Sunbeams illuminating a coastal forest in Port Orford, Oregon

Chuggnutt!

Tag: Random

  • Hobbit holes in Bend?

    Now this is some kind of crazy:

    The hobbit holes will hold lawn mowers instead of diminutive, barefooted halflings from J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy, but The Shire aims to bring some Old World styling and a fantasy setting to Bend’s east side.

    “We call it the place of enchantment, and we are building to that (motto),” said Ron Meyers, the developer whose business card identifies him as Lord of The Shire….

    The application submitted to the city for development calls for a mix of 31 cottages and townhomes on 6.2 acres off Benham Road east of the Parrell/Sisters Mobile Home Park. The project also will have 1.5 acres of common open space that will include trails, ponds, landscaping and an amphitheater, some of which are in place.

    Hobbit holes already are cut into the side of the hill, and Karl Anthony, whom Meyers describes as a “spiritual artist,” held a concert at the amphitheater a few weeks ago.

    It will be the homes themselves, however, that give The Shire its unique look.

    Cottages will evoke English country homes. Townhouses will be built to look like medieval city streetscapes.

    Yeah. Good luck with that.

    …actually, I’d be real curious to see what it looks like when they’re done. Jeez, just when I thought the real estate market around here couldn’t get any weirder…

    One thing the Bulletin forgot: the web site address for “The Shire.” Kind of important, there.

    But that’s okay, I found it: The Shire of Bend, Oregon.

  • That figures

    I guess I shouldn’t really be surprised when the oddball stuff happens around here anymore, but… Bend.com is reporting that during next week’s Great North American RV Rally in Redmond, participants will attempt to build the world’s largest s’more.

    The S’more will consist of about 40,000 marshmallows, 40,000 graham crackers and 14,000 chocolate bars, and it’ll be built by volunteers on Wednesday, July 13, from 10 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Construction is expected to take approximately three hours, with the final product covering 1,600 square feet. The World’s Largest S’more is sponsored by Reserve America, and is expected to break the current record of 1,600 pounds, which was established in May, 2003….

    People from as far away as Florida and Nova Scotia are expected be on-hand to construct, watch and maybe even eat the S’more.

    The world’s. Largest. S’more.

    Sigh.

  • INTJ

    My friend Kerry at work had a bunch of people take the Jung Typology Test to determine personality types and see how well they applied to the real world. I’m not really sure why, perhaps as a group-building exercise. Whatever the reason, they’ve been good for a laugh, but the best part is the analysis of each profile, with lists of famous people—real and fictional, amusingly enough—that match that personality.

    My own score came up INTJ, which is “Introverted Intuitive Thinking Judging.” It’s more or less accurate, in broad strokes. You can read the full profile here, but here’s some of the fictional INTJ’s—characters I share personality types with:

    • Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, from Hamlet.
    • Gandalf the Grey (every geek’s dream come true, I’m sure)
    • Professor Moriarty… Sherlock Holmes’ arch-nemesis. I can see that, I guess.
    • Hannibal Lecter… what the—?

    The best (worst?) part was that someone else, after finding out I shared a personality profile with Hannibal Lecter, looked at me with an appraising eye and said, “Yeah. I can see that.”

  • 15-pound burger

    This is crazy; a 15 pound hamburger is being offered free to any two people who can eat the entire thing in one three-hour sitting.

    the “Beer Barrel Belly Buster” weighs in with 10 pounds of meat molded into a 20-inch patty on a specially baked, 17-inch bun.

    The balance of the weight comes from 25 slices of cheese, a head of lettuce, three tomatoes, two onions, plus copious quantities of mayo, ketchup, relish, mustard, and peppers….

    The 15-pound burger can feed a family of 10, according to Liegey. He has sold two so far to teams of two people, and neither team did much more than put a dent in it.

    Wow. Just wow.

  • Vermont Country Store

    A follow-up to my Scrapple post the other day: that post was inspired by a catalog for the Vermont Country Store (“Purveyors of the Practical & Hard-To-Find”) that inexplicably appeared on the desk of a co-worker last week. It’s a neat store, and I like the website; they sell all sorts of quality, unusual, nostalgic, and/or useful things like this Uncle Sam Bank (I had one of those!) or this Vacuum Coffee Maker or, yes, a Can of Scrapple.

  • Bandage Man

    A bit of Oregon esoterica for everyone this Friday morning, and it’s a ghost story to boot: The Bandage Man of Cannon Beach.

    The Bandage Man is a phantom of a man completely wrapped in bandages that haunts this small community. The bloody figure, who smells of rotting flesh, jumps into vehicles passing on a road outside of town, notably pickup trucks or open-topped cars, but also sedans, station wagons, and even sports cars. Sometimes the mummy breaks windows or leaves behind bits of bloody or foul-smelling bandages. One legend has it that he is the ghost of a dead logger cut to pieces in a sawmill accident.

