Sunbeams illuminating a coastal forest in Port Orford, Oregon

Chuggnutt!

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  • Rajneesh

    The news on KTVZ tonight about the former Rajneesh land being sold caught my ear and got me reflecting a bit on that particular period of weirdness in Central Oregon history. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a “dark day” in Oregon history like the interviewee on the news did, but it was definitely weird.

    The Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh was an Indian (from India the country, not Native American) spiritual teacher who in 1981 came to Oregon, where his followers bought The Big Muddy ranch outside of Antelope and started a commune there. Naming the commune Rajneeshpuram, they attracted all sorts of attention among the locals, mostly negative.

    Understand, this part of Oregon in the 80s was much more conservative and rural than now; the majority of the population was based in agriculture (farmers, cowboys) and operated on Good-Ol-Boy-ism. So the idea of a cult moving in and then taking over the town of Antelope was met with open hostility.

    It didn’t help that the Rajneeshees had a number of odd practices and goings-on as well. They all wore red, for instance. They owned a large number of Rolls Royces and the Bhagwan would ride around in them everywhere. They carried machine guns in open sight.

    And when I said they “took over” Antelope, I’m not kidding—they registered to vote there and got a referendum passed renaming the town to “Rajneesh.” They were able to do this because some 7000 of them lived in the commune.

    Sheela, the Bhagwan’s Number Two person, was a real piece of work. When authorities started investigating the Rajneesh commune, the crazy stuff came to light and Sheela and several leaders “were indicted and convicted of several crimes, including immigration fraud, wiretapping, first and second degree assault (poisoning) of two public officials, and the attempted murder of Rajneesh’s personal physician.”

    Sheela and the Rajneeshees also have the dubious honor of perpetrating the largest germ warfare attack in the history of the U.S., when they infected a salad bar in a restaurant in The Dalles with salmonella—sickening over 750 people.

    The Bhagwan went on the run and was caught back east in North Carolina and deported. The sheriff or whoever who was involved in the capture appeared on the news, drawling, “We caught us a Bag-wahn from Ory-gun.”

    Strange days, indeed.

  • jawdropping

    (Pure geek post.)

    This is sick (not in the gross sense): 6502 compatible compiler and emulator in javascript.

    In JavaScript.

    If you don’t know what any of this means, that’s okay. I can’t hardly get my head around it either.

    Via JWZ.

  • Bend Bulletin’s RSS feed

    Jake first found and posted this: the Bend Bulletin has their own official, bonafide RSS feed. It’s about time! That means I can finally take down my hacked-up RSS scraper feed for them.

    So, this is official notice that I’m deprecating my Bulletin RSS hackfeed, by implementing a redirect to the official feed, and then I’ll be killing off the script entirely. So all three or so people who were using it, be warned.

  • Lego skeletons are cool

    We had a great spring break trip to San Diego last week, and while we took a bunch of pictures, there are three especially that I couldn’t resist posting here. Mostly because they’re so messed up and random.

    The first two are from Legoland. That place is like the Lego Disneyland—lots of rides and fun things, with Lego sculptures everywhere. Pretty straightforward concept, right? That’s why it’s totally awesome to run across something like this:

    Lego skeletons are cool

    I wants me a Lego Skeleton Kit™ bloody well right now.

    And among the various other Lego sculpture decor, most of which was themed and made sense, there was this:

    Lego rabbit with a chainsaw. WTF?

    What. The. Hell??

    Best. Themepark. Ever.

    Earlier in the week, we visited the Fleet Science Center, and they have a section especially for kids there called “Grossology.” While most of the Grossology exhibits are pretty much what you’d expect, there was no way I could pass up taking a photo of this genuine video game:

    Urine The Game. Really.

    Yep. Played it. Need a PlayStation version.

  • Disposable literature

    Writer Charlie Stross has a blog post entitled Why the commercial ebook market is broken that’s a really good read and puts forth a thought I hadn’t really considered before:

    My take on ebooks is that they are — and should be seen as — the cheapest form of disposable literature.

    “Disposable literature.” I like it. I should probably point out that this isn’t meant to be derogatory; rather, Stross is using it in the same sense as for mass market paperbacks: cheap, portable, easy to mass-produce and replace.

    I’m not sure I have more to say about it at the moment… I’m kinda letting the concept roll around and ferment in my head a bit.

  • Where there’s smoke, there’s fire

    Last night, as I reported on my Hack Bend blog, the house across the street caught fire. It wasn’t terribly serious, as these things go: some hot embers from the chimney landed on the wood shake roof and sparked into flames. But the fire department came out in full force; there were four engines, the fire chief’s (or whomever’s) SUV, an ambulance, and police closing off the street.

