible thing. High up in the bleachers are cutouts of seagulls. No word on how the birds paid their $99, though.

So far, the Giants appear to be in little danger of playing more than sixty games. Sixteen teams will be in the post-season playoffs; not likely, the Giants will be one of those sixteen.

Auction News

During this time of COVID-19 we’re hesitant to jump on an airplane where social distancing is not possible or be sequestered for days on a cruise ship with a few thousand other people. Now comes an opportunity to travel with family and friends while maintaining proper social distancing.

The Evergreen State, a three-hundred-foot long passenger-and-car ferry may soon be for sale. Built in 1954 and rebuilt in 1988, the vessel carried eighty-seven cars and eight-hundred-fifty passengers as part of the Washington State Ferry System’s fleet. The ferry system decommissioned it in 2017. A purported businessman in Florida purchased it at auction for $300,000.

The new owner had several declared possible plans for the ferry, but ended up selling it on eBay for $205,100. The deal fell through when the seller could not provide the buyer with documentation—including proof of ownership .

The Evergreen State has been docked at the Port of Olympia all this time, to whom the owner has not been paying rent. The Port, owed back rent of $32,000, has declared it abandoned property and is preparing to put it up for auction.

You likely have seen DUCK amphibious vehicles lumbering around Seattle or other cities, carrying cheering passengers. The twenty-five-passenger jitneys are converted military transport vehicles from the Second World War era. (“Duck” comes from army nomenclature: DUKW.) Duck sightseeing tours travel on roads and water and are popular tourist attractions wherever they operate except, until recently, Seattle.

A Ride the Ducks vehicle crashed into a bus on Seattle’s busy Aurora Avenue Bridge—Highway 99—in 2015. Five people died, more than sixty injured. In 2019, a jury awarded a total of $123 million to the victims. The Seattle Ride the Ducks could not recover and has filed Chapter 7 bankruptcy and liquidation.
The remaining nineteen ducks will soon be available by auction. You will definitely attract attention cruising along in your duck.

You are many eons late for your very own pet dinosaur. Not to worry, though. An auction house in Vancouver, British Columbia is readying for sale a menagerie of animatronic prehistoric animals. Lifelike in appearance but filled with gears and electric motors, the beasts can be controlled by a human operator. Many have motion sensors and spring to action when someone gets too close. Imagine the fun you could have with trick-or-treaters.

A small apatosaurus can be yours for a couple-hundred bucks. A brontosaurus will cost you a few thousand. The auction house has not disclosed the source, but speculation is they’re from a bankrupt manufacturer or touring exhibition operator. The auction company says they have had inquiries from a liquor store and other retail businesses, zoos, restaurants, and private individuals who want to entertain their neighbors or grandkids.

Elk Lives Matter

These are hard times for monuments. Confederate statues have been coming down. Renaming places and institutions identified with racists and traitors has become a blazing controversy. The current occupant of the White House is, as one would expect, opposed to relabeling military installations that bear names of persons who took up arms against the United States.

Christopher Columbus has been a target for years. Revisionist history depicts him not as an heroic discoverer of America but as a brutal imperialist who initiated the near extinction of indigenous populations.

The current-day attacks on monuments to imperialists and racists include the Pioneer statues at the University of Oregon. The Pioneer was pulled off its pedestal and dragged to the entrance of the U of O administration building. The companion Pioneer Mother statue, seated in repose at a serene corner of the campus, was also pulled down.

Being Like Venezuela

Conservative pundits and G.O.P. politicians are quick to point to Venezuela and its erstwhile President Hugo Chavez as the definitive example of the failure of socialism. The country has suffered years of rampant inflation and social unrest.

Under Chavez’s embattled successor, Nicolás Maduro, crime, inflation and poverty have increased. Maduro’s 2018 reelection is considered to be fraudulent. Several countries, including the United States, have refused to recognize his presidency. Russia and China support the Maduro government.
In 2017 Maduro set up the Fuerza de Acción Especial de la Policía Nacional Bolivariana (Special Actions Force), FAES. The federal paramilitary police force’s ostensible purpose was to “combat crime and terrorism,” and wrest control of poor neighborhoods from gang infestation.

The names of top commanders of Mr. Maduro’s special police force, and who exactly has been invited into its ranks are unknown. FAES units patrol Venezuela neighborhoods dressed in black, with balaclavas covering their faces, concealing identities. The forces are accused of breaking into homes without warrants, taking people into custody without charges and allegedly have killed dozens of people.

Here in Portland, street demonstrations, initially to protest police brutality of Black persons, have occurred every night for two months. Some opportunists, predominately young white males, have used the protests as background for looting, property damage and graffiti.

The current occupant of the White House grasping at anything to gain support for a failed presidency in the upcoming election, is following Maduro’s strategy. Federal “police” dressed in camouflage, with no identifiers other than “POLICE” have detained people and taken them away in unmarked vehicles, fired tear gas and shot peaceful demonstrators with “less-than-lethal” weaponry. Their purported purpose is to protect the federal buildings in downtown Portland. The secret police, untrained in crowd control, come from the Department of Homeland Security border patrol.

The COWH is doubling down on deploying secret police. “We’re going to have more federal law enforcement, that I can tell you,” he said. “In Portland, they’ve done a fantastic job.” And there will be more to come. “We’re not going to let New York, and Chicago, and Philadelphia and Detroit and Baltimore — and Oakland is a mess. We’re not going to let this happen in our country. All run by liberal Democrats.”

P.D. East & The Petal Paper

The demise of print media has been a given for years, their death throes fodder for late-night comedians. Magazine and newspaper circulation has declined drastically over the past decade, as have advertising revenues. Craig’s List has eviscerated the want ads and shrinking readership has made print unattractive to advertisers.

Rather than get news from a paper thrown onto a wet lawn, people are getting information from the Internet, where much content is free and they can control what their eyes and ears take in. No need to subject oneself to news one doesn’t like.

In the U.S., newsroom employment is half of what it was ten years ago. The list of deceased newspapers is long and the number of cities with more than one paper can probably be counted on the fingers of one hand.

A hedge fund, whose assets include the National Enquirer, has purchased the venerable but bankrupt McClatchy Co. and its roster of estimable newspapers. The new owners are expected to follow private-equity strategy by selling assets such as real estate and inflicting further layoffs.

Investment guru and Berkshire Hathaway C.E.O. Warren Buffett got his start delivering newspapers. His company had been acquiring newspapers for years. Buffett, famous for keeping investments for the long term, recently sold off Berkshire subsidiary BH Media Group. BH owned seventy newspapers. Vice-chairman Charlie Munger said, “Technological change is destroying the daily newspapers in America. The revenue goes away and the expenses remain and they’re all dying.”

With the incessant torrent from the Internet and twenty-four-hour-cable-news what are we missing? Small-town, local news and public-service announcements—what we who think we’re so sophisticated used to find amusing—go unreported as the means for disseminating local goings-on are disappearing.

But let’s take the Wayback Machine to Mississippi in the 1950s.