Hello, my name is H. Harreld Dinkins. pattern recognizer
Old pics that have been needling me for months since taking them: this was a homeless camp that surely wasn’t going to work where is was beside a school playground. But to see that a crew had been paid to just destroy th...
March 30, 2018
"You're asking what a persimmon tastes like? Well, look: it might very well be a reasonable query to ask if you've never had one, but you'll have to ask someone else. Why? Because it's only with restraint that I've spent...
January 5, 2018
The instant trigger for memories of happiness in childhood often being spent in Grumman canoes in the bayous of southern Louisiana with several of these paddles including one with hidden marks which was my trusted favor...
December 26, 2017
Persimmons in winter’s grim give a brief visual lifering, providing just enough to get to Daphneas and their olfactory lifering.
December 23, 2017
The final number of this derelict AMC Pacer “vehicles” (in quotes because for many had so long surrendered to the moss and rust that even to call them frames would fail to keep abreast of their entropic decay) was alread...
October 21, 2017
While any analysis of floors with metrics that privileged their visual textures over financial costs of materials, installation, and maintenance (to say nothing of structural integrity) would be one sorry sort of metric,...
October 8, 2017
The incomparable rescue dog canine beauty is calmer by the day, and really shines after daily exfoliation and a gluten-free green tea pinch of snuff and a moisturizer of cold-pressed oil from goji berries and tears of jo...
July 31, 2017
#RealMurfatlar is reassuring since it must be premium if you have to go all the way to H Mart in Tigard for the real thing. Amazed to not have a riot during the visit.
July 31, 2017
Jan's descendants had long ceased giving a damn about prestige or the cache of snob appeal. After Trump's ascent they snapped and decided to go for the mass market and gun for the ginormous royalties they deserved but co...
April 12, 2017
The volume of people who emerge from a haze obscuring memory and know only the agony of their own organ count to be lower in the aftermath of hooligans resorting to deceit and theft is far far lower since oversupply has...
April 9, 2017
If you haven't heard the tale told, then you don't know about when a panel truck lost control on a tight turn along hwy 64 on the Lower Ocoee not a whole lot longer than the end of the debate that was open for a long tim...
March 26, 2017
If I had a nickel for every time I heard this cliché over and over in NüPDX: "Making garbage AND recycling a fun party since the midway point of the twenty first century's first quarter' is good, I'll give you that it do...
March 16, 2017
The ubiquity of "Daphne odora" is at last a sign of spring's approach, though I do wish Portland would avoid having it become a landscaping cliche as it is too wondrous a plant to make mundane.
March 13, 2017
Every single thing about this signage, at a place a friend once said should be called "No Lava," has only somehow gotten creepier over time in spite of a period in the 90s when it seemed I'd end up sharing cigarettes wit...
March 1, 2017
Somebody might want to put a check on this sort of hubristic claim or our actionable ability to masquerade snarky commentary in lieu of embracing a real redistributive economic system might force us to examine our incess...
February 26, 2017
A few months ago, I'd have presumed this sign to be a warning to keep riff-raff from vandalizing this particular space. Now it seems just as likely to be a prototype test for transitional signage before we attain the glo...
January 26, 2017
If there might ever be a time when the winds of politics make a potato chip that tastes like booze succeed, it is sure as heck right now.
January 26, 2017
So many of my life's people of portent and/or interactions with impact have occurred in a radius of only a few hundred meters of here, it seems impossible to not visit with as much regularity of a gambler's casino trips.
January 21, 2017
Seeing 雪見燈籠 cues my mind to a catalog of topographies alternating between the predictable and the inscrutable.
January 18, 2017
Ah, the dogs of August heat are always recalled most vividly after the solar day rubs brevity in one's face with cold. At the edge of the forest, los perros!
December 24, 2016
Always chatty, Maki immediately erupted into prolonged dramatic begging the moment we pull up to the dog park and the sound was far too good to miss.
December 21, 2016
East of the synagogue across NW 19th, there is a lot featuring two structures that are placed in proximity but not adjacent to each other, and they take up less than a parking space each. I suppose this is the line that...
December 13, 2016
#Trump transition team has leaked his critical decisions will be deeply grounded with a reliance on nothing but the best moonshot tech we need from the cutting edge...of 1978. #worldfear #tandyisdandy
December 10, 2016
Probably my favorite winter garden in Portland area, today showcased the witch hazel soon to come and the hellebores and daphnea preparing to perfume 2017 and perhaps we can go forth away from the stench that was so stea...
December 9, 2016
PDXFiles: Such a warm place in the heart of the people here, and it's such a good counterbalance to the snuggle toasty in secure and wholesome relief from the wintry weather. HA! Just kidding it's only sometimes that way...
December 2, 2016
Communication, advocacy, research, and effective support for individuals, organizations, and causes.
