Just trying this out. And the ferry starts to leave about a minute into the video.
Video: Taken by me on Whidbey Island on 10 July 2011.

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So, just for fun, we are going to see which version of the tune “Pop Goes the Weasel” that everyone prefers. Two You Tube videos to choose from:

The second one is the one I prefer:

But I’ll let you tell me.

Also, my ulterior motive is to see whether the You Tube links make it to the e-mail system or only appear on the actual blog. Let me know!

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The Columbia River is one of those places that is hard to describe, simply because the nature of it’s beauty is different depending upon where on it’s length you go.  A visit to just about any location along it’s 1,243 mile length is well worth the trip.  A trip along it’s entire length would be a great vacation by anyone’s standards, and would be an education in the history, geology, and ecology of Cascadia as a whole.

Over the years, I have seen most of it, at least up to a couple of km into BC. (And want to do the northern end sometime before I die.) The end by Astoria is it’s own marine type of environment, slowly blending from the ocean to more of what a person would consider being a river. From the mouth of the river to Astoria is an amazing area in itself, where one could spend a week exploring the unique area.

The Lower Columbia (to, say, Portland) is certainly quite impressive and different, but there are better things to come as you travel upriver.  Yet, there is an abundance of rich history here, in this relatively untouched land.  Yes, there is a lot of development, yet there is also quite a bit of natural area to be found.

The Columbia River Gorge is amazing for it’s views, with the river passing through the Cascade Mountains to either side. There are quite a few geological wonders, rock formations, waterfalls that come from seemingly nowhere. It is also an area where looking up a bit of the history of the area ahead of time (or lingering over the historical markers) will add a lot to the experience. Start by looking up Lewis & Clark and The Oregon Trail. Also, from West to East, the geology stays very similar, but the forest then the trees tend to go away.  The transition from the forested side of the Cascade Range to the sparsely-covered side of the mountains can be seen from the car windows within a few miles.  On the Eastern side of the mountains, the trees have mostly disappeared, but the land formations are better seen and enjoyed.

Around where the river bends to the North near Umatilla, the vastness of the river and the vastness of the land around it become apparent. The river irrigates the empty land around here, turning it into farmland.  It is obvious to see where we have tamed this formerly unproductive land.

Farther North, you come to the Grand Coulees, eventually to the dam by the same name, but first to the starkness of the cut through the land that the river has made through the centuries. It was originally formed through the cataclysmic Missoula Floods some 10 to 15 thousand years ago, another good thing to look up ahead of a vacation to enhance the experience.

Above Grand Coulee Dam is Lake Roosevelt. The wide and (relatively) shallow lake behind the dam is an oasis in an otherwise arid climate. My own experience there is with taking a boat out on the lake from one or another of the “resorts” along it’s length. Near the resorts, there is a bustle of activity with campers and boaters and swimmers. Taking a boat out and running a few miles up or down left me with the feeling of being truly in the middle of nowhere, with river and land to watch as far as the eye can see. The lack of human activity highlighted the sounds of water and wind and wildlife that one might not have noticed if you were just driving by.

Up in the Northern end of Washington, the trees return, but with a different experience than further down the river. The climate is different, the tree species are different, it’s a bit steeper in places. It’s also much less developed, which was a selling point for me.

The trip is well worth the effort. Knowing the history of the river really enhances the experience. And don’t try to do it all too fast. It is possible to drive the length in a day or two, but you would miss the point of going there.

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We didn’t start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world’s been turning
We didn’t start the fire
No, we didn’t light it
But we tried to fight it

Yeah, that one. Anyway, I’m thinking about the fact that during the course of the song, there are a LOT of events from the 1950′s and 1960′s and 1970′s and 1980′s that get mentioned. Then I get to thinking like this: That if you knew something about all of the people, places, and events that are mentioned during the song, you would know quite a bit about popular US history. Or, you would have a lot of trivia locked up in your noggin.

Anyway, just for fun,  I thought I would share a list of all the events mentioned in the song.  How many ring a bell for you?

Harry Truman, Doris Day, Red China, Johnnie Ray
South Pacific, Walter Winchell, Joe DiMaggio

Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Studebaker, television
North Korea, South Korea, Marilyn Monroe

Rosenbergs, H-bomb, Sugar Ray, Panmunjom
Brando, “The King and I” and “The Catcher in the Rye”

Eisenhower, vaccine, England’s got a new queen
Marciano, Liberace, Santayana goodbye

Joseph Stalin, Malenkov, Nasser and Prokofiev
Rockefeller, Campanella, Communist Bloc

Roy Cohn, Juan Peron, Toscanini, dacron
Dien Bien, Phu Falls, “Rock Around the Clock”

Einstein, James Dean, Brooklyn’s got a winning team
Davy Crockett, Peter Pan, Elvis Presley, Disneyland

Bardot, Budapest, Alabama, Krushchev
Princess Grace, “Peyton Place”, trouble in the Suez

