Isaac Laquedem

"... And there may be many others, but they haven't been discavard."

Many fields have within their ranks someone of accomplishment whose reputation rests on a slim body of work.  For example, Ralph Ellison's literary reputation rests on Invisible Man, the one novel he published during his lifetime, and Evariste Galois's mathematical fame comes mainly from calculations he wrote down in one night of frantic activity, the day before he was killed in a duel. 

The closest example in musical satire is that of Tom Lehrer, whose entire comedic output consists of three albums (recorded between 1953 and 1965) and a few uncollected songs, totaling about two hours of playing time.  He gave up recording 40 years ago, and except for a few songs written for "The Electric Company" and one trip to the studio in 1996 to record one of his old songs, has stayed out of the public eye ever since.  (He once wrote that when in the 1970s people suggested political topics for him to write songs about, he felt rather like a resident of Pompeii who was asked for some humorous comments about lava.)  He released very few pictures of himself (he told me many years ago that he wanted to be just famous enough that people would recognize his name but not his face), and as far as I know only one video of him performing exists, lasting about 13 minutes.  (It's downloadable here.) 

Yet many of his songs continue to be listened to and sung, ranging from "The Hunting Song," a staple of campfire singalongs ("I went and shot the maximum the game laws would allow / Two game wardens, seven hunters, and a cow"), to "Pollution," a favorite of environmentalists of a certain age ("See the halibuts and the sturgeons / Being wiped out by detergeons. / Fish gotta swim, and birds gotta fly / But they don't last long if they try"), to his tongue-twister "The Elements," being the names of the 102 elements then known set to the tune of the Major-General's song from "The Pirates of Penzance."  The title of this post is the last line of the song.

Today marks Mr. Lehrer's 78th birthday.  Best wishes to you, sir, and if in your musical trunk there should be a few more songs "that haven't been discavard," your fans hope that you'll share them soon.

The Tram: Not hiring a cost manager won't save any money

On March 23 I passed along a query from the Knower of All Things, inquiring whether the City of Portland has taken the advice of its outside construction management consultant and hired a cost manager or cost engineer for the Tram project.  (The Knower suspected that the City hasn't.)

It's April 7, two weeks later, and 8 weeks after the outside expert issued its report calling for the City to hire a cost manager or cost engineer.  It's such an easy recommendation to adopt, and given the sorry cost overruns of the Ftpht such an obvious one to adopt promptly, that I'm curious if the City's acted.  Having the contractor, instead of the City, hire the cost engineer is like insisting that the henhouse be guarded, not just by any old fox, but by one with a hearty appetite and a rotisserie approved by the health department.

An anonymous poet offers advice to Chief Foxworth

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote this quatrain:

Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time.

An anonymous parodist (not me, alas) twisted Mr. Longfellow's verse into one that might better serve Chief Foxworth:

Lives of great men all remind us
As their pages o'er we turn
That we're apt to leave behind us
Letters that we ought to burn.

We type e-mail out, hit "send," and it's gone.  We read the response and then delete it.  From time to time Bill Gates (or his computerized minion) comes along and empties out our deleted items.  They're gone, or at least they look as if they're gone.  It's easy for us to think that e-mail is transitory and ephemeral, unlike words set down on paper.  But it's turning out that e-mail is less transitory than we think.  Business and government e-mail hangs around for quite a while, unlike imprudent words committed to a single sheet of paper. 

I don't think that Mr. Foxworth's imprudent e-mails are a reason to force him to resign his postion as Portland's chief of police, but if the Mayor and Council do ask him to leave because of the e-mails, before they start to search for his successor, they should perhaps commission a review of the e-mails of the rest of the police administration, and quietly let anyone else who's written similar e-mails that they too should leave the force.  They might have to find a lot of new administrators.

The cause of the tram cost overrun has been discovered

An investigation has uncovered what has caused the cost to build the Portland Aerial Tram to skyrocket from $15 million to $55 million and counting.  The ultimate cause is a simple clerical error, compounded by a cultural misunderstanding between the American designers and the Austrian builders.  Neither factor by itself sparked the near-quadrupling in cost, but the two mistakes together sent the costs soaring before anyone realized what had happened.

The tram is being built in Austria to an American design.  The designers completed their plans and shipped them to the Portland Department of Transportation (PDOT), which is overseeing construction.  Then came the first error.  It was intended to send four copies of the plans to the contractor, identified as copies one, two, three, and four, to be distributed to different points in the factory.  PDOT's employee, so far unidentified, marked the four copies "Tram -- Set 1," "Tram -- Set 2," "Tram -- Set 3," and "Tram -- Set 4," and told a clerk to send them to the contractor.  The clerk sent the plans in four separate envelopes without a cover letter explaining that they were identical copies of the one set of plans.

The Doppelmayr Company, the contractor building the tram, was expecting the plans to arrive from Portland but who had not been involved in the design, opened the envelopes.  Doppelmayr's chief engineer, Heinz Grossenthaler,  worked out the German equivalent of the English notations on the plans as "Tramset 1," "Tramset 2," "Tramset 3," and "Tramset 4," and set to work to construct four identical trams.  The contract allowed for adjustments for changes in the costs of time and materials, and as four times the materials and four times the labor were required, the estimated cost was roughly quadrupled.  (Some efficiencies in building the same tram four times over reduced the cost from $60 million to $55 million.)  "Ach, we're sorry about this," said Grossenthaler by telephone, "But fine trams they all are.  You will like them."

The discovery that not one tram, but four trams, are en route to Portland set off varying reactions across Portland, first to assess blame and second to decide what to do with the three extra trams.  Commissioner Randy Leonard, who has long argued that Portland east of 50th Avenue gets far less than its share of city services, has claimed one tramset for Rocky Butte, near Interstate 205.  "We can put a snowmaker there and have year-round skiing," he said in a hasty press conference.  Homer Williams, the lead developer of the South Waterfront district around the east end of the tram, wants two of the extra sets, one to connect his development to the Chart House restaurant on Terwilliger Boulevard and the other to run between South Waterfront and the Portland Development Commission's Old Town office.  "Workable development is all about connections," Williams said, "like the connection the tram will make between the river and OHSU, and I can use a fast connection to the city government.  At three minutes for the trip to PDC, the tram will get me to the government faster than telephoning and being put on hold."  And an innovative idea came from a prominent Southeast Portland activist, who proposed using the cars on one tram as halfway houses for released felons.  "Put one tower in Ladd's Addition and another tower at the Convention Center," he said.  "The halfway houses will still be in Buckman, where the city wants to put them all, except that they'll be 90 feet in the air, and our streets will be safe again."  Sheriff Giusto is said to be studying the idea.