Oregon History: The Exploding Whale

Educator of the week, Mr. Paul Jolstead, sent me a piece of Oregon mythology: the infamous exploding whale. I’ve seen this video clip before, and heard the story many times, but I suspect that many of you are unfamiliar with it. Here’s the original news story (3:26):

According to the Wikipedia:

On November 12, 1970, a 14 m (45 ft), eight-ton sperm whale died as a result of beaching itself near Florence, Oregon. Since all Oregon beaches are under the jurisdiction of the state Parks and Recreation Department, responsibility for disposing of the carcass fell upon the Oregon Highway Division (now known as the Oregon Department of Transportation, or ODOT), a sister agency.

After consulting with officials at the United States Navy, they decided that it would be best to remove the whale in the same way they would remove a boulder and, on November 12, used half a ton of dynamite to remove it. They thought burying the whale would be ineffective, as it would soon be uncovered, and they believed the use of dynamite would cause an explosion that would disintegrate the whale into pieces small enough for scavengers to clear up.

The engineer in charge of the operation, George Thornton, was recorded as stating that one set of charges might not be enough and more might be needed. Thornton later explained that he was chosen to remove the whale because the district engineer, Dale Allen, had gone hunting.

The resulting explosion was caught on film by television photographer Doug Brazil for a story reported by news reporter Paul Linnman of KATU-TV in Portland, Oregon. In his voiceover, Linnman joked that “land-lubber newsmen” became “land-blubber newsmen”, for “the blast blasted blubber beyond all believable bounds.”

The explosion caused large pieces of blubber to land some distance away from the beach, resulting in a smashed car. The explosion disintegrated only some of the whale, most of which remained on the beach for the Oregon Highway Division workers to clear away.

Comedy gold.

Speaking of the Jolstead-Woodruff clan, Amy Jo’s blog has been humming right along lately. Go check out From a Corner Table. But be warned: you’ll come away hungry. (Paul, I want to see your beautiful engraved apple!)

Cat Calendar

For years now — maybe a decade — Kris and I have had the same yearly page-a-day calendar in our bathroom. It’s a cat calendar (“the cat calendar”, as we call it), and every day has a picture of a cat, the cat’s name (and the name of its owner), and some blurb about catness. We love it.

The first three cats of the year are prize-winners. I used to take the page from January 1st and tape it over the cats’ dinner bowls. “Look at this cat,” I would tell them. “This is what you should aspire to. He’s a Good Cat.” They never listened, but they had to stare at the winning cat for 365 days. Sometimes 366. One of my money-making blog ideas is actually based around this cat-a-day concept.

Anyhow, this is all prelude to the following picture:

Why this photo did not win first prize for the year I will never know. Look at it. This one snapshot encompasses a metric ton of catness. Poor, poor Sugar Plum. What mean humans she has, to subject her to such torture. And to photograph it! The indignity of it all…

One Small Step

Max (aka Meatball) has a bad habit. He likes to lay on the stairs, stretched long so that he takes up an entire step. This might not be such a big deal except:

He is grey and the stairway is often dark.
He doesn’t move when a human steps on him.

As you can imagine, this presents some difficulties.

It’s official: I’m cutting back to just three blogs. I’m not sure that I shared the plan Kris and I came up with last week, but here it is for the curious:

Cut back to just three blogs right now: foldedspace, Get Rich Slowly, and Animal Intelligence. GRS is most important, as it is now producing almost as much income as I make from Custom Box. I’m not cutting AI because I love it, and because it takes very little time.
I’ll continue to write about comics and vintage pop from time-to-time, but I’ll post about them here instead.
Next year, on my 39th birthday, I plan to reduce to part-time at Custom Box.
At that time, I’ll start another site since, in theory, I’ll have the time to do so.
On my 40th birthday, I’ll quit Custom Box completely.

These plans are tentative. Any number of things might change them. I might decide it’s foolish to quit. My web income might dry up. I might move to Australia. Who knows? But for now, this is the agenda.

Friday was gorgeous, just at the upper-end of my heat tolerance: sunny and 24 degrees centigrade (that’s 75 Fahrenheit for those of you who live in Oregon City). I met Matt for lunch, and then we headed to the tulip fields to take photos. Matt moved from California to Oregon a couple years ago. He’s a long-time professional blogger, and is full of great advice. Plus he likes photography, bike-riding, computers, etc. I’m pleased to have made his acquaintance.

Taking photos of tulips in the midday sun is an exercise in futility. The colors don’t photograph well under the best conditions; they’re a nightmare in the glare of the sun. The colors are so bright that they get “blown out”. Still, here are a few shots from the trip.

It's difficult to photograph tulips sometimes

Two examples of “blown out” colors.

I love old oak trees. They’re beautiful.

The tulip farm was very crowded. (I saw Karen Kropf.)

