Caught in the Tuna Net

This has gotten to be an in-joke in the thread that I host over on the DAZ3D forums (Virile Noir). It originated with a series of wonderful 1950s beefcake photos that EdFury posted in the Vintage Beefcake thread, gems such as this one:

Vintage Beefcake

And this was the one that really started it all:

CHICKENS!

Therefore, LT, my partner in crime there, and I have come up with stamps of official approval! Mine is the basic white chicken, his is much fancier.

Official Beefcake! Seal #1

Official Beefcake Seal #2, Courtesy of LT Roberts

If you really want your render to be True Beefcake, you need a chicken in it!

Found some more lovely whimsical stuff while researching local color for the stations pages on the Great American Stations site that I manage (and write for).

This is my current favorite: The Nutty Narrows Bridge. It’s a bridge made FOR squirrels in Longview, WA. There are a ton of trees alongside a very busy street, and one engineer, Amos Peters, with his office on that street got tired of seeing the carnage and built a suspension bridge for the squirrels. In 1963, the bridge was hoisted over the road between two trees — 60 feet wide and fashioned from aluminum and a length of retired fire hose. It cost $1,000.

Saint Amos of the Squirrels has long since passed away, but the bridge remains, though it was moved a little. He’s memorialized by a large wooden squirrel in the park nearby.

Another fine structure in the Pacific Northwest is really not very whimsical: Elevator Street in Oregon City. I wrote for that station’s page:

Straddling the bluffs, the city landscape makes a sharp transition over a 90-foot cliff that was originally traversed using a series of stairs. By 1826, the preferred route had 722 steps. In 1912, the city was authorized by ballot to sell $12,000 in bonds to construct and operate a municipal elevator, and on December 3, 1915, the hydraulic-powered Municipal Elevator came into service; that day, nearly all of the city’s 3,869 people took the three-minute elevator ride. In 1924, electricity replaced hydraulics; and in 1954-55 it was overhauled, and still stands 130 feet tall. At the base of the bluff, riders walk a tunnel under the railroad tracks instead of over, as they did orginally. The Oregon City Municipal Elevator continues to operate as one of only four municipal elevators in the world, and this “Elevator Street” is the only vertical street in North America.

And I just learned about an event taking place on my birthday! The Great American Duck Races take place each August in Deming, NM.

Twenty years ago, six friends in Deming, drinking in a bar, decided to alleviate summer boredom by having duck races in a nice shady spot in front of the Courthouse. People now train their ducks to race:

The ducks waddle down an eight-lane, 17-foot channel of chicken wire known as the dry track. In recent years, organizers added a wet track — a wading pool outfitted with eight racing lanes.

Last year, the champions in each category — youth and adult racers — each took home $1,290.

Anyone taking part pays $5 to sponsor a duck, and winners advance through tournament-style brackets. In each round, competitors are assigned a different duck, with all the ducks given time off to rest.

Pretty cool, huh? These days it’s a major festival.

I wish I had pictures for you.

One oldie but goodie is (or was, I haven’t checked it recently) a large sign in the middle of the Route 270 spur as seen approaching from south, just off the Beltway around D.C. It says: Welcome to the I-270 Technology Corridor, or something similar, and sits in front of a thick stand of trees.

I just saw another wonderful one from the MARC train going to work yesterday. I’d forgotten my iPod earbuds (oy) so was awake and looking out the window as we whipped over the Beltway going south. There, another sign saying something like “New Luxury Condos from $450k” (some ridiculous price) and just after it, seen through a light screen of trees, a ruined block of concrete apartments. Yay!

If you wonder where the FAIL thing came from, visit the Fail Blog.

Perforce, I am writing up a lot of the station histories for the Great American Stations web site. Being a lover of the odd and offbeat, the absurd, the silly meme, I am including fun weird facts in the writeups. I’d like to actually see these charming oddities some day. I shall add these as I find them.

High Point, NC

High Point is also home to the “World’s Largest Chest of Drawers,” a building built in 1926 to call attention to the city as “Home Furnishings Capital of the World.” This building has been restored as a four-story beautiful 18th century chest of drawers, which has been the home to the High Point Jaycees.

Gainesville, GA

…Gainesville is also near the Kangaroo Conservation Center, the largest kangaroo collection and preserve outside of Australia. This privately owned facility engages in both captive breeding and public education, and currently has 300 kangaroos of nine species, as well as other Australasian fowl, reptiles, and marsupials.

There are a lot of those…I will refrain from discussing the candidates in the upcoming U.S. presidential elections, who have a lot of Hmmm value.  Except for Sarah Palin, who is so darn Hmmmable that I have to say… WHO thought it was a good idea to invite that jumped-up thug to the party?

Ahem. Sorry.

Overheard at the recent Plone conference:

So he comes to me and asks to have Second Life installed on his computer, and I told him that it was a big pain to do and it would mess up his computer really bad. The truth of the matter is that I just couldn’t explain bondage furries to him—which would be the first thing he saw when he got there.

Yep, bondage furries are really hard to explain. I do not know WHY people in governmental agencies feel the need to get their institutes (as in NIH, for example) space on facebook. Recruiting? Hah. Likely story. Recruiting for what? More importantly, recruiting whom? Scientists with kinks?

Then there’s this thing where bad-tempered middle-aged men dress up in Sailor Moon outfits and go to anime or science fiction conventions. And the costumes are rumpled. It’s a cosplay thing, I know. But really…is this a good idea? Why are they so grumpy? The costume doesn’t seem to be helping.

Then there was the day where I went out at lunch time to go down the block to the bank. I work in an office inside Washington Union Station, so yeah, there is the usual cast of urban characters hanging around outside. There’s this one guy who stands in his special spot that I have to pass when I go to the bank a block down Massachussetts Avenue. He has a phone head set most days, but I happen to know that he’s talking to himself out loud. That day, no head set. And he was casting aspersions upon someone political at the top of his lungs—well, hell, the Capitol is only a stones throw away, why not?—and then he said to himself, loudly, “I AM NOT HERE TO SOCIALIZE.”

Elevator shafts are like the world’s largest shower stalls. Oh my. When I got back inside the building, and was waiting for the elevator up…one of the elevators was out of service, being renovated & worked on, so that shaft was open and just covered up by a plywood shed arrangement while the guys inside sawed, hammered, drilled, and banged around. Some workman was also singing at the top of his lungs, something cheery and very pop.  That made me smile.

17 October 2008

The police chief of Amtrak broadcasts an email:

“There are workers on the roof of Union Station. No cause for alarm.”

And there are workers UNDER the roof, too! (Nothing to see here, move along.) They’d already posted an email about this, mind you. Who was bothering the police chief about window washers? *sigh*