Portland blips

Our friend Alex was in Portland, between the end of a conference and his flight home. We went down on Saturday, picked him up from in front of his hotel (cellphones are awfully handy at times), and dropped in at Josh and Brooke's apartment (these are my brother and his wife). We all went for dinner at a sushi place we like, Sinju. Brooke did not go so far as to eat, since she went next to a carb-loading dinner for the half-marathon she ran today. So we minus Brooke went to see the X-Men movie: Nightcrawler = nifty, Jean Gray = obscurely motivated, I summarize. We found the theater by fishing the Yoohoo-pooled copy of the free weekly paper off the top, and got to it on Portland's enviable light-rail system.

We slept on J+B's high-grade air mattress. The next morning I packed it away and simultaneously entertained their cat, who is named "Putty" but to my eye is rather more orange-tinged than common putty, and who greatly enjoys being under bedsheets as well as being a mighty hunter. We called Mom and said hi. Josh took us to a brunch place, which was good and surprisingly non-surprising considering we still hadn't thought through just what day it was.

In the afternoon, Powell's. Alex and I went through the SF section together slowly and with chitchat. Probably the leisurely browsing is why I got two bizarre books, Etidorpha and Androids From Milk. dr4b ducked out for a few hours to play DDR.

For dinner, her friend, Pete, suggested a kaiten sushi place nearby. "It's kind of punk," he said. The kaitenity was a flatbed train of sushi plates going around the sushi bar -- I snagged a plate of dragon rolls first thing. Most of our sushi we ordered, so it didn't get to come on the train, but it was good food, and cheap. The place is called Takahashi, if you're in Portland. They were playing laid-back breakbeat.

Note for next time in Portland: Everyday Music, on Burnside a couple of blocks distally from Powell's.

We stopped off in Vancouver (WA) and visited some of dr4b's friends (who come up here to play DDR and play Bemani games at her parties). Darren and Megan? Something like that.

If I were smart I would have gotten a reading light in Powell's. Instead I stopped in at a gas station and found a flashlight and batteries. This let me finish my book, since Dee was kind enough to drive the whole way.

Frustrated, U.S. Arms Team to Leave Iraq

As I catch up on the weekend's news,
Frustrated, U.S. Arms Team to Leave Iraq:

Army Col. Richard McPhee, who will close down the task force next month, said he took seriously U.S. intelligence warnings on the eve of war that Hussein had given "release authority" to subordinates in command of chemical weapons. "We didn't have all these people in [protective] suits" for nothing, he said. But if Iraq thought of using such weapons, "there had to have been something to use. And we haven't found it. . . . Books will be written on that in the intelligence community for a long time."

The Bush administration is cynically manipulative enough (scheduling the Republican convention to "flow into" the 9/11 commemoration?) that I have a hard time believing they just got blinded by their own yes-man intelligence groups.