I encountered more assorted weirdness in a 24-hour period between Wednesday and Thursday then I have in months. Was there a full moon? An eclipse of the moon? A blue moon? Some sort of moon-related phenomenon? Here's a small compendium.

- A bar in downtown Portland that looked like a sci-fi subway station filled with chain smoking hipsters, all laughing at that white supremacist sketch from Chappelle's Show.

- A horse tied to a bike rack on 3rd Avenue.

- An undergrad still pissed at me because I gave his former roommate a poster of a half-naked Eric Estrada as a housewarming gift. The poster hung over their fireplace for several months.

- A mutant (?) housecat named Simba with 6.5 toes on each of his four paws. One of them is a pseudo-thumb and he can apparently grip things like toys and cat food. If he learns to write, humanity is doomed.

- A bearded man named Frog selling joke books out of a newspaper stand and offering passers-by a small rubber cow to squeeze. While living in Eugene, I used to encounter him on a daily basis.

- An elderly man hanging around the UO campus at 1 AM, eager to discuss the trolley tracks recently unearthed during a construction project on 13th. "It's a modern-day archaeology site and YOUR GOVERNMENT doesn't care," he cried, before disappearing into the night.

- A White Russian that tasted like a White Russian but somehow smelled like tuna.

- A pint of Fat Tire that somehow tasted like White Out.

- A metal band, driving a Jagermeister mobile, at a gas station in the middle of nowhere. Five members all looked the same- covered in tattoos, wearing black t-shirts with their hair spiked and with soul patches attached to their chins. Then there was the sixth member- a guy wearing a Miles Davis shirt, with dreads down to his butt. I asked him if he was waiting for the bathroom and he said, "Naw, I'm just waiting." Then, when someone came out, he quickly put out his cigarette and dashed in ahead of me while the rest chatted with an area teacher about school buses (?!!).

- A mysterious vortex/tourist trap that distorted the height of bored grade schoolers and blocked cell phone reception. The Junior Mints for sale in the gift shop, however, tasted just fine.

- A bathroom in an Italian restaurant filled with Mapplethorpe-esque framed photos of female body builders.

- A very tall guy dressed in an orange cape and assorted Ren. Fair attire, being arrested by petite cop in downtown Ashland. He was at least 6'5, she barely topped 5 feet. As he was being handcuffed he screamed, "YEAH, SINGLE ME OUT 'CAUSE I'M BLACK!" There were at least 30 other Ren. Fair-ers, lingering on a lawn nearby, all but one of them white, all seemingly oblivious to the situation at hand. This had to be perfromance art, there's no other possible explanation.

- The Lithia water fountains, also in Ashland. For over a hundred years it's provided pedestrians water that smells like eggs, looks like salvia and tastes like rancid salt water. In the space of five minutes, several tourists, some of them French, made the mistake of drinking, and subsequently gagging. Then, sometime later, a hippie guy wandered up and chugged at least a full quart of the stuff. Bleeeech!

- Over a thousand elderly concert-goers some on scooters, some on blankets, in the middle of Lithia park. For some strange reason, everyone middle-aged and below was sitting on the outskirts. I didn't see a "No one under 60 allowed" sign but that seemed to be the case.

Should I post pictures? I probably will anyway.