Podcasting from Cascadia

:: broadcasting from Mt. Tabor ::

Electric ATVs

Given my evident seniority, a euphemism for senior citizen status, or geezer-hood as Jane Snyder started calling us, long before due I thought — she got me ready — I’m thinking about whether people my age should be riding electric ATVs through the forest. That’s isn’t the only cohort I think about, it’s just that I think about my niche.

The electric ATV motif goes back to Project Earthala in these blog posts, which we might see as a branch of “EPCOT West” (another motif). We have this science research campus somewhere near Great Slave Lake (that’s in Canada) and we get around on these rechargeable battery powered ATVs a lot of the time. That’s like a cinematic video clip, something AI could do pretty easily.

Another scenario in which electric vehicles figured was my Ben & Jerry’s in Cuba scene. That was about Unilever standing up to Procter & Gamble and deciding to establish an ice cream factory near Havana somewhere, offering those kinds of jobs the wandering task taking tourists like to get, like driving an ice cream truck around Cuba. Again, AI renderings played a role in the slide decks or whatever.

Fall Equinox 2025

Technically speaking, going by the astronomy tables, the actual Fall Equinox isn't until sometime around Monday, meaning day after tomorrow from the standpoint of today, the Saturday morning prior. 

However, our Wanderers group, which at one time met weekly (more like Mercado Group for me), now meets about four times a year, to celebrate / acknowledge the two solstices (winter, summer) and two equinoxes (fall, spring). The closest Friday to this fall's equinox was yesterday, so I'm looking back on our most recent gathering (wave to everyone).

When we get to a part of the conversation where people are talking about their first religion (which could still be their religion, or not, life stories vary), my standard line is "OMSI was my religion" by which I mean the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, just across the parking lot from Oregon Zoo when I was little. OMSI has since moved, to the east bank of the Willamette River, taking over the site of a PG&E power station, incorporating that building into its own footprint. Oregon Zoo has continued morphing and expanding.

By "OMSI was my religion" one might think I'm claiming loyalty to materialist reductionist science, however in 2nd grade (the age I'm remembering), I wasn't yet schooled enough to think in those terms. For me, it was about the interactive exhibits, the giant heart we could walk through, and all those buttons. You'd push some button and a little show would take place, better than a stiff-still diorama, the more standard alcove exhibit when one walks the great halls of any random museum about something 3D (add motion for 4D -- some of the dinos might swivel their heads).

A museum one might in retrospect call the MotherShip is the Deutsches Museum in Munich (Munchen) Bavaria, Germany. I got to visit there when I was a little older, and Nirvana Я Us (or were us), I have to say. That's when our family lived in Rome and Bavaria was but a few autostradas and autobahns away.

Speaking of "backwards R" (Я), you may pronounce that "Yar!" in Cascadian, connoting "talk like a pirate" like in cartoons. Yesterday, September 19, was also Talk Like a Pirate Day, a theme in these blogs. Portlanders like their pirate memes. "Piracy" even still has current meaning, as in "what the FBI is up against" when it comes to kids using Napster and like that. Pirate Bay and all that. 

Come to think of it, I recall attending a luncheon seminar in an OMSI conference room (near the entrance) where the topic was how police were monitoring electronic copying at PSU (this was back when I was affiliated with the Hillsboro West Precinct via Saturday Academy).

As a capital of Software Libre (you wonder where that "liberal" went, a favorite flavor), Portland doesn't advocate breaking the dinos' laws, but does encourage co-creating alternative ecosystems wherein copying digital assets around among network hosts is not considered illegal; it's a feature not a bug. 

When we make our media, our business models already work backwards from the assumption of infinite free copiability, as a rule of thumb. Some call it the "Grateful Dead model" (for good reason: the Dead encouraged private recordings and bootleg distributions of their performances). 

Free copiability is not incompatible with restricted access. We're not compelled to share; a treasure might still get buried, per the map. Sometimes a puzzle only resolves per the individual in a not-copiable way.  Published solutions come across as a lot of blah blah to most readers. Nature has lots of membranes, barriers, other semi-permeable manifolds (veils, curtains...).

So, full circle: last night I found myself in the OMSI planetarium getting brainwashed by my old boyhood religion, like getting reinitiated. But now that I've been a Princeton philo guy, I wouldn't say materialist reductionist would describe it. OMSI was casting (projecting) Trusting the Universe: the Philosophy of Alan Watts, a mesmerizing experience by Amir Aziz wherein we get mandala computer graphics (animations) mixed with Alan Watts in his own words (a voice recording, subtitles projected, in English, in the margins, slightly above the planetarium's horizon line. 

Most people there last night likely didn't need the subtitles, as their native tongue is close enough to English to make Watts pretty easy to understand.

At the moment I decided to buy a ticket for this event, an electronic document in my Apple Wallet, a QR code admission thing, I'd spaced out that the Wanderers Fall Equinox Gathering was that same night, the nearest Friday as you'll recall.  Fortunately, our gather starts at 7 PM and the show wasn't until 9:30 PM and OMSI is not far away in terms of time, by motor vehicle. 

Per plan, I dropped Sydney the dog back home around 9 PM and was paying for parking via ParkingKitty (another app) well before they started running their program. 

I got to relax in a comfy seat (even if my back was killing me, not literally) and trust the universe for a little while, while Alan poked holes in the idea of our treating him as a guru, opening his hand (nothing!), putting his cards on the table, to show we each had an instructive vantage point, and letting ourselves be shaped by our own experience of Universe is no crime. He also wanted to talk us out of making "experiencing nothing" our goal in meditation, moving the needle closer to the "experience everything" end of the spectrum.

School Chatter

Some of my School of Tomorrow topics are like tent stakes for me, in helping me define the tent inside from outside, but then I haven’t had much time within the tent yet. The Mark Fisher stuff, for example, is dense with cultural allusions that go right by me, because I haven’t yet had time for much immersion in that particular floatation tank. 

So I’m quick to defer to experts who come bustling in saying I don’t seem to know the first thing about X. That could be right. Lecture away, oh expert mam or sir or… help me fill in what I’m missing. You have the floor.

As a result of a Syn-U faculty convergence (harmonic enough) earlier this summer, there’s a new Syn-U preview of an interviews anthology in which I’m presented as an icebreaker interviewee. I knew the cameras were rolling and did my best to ignore them, sticking to a conversational persona wandering around the neighborhood and sharing my views. 

I’ve got a Crusty the Clown look going that gets me thinking of my funny line: that, like Christian Bale sometimes does, I had to put on a lot of weight to play this role.

In making that joke a few times (I plan on continuing with the intermittent fasting BTW), about gaining weight for the role, I found myself in Movie Madness renting a couple Christian Bale movies, why not: Laurel Canyon and The Machinist. 

I also bought another XL Movie Madness T-shirt to add to my collection. I’m wearing it today, right now (and both movies are still in my possession at the time of this posting).

The plan with me playing a Dymaxion clown is to show it at RISD later this month as a kind of project portal. We’re recruiting, as usual, with Cascadian Synergetics, continuing to drum up the many opportunities for collaboration, including but not limited to being interviewed. 

This wasn’t the first time in my case (like Mike Acerra had me on his channel), plus I’m a known quantity appearing solo on my own low key not-monetized channel.

In other autobiographical news, I got that second pair of eyeglasses half off, even more it worked out thanks to specifics, this pair tinted. I’ve been testing them out, and also celebrated this return to high living standards with a visit to a sushi train in the Hollywood neighborhood. I’d been imagining going there for weeks, and this week I finally found the time.

Urban Vistas (Fall Term)

In saying "urban" I'm not pitting it against "rural" as in "yes, the two go together but not every relationship has to be one of opposition; antonyms share the workload, of characterizing a spectrum". And then we have suburban, and, no doubt, semi-rural.

What I am saying, in contrast, is that I appreciate urban studies as a discipline and/or area of concentration as we'd say at Princeton (mine being philosophy at that time), and of late I've been binging on video documentaries about Portland (mixed with walk-throughs around China and clips from Burning Man). 

This focus syncs with my bold talk about Place-based Education being a great way to go, in terms of mnemonics and keeping stories anchored in personal experience. Autobio and first person perspective are implied, meaning not out of bounds, but rather encouraged. We're free to be Bayesians.

Urban renewal: I've already blogged about Robert Moses, picking up much of my info through Defunctland, a favorite YouTube channel, and its focus on old theme parks, expos, world’s fairs. Some fairs were officially recognized as expos by the expo recognizers (Seattle, Montreal...), whereas others were not (New York, Portland...). 

Portland? I'm talking about the Lewis & Clark Centennial of 1905, staged in North Portland, and mostly gone without a trace but for the NCR pavilion, now a McMenamins in St. Johns. So Portland hires Robert Moses to do another one of his famous freeway clearings, this time right through SE PDX. But the citizens fought back, and won. I-80N never happened.

Speaking of "gone without a trace", probably the most eye-opening documentary of them all, speaking subjectively, given my prescription, was the one on Vanport, its rapid rise as a microcosm of the United States then emerging: shipyard workers from everywhere, congregating all at once and working out a lifestyle, with support from Kaiser, that really rocked, according to kid testimony especially. It verged on being a true company town of the kind envisioned by John Cadbury (see Quakernomics).

But Vanport was never designed to be permanent, one reason it was allowed (Kaiser and the Feds largely paid for it), and was being gradually dismantled after the war, but also made into a large community college, serving vets (GIs on the GI Bill) especially. 

The utopian town (too loud, working class, kinda grungy, but always hopping) was pressing on towards the present, until the freak flood of 1948, which was devastating all over, to downtown Portland as well, although the Rose Festival came off as scheduled (Vanport even had a float in the Rose Parade, whereas Vanport itself had washed away in the meantime).

Vanport housing was segregated, and when it flooded, many of its African heritage families, now refugees, strangers in a strange land, moved to the Albina area, which in a later chapter was to face a lot of forced redevelopment, ala the Robert Moses chapter. I-5 and the Rose Quarter (Memorial Coliseum -- no Paul Allen Moda Center back than) had eminent domain. 

Portlanders tend to know this Rose Quarter story and nowadays celebrate what's left of the mowed down (as in bulldozed) area, from SE Mississippi north along MLK to Alberta and such places. Take it all the way to Lombard if you wanna, or to Columbia Boulevard.

But fewer, I'd wager, remember the urban renewal projects that took place closer to downtown, which explains the Keller Auditorium and environs. They took out an old European Jewish neighborhood with lots of single old men (many white ones) in hot-plate-equipped apartments, also Afro-Chinese and Native American, i.e. another microcosm, against which many of the mostly-whites in City Hall (in many cases Klan-friendly) had an immune response and wanted to erase not only physically, but from public memory.

Portland (aka Rust City) has always been a "frontier town" in many ways, with a positive spin on "pioneering" even in an age which acknowledges the imperialist nature of the immigrants' project. Quakers experienced the drive to conquer and enslave first hand in the New World, as the institutions of slavery and militarily enforced expansion filled the ambient culture around them. The Neo-Romans never left us. They established us, coming from an already-established British Empire (United Kingdom).

Generative AI

Buckminster + Herman Munster = thebuckmunster 

We've seen several experiments already around generating text, voice, imagery from the Bucky Fuller corpus. 

thebuckmunster is a convenience meme for handling machine-generated Buckyisms that it'd be inappropriate to attribute to the man himself.

This isn’t necessarily a best rendering. Roll the dice yourself why not?