• Friday, Feb. 25, 4pm.
• Director Park

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This is what happens when you turn your daughter loose with a camera in the woods. See the whole set on flickr.

Fred Leonhard has a great op-ed in the Eugene Registar Guard comparing Portland and the Neil Goldschmidt child rape story to the title city in Ursula K. Leguin’s short story “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.” (Both The Oregonian and Willamette Week declined opportunities to publish this piece.)

The parallels to LeGuin’s story are powerful and haunting.

Many, many still-powerful Portland figures knew about the ongoing child rape. They are accessories to a crime that claimed the life of a girl. So far, nobody’s saying names out loud (ahem– Greg Kantor, Earl Blumenauer), but suffice it to say, the list is extensive and almost all-inclusive. Will nobody pay any price for this woman’s life?

Only Fred has (so far?) had the moral conviction and courage to speak out.

The giant Asurindarahu wanted to see the Buddha, but was reluctant to bow before him. The Buddha, while lying down, presented himself as much larger than the giant. He then showed him the realm of heaven with heavenly figures all larger than the giant. After all this, Asurindarahu, the giant, was humbled, and made his obeisance to the Buddha before leaving.

This month marks the 5th anniversary of this blog, and the sixth anniversary of Wacky Mommy. We started Internet publishing back in 1997 with a little-known literary arts magazine, before anybody had heard of “blogs” and when Mark Zuckerberg was 12 years old. Around 1999, we started another site that morphed into something blog-like after veering through a number of different styles, and in 2005, when blogs were just taking hold, we started writing and hosting our own. In 2008, we started an influential public policy news and opinion site which we ran for two years in our spare time.

Now that Zuckerberg owns the Internet and all your personal data, to be sold on the free market to advertisers, blog traffic is way off. Many, many people don’t venture outside of the walled garden of Facebook… unless there is a link posted there.

Who remembers RSS feeds and readers? (I do!)

The thing is, this technology still works great, and there is great potential yet to be realized. We shelved our New Media networked journalism meta project almost a year ago, but now we’re thinking of dusting it off.

Now, here I go to link this post on Facebook.