What exactly, I have to ask, is the point of all those ridges on the bottom of casual shoes? This particular pair was marketed as hiking shoes, and I got them even though I’ve never done much hiking. But even while hiking, you would not need all those ridges and grooves on the bottoms of your […]
For devoted fans of Albany City Council meetings, the one on Wednesday night must have been a disappointment. It took all of 35 minutes and produced no news to speak of. (The appointment of Mario Lattanzio as police chief had been announced before.) Its highlight was the appearance of Jim Clausen, who regularly addresses the […]
Here’s something you may not have suspected until you read about in the papers or heard it on TV: The number of gun homicides in the United States has fallen sharply over the last 20 years even while the number of guns in civilian hands has grown. From the public buzz lately, you would think […]
How about a special passenger train carrying Portland-area fans to a Civil War football game in Corvallis? It’s just an idea, and here’s how it came up. On April 21, I posted a video wondering whether the Albany wye would be forever lost. That’s the Y-shaped rail junction on the Union Pacific mainline near Sixth […]
Four bills aimed at gun owners are stuck in the Senate, as I mentioned last week. Jeff Mapes of the Oregonian reports that Senate President Peter Courtney has sent them to the Rules Committee because they don’t have the 16 votes needed to pass. Courtney hopes that negotiations can still save the bills. But saving […]
The Benghazi affair would have been over by now if President Obama and his officials had fully explained what did and did not happen. Instead, they first misled the public about the motive for the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on the American mission there, blaming it on an obscure anti-Muslim video even though they knew it was a […]
Park mystery answered
My bike route takes me through Albany’s Bryant Park almost every day, and I’ve been wondering about something: Why has the lower loop of the park drive near the Willamette River been closed to cars? During the routine wintertime flooding, the entire park road was closed. But the upper loop has been open since some time in March […]
Tags: ADA, Bryant Park