The Think Tank

Joel @ Tour de Lab 2009

Joel, Tim and myself joined 1,500 other riders and took part in the 2nd annual Tour de Lab this weekend.

The day didn’t start out on a very good note when, on the way to the event Sunday morning, I inadvertently cut Tim off and caused a collision.  Me and my big ol’ tank of a bike skated through without a scratch, but poor Tim hit the deck and his front wheel was damaged.  Not an auspicious start to the day.  I feel really bad about that, and I told him I was sorry, but that I just couldn’t have him riding his fancy carbon fiber bike and leaving me in the dust, so I had to take his ass out.  🙂

Fortunately he was able to have Aleks bring him his mountain bike so he could still do the ride, although he did miss the first 3 mile leg.  He met up with me and Joel at the first rest stop and we did the remainder of the ride together.

Chris @ Tour de Lab 2009

The route had us ride from one Lucky Lab brewery to the next until you have hit all three.  There were two routes, the “Puppy”, an 18 mile

ride with moderate climbing (when we referred to this one we substituted a couple S’s for some of the P’s) and the Big Dog, a 30 mile ride with what they described as “extreme climbing” up to council crest before descending back into downtown.

Naturally, we signed up for the Pus… I mean the Puppy.

It was a great day and a great ride – the whole crash bit not withstanding – and as it turned out, we probably could have done the Big Dog, though none of were sorry with our decision.  It just meant we got to the finish line sooner and therefore could start drinking our reward quicker.

Tim @ Tour de Lab 2009

At each of the rest stops along the way we were greated with people biscuits, PB&J sandwiches, dog tail breadsticks, Gatorade,  and of course any of the treats available from the various pubs.  We were good and avoided the beer while we were riding, although after climbing up Terwilliger and Barber to Capitol Highway I was really thinking of snagging a brew.

At each stop we gathered up some fancy headwear which we were required to show upon the completion of the ride in order to get our official Tour de Lab pint glass.  It was a great ride and great day.  I will definitely be doing it again next year.

Swiftwatch 2009

Every year in September thousands upon thousands of Vaux swifts descend on Portland to feast on insects by day and roost in the chimney at Chapman School by night.  They have earned a lot of popularity among the citizenry and support from the local Audubon Society and many local businesses who financed a new furnace system to ensure the swifts continued safety in their chosen roost.

Mom and I had heard about them for a long time, but we hadn’t ever gone to see the birds until this week.  It was a great experience and one I would highly recommend to everyone.  The birds typically hang around until around mid October,  and the weatherman is saying that we will have several perfect evenings to pull up a blanket and enjoy this uniquely Portland event.

To see all the pictures we took, you can click on the image or check out Think Tank Gallery.

For more information about the swifts and their temporary home, you can check out these links: http://www.hollywoodpet.com/swifts.htm and http://www.audubonportland.org/local-birding/swiftwatch

East African Crowned Crane

Hey all!

We rented a big ass lens over the weekend and took it down to Wildlife Safari in Winston (Roseburg area) to play with it.  We got some pretty good pics of the animals, so be sure to check out the Gallery to get a peek at ’em!

I was a young stud of perhaps 21 years and my friends and I acquired a screen saver of all the Playboy centerfolds since the magazine’s creation in 1953 (with Marilyn Monroe as the cover/center fold girl).

I learned three very interesting pieces of information from this collection:

1.  If Playboy magazine is the source of your information, women seem to have gotten much prettier in the 70’s.

I really have no reason to believe that this is actually true as I have seen pictures of any number of very beautiful women from before that period, so I am forced to ultimately conclude that the Playboy editors got choosier as the decades progressed. I can only imagine that this happened because the stigma associated with posing in the nude diminished over time and therefore the eidtors had a larger pool to pull from and could be more selective in their choices.

Either that or Mike and I are right and the government secretly started putting pretty pills in the water starting around 1973

2. Until January 1972 Playboy was a breasts and backsides only magazine.

I’m not sure why, whether it was a change in the law or just greater acceptance from the public mindset, but for nearly twenty years Playboy photographers had to carefully cover the ladies’ nether regions with all manner of scant clothing, towel corners, deep shadows or fig leaves.

Which leads us to…

3. The personal grooming habits of women ebb and flow just like other fashion trends.

The 70’s seem to show no particular favorite. The styles ran the gambit from moderate trimming to untamed thickets, but everyone was sporting something. Th 80’s were mostly wildly untamed until about 88, when things started calming down and the triangle was subtly replaced by the “landing strip” as the preferred style. This stayed in fashion all the way through the end of the 90’s, though things got progressively thinner as the years went by.

The collection we had at our disposal came to a close late in 2000, so my official evidence ends there. However, we felt obliged to continue the research and our tireless studies found that, ironically, just shortly after we put a Bush in the White House the same disappeared from ladies’ fashion.

The reason that this has suddenly leapt back to the forefront of my mind is because, apparently, the ‘stache is back.

I know this because a friend of ours was heading back to India this week where he has a beautiful fiance waiting for him, and as such we felt obliged to throw him a bon voyage / bachelor party. We really only know one way to celebrate such occasions (or perhaps I could say “We only know one way to celebrate”) so naturally we ended the night at a strip club. Now, we aren’t exactly strangers to the strip club scene, but we are far from what you would call regulars either, so I can’t provide the exact date that the transition occurred. But sometime within the last fiscal quarter the shaved looked has given way to what my friend very accurately described as “little Hitler mustaches”. At least 80% of the girls we saw were sporting them. This is in stark contrast to everything I have ever learned about stripper grooming habits. Until know the sum total of hair I had seen on professionally naked ladies couldn’t have been woven into a wig for a grape. Not even a pea! But suddenly everyone is very proud of their little magic carpets and the patrons seemed more than happy to take a ride on them, so I guess everyone is happy.

What struck me about this whole phenomenon is this: how do these trends manage to migrate so quickly? If we were talking about a stupid dance like the Macarana or the perfect pair of summer shorts, I can totally understand: some designer or other will flood the market with pictures of pretty people doing pretty things in them and blam! Instant fad. But I don’t really see any large scale media campaigns alerting people to the fact that pubic frenzy is sooooooooooooooooo last quarter. Nor have seen the Democrats dancing around the Capitol building flashing their nethers in grand show of pubic service.

And I can’t really buy the lip service angle either: I’m not really sure how girls do things, but I can safely say that none of my friends and I have ever sat around and discussed the relative merits of how/if/when to shave our balls.

So how do the girls learn what is popular? Do they get requests? I’ve never seen a comment card at any of the clubs I’ve ever been at. Do they just get bored? Do the clippers get dull after a while? Is global warming the culprit? Perhaps Democratic administrations inspire this departure from hard wood floors? I don’t know.

I haven’t yet figured out an answer to this question.  None of the ladies that I know well enough to ask have any answers for me, and I haven’t yet resorted to holding up a sign in Pioneer Square, so I am woefully in the dark on this one.

I am in the process of updating the sub pages for this website, so it will closely match how the site used to be.

I have completed loading the Tidbits posts from the old site. You can reach that page going to www.thinktankblog.org/tidbits, or by clicking on the “Tidbits” page link at the upper right. You can also use the search bar.

Several of the older vacation posts dont’ quite display right. I wrote those pages using notepad when I was first learning about html, and as such they aren’t the greatest. Its very unlikely that I am going to back through and completely re-edit those pages since it would take a very long time and I am honestly to lazy.

Hope it doesn’t affect your viewing experience too negatively. Future posts wil be much better, I promise.