Keillor gets it right

Potato Salad is NOT Ice Cream

Garrison Keillor's latest commentary is on potato salad and he nails it. I, too, went to a July 4 potluck and found, among the chips and guacamole, crackers and cheese, carrots and celery sticks, pork and beans and fried spring rolls, buckets of over-mayonnaised goop containing finely diced potatoes and some other stuff mostly added for color. This stuff passes for potato salad in grocery stores and delis these days.

Keillor observes:

The eerie-yellow store-bought stuff in the tubs was manufactured at Amalgamated Salad in Houston by undocumented 12-year-olds from the hills of Michoacan. Worse, it is teaching our children that accomplishment doesn't matter.

A child served yellow slop from a bucket is being told that it's OK to plagiarize a term paper off the Internet just so long as it's poorly written.

He then gives the basics for real potato salad: "Take half an hour away from your Facebook page and do the job right. Boil some eggs, chop the celery and chives and green onions, boil the potatoes, make your mayonnaise, maybe toss in a little sour cream, use plenty of dill, and sprinkle paprika on top." To that I would add some dill pickle and a dollop of mustard (dijon or spicy brown), and probably take out the chives.

Myriad reasons exist for the promulgation of crappy potato salad, not the least of which is at most Americans will put up with anything that has too much mayonnaise in it. But one culprit is the ice cream scoop. Old fashioned potato salad is chunky and you have to use a big spoon to get it out of the bowl and a small spoon or fork to pull it off the big spoon and onto the plate. But sometime in, I think, the 70s, though maybe earlier, deli counters figured out they could more efficiently transfer potato salad from one container to another with an ice cream scoop, if the salad was modified to something with the consistency of rocky road ice cream. And out went the big chunks of potato and the halves of hard boiled eggs and celery slices big enough to crunch. Thus potato salad became tasteless and bland.

So you ask, why didn't I bring real potato salad to this potluck? I guess I should have, but I decided there would be plenty of starchy salads (potato and pasta), and opted to bring real cole slaw instead. Not the ice cream scoop variety, but slaw with coarse cut cabbage, chunks of apple and onion and a few diced pepperoncini tossed in for spice.

Rule of thumb: other than ice cream, food should not be dishable with an ice cream scoop.

Embracing Chavez Blvd.

Naming Rites

If you were asked to prioritize all of the issues that can be appropriately addressed by the Portland City Council, where would you place renaming a street after Cesar Chavez?

Yeah, me too. It definitely wouldn’t crack the top ten. I suspect a significant number of Latinos actually feel the same way, considering the unemployment rate, high cost of housing, decreased funding for public schools and shabby state of public parks. Nevertheless, the issue is not only on the table, it’s jumping up and down and demanding attention like a four-year-old who didn’t get dessert.

Not that I’m opposed to renaming a street after Cesar Chavez. In fact, I have the perfect street in mind. It’s not 39^th Ave., nor Broadway, nor Grand Ave. all of which have been suggested. No, it’s Glisan Street. Glisan is one of the longest and most culturally diverse streets in all of Portland—and even stretches out to the eastern edge of the city where most Latinos live.

Besides that, no one pronounces Glisan correctly. Named after Rodney Glisan, an early Oregon physician who married into wealth, it is supposed to be pronounced like “glisten.” Instead, it’s commonly pronounced “glee-son.” No one knows why, exactly, though many believe this pronunciation emerged after World War II when a James Gleason was a prominent politician in Portland.

The right way to do it would be to keep it Glisan St. on the west side of the Willamette, because the streets go in alphabetical order in Northwest Portland. (The one that starts with “C” is Couch, named after the famous naval captain who owned much of that part of town—and whose daughter Glisan married). But on the east side of the river, name it Chavez. It’s certainly not unusual for streets to vanish at the banks of the river. For example, from the west, you approach the Morrison Bridge on Alder St., but come off it on Belmont St., which is only on the east side.

