From Streetcars To Spaceships

Urban Agriculture: what exactly ARE our options?

There has been a steady increase in buzz in recent years about urban agriculture. While cities like Havana and Manila have been seeing comprehensive implementation of this for years now and while projects like Growing Power in Milwaukee and Chicago have been pioneering techniques, here in the U.S. we really don't have even much of a sense of just how much land in a given city would actually be suited to this or even how to make that determination.

Well, here in Portland, there has been a wonderful project called Diggable Cities that has taken on just that. I was lucky enough to have dinner tonight with Kevin Balmer, one of the authors of this remarkably complex and throrough study so now I'm posting the link here.

Hopefully this will serve as a model for such projects in other cities. Maybe even interwoven with the kind of city reinvention that Flint, Michigan is now embarking on and others may take on soon.

It makes it easier to get up in the morning knowing that this kind of work is going on.

-Rustin

Promotion - when it goes wrong it's hard to see the point.

Over a year ago I created a group on facebook called Portland Publishing & Printing that was supposed to help people in the area connect. I meet many people in the area who say that they would love to have more local connections to find out about suppliers, to meet for drinks, to maybe do things like share orders for supplies that are only available by the caseload, and so on.

It's been, I say again, over a year. I have been talking this up to people at paper supply stores, to small presses, to not such small presses, to zinesters, to locally owned copy shops that say that they want to reach zinesters, and pretty much to anybody else who seems even vaguely relevant who is willing to stand still long enough for me to get my spiel in.

All of this has added up to 25 members and one post by somebody other than me.

So a few weeks ago I figured that the Portland Zine Symposium would be a perfect place to finally get this thing up and running. Designed a little flyer that, frankly, I think was pretty cool and printed up about sixty of them in full color on heavy, funky paper stock (mostly on a cover weight parchment that I thought would suit the context), handed most of them out to tablers, left a few out on the free table, and brought a few for my PZS talk on Never Go To Kinkos Again.

Also, before the symposium started, I sent a flurry of messages by email, facebook, and phone, asking (sometimes nearly begging) people to join or at least post something on the group board. This didn't seem like much of a stretch since, on top of everything else, all of these folks have new zines or something like that that they're supposedly trying to promote right about now.

So here we are. And all of this has accomplished . . .

(wait for it)

Two new members and no posts.

I know that sometimes these things take a while to show results. I've already heard about people saying that they've learned things just from checking out the member list. But c'mon.

I'm sorry, but some days I really do wonder why i get out of bed at all.

How cheaply and how quickly can an abandoned lot be made into a park?

I've been thinking about this for years and puttering away at it now and again in the real world. If you have access to an asphalt-covered lot, especially one that you don't actually have rights to, how much could you do and how cheaply to make it beautiful? I think that there are some non-obvious answers, especially if you have access to a vehicle and a couple of friends. Since moving next to an abandoned area of over five square blocks I've actually been doing some slowly more ambitious jiggerings of the dynamic and maybe one day I'll write about that here but for now let's consider one thought experiment.

Let's say you've got access to a double-sized lot that is covered with parking spaces and (pretty much) ignored by the owner. We'll assume a temperate climate for now. We'll assume that the temperature never goes below 45 degrees Farenheit in the time that you're working.

So let's say that in one day you go with friends and pick up a few hundred used bricks somewhere. Perhaps you found them on freecycle. This is your starting gun since it can take months to get that cheap load of bricks. That night or soon thereafter, you all go to Home Despot and buy 80 cinder blocks and various other supplies.

You bring them all to your chosen lot.

There you mix some concrete.

You pour a broad line of concrete in a wide circle about a foot and a half wide, about an inch tall, and about 11 feet in diameter.

Along the inner line of this circle you put the cinder blocks so they will be held to the asphalt by the hardened concrete. Around four inches outside that circle of cinder blocks you put a ring of bricks. Inside the ring of cinder blocks you fasten about five or six granite "Belgian blocks".

Five of six cinder blocks are fastened to the asphalt with concrete in "random" locations in the lot. Each of these cinder blocks is bordered by one to three Belgian blocks placed a couple inches away but aligned with the cinder block to create protected nooks and crannies for plants to grow in.

In each corner of the lot you use the remaining cinder blocks and concrete to create one brick high boundary walls about a foot and a half from the actual lot line.