Little Rock, Pasternak, Mickey Mantle, Kerouac
Sputnik, Chou En-Lai, “Bridge on the River Kwai”

Lebanon, Charles de Gaulle, California baseball
Starkweather, homicide, children of thalidomide

Buddy Holly, “Ben Hur”, space monkey, Mafia
Hula hoops, Castro, Edsel is a no-go

U-2, Syngman Rhee, payola and Kennedy
Chubby Checker, “Psycho”, Belgians in the Congo

Hemingway, Eichmann, “Stranger in a Strange Land”
Dylan, Berlin, Bay of Pigs invasion

“Lawrence of Arabia”, British Beatlemania
Ole Miss, John Glenn, Liston beats Patterson

Pope Paul, Malcolm X, British politician sex
JFK, blown away, what else do I have to say

Birth control, Ho Chi Minh, Richard Nixon back again

Moonshot, Woodstock, Watergate, punk rock
Begin, Reagan, Palestine, terror on the airline
Ayatollah’s in Iran, Russians in Afghanistan

“Wheel of Fortune”, Sally Ride, heavy metal, suicide
Foreign debts, homeless vets, AIDS, crack, Bernie Goetz
Hypodermics on the shores, China’s under martial law
Rock and roller cola wars, I can’t take it anymore

So, how many did you get?

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Now, since I rarely do sports stories here, I need to tell you my qualifications to be commenting on NFL football.  I watched 10 minutes of a football game this season.  In a doctor’s waiting room, and it may have been a college game.  I don’t know.  I just looked it up to see whether the Super Bowl had been played yet this year.  It hasn’t.  In other words, I don’t know what I’m talking about.

Nevertheless, let me tell you this:  The management of the Seahawks thinks that somehow they are going to take a wildly successful college football coach and turn him into a wildly successful NFL football coach.  For the sake of the team, I hope it works out for them.  But as a student of history, I have a story to tell.

Once upon a time, there was a college football coach named Dennis Erickson.  He was a great college coach, taking Idaho to the I-AA playoffs, turning Washington State University’s team from a mediocre team into a bowl team, and winning multiple national titles with the University of Miami.  Yeah, that Dennis Erickson.  So, some team called the Seattle Seahawks hired him, and he failed with them miserably.  Yup.  So, he went back to college football, took Oregon State University from being perennial losers and turning them into a bowl team, and one that could win into the future.  So another NFL team stole him away (the San Francisco 49ers) and, predictably, he did miserably again.

There’s a moral to this story.  A great college coach doesn’t necessarily make a great NFL coach.  And all too often, history tends to repeat itself if we don’t bother to learn it’s lessons.  I, for one, won’t be holding my breath.  But I will still wish Mr Carroll luck.

Not that I care.

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As the big day drew closer, there were more and more signs of the season.  Advertisements for items suitable for holiday gifts increased during September and October.  Christmas decor was up in places before Halloween.  At a 24-hour grocery store that I found myself at after midnight on Halloween, the Christmas candy displays had already replaced those from the day’s holiday.

I think that by Thanksgiving, I had almost had enough of the Christmas season.  There was more to come, though.  It was unavoidable.  Much of the traditions we associate with Christmas were gone, but the marketing was still there.  Somehow, it all felt so empty.  But we went through the motions of Christmas anyway.

Finally, the week of Christmas arrived.  Interactions with my customers went beyond “Thank you and have a great day” and added “and Merry Christmas” too.  We did the duty and wished each other a happy holiday.  We weren’t sure which holiday the other actually celebrated, but we did it anyway.  It is the social norm.

Finally the day arrived.  It went much like every other holiday:  An excuse for a day off.  Or a part of a day off, in any case.

But it was the following day that it really hit me.  After over three months of preparing for the holiday, the actual day came and went mostly as an afterthought.  Except that the next day, we weren’t wishing one another a happy holiday, of any kind, anymore.  Back to normal.  The holiday is gone.

It all makes me want to just wait next year for the week before Christmas to acknowledge it, then go from there.  It might not dilute the experience as much.

So many possibilities.  I’m just wondering who killed Christmas.  Anybody see it out there?

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Ivar Feeding the Seagulls

Ivar was a folk musician and entertainer who made the big time with his seafood restaurant.  He was well known throughout his life for the puns he made and the pranks he pulled.  He was just gutsy enough to try anything for publicity.  It was said that he did not break the law, but he didn’t always follow it, either.  In the end, his exploits were always either harmless promotion for himself or his business, or some sort of giving back to the city that he grew up in and loved.  Even after his passing, the company for which he was the “flounder” kept his edgy attitude for marketing.