No matter which street is renamed, people are going to protest it. Businesses particularly get upset with street renaming, citing the cost of changing stationary, business cards and advertising. That’s small change compared to the gain businesses could see were their street to become Chavez Boulevard.

With the economy scraping bottom, businesses need to take advantage of every opportunity. The Latino community in Portland is growing—and also growing more affluent. For the most part, this is a culture with strong family values that also aspires to own all the trappings of the American middle class. It’s a market that is ignored only by the smug and foolish.

Savvy merchants, restaurateurs and barkeeps should lobby for the name change, and then post banners and signs saying “We are proud to be part of the street honoring Cesar Chavez.”

And then make sure they can speak Spanish.

Fauna Chauvinism

The Fly

There was a rumor buzzing around the Internet for a few days that Jeff Goldblum had died, joining Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett and Ed McMahon. Fortunately for all us Goldblum geeks, it wasn’t true. Hope still abounds that he will live on to make films as great as The Adventures of Buckaroo Bonzai Across the Eight Dimension and Earth Girls Are Easy.

The preceding week, President Obama committed the most famous assassination of a common house fly since The Karate Kid. The swift and sudden hand clap executed by Obama was quite impressive. Yeah, no more Mr. Nice Guy.

So along comes PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) complaining that instead of killing the fly, Obama should have gently caught it and released it later—all the meanwhile carrying on an interview about foreign policy. PETA’s protest generated the usual guffaws among the late night talk show comics, yet the true nature of this insidious organization still needs to be exposed.

While asserting the sanctity of all life, PETA neglects to protect at least half of it. Do you ever hear PETA screaming about the hellacious juggernaut of agricultural machinery mowing down defenseless little soybeans so that you may have your tofu? Does PETA ever protest the plucking and slicing of tomatoes? Or condemn uprooting the heads of onions from their cozy refuge in the earth? Of course not. It looks the other way when fruits and vegetables are slaughtered mercilessly. In fact, PETA encourages such carnage.

PETA is a fauna chauvinist front. As such, it has no moral authority. Is a fly more important than, say, an apple tree? I think not.

Therefore, I really don’t get too upset when people kill flies. All I ask is that first, they look to make sure that Jeff Goldblum’s tiny head is not affixed to the fly’s body.

While I was out

For just $1 a day...


My long hiatus from this blog doesn’t signal its (or my) death—just taxes. As usual, I waited until the last few days and then furiously scoured my records for deductions. I used to think it was a national myth that people who file their taxes on the last day are the least likely to get audited, but evidently it’s true. So that’s what I do.

Then I had to take another few days to catch up on all the things I put off while doing taxes. And then the NBA playoffs started and who can ignore that insane scene now that Blazermania has uprisen from the dead? (Does anyone else think the current Blazer ad slogan is as awkward as a pimpled teenage boy asking a girl to the prom?) So the Blazers lost, but the Celtics won a thrilling seven-game series and L.A. is always there to root against.

In the past few weeks since my last post, our world has encountered the likes of Susan Boyle, a new swine flu, a new Arlen Specter, a new-old venue for baseball in Portland, a smashing start of the baseball season for ex-Mariner Raul Ibanez, the resurrection of Wall Street executive pay and the continued decimation of state budgets, particularly those funding education. Not to mention the ongoing sagas of the bridge to oblivion, the dual bush-league stadia and the convention center hovel, er, hotel..

What follows, then, is not my usual wonky and erudite analysis (aka, "rant") of a specific issue, but quick takes on some actually relevant issues:

Education funding: Portland is still haunted by the Doonesbury lampoon of several years ago about being so woefully short of funds that school had to end over a month early. The prospects for the coming year make that scenario look rosy. And yet most of what I see from Salem concerns sharpening the axe and chopping off a chunk of what's left of our education system.

The state is a billion dollars short of what it takes to almost adequately fund public education. According to the Portland Public Schools web site, PPS is $57 million short, though others think these projections are too optimistic. Whatever the case, it's just stupid to cut education budgets. Really, there's enough wealth in this state and city to put that money back into the budget.

