On the bunny walk

Just around 11 every night, I check to see if if I've moved enough that day to satisfy my watch. When the answer is no, if it's not too rainy, off I go on a short neighborhood prowl... Not much is stirring at that hour besides me, but there sure are a lot of little bunnies darting around. They don't need a watch to tell them to move... You just hope they're fast enough to outrun the neighborhood coyotes. Those bad boys are always around...

Last week on garbage night, there were also a couple of humans with flashlights systematically going through the contents of everyone's blue recycling bins... No, they weren't collecting deposit bottles and cans. I don't know what they were after, and I didn't ask... But this is why I shred anything with my name on it...

Turned the corner, and there was my neighbor's house, all decked out for Christmas and with a fully decorated tree shining brightly in the living room window... Sheesh, people, I thought, it's six weeks from now...

It was "leaf day" in our part of town the other day. City crews swept up tons of fallen leaves that lined the curbs. They used to scrub the street down at the end, but I guess that's been cut... Remember when the city charged $30 a house to do this? The Sam Rand Twins at their worst. I never paid it; always raked up my own rather than fork over the dough... Even their successor, Chloe Eudaly, bless her heart, was smart enough to jettison that ungodly tax. Hey, Mayor Wilson, how about now you kill the miserable head tax we pay "for the arts"? If you must, roll it into property taxes and let the county collect it...

Speaking of the arts, I see that the Oregon public health department (go Blazers) is discontinuing its practice of collecting and disseminating Oregonians' poetry about health issues... You wonder how many Salem bureaucrats we were paying to do the curation... Maybe the Revenue Department could pick up the slack. A poetry corner about Oregon taxes? You could put it in the tax form instruction booklet. Pulitzer alert!...

There's a new license plate coming out, celebrating and raising money for the Oregon Zoo... Boy, count me out. That place is a torture chamber for animals. At least with the pharma labs, there might possibly be a slight chance of some eventual benefit to humans besides amusement... Animals like monkeys and elephants do not belong in places like the Oregon Zoo... Neither do you... "Conservation," my eye...

Are you like me, do you fool around with images? I was an early adopter of Photoshop, back when you could buy a stripped-down "elements" version on a floppy disk at Costco for a few bucks... Now it's a spendy monthly subscription, and the program you buy rent is so complicated that you need to take a two-week course to do even the most basic tasks... If somebody's got a simpler but versatile image editing tool, I'm in the market...

Speaking of images, the other night Facebook or somebody fed me an old photo of JFK signing the test ban treaty, with a bunch of unidentified dudes behind him. I asked ChatGPT who was in the pic, and it wouldn't tell me!... Dang, it's a much-published photo, and the answer was a few clicks away, but identifying people, even U.S. senators, in photos? The robot no can do... Or more precisely, won't do... Eventually these things will destroy us all, but in the meantime, you'd think they could be a little more helpful...

Jeff Knight is the former dining and entertainment columnist of the Jersey Journal. Send news tips to Jeff at jeffknightpdx@gmail.com.