This belongs in the “worst insults to journalism” category of bookmarks. Even if it were @Oregonian’s only abdicati… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
May 14, 2021
#COVID upended life >1yr ago & the only west coast state w/o a notification app is #Oregon. WTF has to change for… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
February 13, 2021
#Uganda’s masses would choose @HEBobiwine if elections had been free. Observers say they weren’t. … twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
January 16, 2021
Require a complete COVID-19 vaccination or proof of medical exemption as precondition to get stimulus check or pand… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
January 12, 2021
@KateBrownForOR: Oregonians over 75yo & essential workers deserve to be next in line for vaccines. They face high… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
January 11, 2021
"if something similar had happened in the U.S., life could be completely different now."
So, @MultCoHealth, … twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
So, @MultCoHealth, … twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
November 19, 2020
The Wages of Hatred are Hateful
June 29, 2016
Enjoy these for some Wednesday optics with less agony than my last several grim posts of global ugh.
June 29, 2016
June 29, 2016
For over two decades, I was among those who waited for the day to come when Aung San Suu Kyi and the NLD to ascend to some power and felt confident that things would begin to get better.
My inbox contains a request from Elliott yesterday morning for comments on the article below and reading it was something that was successfully avoided all day for fear it might say exactly what it does. In a Burma where The Lady has forbidden the use of the word "Rohingya" by any public official (including an attempt to "require" the American Embassy to censor the completely accurate ethnonym from being used)...
June 25, 2016
If the pseudosangha of Shoebottom Wirathu needs lessons on what actual Buddhism looks like, they can look not to the absurdity of their infractions against the vinaya, but instead to Bangladesh. This is what monks are doing in a nation where Buddhism is practiced by a miniscule minority and it seems to be going just fine.
June 20, 2016
Donald Trump has managed to dredge up one of the worst people in the world to be his new campaign manager. His background in working for one of the globe's most heinous human rights abusers as a rape apologist for the Burmese Army had rendered him too despicable for any iota of the Bush43 Administration, and thus perfect for running the Trump 2016 campaign.
I didn't know it was possible for Trump's behaviors or actions to leave me stunned but it just has and now I feel unwell.
June 16, 2016
The world continues outside the US, and in The Philippines Duterte is a horrifying setback to a country that deserves its potential to blossom instead of more priggish paramilitary thugs like this ascending to tyranny. Write and share and remind your own elected representative that there's no place for America to play nice with human rights abusers.
June 15, 2016
I'm in a very stunned space in the aftermath of the Pulse Massacre and the ever-surprising ways that our culture's response illustrates ever-recordbreaking ignorance and ugliness. Nonetheless there remains this pivotal question of the next American Presidency and I thank Sally for bringing a smile to my face for the first time in days. #nevertrump #neverdrumpf
June 15, 2016
To everyone but with an eye to the islands summers from Block Island to Orcas Island: Not all of the exchange students you've met during summers are treated fairly,legally, or with common decency. The summer staff at Rosario Resort have been shockingly shortchanged. Make sure everyone who works to help local businesses succeed gets a level playing field in return, and know that there hasn't always been one.
June 12, 2016
If you think for one moment that the way to respond to this morning's news of another mass shooting is to reactively raise the hatred Muslims, you're wrong and you're part of the problem.
For the sake of all fallen, all still with us, and all those to come, do not elect Trump.
Love does NOT always win.
But it could, if we all helped.
Bennett and I visited Paul Sikora's mum Jean in her Portland home yesterday and were gifted with Ohio stories and got to see some of his painting from the time before he'd begun working with mobiles/motion.
June 11, 2016
June 9, 2016
We're centuries late and this ain't the whole deal, but let's start with this, build towards totally smashing the patriarchy and its discontents (and liberating all of us discontented) and welcome the Feminist Utopia at last!!!
Or at least let's shame Trump for a century or more to come in November, eh?
I'm with her.
HILLARY 2016
June 6, 2016
A film worth your time. Already smitten in childhood from reading reference books that listed land and ecologies wildly divergent from New Orleans, by my teen years reading "Desert Solitaire" while running every imaginable usual (and some very unusual) Appalachian creek and river, and by adulthood I was devoted to a trip after stumbling across an Outside piece on this wondrous dory and the saint that paddled it. Never did get the honor of meeting him (for darshan maybe, since I'm sure my otherwise garrulous guide chattiness would cease), but when I finally did have the privilege of a 16-day 7-...
June 4, 2016
It's incredibly sad and upsetting to read this victim's letter for the horrors of the assault and trauma, but I'd little expectation that the judge, probation officer, and whole craptacular "judicial" process would show themselves so willing to assist the seemingly unrepentant and remorseless attacker to minimize consequences, and to do so in ways that prolonged uncertainty, intensified anguish, and ignored real and continuing damages for the victim. For decades now, our societies seem all too often unwilling to take the rather minimal step of ending misogyny and stopping the ceaseless attacks...
