The Title Wave

The Title Wave Used Bookstore, my other favorite Portland bookstore, has been open since 1988. It is housed in a 1912 building at 216 N.E. Knott that was the original Albina Branch Library, one of Multnomah County's Carnegie libraries.

Staffed by fifty-plus volunteers and laid out by the Dewey Decimal System, it is where all of the Multnomah County libraries dispose of their extra stock. They have over 20,000 used books, audiobooks, CDs, DVDs, videos, magazines and cassettes at bargain prices, starting at twenty-five cents.

They hold a once-a-year sale, with 55 percent off everything in the store.

It feels a little odd to be shopping in a library, but quite enjoyable. The books aren't collector's items because of condition, but the selection of books is outstanding.

It is open Monday–Saturday, 10 a.m.–4 p.m.

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Google earth

Yes, this is basically a crosspost from my other Blog, with information both added and rewritten.

Google Earth. I finally installed it and of course had to play around locating and pinning the places I'd been or that were important to me. Nostalgia and a new toy are an odd mix.

This program is a hoot, It lets you be superman and fly around the globe, looking at actual satellite views, current weather, and imagery. The closer you zoom, the more detail you get, it even lets you zoom in to sidewalk level in some areas.

You are NOT getting live views. Some of them are several years old, but still quite interesting. In many areas, you can select the historical view and scroll back through earlier views of the land and see the changes.

Sometimes there is an odd patchwork effect to the look of the terrain, as it is spliced together from satellite photos taken at different times of the day and season, though there are few winter views as snow obscures terrain.

There are a number of overlays you can turn on and off, like weather (current), roads, traffic (current) and interesting places.

Running your cursor over the screen shows you the elevations. You can switch to a flight sim mode wherever you are and see what it would be like to fly over the area. You can turn on a layer that shows the topography of the bottoms of the oceans.

It also links geotagged photos and videos from Youtube and Flickr and ties seamlessly into Google Streets to give you a street level 360 degree view on most roads and streets in the U.S. Even out of the way places like Star Meadows are on Street View.

This is from Google Streetview

The entrance to the Song Cua Lon river, Cau Mau peninsula, Vietnam.

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Don't Read This at Work!

The Darwin Awards is a tongue-in-cheek honor named after evolutionary theorist Charles Darwin. Awards are given to people who "do a service to Humanity by removing themselves from the gene pool" or in other words, lose the ability to reproduce either by death or sterilization in a stupid fashion. This is the official site, where everything is checked for authenticity before it is published.

Annual awards are listed, you can do key word searches or browse categories like Guns or Electricity . Examples of Darwin award winners include:

• Juggling active hand grenades (Croatia, 2001).
• Leaving a lit cigarette in a warehouse full of explosives (Philippines, 1999)
• Jumping out of a plane to film skydivers without wearing a parachute (U.S., 1987).
• Trying to get enough light to look down the barrel of a loaded muzzleloader gun using a cigarette lighter (U.S., 1996).
• Using a lighter to illuminate a fuel tank to make sure it contains nothing flammable (Brazil, 2003).
• Attempting to play Russian roulette with a semi-automatic pistol that automatically loads the next round into the chamber.
• Attempting Russian roulette with an unexploded landmine,
• Crashing through a window and falling to one's death in trying to demonstrate that the window is unbreakable.

Northcutt's Darwin Awards site gives "Honorable Mentions" to people who survive their misadventures with their reproductive capacity intact, by luck or chance. One example is Lawnchair Larry, who attached helium filled weather balloons to a lawn chair and floated far above Long Beach, California, in July 1982. He reached an altitude of 16,000 feet and was later fined for crossing controlled airspace. Another notable honourable mention was given to the two men who attempted to burgle the home of "hard man" footballer Duncan Ferguson (who had 4 convictions for assault and had served 6 months in Glasgow's Barlinnie prison) in 2001, with one burglar requiring 3 days hospitalization after being confronted by the player.

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Cartoon Information

Toonopedia is the place to look if you want some information about a cartoon, past or present. Subtitled "A Vast Repository of Toonological Knowledge", it is an encyclopedia of print cartoons, comic strips and animation. Don Markstein, a writer for Walt Disney comics and the sole writer and editor of Toonopedia, calls it "the world's first hypertext encyclopedia of toons."

Toonopedia concentrates on American and other English language cartoons with the goal of developing the largest online resource on American cartoons. Toonopedia has accumulated over 1,700 articles since its launch on February 13, 2001.

The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum is another excellent reference site whose primary mission is a collection documenting American printed cartoon art. The scope of the collection includes editorial cartoons, comic strips, comic books, graphic novels, sports cartoons, and magazine cartoons.It is searchable by creator, title, topic, genre and other criteria.

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Powell's City of Books: Book Lovers Mecca

Powell's Books is a chain of bookstores in the Portland, Oregon. Powell's headquarters, dubbed Powell's City of Books, is probably the largest independent new and used bookstore in the world. It is located in the Pearl District on the edge of downtown in a multi-storied full city block between NW 10th and 11th Avenues and between W Burnside and NW Couch Streets. It contains over 1.5 acres of retail floor space.

The inventory has over four million new and used books, and their website has also offers over 40,000 DVDs with free shipping. In the stores, new and used books are shelved side-by-side.