Let's put it in the terms used by public broadcasting appeals: $1 billion is just $1 per day every day for every adult in Oregon. And $57 million is a measly 35 cents a day for every adult living in Portland. Sure, for the 12.5% of Oregonians who are unemployed, that $1 a day may be crucial to their own lives—and to be realistic, it's very likely at least 20% of the population isn't employed. On the other hand, the other day on the MAX, I saw one grizzled homeless guy round up $5 and give it to an obviously newly-homeless family. If the homeless can come up with spare change to help each other out, I'm sure we all can chip in.

The legislature should implement a temporary surtax—for just this biennium—that hits each taxpayer's gross income with a percentage charge sufficient to recoup that $1 billion, or however much is needed.

Wall Street Salaries: Yup, the top dawgs on the Street were down for a few months, but then they manipulated their banks' earning statements for the first quarter and as a result, their compensation is as high as ever.

Conservatives like to point out that the wealthiest five percent pay more than half of U.S. income taxes. There's a simple reason for this: they have all the money. (And actually, when you factor in FICA, state and local property taxes and sales taxes, the fat cats don't pay nearly that high a percentage.

Income inequality is at its highest level since the 1920s, perhaps, according to some studies, the highest ever. Either pay scales need to level out or the tax code should be set back to Eisenhower era levels. Under that Republican president, the top rate on incomes over $400,000 was 91 percent. High time to bring those rates back. If Congress won't do it, the Oregon legislature should. After all, the top tax rate in Oregon is 9 percent, which is paid by anyone who earns over $6,500 a year. That's ridiculous. Bump up the tax rate for wealthier people and put the money into education.

Arlen Specter: Sure, he weaseled out of the Republican Party to rescue his sorry butt from defeat at the polls next year, but Specter's defection just shows how irrelevant the GOP has become. Everybody knows that except the lunatics still running the Republican asylum. After all, just 20 percent of all voters are registered in the party.

As Bobby Kennedy once said, “Twenty percent of the people are against everything.” So that percentage is about as low as you can go.

The intriguing question here is how American politics will realign. For the past three decades, since the Age of Reagan, America has only had a far right party (the Republicans) and a centrist party (the Democrats). Liberals have been out of power since the early 1970s. Both presidents Carter and Clinton were centrists, neither of them any more liberal than Richard Nixon.

Obama has succeeded in appealing to liberals, moderates and even some conservatives. The political pendulum swung so far to the right during the Bush era that virtually every thinking person has joined Obama in bringing things back to normal. The cultists in the Republican Party have labeled him a socialist when all he is doing is returning to economic policies that were mainstream under Eisenhower.

Eventually, once these corrections are made, there's going to be discord. It may be delayed until after Obama leaves office, or it may emerge sooner. The Democrats tent has ballooned to include a lot of people who don't necessarily get along with one another. Already, the administration's kid gloves approach to Wall Street has drawn jeers from liberal economists and labor union chiefs.

It makes sense that political parties stand for something, and it's not enough to just stand for sanity and responsibility in government, just because the Republicans seemed to oppose these values. I therefore expect a party shakeout. There will emerge an enlightened pro-business faction that embraces free market approaches while admitting the need for basic government oversight, and a more welfare state faction that demands heavier regulation and government intervention. One of these factions may get to be called Democrats and the other will be named something else. Either that, or as in Europe. there will be splinter parties, such as Labor Democrats, Christian Democrats or just a Liberal party. Or maybe all of the above.

Blazers: On the sports blogs, there's lots of talk about trades and doing things to strengthen the team and take it to the next level. My gut feeling is the less messing around, the better. This is a team that won 54 games and kicked the Lakers' butts this season. The NBA is all about match ups and the Blazers had a hard time matching up with Houston this season. If they had been seeded against Utah, Dallas, San Antonio, New Orleans or Denver, they would still be playing. They might even have had better luck against L.A.

