Bearing Service Company was founded in 1929. The Bearing Service Company building was built in 1945. Above the entryway there is a Deco style sign and round overhang. The round overhang is completed in it’s reflection in the front window. At the base of the column supporting the overhang there is a circle drawn in the sidewalk. The round overhang, column and circle form two wheels and an axle, a good match for an automotive business.
See Portland Memorials for thousands of memorials in downtown Portland, Oregon USA.
Music: Aeolian Piano Roll – “Phantom Patrol” (1903)
Ian MacEwan (aka popjellyfish) has published his online comic The Yankee.
The Yankee is a dumb American. He’s Cosmo Vitelli. He’s Prince Rogers Nelson. He’s a Richard Pryor monologue. Psychedel-economic fiction set in the Nation States of America.
I believe in the complete freedom of thought and speech [...] I believe that it is better to tell the truth than to lie. I believe that it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe that it is better to know than be ignorant. – H. L. Mencken
In carrying out this protest, is Wikipedia abandoning neutrality?
We hope you continue to trust Wikipedia to be a neutral information source. We are staging this blackout because (as Wikimedia Foundation Trustee Kat Walsh said recently), although Wikipedia’s articles are neutral, its existence is not. For over a decade, Wikipedians have spent millions of hours building the largest encyclopedia in human history. Wikipedia is a tremendously useful resource, and its existence depends upon a free, open and uncensored Internet. SOPA and PIPA (and other similar laws under discussion inside and outside the United States) will hurt you, because they will make it impossible for sites you enjoy, and benefit from, to continue to exist. That’s why we’re doing this.
Today, 18 January 2012, a number of the websites I read have made their content inaccessible or difficult to access in protest of two proposed laws in the United States. These laws (Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act) seem likely to have a chilling effect on the internet. If I’m understanding these laws correctly, my linking to a site that in turn links to a site found to be in violation of copyright laws would get me in trouble as well as the site I link to. As I am unable to monitor the content of the sites I link to in my 19,100+ blog posts, I may unknowingly be in violation of these laws when all I wanted to do was point out a funny video or an interesting article.
I make it a point to read across the political spectrum. This is my greatest hope to foster ongoing critical thinking, and often I learn of laws or events from one side of the sausage factory that the other side of the sausage factory is silent about. That silence may be based on ignorance or it may be a willful silence. Whatever the reason, I am not diminished by taking in more information.
I note that the SOPA / PIPA blackout is not common to sites that are likely to self-identify as ‘not-left.’ I use the vague term ‘not-left’ deliberately. My compilation of this list is no claim that these sites are of a kind, aside from a likelihood they would not identify as being on the political left. How far not-left they are, how that is manifest, varies. The sites I list below are not necessarily aware of or in agreement with each other. I am certain that some of them are antagonistic to each other. Inclusion in this list is not at all a claim that anyone on this list agrees with or is aware of anyone else on this list. I have looked at each of these sites at least briefly, and I can say that I also do not agree with the entire content of each one. The problem with SOPA / PIPA is it applies the contagion theory to information: if I link to a site, I’m guilty of what that site contains. If you think my linking to these sites contaminates me, then I suggest you speak out in favor of SOPA / PIPA – and reconsider reading my site any more, lest you yourself be contaminated. At the same time, I caution the reader that some of the following sites are factually incorrect, mean spirited, possibly illegal outside the United States, discriminatory and almost certainly not to be read at work. To the best of my ability, I have confirmed that these sites all reside in the United States.
The Occupy movement in the United States has been allowed months of free speech, then had it taken away. American Renaissance has been denied a single second of public meeting time for two years. Occupy is decidedly ‘not-right’ and American Renaissance is decidedly ‘not-left,’ but both share the thirst for freedom of speech and association. All ‘not-left’ sites are at risk from SOPA / PIPA. But few ‘not-left’ sites are participating in the blackout today.
Daniel Rafatpanah thought he was going to die. A jittery gunman was marching the 29-year-old and two of his Southeast Portland housemates upstairs to the attic, a handgun aimed at their backs. None of them knew the man, who demanded Popsicles and alcohol before taking them hostage Monday afternoon. But when he placed the gun under his foot to change into a new pair of pants, they knew it was their only chance. “Everything’s in slow-mo, and I’m like, ‘It’s go time.’ It’s time to fight this guy,” Rafatpanah said.
Jonathan Mooney, 26, bearhugged the gunman from behind. Robert Steinfeld, 21, broke a beer bottle over his head. And Rafatpanah started throwing punches, his hands bloodied by the shattered glass. Everyone reached for the gun as the man fell. The man fired a shot as the struggle continued. Rafatpanah’s right hand got sliced open by the gun’s mechanism, and blood poured everywhere.
A neck hold wasn’t working. Not knowing what else to do, Rafatpanah bit the man’s ear. “Let go of the gun, let go of the gun!” he yelled through clamped teeth. “Let go of my ear!” the gunman responded. The two tore apart, and Rafatpanah spat out a bean-sized piece of ear.
“I tasted the blood of my enemy in my mouth,” he said. “And so at that point you realize the stakes have gone so much higher because blood is being drawn – my blood, his blood.”
Rafatpanah lunged toward the gun and wrestled it away.
Trevor Blake: The Sound of the Hammer Greets You on Every Side: Portland Memorials
Between 2009 and 2011 Trevor walked the length and breadth of downtown Portland. When he found a memorial, he transcribed what it said and where it was. Portland Memorials includes all the memorials in downtown Portland. The book is entered this book into the public domain for the same reason Joseph Shemanski gave Portland the Shemanski Fountain: “to express in small measure gratitude for what the city has done for me.” Trevor will discuss the book and the remarkable memorials he found while writing it.
Trevor Blake was born in Knoxville, Tennessee and moved to Portland in 1992. He works as a freelance sign language interpreter. Besides Portland Memorials, he is the publisher of OVO (1987 – present); author of The Buckminster Fuller Bibliography; contributor to The Journal of Ride Theory Omnibus (Portland, JORT 2003); In Extremis (Athens, Survival Kit 1994); Pozdravi iz Babilona (Ljubljana, KRT 1987); and the literature of the Church of the SubGenius.
Trevor Blake: Floating Bathtub Stopper. Corks, chain, stopper. 2010.
