Where's George? At the Dollar Tree!

I took Max to the Dollar store ("Dad, the real name is "the Dollar TREE.") to get some goodies for a sleepover. He'd gotten a zip-style motorcycle which instantly broke but was still fun, and we figured we'd get some more of those. The rider's legs had broken horribly, but not in a crash, they just broke, and the seat came right off but you could still run the plastic zip strip through the wheel and make it go. The zipper degraded visibly right before your eyes; I figure it's got about a hundred runs in it.
Anyway, caveat crap, and I have a hate/hate relationship with cheap-ass Chinese crap, but I is unteachable, and we went anyway.

We got some really cool flip-over cars in similar packaging to Evel Parapelegic, and some glow bracelets for everyone to have fun with after dark. So, six bucks. Everything's a dollar at the dollar store.
When I went to put back the "Two Three-Color Glow Necklaces!" in favor of the pick-up-sticks-sized-tube of 15 various glow things, there were three hispanic kids playing in the aisle, and a dollar bill lying on top of the toys in a bin.
It brought me up short. "Is that yours?" The kids were running around, paying no attention to me or the dollar. Weird. The back of the dollar was up, and in the middle I recognized the "where's George" stamp.
One aisle over, there was a loitering teen with pinkish hair and a trenchcoat. I think he had a friend wandering around, as well.

That was cool. What wasn't cool was just now finding out how lame the Where's George site is. I expected I'd be able to search for McMinnville, or 97128 and try to figure out which bill I'd seen. Nope. Nada.

Plus, I know I entered a bill once, but they had no record of my email address. Any of them.
Sucky. Plus there are idiotic banners for things much less cool than I'd expect from such a conceptually cool concept like tracking currency collaboratively with rubber stamps and internet connections.

BUT! By using Google to search ONLY wheresgeorge.com (Advanced Search), I found several McMinnville dollars, the most recent of which was found on July 2nd. I wonder if the pinkish-haired kid was the one who made the note about the small tier (sic) in the bill.
Note, though, the idiotic map showing Alaska in Baja, with a red-rocket-line of the bill shooting up to Washington from the south. Edward Tufte would not approve.

The one that had two entries two years apart in McMinnville made me wonder, too. Did it just knock around here for a couple years, was it in someone's piggy bank the whole time? Did the same person enter it both times?
I wonder.

Pronunciation update

I called the last post "pronounciation" to make you pronounce it wrong, but I'm over that.

I talked to my neighbor in the Courtyard, who'd just gotten back from 18 days hunting elk in the backcountry. He hadn't gotten his elk this year, but had come pretty close and had a good time. Seven inches of snow had fallen and crushed his tent.
I was sporting, I said "that sounds okay, though, you and your horse and your gun out there in the mountains," and he said actually he was a bow hunter, and was very scrupulous about taking a shot that might only injure the animal. He said, "not to say anything bad about anyone," (which always means you're in for some dirt) there was a guy in Grande Ronde who always got his buck, but might have to track it for a couple of days before it died with his arrow in it, "finding it by smell or something sometimes."
We both agreed that wasn't right.

He pronounced Grand Ronde "Grand ROUnd", which makes me think of ground round, which is kind of funny.

Riding Bikes

Riding bike is really cool. Last night Rex called up to ask if we could all ride bikes today, so we did. Mark, Rex, Max and I rode around the neighborhoods between NW 19th and downtown, played in Dragon Park ("Rarrhh! I'm a lava monster!"), ate and drank at the Hotel Oregon, and had ice cream at Serendipity, the best smelling place in the world.
It smells like being 7 years old, in the candy store on 4th St. in San Rafael, where I once got 5 soft serves because the guy filling in for the owner (who was at a funeral) couldn't get the machine to work right. Total bliss. I was replete. There was melting ice cream everywhere. I had one in each hand, my dad had two, and my mom had one, walking down the sparkling sidewalk.

We rode back through the NW neighborhood to about 12th Street, and came home. We looked at the 1920s bungalows, kept the kids from getting run over, and enjoyed the town.

In the evening I went for a ride out Hill Road, which turns to gravel where the yellow line in the road ends. There are two more hills behind that one. Not too steep, but it was a lot easier to come back in the 54" gear than it was going out in the 70" one. It's cool to ride on gravel with fat tires, but there are still cars (well, pickups) that use it as a real road. I had to put my shirt in my mouth on one downhill to filter the billowing clouds of dust after an F150 with a trailer of ATVs passed.I'm surprised at the number of dirt roads in Oregon that actually GO somewhere. Even in Portland, there are neighborhoods where you're driving along and "whoops!" there's no pavement. It's cool. It reminds me of Australia. Which reminded me of 1970s California. Which reminds me I have yet to write the post called "Why DO so many Californians move here?"

The colors in the evening on Poverty Bend Rd ("Poverty Bend Road" might be the best name for a road ever) were incredible. Very intense greens. Warm orange lambs. A field that could not be any greener. The Perkinje Effect, of course.

Named for Mr. Perkinje... of course, who noticed that in the evening, right before sunset, red things really popped, and green things looked really cool. He figured out that it was because the light from the Sun had to pass through more atmosphere in the evening, and some of the shorter wavelengths don't make it. So more green and red light gets through to reflect off green and red things, and hit our eyes and make us say "ahh, the Golden Hour!"

My friend Holden told me about the Perkinje Effect a long time ago, at sunset, which made me realize something important. If you notice something, and can give it a credible explanation of WHY it's happening, you can name it after yourself.
You want to be careful, though. If I figure out that the reason people are such wadweeds* on the road, or choose to put things up inside themselves, I might not want to call it "the Philip Effect". No.Besides, "the Philip Effect" is already taken. It's the effect where people notice something happening, and explain it, and get to name it after themselves. "The Philip Effect." Simple.

Riding out there made me glad to be an American. But this... made me proud.

*I was pleased to see that Ben Pappas' 1992 coinage, "wadweed", is completely absent from the internet. Until now.