Fans want to dump Steve Blake and find a better point guard. Newsflash: that guy is not going to come from the Blazers' current roster, unless you switch Roy to point guard. And let's take a look at the league's premier point guards: Chris Paul, Deron Williams, Steve Nash, Tony Parker are all on vacation as of now, too. Meanwhile Derek Fisher of the Lakers is still playing, and he's no better than Blake at this point in his career. Neither, really, is Jason Kidd.

So let's keep Blake and then pick either Sergio Rodriguez or Jered Bayless as the back up and develop him. We all know that Rudy Fernandez is a rising star who can play in big games. Nicholas Batum also has the potential to be another Tayshaun Prince and should be all the Blazers need at small forward. Oden, if he stays healthy, will emerge as a strong, though probably not dominant, center. For next year, I'd still give Joel Przybilla the bulk of the minutes—the 'Zilla earned them by become one of the most reliable defensive forces in the league this year.

So it comes down to this: trade Travis Outlaw, who despite being a relatively good streak shooter can't learn his defensive assignments and doesn't rebound well for his size. He's a nice kid, but he gets way too many minutes as it is. I'd give up on Martell Webster, too—he's not as good as Batum. My ideal move for the off-year is to sign Grant Hill to a two-year deal. Hill has been physically sound the past two years and played marvelously for Phoenix last year. He is a solid citizen and a great team player and he could tutor Batum in the nuances of the game. He signed a two-year contract with the Suns in 2007 and that means he should be a free agent now. The big problem is that he will command a salary higher than what the Blazers can afford under the cap this year.

White elephant in the room

A beautiful day for a protest

I wanted to work in my yard on this glorious spring day—get some flowers planted along the front walk, weed and till the raised beds, maybe even spread out some compost. Really, I did. Instead, I went for a bike ride down to Waterfront Park. It was my civic duty.

There was a rally down there at noon to stop the $4 billion white elephant known as the Columbia River Crossing (CRC). This is the proposal for a new I-5 bridge of 12 lanes, plus bike lanes and a light rail line. Something for everybody, but mostly, a lot of new capacity for cars and trucks to fill up—or not.

I commented on the CRC several months ago. No information has surfaced since then to change my mind. If anything, it’s even more crucial to stop this bridge and use that $4 billion for something else, given the state of our economy.

Most of the speakers cited global warming and other environmental and health hazards as a key reason why the bridge should not be built. Roadway expansion generally is a function of Parkinson’s Law—stuff expands to fill the space allotted for it. It certainly has been true for freeways; building them only increases traffic and thus never mitigates congestion.

My own take on this project, however, is that by the time it gets built nine years from now (if it does get built) traffic volume will have dropped due to rising gas prices. In addition, the tolls necessary for covering half the cost of the bridge—around $2 billion—will also reduce demand. So we will have spent $4 billion (and likely a lot more than that) for something that isn’t needed.

By the way, the current I-5 bridges are in no danger of falling down, according to recent engineer’s studies. The Marquam Bridge over the Willamette River is in worse shape, as is the poor stepchild of government discord, the Sellwood Bridge.

All of the speakers referred to the historic public uprising against the Mt. Hood freeway that was proposed to run through Southeast Portland in the 1970s. Waterfront Park was a handy venue for the rally, as the speakers could point towards the end of the Marquam Bridge where there is a span that was supposed to link to that freeway. That ill-conceived mega-highway got shot down by tremendous grass roots movement. A good thing, too, as it would have run right through my favorite coffee house on Southeast 26^th Ave. and Clinton St.

But the repeated references to the successful anti-freeway campaign of the 70s reveals a bit of desperation in this current movement. There were maybe 300 people at the rally, the vast majority of whom arrived by bike and, like me, were mixing politics with pleasure. Perhaps we live in different times, or that the circumstances are different. The Mt. Hood freeway provoked extreme outrage, since it threatened to destroy many fine Portland neighborhoods.

