Bloggers linking each other is so incestuous, but I'm enjoying creating my "Other Bloggers" page nonetheless. I've now inaugurated a "Portland and Oregon" section, as the last few weeks have seen not one but two new blogs devoted to those subjects. First we have Beaverblog, founded by a young fellow named Ben Cannon. Ben is a once and future Oregonian, but at the moment he's a graduate student at Oxford University in England. In our wired world, anything is possible. Ben reflected today on the piece in the other day's New York Times about traffic "calming" devices, and how Portland is one of the most "becalmed" cities on earth. I like the calming, but I hate it when Portland gets cited for something in the Times. The current regime in City Hall lives and dies for Times mentions, even when it means bankrupting the city to the point where we have crummy schools, no police stations at nights and on weekends, and no meaningful mental health system. If she thought it would get a favorable mention in the Times, Mayor Katz would burn barrels of cash in front of the Pittock Mansion. Livability is in the eye of the beholder.

Today I also noticed a new blog by someone who calls himself The One True b!X, and it is called Portland Communique. From it we learn that the silly plan to put a skating rink in Pioneer Courthouse Square for three or four months every winter seems to have a life of its own, even though it will be ugly and out of character. To which I might add, as I have here before, way too expensive, and as others have pointed out, competition for the other big local skating rink, at Lloyd Center Mall. People forget that in the '80s the owners of Lloyd Center were looking for an excuse to close that rink, despite the love of it by the local citizenry. The Pioneer Courthouse Square rink could begin the demise of the Lloyd Center rink, at which the crocodile tears will flow from the City Hall planners who seem hellbent on defiling "Portland's living room."

Anyway, Ben and b!X, glad to link ya.