The Abortion Battle Will Return . . . So Here's Some Tools for the Fight

In the wake of yesterday’s news about Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy’s impending retirement from the bench, I’ve seen a lot of pain and despair among friends on my Facebook news feed.

Along with assaults on environmental protections, undermining of workers’ rights, greater pressure for alternatives to public education, disrespect for racial, religious, and sexual minorities, and demonization and mistreatment of hopeful immigrants, we can surely expect greater assaults on abortion rights.

I’m not too surprised. Abortion was not a frontline issue for most of us in recent years -- not the way I remember it turning up on state ballots and in high-profile court fights in the Eighties and early Nineties.

But I’ve seen it rising in the last two years. Heartened by this administration’s bullying of the left, women, and minorities, “pro-lifers” are increasingly reaching for abortion as the trump card, so to speak, that overrules any other issue.

For instance, earlier this week I saw anti-immigration statements that reached for “the slaughter of millions for decades” as a more pressing matter than children separated from their parents who seek asylum. Conservative citizens appear ready to overlook any outrageous behavior and policy on the part of this president and his team, because they think the GOP will continue to erode access to abortions.

What I Do for the Portland Streetcar . . . a self-interview

As friends are well aware from tales and photos that appear periodically on my Facebook page, I work part-time as a customer service representative for Portland Streetcar. Over time, I’ve collected and re-posted some of my most memorable experiences and observations aboard the streetcar in 2014, 2015, 2016, and last year. (Check ’em out, if you haven’t seen them already; they’re highly entertaining!)

Here’s a self-interview about the job, in which I answered questions that one of my supervisors devised for me.

1. How long have you been working for the Streetcar?

Four years. I was hired May 28, 2014, started training in late June, and was working steadily by the first week of July.

2. What drew you to the job?

I liked the streetcar from the very beginning. I’d attended college in Boston, so I had spent a lot of time on that city’s century-old subway rail lines and Green Line street trolleys back in the late Seventies and early Eighties.

Oh, No . . . He's at it Again! (Best Loftus Puns and Wordplay of 2016)

Several years ago I started collecting the best items from my Facebook postings of the previous year for this blog -- for example, the best Portland Streetcar adventures of the year, the best Portland Walking Tour incidents of the year, the funniest typos and English errors in my editing work, and of course, the best puns and wordplay of the past year.

I’ve been so busy with other things that I actually missed two years of year’s best puns. So here’s the best of 2016. You have been warned. . . . 

Jan. 10: Faces-the-Sea was chief of a coastal First Nations tribe. One day he had the bright idea of building a breakwater in the bay to catch cod fish that swam over it during high tide and would become trapped behind it when the tide went out.

The tribe thought such a dam would be a splendid and easy way to catch many fish, after the initial hard work of having to build the structure. It seemed to work: The pool behind the submerged stone wall captured many cod.

But alas, the breakwater collapsed as the tide went out again, and all the fish escaped. In disgrace, Faces-the-Sea exiled himself from the tribe. The people agreed: 

It was a cod dam shame.

Cod Fishing Summer, 1920

In the summer of 1920, Art Loftus made his first trip west at the age of 23. As he liked to put it, he “always gave all of his business to the Northern Pacific,” which meant he bummed his way by rail, riding the gondolas and freight cars with a buddy named Cliff Reisberg.

When they got to Seattle, the two signed on with a two-masted schooner called The Maid of Orleans, captained by J.J. “Codfish” Kelly. Raised in upstate Wisconsin, Art had never been on the ocean before, but according to his wife Dorothy much later, given his “Viking” background, he loved it. The Maid went up the Unimak Pass to the Bering Sea for cod.

Sailors went out at 5 AM for the day, in one-man dories that were about 14 feet, and hung out a pair of lines with baited hooks just above the sea bottom to catch cod. There was a windlass on board to weigh anchor, but Art pulled the tarred cotton fish lines with twenty-pound cod by hand, and slit their throats for distribution in bins aboard the dory.

"Exoplanetary" . . . life, work, and time travel in the 26th century and beyond

Perhaps the most ongoing fun I’ve had the past two years has been doing character voices for a science-fiction podcast called Exoplanetary.

The brainchild of writer-director C. Christopher Hart (who’s also producing and editing the show, as well as voicing some of the characters), Exoplanetary is set in the 26th century (partly), when pretty much everything -- including the surviving religions -- is owned by a handful of mega-corporations.

Exoplanetary, popularly known as “Exo,” is one of them. The company owns retail outlets, transportation systems (which is to say, rockets), mining operations on asteroids and moons, recreational theme parks, and other facilities throughout the solar system. Earth has been a blasted ecological wasteland for several millennia, though primitive life forms have been rumored to be thriving there once again.