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Category: Local Interest

Portland’s Daily Stolen Car Count

Portland’s Daily Stolen Car Count

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Property crime – including car thefts and break-ins – have become the new pandemic in Portland for both 2021 and 2022. In 2021 we reached a 25 year high in car thefts with over 1000 car thefts per month. 2022 is shaping up to be the same or worse.

It’s not uncommon to see vehicles without license plates driving around city streets and even randomly crashed into buildings. Since last year, Portland police can no longer pull cars over for traffic infractions, missing tags, expired registration, etc. It may soon be Oregon state law that police cannot pull anyone over for minor infractions.

Much like the old Portland Stabtown counter, there is now a new PDXStolenCars.com that keeps tally on the location and stolen vehicle count each day. They also list the most common open-air chop shops and dumping locations for boosted cars since local police no longer pursue such cases.

Funhouse Die Hard

Funhouse Die Hard

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Time to celebrate one of the best Christmas movies around – Die Hard.

Funhouse Lounge here in Portland has done a Die Hard musical parody show for several years now. This year is no different and all the shows almost immediately sold out. However, given the COVID situation, they also graciously provided a streaming option. I gave it a watch, and recommend you do too – but hurry – there are only a few streaming opportunities left.

More Polybius

More Polybius

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Polybius is a great urban legend that got its start in Portland. There’s lots of fodder thrown around about it, but The Polybius Conspiracy appeared to be a real investigation on the subject. They even have a lot of interviews from local people. It turns out, it was COMPLETELY FALSE and their main character was an actor.

None of that was disclosed. It is one more reason you should be very weary of documentaries as information sources. Evidence shows you should NOT be putting faith in documentaries any more than an editorial opinion piece.

If you want a little better coverage, this is also a good video about the urban legend:

Fire Towers of the Northwest

Fire Towers of the Northwest

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Staying at remote fire watch towers in the Pacific Northwest is kind of a thing for me. Above are two of the ones I stayed at. After getting lucky enough to land a near-impossible reservation, they usually require you to hike in to remote locations at the top of mountains. No power, no plumbing, and sometimes no cell service. You have to hike your own food and water into these remote locations – making them amazing experiences in living off the grid. The views, solitude, quiet, and beauty can be jaw dropping experiences for the lucky.

Keeping track of which ones are closed for repairs, inaccessible due to landslides, fires, blowdowns, snow, learning about new regulations and seasons of operation has never been easy.

Fortunately I’ve found another person with the same passion and she posts updates on some of these towers as well as her progress on visiting every one before they are gone.

One of the more notable postings was of my favorite tower Gold Butte which was recently wrapped to protect it from wildfires that ravaged one side of the peak.

Peak Fall Foliage Tool

Peak Fall Foliage Tool

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My favorite season is fall. The air turns cool, there are hay rides and pumpkin patches, one curls up with a good book in front of a fire, reading scary tales, and, of course, watching the leaves change.

Japan has some very good, live updating of fall colors on a few websites.

The folks over at this website have a nifty little tool that predicts when fall colors will change this year. How do they predict the trends this year? With a little bit of data (and possibly a touch of pretentiousness):

The company uses a model that ingests a multitude of data sources including historical precipitation, NOAA precipitation forecasts, elevation, actual temperatures, temperature forecasts, and average daylight exposure to develop a baseline fall date for each county in the continental United States. Next, the model consumes hundreds-of-thousands of additional data points from a variety of government and non-government sources and layers this data over its own historical data from past years and, finally, with a high degree of accuracy, the algorithm produces nearly 50,000 date outputs indicating the progression of fall for every county in a graphical presentation that is easy to digest.