Then everybody goes home and leaves the concrete to cure.

The next time you can all get together you all go back and pour about an inch of rough gravel or sand into each cinder block, into the space between the cinder blocks and bricks, and for about a foot outside the bricks and inside the cinder blocks. Onto all the cinder blocks you spray "moss smoothies".

Pour soil over the whole shebang, every brick and cinder block, until they're barely visible. This will settle quite a bit.

Into this loose soil you shove hundreds of various beans obtained by the simple expedient of buying bags of beans at the supermarket. Each bean should be about two inches down and you should end up with about ten various beans per square foot.

Into this soil you also put hundreds of drought-resistant "plugs" of sedum, alyssum, and other very tough plants that propagate themselves and can stand up to plenty of abuse.

Over ALL of this, you then spread a thin layer of fine gravel. Fine enough to be the type used in fish tanks. This will allow things to "rest up a bit" and get settled and keep soil from blowing away or be forced to the side too much by things like dog pee.

Before leaving that day, water this all copiously.

Think of what this would all look like within a month. It would be elegant, welcoming, and have the beginnnings of a local ecosystem. Among other things, some kind of plants or other will "volunteer" and start growing there without your having had to put them there. All those bean vines will be encouraging the soil to stay healthy and tying it all together, literally.

The last step, just to add the final touch to bring people in, is to occasionally scatter inexpensive pretty things around the space. On the lots near me I scatter handfuls of semi-precious stones like cornelian, hematite, and clear quartz. Bought by the pound from the right stores, they're only about eight dollars a pound. Shells work well, too. Just be sure to not put them all out on one day or in one place. You will be amazed at the sense of magic it gives somebody to find something like a tiger's eye lurking under a bean vine.

Now let's itemize out our shopping list to see just how much this would all cost. I need to get to bed so I'll come back later and fill in the prices.
80 cinder blocks ($1.40 x 80) $120
200 bricks (used)
40 Belgian blocks ($2.60 x 40) $104
6 bags of cement
6 bags of sand for concrete
3 landscaper's flats of mixed plugs (3 x $50) $150
10 bags of beans ($1.20 X 10) $12
20 bags of soil ($2.30 x 20) $46
30 bags of rough gravel or sand
5 bags of fine gravel
semi-precious stones $40
transport costs $100
random tools,etc. $60

Anybody care to tell me that this will cost more than a large party?

Shame about all those highway deaths.

Funny, we've got all these studies about our dangerous roads, especially crowded highways, because of texting, alcohol and drugs, fatigue, and so on. I read the articles and they suggest remedies. More laws. More cops. More signage. More checkpoints. Wider highways. Cutting down all the trees to clear the sightlines. Driver training. Sorry, but I look at those and think "what the hell are they doing in cars in the first place?" Mass transit addresses all of these, ya know.

I've taken plenty of forms of mass transit so f*cked up that I could barely see. Tired, drunk, distracted. Never seen any of that affect the safety of the vehicle yet.

All of this, I might add, applies just fine to cabs and jitneys. How many cabs could we subsidize to what degree to keep drunk drivers off the roads and have it cut net costs for a given city?

Do I sound snotty? Yeah, I guess that I do. But as far as I can see, this is yet another case of "normal" Americans who live in a way that results in vast processions of deaths, cripplings, torturous pain, and billions upon billions of dollars of costs but even when confronted with all of this they can talk about it for years and shake their heads disapprovingly and suggest yet more spending and never once even consider that maybe instead of more subsidies and more police state tactics, maybe the rational answer is TO STOP DOING THIS THING THAT KEEPS KILLING PEOPLE.

Why is this so hard to understand?

Old 1920's shorts used to treat it as a given that the drunk guy in the Betty Boop or Keystone Kops or whatever film would then shamble off and get on a trolley. A simple, safe (compared to cars) trolley that would then deliver said drunk person to a location a few blocks from their door. This was just obvious common sense with technology we had by 1915. If you think that we can't cost-effectively do it now well, I don't even know what to say.

Oh, right. Yes, I do.

Go play in traffic.

-Rustin

They say that I'm a criminal.

I'm going to tell you a story. Quite a long one. But I promise that none of the details (well, almost none) are pointless and that I will get to that point. I will most bloody well assuredly get to my point.

