:: myitson dam project (artist's conception) ::
Carol and I were invited to an "oyster freakout" in North Portland. My GPS took us to the wrong place but only because I'd dialed it in a little wrong. Alan still hears his phone (smile). We enjoyed some of the best food we'd ever had, including fresh caught salmon brought by Bob, a talented fisherman.
Alan was just back from Burma doing what he does best: preserving a way of life in a sharable PDF document, showing how scholarship could be done if more than perfunctory. He's a "best of breed" at what he does. China has seven dams planned in the region but doesn't play by the same rules. Now that China has sided with Burma this many times in the UN, it's time for that nation state to cough up the goods, is how some analysts see it.
Alan has popped up in my blog before. He and his world class scholar of Burmese Buddhism wife got married in my living room ("my" in the sense of lent to Urners for the duration of their stay) when visiting on their honeymoon. They'd planned another "more official" backup marriage ceremony in France in case the Bhutanese certificate didn't hold up in court, but it did, with flying colors. Something like that anyway.
Of course when I heard about the Chinese plan for the dam I immediately said "Celilo Falls" i.e. immigrants arrogated severe privileges around here as well, much to the sneering and jeering of Roosevelt wannabes who couldn't fathom how much power Google would eventually need. I'm talking about The Dalles, where Celilo Falls, one of the most important fishing sites in North America, was submerged, somewhat redundantly with Bonneville further down river. Aluminum was another big consumer of inexpensive power, before Amazon and like that. Oregon also exports to California via HVDC.
Willamette Quarterly Meeting is going on at the Stark Street facility. Our region is experiencing none of the tumult that characterizes the Southeast (Carolinas and such). They're still fighting the Vietnam War per the recent summary by Chuck Fager. Our meetings are not FGC (yet) but we use their Cloud Services quite a bit, for websites and whatever. A professor at GFU that I know thinks we're bound to "come out" as FGC at one point or another. Another option is to just stay what we are, descendents of a New Hampshire lineage named "Beanite" i.e. named for the Bean family, refugees from religious persecution in Iowa.
