Isaac Laquedem

Only really, really thin senior citizens can have pets

Venerable Mom Laquedem inhabits, not too happily, a nearby senior center which is in the process of changing owners.  The new owner wants all of the residents to sign new residence contracts, printed in type small enough to be difficult or impossible for the average octogenarian or nonagenarian to read.

Many things about VM are above average, but her eyesight isn't.   Hence VM's call: could I read her contract, tell her what it says, and tell her if she can safely sign it?

I found a few things in the contract that could have benefited from, or that should have been quietly exterminated by, a competent proofreader, including a gem of a sentence that, as written, allows only residents who weigh 25 pounds or less to keep a pet in their apartment. 

A quiet and friendly pet can be a great comfort to an elderly person, but not at the cost of anorexia.  Venerable Mom doesn't want a dog or cat for herself, but she'll watch with great interest to see if any of her neighbors start skipping their meals.

Safety net or not, Paul Ryan is his brother's timekeeper

Yesterday my lunch date and I mainly discussed national politics and the presidential race, including the claim of vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan to have run a marathon in less than three hours instead of his one actual recorded time of four hours and one minute.  One of his defenses was that he had confused his marathon time with his brother's time, though as it turns out, his brother has never run a sub-3-hour marathon either.  In the unlikely event that I should run for office, I'll disclose that my fastest time for traveling 26 miles, 385 yards on foot is a leisurely 32 hours, including the meals, ale, pub singing, and overnight.

My lunch partner and I agreed that this situation is one where a candidate's ego has not served him well.  Instead of claiming an admirable but debunkable time -- that is, instead of passing himself off as a high achiever in a crowded field -- he might well have answered the question along these lines: "Twenty years ago I ran a marathon and I'm proud that I finished the race.  As to my race time, I finished the race the same day that it started.  Let's just leave it at that." 

The light touch is more effective than braggadocio.  For example, Gerald Ford was a strong golfer, with a 12 handicap even into his octogenarian years.  I heard someone ask him about his golf skills.  Although he could legitimately be proud of having maintained a low handicap well into his senior years, he downplayed his ability, ending with the line, "My golf handicap is a closely guarded secret."

Isaac updates Ronald Reagan's famous question of 1980 for the Romney campaign

It's not as Ronald Reagan posed it, but it might eminently suit the position that Mr. Romney is staking out for his campaign for him to ask his target voters, "Is your pilot better off today than he was four years ago?"

Clackamas County voters derail TriMet: the vote-by-rail measure passes

So, at least, say the election returns for Clackamas County Measure 3-401: the measure is passing with 60% in favor, a margin that in a two-person contest would be called a landslide. 

Another way to look at street parking

The growing public backlash over the City of Portland's push to encourage developers to build dense housing without parking in single-family neighborhoods led me to do a little math.

First, some basic facts.  A standard city block is 200 feet long from corner to corner.  A 200-foot-long block face with parallel parking and without any fire hydrants, sidewalk extensions ("corner bumps", the little curved bits that project into the street at the corners), truck loading zones, and driveways will accommodate 10 parked cars.  A block face with sidewalk extensions will hold 9 parked cars.  A block face with sidewalk extensions and four houses with single-width driveways will hold 5 or 6 cars, depending on how the driveways are arranged.

Next, consider the proposed 50-unit project at 30th and SE Hawthorne.  The story quotes the developer saying that at a similar project in Northeast Portland, "only 13 to 14 cars parked on the street were attributed to residents of the building."  (I think he had in mind the Irvington Garden Apartments at NE 15th and Hancock Street, also a 50-unit project.)  Taking that as fact, the Hawthorne Boulevard project's residents will bring 13 or 14 cars to the neighborhood to park on the street.  This doesn't count visitors they might have.

How much curb space will the residents' cars require?  Likely about 280 to 300 linear feet, or just under a block and a half.

The Hawthorne site itself, however, is only 100 feet square.  Half of the Hawthorne frontage is taken up by a curb extension for a bus stop, so the site will contribute only 150 feet of curbfront toward the parking needs of its residents.  (The fire hydrant is at the corner and doesn't reduce the available parking.)  The project will require another 130 to 150 feet of curbfront for its residents beyond what's in front of the project itself, putting its residents into a parking competition with the condominium (four units) and two houses to the north.

This leads to the question: what is the available common parking supply, and who should get to claim it first?  It's a question that the city planners should answer before they burden it with more than it can handle.