In the afternoon, Kris and I were going to visit the rhododendron garden, but we opted to do yard work instead. We made a trip to the hardware store to load up on mulch. Later, she worked in her flower beds while I popped dandelions and then mowed the lawn. Together we tied the blackberry and raspberry canes in bunches, which makes for a much neater presentation. My grapes look awesome. I love all the buds on the vines.

Because it was so beautiful, and because the weather is getting warmer, Kris opened the French doors in the bedroom and latched them down. In theory, they’ll stay open now until October. I say “in theory” because at 2am Saturday morning the rains set in. It rained for eight hours. It’s a wonderful, comforting sound (exactly like the “Hawaiian rain shower” I listen to on my iPod sometimes in order to get to sleep).

On Saturday we got a very early start, running all sorts of errands by noon. We stopped by to see Andrew and Courtney before 9am! Kris and Courtney discussed gardening while Andrew showed me his new Super Deluxe-o-Matic 12″ compound miter saw. I’m not much of a tool guy, but even I had to drool over that machine. (I’m drooling just remembering it.)

It’s been a great weekend so far. Now, early on Sunday morning, the sun is back, and I think we’re going to be able to finish our yard work while keeping dry. I’ll spend most of my day, of course, writing weblog entries for the coming week. It’s been a long time since I was ahead on my writing, but I sense that I can get there today.

Get Rich Slowly Discussion Forums

Dear foldedspace readers,

I’m here today to ask a favor of you. I’ve decided to bring back the discussion forums at Get Rich Slowly. When I launched the blog last April, I also set up a discussion board. It got a little use, but not much. Then the spammers found it. I shut the forums down last fall.

Fast forward to today.

I’m having trouble keeping up with all of the reader questions and suggestions. I’d like to bring the forums back as an avenue for people to seek additional help, and to have other conversations about wealth and happiness. I’m inviting you to help me get these forums started.

There’s not much there now because I’m just getting them off them ground. There are just a few sections at the moment — if needed, I’ll split things in the future. Let me know if there’s anything that could be fixed or made better. And feel free to add lots of threads.

The best way to make the launch of these forums successful is to have it seeded with many topics when I announce their existence to the public, which I plan to do on the site’s first anniversary, April 15th. In the next ten days, I’m hoping that you will help me get some discussions started.

To register, simply follow this link. You’ll also need to use the registration code 0325.

Hidden from Myself

I’m cleaning downstairs. After this week’s session with Lauren, I’ve agreed to clean the house (well, I agreed to clean my office, but I need to clean the house to clean the office), and I have piles of magazines, books, and papers on the dining room table.

I put the jacket back on The Secret. In the process, I find a stupid adhesive anti-theft strip, peel it off, and take it to the kitchen. On the way, I spot my lovely new notebook. I pick it up, too. I take a few steps, set down the notebook, take a few more, throw away the anti-theft strip.

It occurs to me that I ought to check Amazon to see if they carry this lovely new notebook. I retrace my steps so that I can check the model number. But I can’t find it. It’s not on the dining room table. It’s not on a chair or bookshelf in the library. It’s not in the bathroom. It’s nowhere in the kitchen. It’s not in the living room. (I hadn’t gone anywhere near these rooms, but I checked them anyhow.)

The notebook has vanished. Somehow I’ve managed to hide it from myself.

I am getting old.

Wii Man

Kris and I have been playing a lot of Nintendo Wii lately.

We played the game a lot when we got it in November, mostly because of the novelty. During the holiday season, we had fun sharing the Wii with friends. Whenever we had guests, we would create a Mii for them. (A Mii is a cartoon avatar that represents a person in the game.) We now have a large library of Miis for all our friends.

During January and February, though, we didn’t use the Wii much. It sat unused, looking more-and-more like one of those impulse purchases that I used to make. (I have boxes of seldom-used gadgets out in the workshop.)

Then Kris discovered fitness mode in Wii Sports. Wii Sports has five games: tennis, bowling, golf, baseball, and boxing. You can play these games by yourself or against other players. But you can also do three training exercises for each sport. In fitness mode, the Wii randomly selects three of these fifteen exercises for the player to perform. Based on the results, the game assigns a “fitness age”.

Kris had been doing this for about a week before I decided to try my hand at it. I was dismayed to find that my fitness age ws 58. The horror! I began to take the fitness test every day. (Each person is only allowed one chance per day.) I’ve managed to climb into the 30s and even the 20s now. I still have bad days (51 last Saturday!) on occasion, but most days I’m around 25. The best score you can get is 20, I think.