    The weird thing is, we didn’t hear any of the emergency vehicles arrive, but other people in the neighborhood told us they heard them coming. Instead, around 6:20 I started noticing a rumbling noise coming from outside, but we were eating dinner and I didn’t think much of it—nothing that couldn’t be checked until we were done, anyway. It was my wife who took something out to the garage that heard the noise, too, and went to the window to see what it was.

    Imagine our surprise!

    So we ran outside and rubbernecked along with the rest of the neighborhood. Smoke was still rising from the roof next to the chimney while we were there; our neighbor next door told us she had seen the flames when she came out. They were still hosing the roof down, but got the smoke under control pretty quickly. After that, they tore out the chimney and the part of the roof that was (presumably) still hot and/or smoldering.

    Nobody was hurt. According to the KTVZ article, the fire did $25,000 worth of damage, with minor smoke damage inside the home.

    Here’s some of the pictures I took (when I finally had the presence of mind to run back in the house for the camera):

    Fire trucks on the scene

    Fire hydrant pumping water

    Fire fighters clearing the roof after a house fire

    Fire fighters clearing the roof after a house fire

    Fire fighters clearing the roof after a house fire

    Apologies for the mediocre quality of these pictures… it was dusk and the low-light conditions along with the zoom was enough to get the point, but some came out shaky. And actually, when it was starting to get really dark, they brought one of the engines over with a set of bright spotlights to illuminate the scene:

    Fire truck at dusk lighting up the scene

    You can see the light pole sprouting up from the top of the truck. And here’s a shot of the lighted-up scene at full dark:

    Fire truck lighting up the scene at night

    I actually think this last picture is kind of cool. Unfortunate set of circumstances, but you know what I mean.

  • Spring break: San Diego

    Next week is spring break around here, and this year we decided to pack up and head down to San Diego for the week, to visit my brother and his wife.

    We’re driving down, spreading it out over two days each way. It’s roughly 1000 miles from Bend to San Diego, so that’s a lot of driving. But hey, that’s the Jack Kerouac experience, right? Sort of. Though I’m pretty sure Kerouac didn’t have a family along with him.

    It’s been awhile since I’ve taken this much time off from work. I wonder if I’ll be able to go back.

  • Comic book rant II

    Okay, it’s been a good long while since I unleashed a comic book rant here and got my geek on. If you don’t read comic books, or don’t care, or whatever, you can safely pass this by. Otherwise, expect this to go long, and you may even be a little embarrassed for me. :)

    Full-on rant after the jump…

    (more…)

  • Psycho!

    The other day Dave posted a story riddle with a creepy punchline: the people who answer it “correctly”—i.e. a certain way—think like psychopaths. (Sorry to spoil the surprise.) It’s meant to illustrate a particular way of thinking that psychopaths exhibit: that of other people—even family—as impersonal tools to be used for their own benefit.

    (Fortunately, I didn’t answer the riddle “correctly.”)

    Of course, I make random connections, as I am wont to do, and I remembered this older post on Boing Boing about psychopathy:

    Are psychopaths genetically adapted to survive by exploiting the rest of us?

    [CBC’s Quirks and Quarks] talks to research psychologists about the biological basis for psychopathy — and the fact that psychopaths are sexually profligate and have lots of kids. Psychopathic rapists target fertile women — not children or old women.

    Dr. Marnie Rice is a psychologist with the Mental Health Centre Penetanguishene, in Penetanguishene, Ontario. She studies criminal psychopaths who are incarcerated there. She views psychopathic behaviour as an evolved survival strategy. She says that there’s not a lot of evidence to suggest that psychopaths are mentally ill but there’s good reason to believe that their disturbing behaviour is an evolved trait. She says psychopaths have evolved to capitalize in a particular environmental niche — namely preying on the rest of society.

    Yeah, it’s kind of an odd thing to be ruminating about. But it’s a weirdly compelling idea to imagine that psychopathy is a possible result of natural selection. It makes a certain sense. I wonder what the “particular environmental niche” is referring to—large cities? Seems to me (from a purely layman’s perspective) that’s where this particular trait would take hold and be successful in an evolutionary context.

    For reference, here’s Wikipedia’s article on psychopathy.

    Anyway, cheery thoughts to take you into the weekend.

  • On a podcast…

    So my friend Brian of BuzzTouch Designs has a regular podcast, each show lasting a few minutes (not super long, like some) and touching on local happenings—and on yesterday’s “episode” I was the guest star. Or interviewee. Or something. Basically, Brian called me up and we did an interview (I was in my “Brew Site” persona) on the topic of beer label art.

    I had fun doing it, and actually thought it turned out okay. (Not a slam on Brian—I just wasn’t sure how I’d sound myself!) You can listen to the show here.