It's been a great holiday season. Time with the family. Gave a huge mound of gifts to some my friends' kids. (Some of them even educational!) Plenty of parties. Lots of fun. But the real event that makes this holiday season one to remember has been getting written up on a morals charge.

Yup. That's right. One of our fine men in uniform has determined that I am a corrupter of youth and is determined to see me pay.

While I wait for the papers to arrive in the mail, let me tell you all about it.

My birthday is Christmas Eve. As I'm sure you can guess, this sucks. Luckily Christine, one of the people I know from the IPRC, had the same dilemma. So she arranged a party. At first is was to be on the 24th but with everybody planning to go away and the snow getting deeper all the time, she relented and off we all went for goofy times and bad Chinese food.

And that is why, at 1:00 in the morning, with the 23rd fading into memory and the 24th just begun, I was just then leaving Chopsticks, having left the crowd recovering from my unique rendition of There Is Nothin' Like A Dame (it's not my fault that the karaoke machine mixed up the music and lyrics) and the staff (I hope) pleased with the generous tip I had just put on my debit card. It had been a fun night and, if nothing else, it had been cool to finally get a chance to sit and chat with several people like Indigo Kelleigh and Carolyn Main who I had pretty much just seen around the Portland scene and rarely exchanged more than a sentence or two with. In fact, there had been at least ten at our table from the time I arrived until right before I left.

So, in short, I was in a jovial mood. And I had been there so long that I was even (sadly) stone cold sober. (My booze budget had been hit too hard over the previous weeks.) The view down Burnside was breathtaking, the snow was just a picturesque sprinkling, and the wind was gone. So I decided to walk home. And it was so very pretty. Of course a little part of me winced when a bus actually drove right past but overall I was mellow and delighted. And it being not only after one in the morning but also right in the middle of one of the biggest snowstorms in Portland history, the streets were empty. Everything was closed. I walked right down the middle of Burnside much of the way and the view right down the drive and across to the downtown skyline was enough to warm the heart.

So this was the state I was in as I reached 12th Avenue and Stark.

And there, in the vast lot that has been abandoned for so many years, I saw a wondrous sight. A positive league of holiday enthusiasts, something like ten of them, were building an igloo. And by igloo I mean the real thing. Blocks of packed snow built up like rows of bricks. About eight feet across, two windows, little half cylinder tunnel out of one side, big enough to let you crawl in and out, fit a few adults inside at a time. And even though they were just then starting to taper it in seriously, this wondrous bit of transitory architecture was already up to their shoulders.

And what were they using to build this? A couple of those yellow recycling bins we've all got were being used to gather snow. A beat up little corrugated plastic mail basket was being used to mold the blocks. And an assortment of mugs and cups and a stew pot or two held water to pour over joints and strengthen the whole assemblage. This was American gumption, straight out of Norman Rockwell. And just as pretty.

So, of course, I walked around the lot, up the slippery stairs, down the slope, and over to tell them how cool this was. And, by the way, could they use any help? They said, sure, another person to help fill in cracks and bring snow would be welcome. So I joined in. I told them that chances were good that pictures of this would be in tomorrow's paper, at which point one of them pulled out a camera and started snapping shots of others in the igloo looking out. After a couple of shots they remembered to move the six-pack of Hamms out of the way and to stand so the flash didn't reflect too much.

Well, sadly, this was about it for most of them, so most of the bunch headed in. It turns out that some of them had been there since five or six that afternoon. They were cold and tired and it was time for bed. So this left me and two of the guys. I was sad to see so many of them go since they took a bit of the party atmosphere with them but it let me focus more on things like getting a big chunk of ice to finish off the tunnel entrance and then start packing in snow and ice to smooth out the insides and outsides. Just my kind of thing.

We would have probably been at it for quite a while longer when we saw this guy in black headed our way, dropping his bicycle (!) about thirty feet off. He gets close and his first words are, "I'll need to see some ID; I'm gonna have to be the party pooper here." I would soon learn that "party pooper" was one of his favorite phrases. You see, he was a security guard for the property. And we were trespassing.

