For an example of bus etiquette, when someone with a walker or motorized wheelchair needs to get off, the driver has the option to both lower the front of the bus, and to unfold a ramp to the curb. Those wishing to board the bus need to stand back and let those getting off do so first, including if a ramp is deployed.
A young blond, a male teen, didn’t get that, and the driver had to keep telling him to wait, as the ramp maneuver was still pending. But the teen didn’t get it, seeing the open door and no one in the way, so time to get on right? Wrong. Driver: wait.
Finally the would-be rider just wandered off, apparently too demoralized by the experience to want to continue it. No bus ride for now. People hate being wrong, especially in public.
Alberta Street, like NW 21st, mirrors SE Division in many ways, with its own Petite Provence (French restaurant) and Salt and Straw (exotic ice cream flavors).
I had a pretty firm objective this time: get pictures of a specific wall mural, one showing an icosahedron in wireframe as an apparent source of teachings, spread by wind. The prayer flag motif in many ways, like in my backyard on TikTok.
On my way back to the Max, on a bus 8 from Alberta Street, I stumbled across a retirement party, in Holladay Park, for one of the first (Type 1) Max trains. People lined up for photo ops inside, and to sign their names to the train’s exterior.
I asked an official about the planned fate for these particular cars and she wasn’t sure where it’d go next. Something for sleuths to monitor maybe.
I wasn’t the only one engaged in a form of treasure hunting (another form of skills building, involving clue following): Dave went to a postmortem regarding an pre Rose Festival treasure hunt organized by veteran Rose Festival treasure hunters. There’s an official one each year, with published clues coming out each day. These hints are purposely cryptic, yet all point to a specific location: where a plaque is hidden for the winner to find.
This hunt was unofficial and this time steered hunters to the Mt. Tabor area, which Dave well knows (me too), although he was not the finder in this case.
The treasure hunting game resembles geocaching in large degree. The term “geocaching” was invented by Dave Ulmer, a Tektronix engineer who, in his next chapter, acquired an RV tricked out with bells and whistles I associate with the BizMo (business mobile) design.
He parked behind the Pauling House that time (soon after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans) and gave us a tour. Don stayed in touch, subscribing to Ulmer’s “daily picture” (usually of some deserted wilderness he was parked in) shared by satellite. This was all well before Starlink.
Although I had my 3-ring binder of “bus reading” with me, I found I was more into churning through my own thoughts on this trip. I did some thinking about the public sector and public spaces. There’s a public-private as well as private-public flow, with public metrics suggesting a kind of ambience or groupthink. To some extent, the groupthink varies by city.
Just as radio and TV resulted in the spread of new standards, in terms of accent and the look of one’s kitchen (ideally), so is AI spreading new speech and thought patterns.
The construction I call “not but” is on the rise. “This was not just a spur-of-the-moment decision, not a random act, but a pre-meditated, carefully planned exercise.” That’s a not-but. You’ll hear a lot more of this construction on YouTube, as AI continues to take over, not just thumbnails, but audio tracks as well.
Without myself being an AI, I’m nevertheless a natural language processor and somewhat LLM-like in how I continually reweigh my various marbles (presuming I have any; we know we have marbles because they say it’s possible to lose them, or to have too few as in “he didn’t have all his marbles”), so naturally my own speech and thought patterns are being influenced, as I absorb the new vernacular and update my worldviews.
