Category: What the…?

From the Fujin:

Tomorrow is a good day for trying something new.

No sign yet of last Tuesday’s “opportunity.”

A couple of months back we got a good laugh because my wife — whose last name comes from good Ukrainian stock — got a plug in the mail for some sort of women’s health magazine that was in Russian. We figured they must have some sort of program out there matching the “-sky” and “-ski” surnames to target the large recent immigrant community in the Portland/Vancouver metro area.

Her father’s branch of the family immigrated to the US a decade before the Civil War, and the her great-grandfather moved to Oregon in the first couple of decades of the twentieth century, so they’ve been here a while, there are a lot of them, and some of them have done fairly well.

But most of them — like my wife — don’t speak or read any of the languages using any variation of the Cyrillic alphabets. Needless to say, we didn’t buy or respond to the magazine solicitation. But now we’re starting to get flyers targeted to Russian speakers from organizations that we already get stuff from.

In The Know: Has Halloween Become Overcommercialized?

It may not have been quite Halloween, but the Roky Erickson show last night at the Wonder Ballroom was a — shall we say — scream…

A couple of weeks back, Barbara and I wandered over to see Nathan, Sara, and Everett for a photo shoot, so Nathan could put together his two–part comparison of the smart car and the Dutch Bakfiets cargo bike.

Regrettably, I wasn’t able to make yesterday’s local smart get-together. About twenty smarts and assorted hangers-on, met at the Evergreen Air & Space Museum in McMinnville, where they got a group shot in front of Howard Hughes’s Spruce Goose (photo via Mikie at the Smart Car of America forum).

Then, in order to get some other entertaining small car photos, they caravaned down to Silver Falls State Park via the Wheatland Ferry (another Mikie photo).

A great morning in smartspotting. Some folks around the corner have a yellow and black (“bumblebee”) hardtop and they were just pulling up to their garage as we were leaving. Then, in the parking garage at Kaiser Sunnyside, there was a black and white hardtop. Two rows down was a virtual twin of our own red and black cabrio.

From Tuesday, at the Fujin:

You will be happily surprised by a long time friend.

For my folks:

For Annie and Eric via Wikipedia’s featured article of the day:

One year ago today: Mom, Dad, and Barbara at the town center of Chester, Cheshire, England. Some of my Plant family ancestors came from the area. It’s the last one in this series, because we went home the next day.