Now those of you who don't know southeast Portland won't know the spot I'm talking about. You can see it here. It's a big ol' lot that has people on it all day long. It's used as a dog run. I've seen people wander through it after parties. The only place you won't see anybody is the building, which is so boarded up, chained in, and obviously abandoned that any day now it may be used as the set for Friday the 13th, Part Umpty-zillion.

But as this earnest individual was very adamant we understand, it is, in point of fact, owned by the Portland public schools (from what I understand it actually was used as a school right up until a mere twenty years ago) and so we were on school grounds after school hours and so not only were we trespassing this was about corrupting youth. (Should I ask which youth we were corrupting at an abandoned building at two in the morning? No, I didn't think so either.)

And yes, he did have an additional complaint. You see, once he was there he could see that we had those terrifying cans of Hamms beer nearby. And a couple of them were (as far as I could see) empty. So we had open containers of alcohol in, as he reminded us again, a schoolyard.

The two guys and I had all immediately handed him ID as soon as he asked for it and as he lectured us we all tried to get him to see just what the situation was a little more clearly. As soon as he has finished writing our information in what I assume was his ticket book and given back our ID I asked, "Well, look at this. Can you at least admit that it's pretty?"
His response, in a mumbling into his chest kinda way was, "I built one of those. . . In eighth grade." The pause had been long enough to fit a short opera in, the tone by the end an impressive combination of quietly dismissive and truculent.
"You built one of these. Like this. In eighth grade?" I asked.
"Well, um. . .  mine was a bit smaller."
"A bit?"
"It was smaller. But in my day we didn't have all sorts of special tools and stuff like you guys had. I had to build it with just my hands, just push it together."
Immediately dozens of ads from fifties issues of Popular Mechanics and seventies supermarket circulars started whizzing around in my head. Ads for cheap, easy to use plastic kits for building snow forts and igloos. Not, remember, that we were using any such things. Or, for that matter, that I had needed any in my long ago childhood days of snow fort building.
"but I thought that stuff for making these have been around for ages." Say I. In, of course, the most positively glowingly friendly but sadly perplexed tones. I just need him to explain it to me, you see.
"Well, this was a small town and we didn't have all that specialized stuff."
By this point the ghosts of a hundred thousand onetime children from broke country families, my father, late of the elegant metropolis of Poverty Knob, among them, were surely whizzing all around his benighted head trying to explain to him all that had been done by them with scraps of wood, chucks of discarded cardboard. Even, say, a couple of recycling bins and a box from the curb. But clearly we weren't getting anywhere with this.
I try another tack. I take off my glove again and offer him my hand. "Well, you've seen already from my ID, but even so, hi, my name is Rustin. What's your name?"
"I'm Corporal Saunders."
Corporal. Oh my. Dealing with the upper crust, I see. Actually, he may have said his first name too. He was kinda mumbling that part. But the Corporal came out loud and clear. And I could see Saunders on his little brass nametag so I know that I got that right.
And yeah, by now it was obvious that this was the kind of guy who must have loooved being hall monitor as a kid. Because, you see, it was so unfair that the other kids got to have all the fun. All the kids like me.
The guys and I all try one last time. We're building an igloo for crying out loud. On Christmas Eve. Surely he can cut us some slack. He talks about being "a party pooper" again. He comes back to the open containers of alcohol. I say that I don't know about anybody else but that I haven't had any of the beer and I don't see anybody bring them.
"So they were just sitting here when you got here." he says with a generous helping of sarcasm.
"That's exactly right" I say with complete honesty.
For what it's worth, you'll want to keep three things in mind.
First of all, as you know if you've read from the beginning, I had headed there at one in the morning through a snowstorm and, in fact, hadn't had so much as a sip of beer in the time I had been there. I mean, if nothing else, it's Hamms. I've got plenty of real beer in my place five blocks away. Why would I drink something generously described as PBR's inferior cousin when I had everything from Fat Tire to Bushmills a few blocks away?
Secondly, in the last half hour or so, the other guys hadn't been drinking either. Or at least not as far as I could see. We had actually all been working quite industriously.
Thirdly, it may not have been snowing much but it was snowing. So there is no way that a security guard riding a bike in a snowfall several blocks away could have even seen those few cans sitting amidst tall piles of broken snow blocks and various implements, from, if I understand his original path right, over a small rise.
But our Man In Uniform, from the esteemed ranks of Reliant Security, knows a liar when he hears one and he made a few choice comments more on the credibility of my statement. I would guess that he was about in his late twenties, early thirties but he was determined to come across as a solid authority on this. Which, I will admit, must be hard when talking to a blase guy at least ten years older than you who obviously is nothing like impressed. Though still smiling. Mostly.