Meanwhile, I’ve also begun to practice bowling and tennis, the two games I find most enjoyable. For a long time, I was using a bowling throw that removed spin from the ball: I released the ball late, lobbing it out into the lane. I was able to get some good scores — a high of 258 — but ultimately I decided this lob throw was too sporadic, so I’ve been working on a spin throw. (I actually tried this lob throw at a real bowling alley, thinking it would reduce my natural spin. Not a good idea. It’s very conspicuous when your ball sails through the air and then clunks to the ground halfway down the lane. Management doesn’t like that.)

Tennis has been my real source of joy lately, though. As you get better at each game, you’re given a rating. “Pro” level is 1000. I think the max rating is 2000. My bowling rating has hovered around 1250 since last fall, but my tennis rating had been a measly 400. With daily practice, I have this up to about 1750 now, and can usually win against the top two computer opponents (rated 1900 and 2000). I love the tactics of Wii tennis: the positioning, the shot selection, etc. It’s fun. (I’ve never really played actual tennis, so I don’t know how it compares.)

I’ve also begun to explore other areas of Wii-ness. For example, yesterday I downloaded the Wii web browser. It’s quite a trip to look at my own websites from inside a video game console. I also recently downloaded some classic games. The Wii comes with a “virtual console”, which means it’s able to play games from all of Nintendo’s past systems. You have to pay to download them, but they’re relatively cheap. For example, I paid $5.00 to download Super Mario Land (from the Super Nintendo system) and $12.00 to download Mario Kart 64 (from the Nintendo 64). Fun stuff. The selection is limited, but it doesn’t matter because Nintendo is offering only the best classic games. (The Wii also plays Gamecube games directly — no downloads required.)

I bought several games when the Wii was released, but I haven’t played them much. (I’d like to trade them for other games.) I do like Zelda and the surgery came (which I forgot to show to Pam), but the others aren’t that exciting. I’m waiting for more stuff directly from Nintendo itself.

I’m only spending about 30 minutes a day with the Wii, but I’m having a lot of fun!

The Pleasures of Hot Food

Kris and I went out to Gino’s for dinner on Friday night. Since Amy Jo introduced us to the place a couple months ago, it’s become one of our favorite restaurants. It’s relatively close to home, the food is good, and the booths are private.

Ostensibly our purpose was to discuss my possible transition from the box factory to stay-at-home, full-time blogging. In reality, we wanted some of Gino’s hot food.

Most restaurant food is served tepid. It’s warm, but either the food has been sitting under a heat lamp, or it was never truly hot in the first place. (Often both.) This isn’t anything we’d ever really noticed until we found Gino’s. At Gino’s, the food arrives at the table piping hot. It’s a revelation.

On Friday, for example, Kris ordered an Italian herb-encrusted chicken on a bed of potatoes. When she cut through the bird’s crispy skin, steam poured from inside. She took a bite. She closed her eyes and sighed, “Mmmm…. this is so good, so hot.” The entire meal was like that.

For my part, I had a bowl of clams and mussels in a broth of wine, butter, and fish stock. When I met Tom and Paul at Gino’s in February, we’d ordered this for the three of us, and I had been shocked by how good it was. Sometimes you order an unassuming dish in a restaurant only to discover it’s one of the best things you’ve ever eaten — this is one of those dishes. My bowl came hot, too. It was delicious.

On Saturday we attended an impromptu dinner party at Jeremy and Jennifer’s. Yay! It’s been more than three years since we last experienced a Gingerich dinner party — this was the best yet.

For appetizers we had:

puff pastry with melted blue cheese
lime-pepper dates stuffed with almonds

The first course was, to my delight, a close facsimile of the clam dish I’d had at Gino’s the night before. Jeremy reduced some wine and fish stock with a lot of garlic and a little pork of some sort. He added a bunch of clams to the liquid and boiled them ’til they opened. After reducing the liquid further, he served each person 7-8 clams, a cup or so of sauce, and some garlic bread. It was awesome. (Gino’s version is more of a broth; Jeremy’s was more of a sauce.)

Next came an asparagus salad with tangerine aioli and hazelnuts. This was followed by a butternut squash ravioli with browned butter and hazelnuts. (Jeremy and Jennifer have a filbert orchard, so hazelnuts are plentiful.) The entree was rack of lamb served with green herb-butter mashed potatoes. The lamb’s presentation was great: it featured three chive stalks jutting from the potatoes. The evening wound down with a cheese plate, and then a banana bread pudding with chocolate and caramel sauces.

The food was delicious. The wine was excellent. The company was delightful.

But all I can think of in retrospect is that I WANT MORE CLAMS! I’ve never been a huge seafood fan, but the older I get, the more I learn to appreciate its charms. (Here’s a promising clam broth recipe from Giata.)

Space Mountain

Here are a few things that scare me: heights, roller coasters, The Dark.

Imagine my terror, then, when I rode Space Mountain on my first trip to Disneyland in 1987. I had just graduated from high school, and was in Anaheim for the annual convention of the Future Business Leaders of America (a high school club that boomed during the 1980s).