The CRC, on the other hand, replaces an existing bridge and adds freeway lanes and ramps in that sort of empty area south of the river. Not so much to get worked up about.

But we should. It’s an enormous expense. At the rally, I talked with a representative from the Association of Oregon Rail and Transit Advocates. He told me that for a measly $100 million, all of the track between Portland and Seattle could be upgraded to allow Amtrak’s Talgo trains to maintain their top speed of 125 mph, which would cut train travel between the cities to less than two hours. Right now, Horizon Air has planes leaving PDX for SEATAC every half hour. If we had trains leaving every half hour—or even every hour—they would offer a faster and greener way to go. If we also switched more freight from trucks to trains, there would be considerably less congestion on I-5.

Shouldn’t we get some of Obama’s stimulus money for this? I know Amtrak improvements are slated for the Eastern seaboard, but not out here. So start writing and calling your representatives, local as well as congressional. Especially those of you who didn’t attend the rally and got your garden in ahead of me.

Go to the Council for a Livable Future for ways that you can help stop the bridge.

City Councilor Amanda Fritz speaks at rally.

Greening the Urban Jungle

The future was 42 years ago

Michelle Obama is getting a vegetable garden going in what was once part of the White House lawn. Good for her. I hope her example has a profound effect on the 49 other states and the District of Columbia.

In Oregon, of course, we don’t need that encouragement. To be a true Oregonian, you have to get your fingernails dirty. You have to dig in the dirt , starting right about now (See Ketzel Levine over in the left column). Sure you can wear work gloves, but it’s just not the same. Wearing work gloves for gardening is like using an umbrella when it rains. It’s for wusses—aka, transplants.

I usually wait until the middle of May to plant my veggie garden, because we all know the sun won’t shine and make crops grow until probably July. I do get the flowers going and plant some seeds in pots and mess around with the compost. Last year, I dug up all the lawn in the front yard and converted it to vegetable garden, though I left the strip between the sidewalk and the street. This year, that's going, too. My back yard is really small and too shaded by neighboring trees, but it provides plenty of ranging room for my hens.

At least I have a yard. A lot of people don't. I suppose the folks who purchased condos in the Pearl made a conscious choice to live without a yard (and thus, without yard work). Thousands of others, however, live in apartment complexes where the only things growing are the ficus trees in the lobby and the intermittent shrubs amidst yards of barkdust on the berm between the parking lot and the street.

Portland's propensity for density has left some parts of the city barren of arable land. This became a sore subject over at BlueOregon a while back, with the usual anti-planning stalwarts citing the lack of garden space as another reason why there should be no urban growth boundary, so that vast suburban tracts of single family homes can spring up across the countryside and let a million gardens bloom. Some people just hate the idea of real cities and they will use any straw man argument that comes along to dispute the notion of growing a city up rather than out, never mind that growing out means replacing honest agriculture on our best soils with faux agriculture, aka well-manicured lawns.

Hate to say it, but they do have a point. With today's urban design, it's awfully hard to grow your own tomatoes in a high rise apartment complex. Some apartment dwellers are lucky enough to have space in a community garden, and they are going to cling to those little plots like a New Yorker with a rent-controlled tenement.

So let's redesign the way apartments are built. A number of small measure can be implemented and some already have. For example, the city has financial incentives for developers to install “eco-roofs” on their buildings. The primary reason for this is to reduce rain runoff and thus not overload the sewer system, but these green roofs could also support high rise tenant or community gardens. Unfortunately, most of them look as if someone threw a few bags of wildflower seeds around and walked away.

I'm not sure the city should mandate greener green roofs, but the incentives ought to go further and encourage the growing of food. The city also should mandate proper balconies on all new apartment buildings, and not those fenced in ledges like you see on the Belmont Dairy.

Useless landscaping and excessive parking can also be transformed into garden space. Recently, a very ordinary suburban-style apartment complex was turned into an “ecovillage” by Ole and Maitri Ersson The Kailash Ecovillage boasts a huge garden space in what formerly was part of the parking lot, Formerly the low-rent, often troubled Cabana apartments, the Kailash is now appreciated by its tenants and neighbors.

