Pretty Sweet Cultural Mashups

It's been more than a year since I've been over here, not to mention the plethora of other blogs I keep (books, sports, cooking, Long Beezy local news...), but Time to return with a classic.

I've come across some items that are encouraging in that they speak to those of us weird enough to get them. Here's the first: "This is bat country."

This is a pretty nice cultural mashup, using the HST quote and scene to great effect.

With that comes the next mashup, the obligatory Gonzo and the good Doctor, and the Animal as facsimile of Oscar:

Here's one more of Jim Henson's Gonzo, done portraiture style as Hunter, but the medium is blotter paper:

"Pretty sweet" must just mean "involves Hunter Thompson."

Poaching...Murder?

That's a question that I've been thinking about the last few days and DO NOT claim to answer here and now. I was just having a thought...

In 1994, Charger, a majestic bull elk that patrolled the streets of Yellowstone, was gunned down. His corpse was found a few days later---his antlers had been hacked off. Here's a picture of Charger:

A few weeks later a taxidermist in Utah thought a set of antlers someone had just brought in to him bore a resemblance to the eulogistic article about Charger he'd just read. After some animal DNA investigations (seriously), CHAD BEUS was charged with killing Charger. He was fined $30,075 and sentenced to six months in jail. Here's an article about the lab that helped snare the young Beus.

Would anybody be surprised if Chad Beus would be arrested again for poaching? That he would be banned from hunting in 24 states for nearly a dozen years? You don't need to be a cynic to make a guess about killers. It took until 2005 before he was caught again.

Having to hunt for sustenance for you and your family is one thing. Elephants for tusks, elk for antlers, sharks for their fins...and then, how easy is it to reconcile that with all the violence that we mete out onto each other?

Anyway, all this is some background for when I start using chadbeus as a pejorative term synonymous with scumbag, you'll know where it came from.

Auxiliary Portland Pictures

What follows are some pictures from around Portland I took while on our most recent trip. 

This first one is a neat sculpture of wood and metallic corner details:

Among the many bike stores and camera stores (at least three! that could be an entire post by itself), there were a handful of used record stores, which is always good to see:

This is Pioneer Square and the courthouse at the end of it. It had a bas relief word marking on it saying "Pioneer Courthouse", so I'm not sure whether or not it's still in use. We were going to visit the site during our trip, but missed it until the very end, as the metro to the airport picks up right next to it:

These are artsy sculptures that collect sunlight to power the metro stop fixtures that are right there. That's the Rose Garden---aka basketball arena---in the background, and this is one of the metro stops associated with the arena:

Big mural or advertisement, on the side of the riverside factory. "Long Live Oregonians", aka "white people". Seriously, any ethnic people in the mural/advertisement? Maybe one?

Here are some of the stained-glass windows at Voodoo Doughnuts:

Roses, roses everywhere, so lets all have a sniff:

Tricky, Tricky

I need to do this for my phone, oddly enough.

Nothing to see here...

Limekiln Wildlife: Critters Edition

Here are some pictures of the animals we saw during our Limekiln camping trip:

In the first five minutes after getting there, there was a deer roaming the grounds, and I caught him like a ghost in the upper right-hand corner of this exposure:

An obvious addition to any trip to a California coast--seabirds:

Banana slugs in the wild! I'd never seen one before. It was pretty small, and I remember thinking, Who left a golden pepper out here? But it was moving! Cool:

Be careful and wary: smelly elephant seals brawling in the surf:

And sunning on the beach:

The big male on the upper right is nearly as big as my old Datsun 240-Z.

Look Out!

Piranhas! Attacking the Jungle Cruise ship, a rare specie that loves the sunny afternoons of Anaheim:

Pretty cool effect, anyway...

Columbus Circle

There was a cool scene from Taxi Driver where they frame the Senator Palantine during one of his speeches at Columbus Circle in Manhattan, with his arms raised matching the statue, but both heads being cropped out of the picture, to show Travis' disconnect from the rest of the world. But I went by and took a few pictures of the zone for myself. The first two are of the same statue, Columbus, but from different angles:

The specific statue from Taxi Driver: