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The City That Works? Tell Phil about it

Friday 5.30.03

Odds and ends: Today completes two full weeks of the revamped and reinvigorated Worldwide Pablo website. Reviews, cranky put-downs, politics galore and personal travails – hey, no topic is too small for WWP. He kindly invites his readers to share their faves or raves. All suggestions will be considered for inclusion here. Which is another way of saying, generating fresh stuff is harder than it looks. (Worldwide Pablo pats himself for making it this far. Stick with him, folks.)

Meanwhile, today we look at some of the leftovers in Worldwide Pablo’s Internet grab bag. Enjoy.

Maybe we could turn it into a Pea Patch? Memorial Coliseum, whatever will we do with that white elephant, WWP wonders. Housing? Shopping? (Please, God, not another Home Depot.) A Victory Garden? The City of Portland is entertaining ideas. What’s your suggestion?

Try to remember: Check out this cool website. You type in your birthdate (in this format: 1/1/2001, for example) and – voila! – it computes more than just your age. Proof again that some people have way too much time on their hands.

Stupid word tricks: Friends of Worldwide Pablo know how much he loves words and language. A well-turned sentence has been known to make his day. But, ooh, some of those clunky modernisms can grate on the ear. A nice selection of the latter is found here.

C’mon people now, smile on your brother: In Worldwide Pablo’s formative years, the idea of a gay/straight alliance on his high school campus would have ranked right up there with the possibility of a Martian invasion. Consider this one of the true blessings of the 21st century. The personal stories of gay/lesbian teens are not to be missed. (Thanks to Donna G. for the web tip.)

That’s all for today’s grab bag. Worldwide Pablo wishes you a nice weekend.

Thursday 5.29.03

All the nudes that’s fit to print: Proof that next year’s mayor’s race is beginning to heat up arrived this week. City Commissioner Jim Francesconi, long rumored to covet the mayor’s office (should Veritable Vera decide not to run, which is still a pretty big IF), is now pushing for the City of Portland to file legal papers in opposition to nude dancing. It all revolves around a legal case involving the tiny eastern Oregon burg of Nyssa, where city fathers (parents?) successfully placed new limits on nude dancing. Naturally, the case has been appealed up to the state supreme court, and Francesconi wants Portland to weigh in against booty shaking. Arguments will not occur until this fall, and a decision could be months after that. But the timing could be perfect for a candidate attempting to stand out in a potentially crowded race – a race, not so coincidentally, that should be in full swing about the time Oregon’s high court delivers its opinion.

Worldwide Pablo has his own opinions about nude dancing (after all, he’s been known to darken the door of Portland’s finer dance establishments in his time, but we digress). Of greater concern to WWP is the fact that the mayor’s race is off to such a seedy start. With no shortage of actual issues facing city hall (adequate police, parks and roads, for starters) it raises WWP’s already-borderline blood pressure to think the important task of selecting a mayor could depend on a candidate’s position on, say, pasties or G-strings.

In politics, such positioning is known as picking a “wedge issue” to gain electoral favor. But to the rest of us, it’s just plain ol’ political pandering. C’mon Jim. You’re better than this.

Playing with a full deck: We’ve all seen them, those ubiquitous “pop-up” advertisements on the Internet for playing cards depicting the most-wanted Iraqi officials under Saddam Hussein. Before you could say “now there’s a really stupid idea,” the Internet became awash in offers for other kinds of playing cards. “Heroes of Operation Iraqi Freedom.” “Scoundrels of the Iraqi War.” And so on.

What next, WWP wonders? “Heroes of the Internet.” “Scoundrels of the Oregon Legislature.” “The Bozos of Hollywood.” “Jerks of Portland.” “Hunks of the Internet.” Oh, the possibilities!

See some of the cards for yourself: Democrats click here. Republicans click here. (If anyone finds a nice set of cards for Libertarians or independents, please let Worldwide Pablo know about it and he’ll post the results on this website. Thank-you-very-much.)

Wednesday 5.28.03

Scary but true: Worldwide Pablo never pays attention to conspiracy theories, and so recent comparisons of post-9/11 America (under the USA Patriot Act) to post-World War I Germany fail to impress him. It’s just so much shoddy history, he sniffs (to say nothing about being overheated rhetoric). But WWP is chastened by recent events and is rethinking this view. Now, according to the U.S. Supreme Court, “foreigners” may be easily deported without benefit of that pesky little thing the rest of us take for granted. (It’s called “due process.” Look it up sometime.)

WWP poses a simple question: In securing our homeland, have we become the evil we deplore? Read ’em and weep.

No contest: A reader of Worldwide Pablo writes that when President Bill “Blow Job” Clinton’s budget came up for a vote a few years back, every Republican voted against it. “Vice President Gore’s vote broke the tie, passing the budget. The economy grew at a rapid rate. Twenty million new jobs were created. Unemployment dropped to its lowest level in many years. The national debt was reduced. Deficit spending was stopped. Budget surpluses in the trillion of dollars were projected as far as the eye could see.”

Compare this to last Friday, the reader says, when Vice President Dick “Blow Hard” Cheney voted to break a tie on W’s tax whopper (which purportedly will create one million new jobs). “We will have to wait and see,” he says. “The last tax cut lost two million jobs. Deficit spending skyrocketed. The national debt is going up by trillions of dollars. And to think that the president still wants to circle the wagons and cut taxes again even before we see any results from this recent rash of tax slashing in the absence of spending cuts.”

It amuses Worldwide Pablo when Democrats behave like Republicans. But it confuses and infuriates him when the reverse occurs. WWP remembers the Grand Old Party as the standard bearer for such values as limited government, fiscal responsibility and individual rights. The current administration is 0 for 3 in this regard. Something’s rotten in Denmark.

WWP wonders: Will the party of Lincoln ever find its roots again? And will the American public ever notice if it doesn’t?

The Final Private Reserve: True to his word, Worldwide Pablo spent part of his day Monday observing the national holiday, Memorial Day, in a fitting fashion: visiting graves. A trip to Portland’s scenic and historic Riverview Cemetery provided glimpses of the final resting places for a veritable “Who’s Who” from early Portland: William Ladd, Henry Failing, Henry Corbett, Henry Pittock, Harvey Scott, Simon Benson, Abigail Scott Duniway, Albertina Kerr, Virgil Earp (brother of gun-slinging Wyatt), Dorothy McCullough Lee and many others (including footballer Lyle Alzado).

WWP’s personal favorite is the family plot for Henry Weinhard, he of the beer-making fame. Mourners still bring Private Reserve bottle caps to “deposit” at his headstone. Here’s a photo of the gravesite, minus those tawdry twist-tops.

By the way, if Worldwide Pablo’s readers are interested in seeing other photographs of the Riverview glitterati, take a detour to Find-A-Grave, the essential online source of the macabre.

Tuesday 5.27.03

Restating the obvious? At the risk of repeating himself, Worldwide Pablo directs his readers’ attention once again to the slowly emerging realization that not all Oregonians are pulling their weight, tax-wise, that is. The Oregonian, the state’s official handmaiden to the business lobby, is the latest to come to this realization. The O is shocked, shocked!, to learn that 65 percent of Oregon corporations paid no state income tax in 2000, opting instead to write $10 checks to the state Department of Revenue -- the minimum required when the tax liability is reduced by deductions to zero.

The Big O reports: “Astounding as the percentage may seem, it's not unusual. For years, roughly 60 percent of corporate Oregon has paid just the minimum, first set at $10 in 1931. … Corporate tax collections for the two-year budget period ending June 30 will drop to their lowest level in a decade, according to recent estimates from the Oregon Office of Economic Analysis. The take, at $404 million, represents a 46 percent slide from the $755 million gathered in 1999-01. Corporate taxes as a percentage of general fund revenue will shrink to 4 percent in 2001-03 from 7 percent in 1999-01. At no time since record-keeping began in the late 1970s has the corporate contribution to the state budget been so low.”

WWP thinks the time is ripe to let your legislators know what you think.

Oh, those Brits, Part 1. From time to time, Worldwide Pablo revels in reading the back pages of newspapers, taking time to peruse the obituaries and death notices whilst there. Not that he has a morbid, streak mind, you – it’s strictly a professional curiosity. You see, over the years WWP has written more than his fair share of memorial notices, several hundred in his estimation. Nowhere is the art form of obituary writing more refined than it is in the United Kingdom, where language and lifestyle unite to produce death notices unrivaled for originality and curiosity. Alas, the link originally provided here providing an example of such work no longer works, as The Times of London has removed it from the Internet (another reason to ready Worldwide Pablo daily). Worldwide Pablo promises to post similar works in the future, so keep watching.

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Friday 5.30.03

Thursday 5.29.03

Wednesday 5.28.03

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