Powell's buys over 3000 used books a day, sells over four million books a year, and has over 300 employees. They have been selling books on the net since 1994, a year before Amazon got rolling.

In addition to its "City of Books" location, Powell's also has several smaller stores: a technical bookstore a few blocks east of the main store, a 32,500 ft² general bookstore with the "largest children's book section of any book store on the West Coast" in Beaverton, a store in Portland's Hawthorne District, a store with cooking and gardening materials two spaces east of the Hawthorne store, and three stores at the Portland International Airport.

If you want it, Powell's probably has it -- if they can find it. It used to be a bit chaotic in there, somewhat like Blacktail Mountain Books usually is. It is a book lover's dream.

Do I wish it was mine? No, to be honest. I would miss the personal hands-on approach to book selling, though the income would be nice. Do I like shopping there? Yes, very much.


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Military Grade Outdoor Gear II

Supply Captain carries a limited number of items, but a few of them are nitty-gritty things that other sites I have mentioned do not -- things like 1,000 foot spools of paracord. Worth checking for harder to find items.

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Tandy: Leather and Laptops

Tandy Leather Factory, founded in 2000 when Tandy and The Leather Factory merged, is the part of Tandy Corporation which sells leather supplies. The rest of the Tandy Corporation is Radio Shack.

Tandy Corporation started in 1919 as a family-owned leather goods company based in Fort Worth, Texas, but is probably best known for giving its name to the Fort Worth, Texas-based Tandy Radio Shack Corporation when it acquired RadioShack in 1963.

The Tandy name was dropped from The Shack in 2000, when RadioShack Corporation was made the official name.

Tandy Leather, with over one hundred locations, is probably the best U.S. source of leather and the tools to work with it, offering both kits and separate tools and materials. It is the best place to look if you want to make anything, from wallet kits to holsters to cowhide seat covers. It is the source of supplies for some of our local saddle makers, so you know Tandy's quality has to be above average.

They offer a free catalog for anyone interested.

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LED by the Light

4Sevens is an excellent source of reasonably priced high-tech flashlights. Think SureFire, but at one quarter the cost.

In their words: From the start, 4Sevens focused on introducing some of the top flashlight lines in the world (Fenix and Nitecore, to name a couple) at affordable prices. Now our customers rely on us for the latest in cutting-edge flashlight technology - and equally for the dependable, personal caliber of service that comes with our flashlights. These are the foundations of our success: the best technology, the best customer service.

These new LED flashlights are not Grampa's old Maglite, or even his Maglite LED. Multi-mode operation, variable output, efficiency and long life are the new mantra. Dialing up just enough light for a task makes for long battery life and the electronic control keeps the light constant without the gradual fading from battery drain that is normal for cheaper lights. The built-in strobe and SOS signal on these higher-end flashlights can be life savers. The high lumen output of the Turbo modes rivals or exceeds much bigger lights.

This Fenix L2D (now upgraded to the LD 20) is my personal choice:

• 6 inch length, 3 ounce weight
• 6 output levels: Low-12 lumens (55 hrs runtime) -> Medium-53 lumens (10.5 hrs) -> High-107 lumens (4 hrs) -> Turbo-180 lumens (2.4 hrs) -> Strobe ->SOS
• (Comparison: the Minimag LED, 3.78 ounces and 5.75 inches long, puts out 15.2 lumens for 5.5 hours, the five D-cell Maglites (19.5", 50 oz) output 119 lumens for nine hours.)
• Aircraft-grade aluminum, Type III hard-anodized anti-abrasive finish.
• Waterproof to 12 feet for 24 hours.
  
• Virtually indestructible, microprocessor-controlled, CREE light emitting diode (LED) has no filament to burn out or break.

The money saved on batteries because of the longer run time and the greater reliability will more than make up for the price difference in the long run.

Nope, these ain't Grampa's Maglites. They're way better.

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Poor Folk Bows: Howto

Poor Folk Bows is a good site for "poor people and apartment dwellers" to learn how to make their own archery equipment. There are how-to articles, photos and Youtube links for a number of different bows.

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TreeHugger!

"Treehugger" is not a word you can hear without some emotional reaction, pro or con, but this site is worth visiting. I am all in favor of sustainability and conservation and efficiency, and these are principles this site promotes. Being a Treehugger is not always all about extremism. It is about practicality.

TreeHugger is dedicated to driving sustainability mainstream. We strive to be a one-stop shop for green news, solutions, and product information. At TreeHugger we know that variety is the spice of life, so you can find all you need to go green in our up to the minute blog, weekly and daily newsletters, weekly video segments, weekly radio show and our user-generated blog, Hugg. We also extend our expertise to companies looking for a little green guidance.

TreeHugger By The Numbers:

• 19 staffers, 55+ writers
• 10+ countries covering the latest in green
• 35 posts per day
• 35,000+ posts (articles) across 8 key categories
• 172,000+ reader comments
• 64,000+ total newsletter subscribers
• 81,000+ rss feed subscribers
• 9,200,000+ pageviews (September 09)
• 3,200,000+ unique visitors (September 09)

At worst, this is an interesting site. At best, it might be doing some good. In any case, there are some nice photos and thought-provoking articles to browse through.

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