Anyway, that was basically it. He made a few more comments, we asked him to let us at least finish the job. He said that we would have to come back and finish it in the daytime. And we all walked off. The next night, round about eleven p.m. I came back with some friends, took some pictures of the now rain-shrunk igloo. Passed a taller guy in a Reliant uniform walking right past. He waved, we waved, we all wished each other happy holidays. We talked to the lady with the dog who was standing right by the igloo and she said that she had been there for a while. I guess that the guy on shift that night was being a bit more reasonable about who was allowed on the fields when.

And now I'm waiting for my charge. Hasn't turned up yet. I'm guessing that whichever cop was supposed to sign off on it has had a good laugh. Of course posting this (with names and all that) has probably increased my odds of being charged tenfold. Which would be cool. I would love to contest it and get a chance to stand in front of a judge (complete, mind you, with a copy of my timestamped receipt from Chopsticks) and tell him the story of my evil deeds building an igloo on my birthday, Christmas Eve.

I could go into more detail. At some point I will.

I could reference the recommended procedure for such encounters from the 2008 training manual issued by the Portland city government that I just happen to have sitting next to me at my desk as I type this. ("Verbal Judo", huh? Interesting run of phrase, that.)

I could talk about more serious examples of what happens when "law enforcement" is about "do what makes me feel good" instead of protecting citizens. About Duane Kercic, who was harassed and detained for taking pictures in a public part of an Amtrak station. To get, mind you, shots for an Amtrak-backed contest for best shots of their trains and stations.

Or really serious stuff like Hope Steffey, who was beaten, stripped, and left naked in a jail cell without explanation for six hours for not showing a policeman sufficient "respect" when he arrived to investigate an earlier incident in which she had been attacked.

Or I could talk about my years working right by the New York City Police Academy and seeing them break laws like it was a daily requirement, all while the academy looked on, disciplined none of them, and graduated just about every one for service as a cop.

But I won't because this is just a silly blog post. No real point at all. Just about a guy in a uniform enforcing some laws against some other guys who were all, without doubt, breaking at least one of those laws. After all, the details don't really matter.

Do they?

Happy New Year. Let's make the best of it.

Commercial to residential. Or mixed. It's the smart move.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. America is flooded with surplus commercial real estate. Rental demand is climbing and the available rental unit supply is not up to the job. Thus rental prices stay high (relative to the economy) while hundreds of millions of square feet of real estate sits vacant, not generating income and in some cases, so empty of people as to be at increasing risk of vandalism and theft. And real estate companies are in serious financial trouble. We also need to face that as people get poorer, they'll become more prone to exactly the kind of destructive behavior that any owner of an empty building should fear.

The obvious consequence will be more people living illegally in commercial spaces. Done illegally, landlords will look the other way because they're hungry for the revenue, but the conversions, such as will be done, will be rushed and unsafe and will cause problems ranging from fires to floods caused by amateur plumbing.

This being the case, smart municipalities should be exploring passing temporary variances to allow, and perhaps even assist the use of some commercial spaces as residential. Maybe even allow or even encourage the conversion of zoning with an option for those conversions to be permanent. Or, even better, allow more spaces to be zoned more flexibly, allowing mixed use to be not just within complexes but in side by side units.

Commercial space, in normal times, rents for more per square foot than residential. Many landlords also consider it far less of a headache. 

But these are not normal times.

It's time that we started doing a better job of thinking through how or society can best adapt to that.

Potluck Barbeque at Watershed

I see that somebody has been searching this blog again for information on the Watershed barbeque.

Well, once and for all, there is a potluck barbeque (BBQ? bar-be-que?) at Watershed, the arts and events space at 5040 SE Milwaukie, every Tuesday night. This is between McLaughlin and Mitchell. Show up at about 8:00 p.m. If you're early and the front door is closed, then go back behind the building and go in the door up the stairs.  More food is always appreciated, vegan or otherwise. Stuff you can eat without flatware is usually best. If you don't have the chance to bring food, don't sweat it; there's always plenty. Drinks of all sorts are welcome and as are fruits and veggies.