    The Bandage Man is sometimes said to eat dogs and may have murdered several people. He appears on the short approach road connecting US Highway 101 to Cannon Beach, between the town and where Highway 26 intersects with 101. The phantom always vanishes just before reaching town.

    I first came across the story of Bandage Man in the book Ghosts, Critters & Sacred Places of Washington and Oregon, and it stood out because it’s not the typical “sounds and thumps in the night” type of ghost story that fills books like these.

    Not surprisingly, there’s not much on the web about Bandage Man; digging around only reveals a handful of sites, with pretty much the same one or two paragraph description. However, I did find this post on the MysteryPlanet MSN Group that sheds light on the origin of the legend:

    I was googling on the chance that I might find some mention somewhere of the Bandage Man. I have been aware of this story for over forty years. For I was a child in the community where it got it’s start. I knew some of the family of the kid that first encountered the Bandage Man. There is an old road, that for all the years I was growing up was known as “Bandage Man Road”. It was just an old section of Highway 101 that had been bypassed when a new section put in place, but it was still accessible and wasn’t very long-just a short loop off of the highway-the whole thing from end to end could be driven in maybe five minutes or so.

     

    This loop of road was a popular place for local kids to go park and makeout.

     

    That is where the story started. One night, two of the local kids were up there doing just what teenaged boys and girls do when they are parked on dark lonely roads. The boy had an old chevy pickup and his girl and he were sitting in the cab. All off a sudden they felt the truck sort of lean, like something was moving around in the bed of the truck. They turned to look out the rear window and there looking back was a bandaged face, with only some wierd looking eyes showing through eyeholes in the bandages. The bandaged figure started beating on the glass, and the top of the cab. The kid started his engine, got it gear and tore out of there-his girlfriend screaming in terror as the man in the back continued his pounding. Any of you who’ve been to Bandage Man road, or Cannon Beach, know how curvey the roads are and to drive them at highspeed is dangerous. On they went-after what seemed an eternity they made it to downtown Cannon Beach, where the boy’s family owned a service station that they lived next door to in green house. Once they got there, they looked in the back and the Bandaged figure was no where to be seen.

     

    I first heard this story back in 1960-61. And it’s the original version. Some of the family of the kid still lives around here too, I know two of his brothers.

     

    I have never heard of a repeat appearance by the Bandage Man.

    I guess you’d better watch out if you’re driving around Cannon Beach, if you believe that sort of thing…

  • Houston’s glass public toilet

    Updated, see below.

    A while back, Jake posted about a public restroom in Switzerland that was made out of one-way glass. Well, apparently there’s one in Houston now; my friend Kerry sent me the pictures in email this morning.

    Here’s what it looks like from the outside:

    Exterior of Houston's glass public toilet

    And, here’s the view from the inside:

    Interior of Houston's glass public toilet

    Man, that’s just wrong. I just couldn’t use it, no way.

    Update: These are the photos from the original Switzerland toilet; looks like they’re being recycled again. So, take this all with a grain of salt. What’s funny is that I first heard of this (and then got the email) from people at work, and it’s making the rounds on other sites as well (a quick search on Google pulls them up), so there may be an actual Houston toilet; who knows.

  • Boss Hogg: Linguist

    Random fun fact for the day: Sorrell Booke, the actor who played Boss Hogg in the Dukes of Hazzard television show, was fluent in five(!) languages and served in the Korean War as a counterintelligence officer. Who would’ve guessed? All I could dig up for what languages he was fluent in were English (obviously) and Japanese; I’m curious as to what the others are.

    Sources: IMDB, Wikipedia.

  • Central Oregon’s biggest baby?

    According to this article in the Bulletin, a woman in Prineville gave birth to a 14 pound, 1 ounce baby. Holy c-section, Batman! Still, as big as that is, it doesn’t quite beat the 16.7 pound baby born last month. And then for some bogglers check out these Guinness World Record entries for heaviest births.

  • Cartoon skeletons

    This is cool yet random and kind of freaky at the same time: Skeletal Systems of Cartoon Characters.

    Animation was the format of choice for children’s television in the 1960s, a decade in which children’s programming became almost entirely animated. Growing up in that period, I tended to take for granted the distortions and strange bodies of these entities.

     

    I decided to take a select few of these popular characters and render their skeletal systems as I imagine they might resemble if one truly had eye sockets half the size of its head, or fingerless-hands, or feet comprising 60% of its body mass.

    I like Charlie Brown’s skeleton a lot, but nothing there is quite as alien and disturbing as Buttercup’s (the Powerpuff Girl) skeleton. And this is cool: “Twenty-two of these are currently on show at Stumptown Coffee/Belmont in Portland, Oregon the month of December 2004.” I wish I had time to see them since we’re in Portland right now, but oh well.

    Via Boing Boing.