But even the Kailash is small potatoes compared to what could be designed from the ground up. For one thing, people with families usually prefer to live in their own houses and have their own yards. And yet, single family homes are at a premium in most parts of Portland, even in this down economy. It's a little easier to find an affordable house now than a year ago, but not necessarily in the vicinity of a good elementary school or easy access to mass transportation.

Creating houses with yards, however, will take up too much of our precious space, won't it? Maybe not. The answer may come from a 42-year-old development in Montreal, known as Habitat 67.

Picture McCormick Pier on steroids. It's a condo development with the difference that one person's roof is another person's back yard, and so on. Designed for the Montreal Expo in 1967 by the architect Moshe Safdie, Habitat aspires to be a hill town built on a flat surface.

"Safdie's dwelling complex 'Habitat' was designed to give 'privacy, fresh air, sunlight and suburban amenities in an urban location.' It was designed as a permanent settlement and consists of 158 dwellings, although originally it was intended to provide 1,000 units. The resulting ziggurat was made up of independent prefabricated boxes with fifteen different plan types."

• Dennis Sharp. Twentieth Century Architecture: a Visual History.

Not all of the units in Habitat have gardens, though many do and some actually have trees growing on those roof/balconies. I don't know if anyone planted a lawn but there definitely are vegetable gardens there.

Safdie envisioned Habitat as a way of building low cost housing for families. Ironically, the uniqueness of this concept has made the units highly desirable and they now are among the highest priced real estate in Montreal. Neither he nor anyone else has built anything like it since. A big reason why Habitat never reached the 900 units that were originally planned is that it cost far more to build this structure than he thought.

Yet now, with land prices being a major cost of development, one would think someone would try to improve on Safdie's design. Certainly, there must have been improvements in building materials that would lower costs, and the way the thing is so strangely configured could be loosened up a bit by departing from the cube-only scheme. For my money, the places could be built so that there's more yard in one place, perhaps by stacking just enough of each unit on the top of the other and supporting the rest of it in another manner.

So anyway, what's the deal? Does anyone have an answer as to why this concept has never been tried again?

Won't you help?

Don't let the AIG bigshots fail

I know the recession is pinching every pocketbook, but please take time to consider the plight of the poor, besieged AIG executive. Not only are these lost souls being maligned in ever corner of America, from the halls of Congress to the local barbershop, but it appears they are going to lose their hard-earned bonuses. Either they will have to give them back, or else their bonus booty will be taxed right out of their Cayman Island bank accounts. Even Oregon is getting in on the action.

How would you feel if you were the target of an entire nation's wrath over our economic meltdown? Pretty depressed, I'd bet. These execs were, after all, just doing their job. In fact, they did their job too well. If they hadn't put in all those 80-hour weeks swapping credit defaults and diddling with derivatives, if they had slacked for the past several years, they might not have found themselves in the middle of this mess.

And so what is their reward for all this hard work and making money out of thin air? They stand to lose their bonuses—er, retention pay. What is going to motivate them? What will make them want to stay on the job? That is other than the fact that probably no one else will ever want to hire them?

They stand to lose their second or third house, or at least that nice condo in St. Lucia. They may have to sell off their Bugatti Veyron and downsize to a totally inadequate BMW Z8. And after cultivating a taste for well-aged scotch, can you expect them to live on Dewar's?

Won't you help? Won't you please help?

For a donation of just $100,000—that's a mere 20 cents per minute—you can keep one broker in Talisker 30-year single malt scotch for one year. (Assuming a fifth a day is enough.)

Please act today to end their pain and humiliation. Send your blank check or credit card (yes, the card itself) to:

Too Big To Fail Foundation

P.O. Box 31337

Georgetown, Grand Cayman Island

KY1 -1209

Your donation is not tax deductible. But then, unlike the poor AIG wretch, you probably won't make enough money this year to need to pay taxes.