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Light pillars are an interesting natural phenomenon in which a vertical beam of light appears to extend above and/or below a light source. The effect is created by the reflection of light off tiny ice crystals slowly falling through the air, reflecting light rays off of them.

While more common in Canada/Alaska and other northern latitudes, they recently appeared in the night skies over Redmond, Oregon on Christmas Eve 2022. Pretty cool!

Polybius is an urban legend about a video game that appeared in arcades in the 1980’s around the Portland, Oregon area. It caused people to migraines, have hallucinations, hinted at mind control, cause knife attacks on others, and government conspiracies.

Like most things, if you dig in there is very little concrete evidence. Instead, it appears to be a collection of events that were all real and related to video games of the era.

The Why Files does a pretty decent job digging into the legend and gets a good collection of the facts behind the legend.

This one is definitely better than the fake documentary from a few years back – a reminder that documentaries need to be verified too.

At the Clark County Fairgrounds in October, Cinema of Horrors sets up a temporary drive-in and puts on a few weeks of scary movies.

I’ve gone in years past and it’s a lot of fun for what it is. There are a few small booths with food carts, merch, and people walking around dressed in scary costumes. They have classic scary movies (Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street, Scream, etc) as well as a few family nights (original Ghostbusters, Casper, Beetlejuice).

Definitely fun for fall.

Give workers a living wage! Tipping in restaraunts is wage slavery!

I’ve heard it all out here in Oregon. Calls to unionize restaurants have…been mixed at best. But it turns out, changing restaurant serving work to a ‘living wage’ has largely gone poorly. It turns out the people most upset and leaving restaraunts with no tipping and living wage pay are the workers themselves. A great majority of the restaurants that tried it over the last few years have quietly quit the experiment. Eater magazine, one of the most pro-food restaurant and food worker magazines has written up an excellent article ‘Why the no-tipping restaurant model failed‘. Why would workers leave living wages jobs?

It wasn’t that they didn’t try it or fully embrace the idea. High profile restaurants in San Francisco converted to a no-tipping living wage model – Sons & Daughters, Menlo Park’s Flea Street, Cotogna, Faun, and most famously, Zuni. So did restaurants in New York and other major food destinations. I often ran across restaurants in Portland that gave up tipping in favor of a mandatory living wage surcharge. Since then almost all of them have quietly quit and gone back to tipping – save a few holdouts. Why? The workers left.

It wasn’t just the diners that doomed the movement; workers saw lower earnings were also reluctant to embrace the change. At Faun, for example, Stockwell started servers at $25 per hour when the restaurant was tip-free. Even then, he says, it was “virtually impossible” to compete with what servers could make at a “similarly ambitious local restaurant with tips.” If a tipped server could make $40 to $50 an hour, or up to $350 over the course of a seven-hour shift, why do the same work for half the money?

But it wasn’t just workers. Higher costs do have an impact. A UC Irvine study found that for every dollar increase in food cost, it resulted in more than a 6% decrease in full-service restaurant employment. 

It’s not like this wasn’t expected. But politicians and activists ignored the simple economics. The wide-spread reality and economics of tipping is right there for politicians. They could have easily found out by checking W-2 reports, well, assuming workers were reporting all their tips ;). The people who were hurt from these experiments in social restructuring and activism are ironically the workers at these restaurants. They were ultimately those that had to change or lost jobs as the predicted lower actual pay and the extra costs drove away customers played out in the economy.

This is not to say that the tipping model is perfect. It certainly is not. But good intentions are NOT enough and certainly not enough to make industry-changing policy. Unintended consequences have very recently been showing the flaws of many poorly designed and implemented overly naïve activist policies.

Other first world countries like Europe and Japan manage to have very affordable food and restaurant experiences in the most expensive cities in the world without trading livability of employees. I have been surprised to find my meals in Paris, London, and Tokyo were often better, and cheaper, than many I have had in the US. Perhaps we should learn more about how their working systems operate instead of letting activist, who rarely have experience or training, legislate policy.

The Original Practice Shakespeare Festival puts on free Shakespeare plays in local Oregon parks. It’s quite a prolific group – they do multiple shows per week at a variety of local parks each summer. It appears the cast is volunteer and they do carry small scrolls in case they get lost but what they lack in technical skill they make up for in theatrics and good fun. So, it can be a somewhat rag-tag operation at times but it’s definitely a fun and cheap way to catch some Shakespeare.

After a 72 year ban on self-serve gas, despite it passing unilaterally through the Oregon house and senate, and despite the governor waffling and ‘wanting further input from citizens’ before signing – as of today you can now pump your own gas in Oregon.

Don’t worry – local news is alway helping with instructions for scared residents that are sure this is what’s about to happen all over the state:

Original version on Imgur.