Things I would have Twittered, but didn't

By Todd Stadler · Wednesday, October 31, 2007 4:16pm

This past weekend, I found myself accumulating thoughts. You know the ones, that seem clever or worth retelling later, but after a few hours have passed, you realize you were just hyped up on coffee at the time or very bored? Yes.

And yet I saved them all up for you to read. I would have Twittered them, but I only do that when I'm at a computer. Twitter's loss, your gain.

• I saw a doctor eating an apple. This troubled me — does he feel internal turmoil when doing that? Does he have to be careful to only eat one every other day? Or does it only ward off other doctors?
• According to a sign near the pedestrian bridge over I-5, former Portland mayor Josiah Failing was a "public education pioneer". My question is if he did, in fact, invent the F.
• Yeah, I'm not the first person to make a joke about his last name — the pedestrian bridge used to be labeled the "Failing Pedestrian Bridge", since it connects to Failing Street, named in Josiah's honor. Now it's labeled the "Failing Street Pedestrian Bridge", for reasons I hope are obvious.
• Going from our house to North Portland is easy, since we just hop on the #4-Division to downtown and stay on when it becomes the #4-Fessenden to North Portland. I wondered if the #4 wends its way through all five quadrants, since it starts (for us) in Southeast, makes its way to downtown in Southwest, barely nips into Northwest to cross the Steel Bridge, and then ends up in North Portland. I couldn't tell if it actually makes its way into Northeast or not, though it does seem to traverse NE Wheeler Ave. If not, it gets very, very close to Northeast.
• Non-Portlanders think it's funny that we say we have five quadrants, but I really think it's the best way to express the concept.
• While waiting at the doctor's office, I picked up a copy of Martha Stewart Living to flip through. Something about the magazine seemed off, but I couldn't put my finger on it. I found myself staring at an ad for a Macintosh computer. "Hmm," I thought, "Haven't heard the name Macintosh in a while. They always call themselves Apple now." And then I noticed the model being sold was the Performa, which I hadn't heard of. And then — hey, there's no mention of the Internet in this ad! What's the copyright date on this thing?! Gah — 1993! The magazine was from August 1993. I matriculated into Rice that year. I can't tell you how eerie it was, in retrospect, to realize that not a single ad had a URL in it. Shudder.