Hello to you, and welcome to Thursday, March 14, 2019, the Eve of the Ides, and look! Spring weather! Today will be partly sunny, high 55, and then I'm happy to lazily paste the words the National Weather Service: "A ridge of high pressure will linger over the Pacific Northwest for the next week. A few weak weather systems will try to push across the ridge at times, but overall expect a mostly dry week with temperatures a little above normal." That means we'll be in the sixty-degree neighborhood, friends! Bring in the shovel, stash the YakTrax, and go get some popcorn at Les Schwab. It took a month to break out of February's persistent threat of lowland snow, and now with six days until the Equinox, it looks like Spring is moving in to stay. You know where to find me! Sunrise 7:25 AM, and sunset 7:15 PM Pacific.
Facebook, are you back? Yes? No? Will the world experience a Christmas baby boom?
Colorado. Whoa. Hundreds of thousands out of power, following a supercharged snowstorm with hurricane winds, and now it's moving east. Denver Dripsters, please--stay warm and check in!
The world's skies are currently devoid of Boeing 737 Max 8 and 9 aircraft, now that the US has followed the lead of every other major country and grounded the glitchy aircraft. They'll figure out what's wrong and fix it. In fact, American Airlines developed a workaround for the nose-down problem and trained up its pilots, who liked it. So this might not be a protracted shutdown. The Max 8 does fly into Portland, though the Port says Southwest is the only airline that's been flying it here this month, and the next one wasn't scheduled until Saturday. For now that appears to be off. In private conversations about this, Trump said he thought the entire 737 series "sucked," according to anonymous people in the room quoted by the Washington Post. But grounding the plane was not the president's call...at least it shouldn't have been.
Beto O'Rourke announced his run for President this morning. Wife Amy by his side, the young former Texas congressman said on video that "This is going to be a positive campaign that seeks to bring out the very best from every single one of us, that seeks to unite a very divided country."
One of the Proud Boys charged with pounding a man on a Portland street seems to have fled to the South Pacific. 26-year-old Tusitala “Tiny” Toese, a Joey Gibson sidekick, said on social media that he's “enjoying my homeland” of American Samoa.
A search is on for Maya Sanders, age 29, who vanished Tuesday afternoon in Astoria, where police believe she may be in danger. Some of her belongings have been found on the street. She suffers from disabilities, was not dressed for the cold weather and doesn’t have her cell phone.
There's a bit of an uproar in Portland's internet community, as moderators for the local Reddit message board have banned the word "criddler" in reference to the homeless population. As one moderator wrote, "From this moment forward we're adding "Criddler" to the removal list. It has gone from meaning a thieving meth addict to anyone on the streets and is now used mostly in a hateful context toward the homeless population." Snarky retorts go on for pages. One example: "I look forward to the ever-growing list of actually insulting and offensive replacements that this community is almost certainly going to come up with. I think this was a poorly thought out decision that will almost certainly not achieve the desired effect (whatever the hell that might be), but adding some clever new tidbits to the vernacular might be fun."
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It's Pi day. You know, Pi, 3.14...the beginning of the eternal series of digits that represent the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. Lots of math classes make a game of it, and none more robustly than St. James School in McMinnville, where teacher Gus Pappelis today will lead the 5th annual Pi Day Celebration that involves nine schools and more than 200 students and teachers. Pi Day!
We lost Stephen Hawking one year ago today. I tried to bull my way through his "A Brief History of Time" one year, and I'll admit that, like the cosmos he was explaining, it was vastly over my head. But I do love the photo of him draped in a Portland Timbers blanket, given him by an Oregon Teacher of the Year.
Cirque Du Soleil - Corteo opens at the Moda Center tonight.
Here's a group that's familiar to K103 Christmas Music listeners: Boney M performs at the Keller Auditorium tonight. This Jamaican-European vocal group has been making hits since the 70s, but none more famous in Portland than their cover of "Mary's Boy Child"--which was such a Christmas smash on K103 in the 80s that record stores were sending buyers to Canada to scoop up copies. I don't think that song's on their middle-of-March setlist, but they've got to be aware of that recording's unique popularity in Portland. So who knows?
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Here are the stories in today's Smile File, discretely tucked into the Daily Drip Coffee Cup. Please feel free to share the cup link with your friends...with Facebook down for so long, they might appreciate some friendly reading material!
--"Once homeless, teen gets 17 college acceptance letters"
--"Man jumps shirtless into frozen lake to save two dogs"
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--"Dad Plans Touching “Captain Marvel” Surprise For Bullied 5-Yr-Old Daughter"
--"Robber Returns Money After Checking Woman's Bank Balance"
--"Scientists Found That You Can Grow Better Blueberries by Ditching the Fertilizer"
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My friend Lew just sent the most intriguing story, and I don't have time to read it yet because I'm doing the K103/KEX fandango today. So I'll just share the headline, and leave it to your imagination, as we head out the door and into the future:
""Physicists Just Reversed Time on The Smallest Scale by Using a Quantum Computer"
If I could reverse time on a small scale, I'd go back and get a few Z's. But if we could do it on a grand scale, what else might we amend?
Think about that. See you on the radio!