If you're coming by bike, you'll find plenty of places to put it inside. If you're coming by bus, the 70, 33, and 19 all run right by the building. The 17 also stops about six blocks away on Holgate. If you've got a car, there's usually plenty of parking behind the building.

About half the time something else is also going on. Tonight about ten people were making mutant toys with maniacal enthusiasm while between four and eight people were practicing circus arts stuff at any given time, mostly stilt walking and firedancing. Me? I stuck to cooking burgers, veggie burgers, and vegan "chicken" patties, and kept a big batch of onions browning on the grill. Not to mention toasting buns, making sure the six kinds of chips and crackers were out where the most people could see them, and generally being social.

We're a varied bunch. Some of us do things like printing or bike building. Quite a few are Burning Man people. There are various techies and activists. It's mostly a twenty-something crowd though there are always a few of us old farts in our thirties and forties and an occasional teenager. Usually somebody has brought their kids. Not many people in their fifties or older recently but that varies. We get high school dropouts and people with doctorates, lifetime locals and people who just hit Portland two hours back. In my experience, the real common ground is that pretty much everybody is smart and creative and it's damn rare to see somebody who looks like they would rather be home catching "the game" on TV.

I usually leave by around 11:00; it's usually quieting down by then. The only real problem is that after 9:30 the bus service to other parts of east Portland sucks. The 33 or the 19 will take you to downtown until a bit after midnight but if you're looking for a straight shot across to northeast, you're out of luck.

That's about it. A few nights it's been just a few of us standing around the grill, shooting the breeze. Occasionally it's like something out of a Fellini movie, complete with costumes, firebreathers, live music, and conversations that will spin your head. Ya buys yers ticket and ya takes yer chance.

Hope to see you there,

Rustin

Residential prices stall, commercial plummet. REAL loft living can't be far behind.

Here in Portland and all around America, residential rental prices continue to be crippling. The outrageous rises of the past twelve years haven't really retreated much at all. Meanwhile people are broker by the day and, with more and more people losing their homes and mortgages out of reach, the demand for rentals can be expected to go up. And while all of this happens, commercial real estate is, in a word, screwed. Overbuilt, overpromoted, deep in debt, and racked with cubic miles of empty space before the latest few months.

Seems to me like two things are as predictable as gravity at this point.

Far more people are going to start living illegally in commercial space. In truth I've already heard about two more in the past few weeks.

Smart owners of commercial real estate will agitate for some kind of temporary zoning variance, allowing them to rent their spaces for residential uses for some short period. Maybe five years. Less sophisticated ones will simply turn a blind eye to such conversions.

I'm also guessing that a few smart legislators will have the brilliant idea of New York style loft laws, allowing residential conversions but only on terms tailored to maximize political gain and socially engineer who gets that housing and for how much. Meanwhile, at least a few dimwitted government departments in various, probably authoritarian cities will go on rabid binges of enforcing fire and zoning codes. Probably after some disaster that hits the front pages or simply as yet another round of our continuing war on illegal immigrants.

It's going to be a good time to be a maker or retailer of do it yourself plumbing and room divider materials. And it's going to create an entire new generation of scofflaws. People, most of them creative, ambitious ones, who have made their peace with living lives that are fundamentally dependent on living in a way that is illegal. This will push them even further than the past decade has in the direction of seeing police officers, firemen, meter readers, and just about anybody else in uniform as an enemy until proven otherwise.

Anybody but me realize that every week that legislators put off variances or rezoning is a week we fall further into trouble?

-Rustin

Tonight's Portland blackout - now wasn't THAT fun?

I was peacefully reading an article online at about 5:35 this afternoon when everything went dark. It only took a couple of minutes to figure out that we were in the midst of a blackout. I got somebody from our building's management company on the phone and he said that according to PG&E between 18,000 and 25,000 subscribers were without power. My building is at 13th and Yamhill and we were right at the edge of it since buildings along Belmont were fine. According to the guy I spoke to, a building on 33rd and Hawthorne was dark, so that defines the affected area a bit.

My only serious concern was that the Elections building might have lost power, but it was fine.

I went to Plaid Pantry to buy a flashlight. They didn't have any. So I took a book of matches and went back. The streets near my place were quiet. What few people I spoke to seemed utterly unphased.

