George’s slightly off-center view of the world
This is the centennial anniversary of my mother’s birth. Marion Yvonne Riley was a product of the Heartland, born and educated in Iowa. She was the first woman reporter for the Mason City Globe-Gazette newspaper. During World War II she taught Army Air Corps (now the Air Force) servicemen who were training to be radio operators on bomber aircraft. (It was then she picked up the nickname “Mike” that stuck with her the rest of her life.)
Continue reading “July 26, 1919”“The wanton disrespect that these elected Republicans showed Mueller was perhaps the most alarming testament yet to Trump’s total conquest of the Party. In today’s G.O.P., as in Stalin’s Russia, evidently, decades of loyal public service count for nothing when the leader and his henchmen decide someone represents a threat and the apparatchiks have been ordered to take that person down.”
John Cassidy – The New Yorker
It was 1960… or thereabouts. I was sitting in the principal’s office, across the desk from Mother Mary I-forget-the-rest-of-her-name. (Why nuns of the Holy Child order were addressed as “Mother” and not “Sister” I never learned.) Sitting in a chair next to me was my mother, who had been summoned to this meeting addressing my egregious behavior.
“Do you approve of your son’s reading this?” she scowled, holding up the MAD magazine that had been confiscated from me.
“If that was the only thing he read I’d be concerned,” Mom replied. “But it isn’t.”
Thanks, Mom. Unfortunately for me, she agreed that it wasn’t what I should have been reading in class.
“My best poem, a prayer in steel.” – David Steinman on the St. Johns Bridge
It’s easy being green… if you’re a bridge.
I was surprised the first time I saw the Golden Gate Bridge; surprised because I was expecting it to be painted gold. Some patient person explained to me that the bridge was so named because it spanned the Golden Gate between the Pacific Ocean and San Francisco Bay.
Continue reading “It’s Easy Being ODOT Green”The acidic cormorant poop threatens to mess up a $75 million paint job that drivers across Washington and Oregon are paying for through gas taxes.
For salmon, if it’s not one thing it’s another.
In the Klamath River Basin straddling the Oregon-California border, salmon compete with onion, potato and wheat farmers for the ever-scarcer water. Dams on the river have also contributed to the decrease in the salmon population. Further north, sea lions from California(!) travel all the way up to the Columbia River to feast on the salmon returning to their spawning grounds. That’s if a few years earlier they escaped predation by cormorants as they made their way from the river to the salt water of the Pacific.
(Fun Fact: The name “cormorant” is a contraction of the Latin words corvus and marinus which taken together mean “sea raven.”)
Continue reading “It’s Not Easy Being Salmon”As Major League Baseball takes a break for its annual All-Star game, let’s take our time machine back to 1919. A year after the end of the Great War, the U.S. was recovering from the Great Influenza Pandemic and beginning a decade of prosperity. Baseball was truly the national pastime. But a hundred years later, the 1919 World Series is still remembered in infamy for the “Black Sox” players who conspired with gamblers to lose the Series.
The White Sox were World Series champions in 1917. The following year several of their players, including star outfielder “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, went off to war and the Sox fell to sixth place. Back to full strength in 1919, they won the American League pennant and faced the Cincinnati Reds in the Series. Several Sox players followed the lead of ace pitcher Eddie Cicotte: In exchange for $10,000 each ($146,000 in 2019 dollars) they made a deal with gamblers to lose.
Continue reading “100 Years Ago: Black Sox”
