Snow is not an entirely uncommon occurrence in Portland. The downtown area usually gets one or two events of the white stuff during the winter every year. Keeping this in mind, I find it hard to believe how unprepared the city seems to be each time a snowstorm hits.
It seems that Christmas starts earlier every year. I was subjected to my first Christmas commercial this season only a day after Halloween. Decorations, lights and trees are springing up everywhere. Christmas is such a symbol in our society that it often pushes other holidays to the side, holidays that are being celebrated around the same time. I am talking, of course, about the Jewish celebration of Hanukkah.
A few weeks ago a 50-pound Rottweiler mix attacked and killed one of its fellow canines on a TriMet bus. There was no provocation, no growling, no barking; the attack came without warning. It was an accident and accidents happen.
We could have walked there by now. I once found these apt words scrawled inside the shelter at a streetcar stop in Southwest Portland. It may also have been one of the many instances that I looked up at the arrival times only to see the five turn into an eight, then to a six and finally up to an 11.
Last week the parent of a Sherwood High School student decided his child was neither mature nor smart enough to cope with the violence in the John Gardner novel Grendel. The book has been part of the curriculum in this English honors course for years. This year the administration decided to give a heads up to parents by sending home permission slips making sure that parents approved of the literature.
Smoking is bad for you. We all know this. Yet I, and many others, make the choice to do it anyway. It is our right as citizens of the United States to put poison into our bodies if we so choose. And as it stands right now, I have the right to smoke a cigarette, inside a bar, with my beer. Starting on Jan. 1, 2009, I will no longer have that right. Oregon has decided to follow the lead of many other states and ban smoking in bars, which are the workplaces of many bartenders and servers.
Many a time I have walked into the Portland State library after class to write a paper or print something out, only to find a line of five or more people waiting to use the same computers. Here’s the problem: I would bet dollars to doughnuts that a good percentage of the students already on those computers are busy chatting on Facebook, watching episodes of The Office on YouTube, or playing card games on Pogo.
By now most of us know how bad plastic water bottles are for the environment. Next to plastic bags, bottles are one of the most talked about landfill items. But what about the water that fills those plastic bottles? Is it really worth the trouble, not to mention the price, of bottling what is essentially tap water?