I’d already been on Pirates of the Caribbean, which I loved. (In fact, I still love Pirates so much that to this day it’s the ride I want to do first and last when visiting the park. Once when a group I was with wanted to watch some silly parade, I rode Pirates over and over. It was awesome.)

Visiting Disneyland with my high school pals, we didn’t really have a method, and it took us til late morning to reach Tomorrowland. We rode Star Tours (newly opened at that point, I think), a Star Wars-themed ride, and watched Michael Jackson as Captain Eo. Then we entered Space Mountain.

“What’s this like?” I asked somebody who’d been to Disneyland before.

“It’s like a roller coaster in space,” he said.

I was a little worried, but not much. I stood in line, took my seat, and the ride began. I was in the rear car, and as we entered the dark core of the ride, I began to get nervous. Nervousness turned to fright as we took our first drop. The entire minute or two we whipped around, I clung to my seat as tightly as I could. I did not have fun.

I hated Space Mountain.

…time passed…

Kris’ uncle Bob works for Disney, and when we visit her parents in San Bernardino, he’s often able to sign us into the park. (For which we are very grateful. Thanks, Bob!) Over the past twenty years, we’ve visited Disneyland three or four times. In this time, I’ve made a discovery:

Space Mountain is a blast if you are seated in the front-most car.

On one visit I was seated in the front car by sheer chance. I knew I was going to be scared, but I was ready for how giddy the terror would make me. When you’re seated in the rear of the train, you can see what’s happening to the people in front of you a fraction of a second before it happens to you. This isn’t true when you’re in the first car. When you’re in the first car, you can’t see a thing. Everything that happens is unexpected. And it makes a huge difference.

Riding in front is scarier than riding behind, but it’s such an overwhelming fear that it’s fun. (Here’s a secret that Bob once told me: when you get to the front of a line, you can ask the “cast member” to seat you in a particular spot. They’ll often ask you to step to the side for a minute or two, but then will seat you in the spot you’ve requested. This is an excellent way to get the most out of your rides.)

All of this is just a belabored intro so that I can share this virtual recreation of Space Mountain that I found via Boing Boing. Enjoy!

Now I look forward to my next journey inside Space Mountain!

IPR: Irrational Public Radio

Something else for Kris and her smug little lab friends:

IPR: Irrational Public Radio

This isn’t critical of NPR — merely mocking. And I think we can all agree that NPR could use some good mocking.

Actually, this is basically for every single one of my friends, all of whom seem to be NPR junkies. I call NPR “noise pollution radio”. It’s not that I object to its content — it has good stuff — but I cannot fathom listening to it non-stop like Kris does. Dad used to say, “I can’t hear myself think” whenever I had on something that distracted him. NPR is like that for me. (Especially those blathering car brothers.) I am constantly engaged in extensive internal dialogue, often trying to figure something out. That’s why I like driving techno music. It helps me get in the zone. NPR? NPR takes me out of the zone and forces me to focus on whatever is being discussed, thus “noise pollution radio”.

A Cat Post

I know that all you folks really want to see is cat pictures. To that end, I dug the camera out of its nest last weekend and stalked my children in the yard. First of all, for Lee, who complains that of course she can’t remember Nemo’s name because, after all, I never write about him, here’s a picture of him:

Actually, that’s Max/Meatball/Meathead in the front, looking pretty, and Nemo rolling on the sidewalk in the background. Nemo is in constant motion, which is one reason we don’t have any good shots of him. Nemo likes to bonk people. He actually has a small bald patch on his forehead from bonking all day long. He’s silly.

Oh look. Here’s a real photo of Nemo:

Toto joined us outside, too, so we actually had “family time” (which is what Kris and I have dubbed the strange nexus when all six family members occupy the same space). Doesn’t she look pleased to be with us?

She’s thinking, “I want Auntie Pam.”

In the following photo, you can see Max, Nemo, and Toto all in roughly the same spot. Simon thought this was too good to pass up, and shortly after this image was made, he began to pick his siblings off one-by-one.

First he tackled Meatball. Max was game, but is still rather scared of Simon. He beat a hasty retreat. Next Simon took down Nemo, who squawked and fled. Then, in a surprise move, he charged Toto. At the last moment, he veered off and trotted to the grass. “Psych!” he said. Toto hissed and ran inside. Simon is king of the house. Or is Toto queen?

Later, Oreo the neighbor cat came for a visit. He likes our yard. He considers this his space, a claim that Simon doesn’t much care for.

Max is rather wary of Oreo, and Oreo is wary of him.

Finally, here’s a photo from my mother’s Flickr stream. I’ve cropped it and enhanced the exposure. I think it’s fun.

Silver, the tabby, is Simon’s sibling. And Socks is Meatball’s sibling. We have this same fight in our house, but with a different set of actors.

Yay, cats!