So this September, when the company announced that they had found some underwater billboards that had been placed around Puget Sound in the 1950′s to advertise to a potential underwater audience, Seattleites had the right to be skeptical.  A  few prominent people were in on the joke, like Bob Donegan, president of Ivar’s and Seattle historian Paul Dorpat, who among other projects, has written a book about Ivar Haglund.  When he told the Seattle Times that he had some evidence that the billboards could be legit, there was some cause to believe that the story could be true.  Unless you were not familiar with Haglund’s life and the Ivar’s culture.

This week it came to everyone’s attention that the story really was a hoax, and that the billboards had been “found” in the spot where they were placed not long before.  Everyone had a laugh, and everyone chuckled that Ivar himself would have done something like that.  Also, everyone went down and had a cup of chowder at Ivar’s.  Their sales of the famous soup quadrupled during the faux promotion.

That is to say, everyone had a laugh except for longtime Times reporter Erik Lacitis and his editors.  He felt duped that a noted historian had “lied” to him for the record.  Times Executive Editor David Boardman says he was distressed that Paul Dorpat, the respected Seattle historian and first vice president of HistoryLink.org, had given legitimacy to the fake billboards even though he knew otherwise.  He was going to review whether Dorpat, who had written a local history column for the Times since 1982, should continue to do so, since he had given incorrect information to another Times reporter.

My response to the Times on this matter is to get a life!  You were given a taste of Seattle’s past to write about, and another small chapter was written in the Ivar’s story.  The Times writer had even written the story giving the facts but expressing that it was likely some sort of stunt.  The actions of Dorpat are the result of a 71-year-old man who had spent a lot of time researching Haglund and was not beyond wanting Seattle to relive some of the past.  He and Ivar’s president Donegan get an A+ in my book for simultaneous creativity in marketing and creativity in presenting local history.  Thank you for the bit of fun.  And shame on the Times for not seeing this for what it is.  Fun.

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Yes, a new movie with the incredibly creative title “2012” has recently placed the date of this seemingly important event at 21 December 2012.  This is, of course, somehow more credible than all the other dates that have been quoted as the final day for life on our planet.   The reason why escapes me.  But the fact that all sorts of sources have been predicting the end of the world since the day after the world began, and that they have all been wrong, stands as no deterrent.  We seem to have a bit over two years to live.

The first question that popped into my mind?  Are we using 21 December on the Julian Calendar or on the Gregorian Calendar?  I mean, after all, if you are going to claim that the day was pre-chosen some number of thousands of years ago, was that prediction adjusted for adjustments that have been made to the calendar in that time? In any case, I feel the need to completely ignore the movie and it’s surrounding hype.

Let’s say the world is ending.  Will I care.  No.  Why not?  Because none of us will be here to talk about it.  If the world doesn’t end, life will go on as normal.  If it does end, then there will be a busy day at St Peter’s Gate, or wherever your particular belief system says you will be going afterward, but I’m sure the Creator has that one worked out, too.  When it ends, our worldly selves just won’t be around to care at that point.

I don’t know about this particular film, but in most of these cosmic disaster flicks, there will be six of us (five, plus one more found alive later under the burned hulk of a pickup truck) left to start over with this Earth thing.  The rest of us will be those incinerated skeletons littering the ground.   I will be one of those skeletons.  So will you.  Neither of us will care at that point that the world just ended.

This just leaves me asking “What the heck?”  Movies are supposed to be fun.  Entertaining.  This movie will be entertaining for those waiting for the end of the world.  If you are, go for it!  For those of us who look forward to the Sun coming up tomorrow, then go on about your business.  Don’t bother me with all of that.  I will be the one not caring when it happens.

Of course, it might not hurt to hedge our bets.  Shall we make a dinner reservation for 21 December 2012 at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe?

PS #1: When the world does end, if you want to tell me that I was wrong, just email me here at Cascadia Journal.

PS #2:  Just in case the world does end, I have tagged this post under the category “Environment.”  Just in case.

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To everyone, I would like to introduce another blog project that I am working on.  It will not replace this one.  I will continue to share my opinions here with all of you who read and care.  The new blog, Cascadia Daily Photo, will take one picture per day that shows some aspect of the nature or culture of the Cascadia region.  This, of course, covers what most people know as Washington, Oregon, and British Columbia.

Please feel free to go over there and take a look at the pictures already there.  I’m told that some of them are pretty good, but I’ll let you be the judge of that.   I’ll leave you with an example here:

Yes, it is Multnomah Falls, one of the special areas that makes our part of the world so special.  No, all of the sites pictured in the new blog are not so well known, so it is worth a look to see what is there every day.  There are also links there to daily picture blogs done by other people from throughout the region.  Photo: Taken at Multnomah Falls on 16 June 2007.

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So predictably, about this time every year, the lovely lady Katt tells me that she is Hot!  Of course, when I tell her that I agree and that she is hot, I get the funny look and a “No, I don’t mean hot like that”.  Well, I did.

Anyway, I have to confess that every time she tells me that she is hot, the following song goes through my mind:

Well, it does…….

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