Me? I packed a bag, using this as a test of my ability to get a bugout bag right and be out the door. This ended up taking about fifteen minutes, mostly because I was in the dark and couldn't find any of my flashlights. I did most of it by the light of several candles placed here and there about my apartment. Interestingly, that took longer than expected because the "utility" candles I had bought were poorly made and I had to dig the wicks out by touch with my fingernails. (Let me assure you that in the next few days I'm going to buy more candles and this time I'll be checking all the wicks.)

I would have gone to the Freddy's on Hawthorne to buy a few LED flashlights and lanterns but they seemed like they might be shut down. So I went all the way across to the one on Northwest Burnside. They had nothing useful. So I went a few more blocks up to Walgreen's where I found something like six kinds of LED flashlights, two kinds of LED "Christmas candles" that ran on AA batteries, and a strand of white LED "wreath lights", also designed to run on AAs. I bought two flashlights, two "candles" and one strand of wreath lights. Thank the gods for LEDs.

Update: Here's the Oregonian's coverage.

EVERY kid should have a dictionary.

I think that by now anybody with a clue agrees that we need to get a lot more serious about k-12 education. And here in Oregon it's pretty damn obvious that we're even worse off than most due to the pathetic level of education funding. The schools haven't got enough money to allow the typical "solutions" and they won't any time soon.

Well, that means that we, as citizens, need to find and implement cheaper ways. Ways that don't require any significant involvement or commitments by schools or teachers. Ways that help kids across class, economic, and talent spectra.

So let's start with basics. Sometimes a good place to start is with something that is both useful and that shows the way to doing things that are more difficult or contentious. Something non-controversial so it will be allowed through the schoolhouse gates and will have minimal opposition from parents and other potential roadblocks.

So let's get started on getting a usable, well-designed, kid-optimized dictionary into the hands of every schoolchild in the state of Oregon.

Speaking as a publisher, I know how much it costs to produce, print, and ship books and I'm telling you that for an order of several thousand or more, we could get dictionaries for under a buck apiece. And I'm betting that done right it should be possible to get printers, paper suppliers, and others to kick in enough to get that down to fifty cents a copy.

But let's start with a budget of a dollar-fifty per copy.

And let's start by choosing one year.

I say choose eight grade. It's right around then that kids start to feel most abandoned and it's about then that they are expected to do a lot more for themselves. They're mature enough to handle "adult formatted" type and have vocabularies large enough to justify something a bit more complex than most of them will have access to.

And beyond that, they're reaching the age that it gets essential that they have beautiful things of their own that are sophisticated enough to help develop the sense of nuance that is so essential to good adult judgement. I love ebooks. I'm very in favor of online content. But for certain things, it's still better to have an actual physical copy. And this is one of those things.

Now, my plate is beyond full, so I don't know when or how I'm going to pull this off. It helps that I'll be dealing with plenty of the relevant people anyway in the course of doing my own work. But piece by piece I intend to proof out text, including some Oregon-specific stuff, put together layouts, and do a small print run, possibly, if I have to, on my own nickel. Then I'm going to give them away to the students of any school I can find that will say "yes".

Except for a couple hundred copies that I will keep around as examples. To show to possible donors. Because I want to see a non-profit up and running, one utterly independent of the government, with a charter and an endowment, whose purpose is to work towards having every student in every school in Oregon, from third grade on, walk into school the first week of the year and get asked if they have a dictionary. And if they say "no", one gets handed to them. No other rules, no other conditions. And twenty percent held in reserve each year to be handed out to the kids who lose theirs during the year.

Of course, I have no objection to copies of this being made available for sale in stores. At, say, six bucks a copy. With half of the profits going straight to the endowment. I'm a big believer in the power of a well-configured endowment and nothing in the recent economic news changes that conviction a bit.

You think that I'm nuts? Work it out. I don't have the time to do the links right now, but go for it, look at how many kids are in school in Oregon in a given year. This is a doable thing. And if it is done right, it lays the groundwork for more ambitious plans. For taking a bit more of the load off of schools and parents. For taking advantage of the wonders of modern manufacturing, design, and pedagogical understanding in ways that schools and governments can't and/or won't.

I don't know about you, but I'm eager to get started.