June 2, 2016
Please donate anything you can to a family that deeply needs help and repost even if you're currently unable to spare cash at the moment. If you live in the Northwest, you've benefited from their contributions to the best of the region's community culture and this is a critical time to give them support so they may thrive.
May 31, 2016
This is a willfully ignorant decision that increases risk from a public agency tasked to do decrease it, precisely the opposite. England should feel incredible shame from this and the greed-based paranoia that drove this decision will cost it far more in the long run.
May 30, 2016
Watched this on a park bench and it just made me cry so hard a kid across the street came over to ask if I was okay.
WTF is wrong with us as a species that enables us to hate each other so grimly and to avoid seeing our shared presence?
Would you look into another's eyes before hating them? Would you hate so readily after looking into mine?
I'm not sure if I'm okay sometimes, but it's always worth aiming higher. And waking up every day, I'm deeply dedicated to be prepared to look in the eyes of anyone as I judge them, rather than to dehumanize them by avoidance.
There is, apparently, an actual monk from the Sasana that has read the Vinaya and is not a disgusting bigot like Shoebottom Wirathu.
Maybe Buddhism won't self-destruct there.
May 30, 2016
Looks like Floridaman got pushed off the pedestal by Texasman...who then shot him in the back and screamed something while wearing a Trump T-shirt.
America: Stop the Islamophobia, now.
May 29, 2016
May 28, 2016
At last, Cardinal Bo speaks to the urgency of this horror of Islamophobia and racism in Burma. All of us still await some semblance of acknowledgement from Daw Aung San Suu Kyi to say anything at all on the human rights so vital to supporting her decades in house arrest being the entitlement of ALL human beings.
May 26, 2016
This rape and trafficking of non-Burman women in Burma isn't new, and in 2002 the meticulous documentation by Charm Tong and the Shan Women's Action Network presented "License to Rape" and the evidence presented seemed to hint at the possibility of such awareness that it seemed the world really might pressure and end to the Burmese military (Tatmadaw) practice of raping ethnic minority women as a weapon of war. Depressingly, relatively little was done.
While gender-based violence and sexual assault remained a high priority concern for human rights groups, the generalized oppression of non-Burm...
May 24, 2016
This WaPo piece by Weingarten caught my attention and it seemed worth leaving here to see what responses it might get.
Who from my circles will have the requisite intelligence to respond appropriately, rise to the challenge, take this bait, or behave exactly as predicted, and where those areas may overlap or exclude each other?
May 23, 2016
In South Africa, which has had LGBT marriage guaranteed by law longer than the United States, Mojo and Marceline had the support of having the nation's most famous face of faith as a father (and in an effort to not provoke the church hierarchy, he even bent to compromise on his own daughter's wedding). Even still, a member of the faith a Reverend for the crime of love. Because church's are an odd island in the society which has the right to continue to hate. Ugh.
NOTE: SOUTH AFRICA PROHIBITS DISCRIMINATING AGAINST LGBT PEOPLE IN EMPLOYMENT & HOUSING. In the United States, such rubbish is s...
May 23, 2016
This is getting worse, not better. The growth and enthusiasm with which humans delight making other humans suffer would be repellent for anyone. Is this sham of Buddhism as a bigot's boot and the delusions of ethnic superiority of some over others Burma's democracy?
Really?
Wielding power to hate and harm the least protected anywhere on Earth is just about as despicable as it gets.
Burma, you are shaming yourself.
Stop hate speech & sexist threats now. Sign to tell Seattle Councilwomen: We stand with you!
May 6, 2016
#RUFKM You might wonder if everyone isn't just pretending to see how long until they laugh. Except dead kids. https://t.co/Qh1hIHssyl
April 28, 2016
April 28, 2016
Is Patrick Stewart in an excellent Python-inspired short human rights piece?
Yes, and you can watch it here.
It is harrowing how much this kind if awareness is needed in the United States given the cowardly choice to use drone murder and inflict torture instead of aiming for diplomacy guided by human rights principles.
People often don't know enough about human rights, especially those at risk of having them denied and often those who are failing to respect them. Americans are quick to bluster on aggressively about the world, but fail to recall the role we played in helping to create a righ...
While you napped? Oh, nothing much...except for the fact that THE DALEKS ARE IN CHINA!
April 27, 2016
If this device is affordable and reliable, the change potential for many seems so big thay I just found myself exploding into smile and pacing with impatient hope wondering about how to get one to someone.
April 26, 2016
If you're in Portland next week, you really need to see this.
April 25, 2016
April 25, 2016
If you live within the Columbia Watershed or one that drains into Puget Sound, then you already have your life fueled by this very oil. This scenario is one you should consider. How do you think we might respond to an event, prepare for possible ones, prevent them from happening, and ultimately neutralize the risk in full?