General semantics solves the "Which Romney" problem

General semantics, an intellectual discipline mostly devised by Alfred Korzybski (1879-1950), encourages us to look into the meaning of the words we use and recognize when we use one word to mean two different things, including when the word has two meanings because it's referring to the same object at two different times.  For example, "Congress" means the legislative body of the United States, but "Congress" means one thing if you're using it to refer to Congress in 2012 and another if you're using it to refer to Congress in 1948 (the 80th Congress of electioneering fame).

One problem my centrist friends face in this election is to form their opinions about Mitt Romney.  Mr. Romney, as governor of Massachusetts from 2003 to 2007, promoted government-mandated health care, increased fees and the gasoline tax, closed tax loopholes, opposed imposing restrictions on abortions, and banned assault weapons.  Mr. Romney's positions on these issues are different today.  Thus the problem: are Mr. Romney's supporters voting for his positions of this campaign, or of the positions he advocated ten years ago?  Mr. Obama's supporters do not face this problem, as his positions are generally the same as what he advocated in 2008; their question is whether he's sufficiently achieved his goals in his first term as President.

General semantics offers a solution through what it calls "extensional devices," including one that recognizes the problem underlying my "Congress" example.  Words can be tagged with the time to which they refer, so that it's clear that "Congress(1950)" and "Congress(2012)" mean different things.

I suggest that we print Mitt Romney's name on the ballot twice, once as "Mitt Romney (2003)" and once as "Mitt Romney (2012)."  All the votes would count toward his total.  He, and we, could then see whether Mr. Romney (2012) is in fact an improved and more popular version of Mr. Romney (2003), or whether the oddities of the Republican Party's nominating process have imposed upon him an unplanned obsolescence.

A third oddity in the Multnomah County voting registration figures

As of August 20, Multnomah County had exactly one registered voter who lives within the Hillsboro School District, which (as I discovered to my surprise) takes in a small portion of NW Skyline Road, well beyond the limits of the City of Portland but distinctly within Multnomah County.

The Measure 3-401 (vote-by-rail) opponents use the unisex bathroom argument

I'm still mulling over the arguments in favor of and against Measure 3-401, Clackamas County's vote-by-rail citizen initiative, as well as the larger policy effects of the underlying issue, including in particular the tie-in with the county's land use policies. 

One of the arguments in opposition struck me as not well thought out.  Five of the eight Voter's Pamphlet arguments in opposition state that if Measure 3-401 passes, county emergency services (police and fire) could not respond to an accident on a rail track without first getting approval from the voters, apparently because (in their view) putting out a fire on a rail track or taking an injured passenger to the hospital would be "financing, designing, construction, or operation" of a rail system.  One of the opposing arguments, furnished by Eleanore Hunter of Positively Clackamas, implies that the county would need to hold an election before it could paint a crosswalk.

This argument reminds me of the famous argument against the Equal Rights Amendment, that if it is adopted then public facilities would have to convert their restrooms to unisex bathrooms.  It was one of a parade of horribles that opponents raised.

The argument that the county won't be able to put out fires on a rail track is equally false, as we can see by analogy.  The county can't lawfully go into the banking business because it doesn't have a banking charter, but it can still chase bank robbers and put out bank fires without begging the permission of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

Which Multnomah County Commissioner represents the children? Diane McKeel, actually

In addition to the affinity between Republicans and small water districts, I found some other curious things in the statistics from the Multnomah County Elections Office, including this one.  The Multnomah County Commission has five members: the chair, who is elected countywide, and four others, who are elected from districts.  As with federal and state representatives, the four county districts are reapportioned every 10 years based on the census results to keep them roughly equal in population.

And they are now equal: the spread from lowest to highest population runs only from 183,359 (District 1, west side and the inner east side) to 184,228 (District 2, Portland north of the Banfield Freeway).  That's a spread of about 0.5%, well within constitutional requirements.

The oddity is that although the four districts are almost equally populated, their voting strength is wildly different.  District 1 has 120,237 voters, District 2 has 112,158 voters, District 3 (Portland south of the Banfield from 39th to 122nd/148th) has 97,687 voters, and District 4 (Gresham and the rest of east county) has only 87,526 voters.  A voter in District 4 (Diane McKeel's) has 37% more influence on electing his or her county commissioner than does a voter in District 1 (Deborah Kafoury's).

Why the great difference?  My first thought is that it reflects how appealing (or not) the different parts of the county are to households with children, who count toward redistricting but can't vote.  The population and voting statistics suggest that Portland's become family-unfriendly, and that households with children would rather live in the suburbs.  I'm open to an alternative explanation that doesn't involve our fair city chasing off the children.

Measure 3-401 deserves a catchy nickname

And I think I have found it:  the "vote-by-rail" measure.