Have you ever been to Powell’s bookstore in Portland (Oregon, that is)?  It’s a real adventure.  You walk into a rather nondescript building and find yourself in a labyrinth of rooms all hooked together in seemingly random fashion by stairs, or one or two steps, or maybe just an invisible line.  They are color-coded, these rooms.  You’ll find architecture books in the Pearl room on level 5.  Craft books are on level 1 in the Rose room.  Fiction?  Blue, Level 2, I believe.  There is a green room, an orange, a purple, a red, and colors that I cannot even remember.  Each room is filled with books from floor to ceiling, and with people from wall to wall.  Many books are new, and many are not. 

This is where we found ourselves on Saturday, after a luscious lunch of Lebanese lamb gyros and hummus eaten on the stuffy second floor of a small cafe a few blocks away. Five weeks ago I was at Powell’s and bought a copy of The Pillars of the Earth, leaving several copies on the shelf.  This time, I went to check a reference in the preface of that same book, and found that all the copies had been sold.  It’s hard to imagine the volume of sales a bookstore must be doing to sell that many copies of a single title!

Portland is a small city that somehow managed to get a decent transit system.  Seattle, on the other hand, can’t get a consensus among its population for more than two minutes on anything, much less something so vastly important as public transportation, and so it lags far behind the BART of the San Franciso area, the MAC of the Portland area, the L of Chicago, and the T of Boston.  We are supposed to have a partial working light-rail system some time in 2009, but I don’t know what it is to be called.  I suggest SEX– the Seattle EXpress.  It’s sure to be a hit, because SEX sells.  Most people who haven’t tried SEX will like SEX, and parents will no longer need to caution their sweet young girls to avoid it.  It won’t lead to pregnancy, and SEX will get you where you want to go.  It really will be SEX in the City!  Seattle is already so liberal that surely nobody will gasp at the audacity of the acronym.

But I digress.  In our all-too-brief one hour at Powell’s I found a book I had been wanting to read for some time:  Jacquard’s Web  How a hand loom led to the birth of the information age.  It is a used copy, and so was not very expensive.  People in my profession often raise their eyebrows with surprise or even disbelief when I tell them that modern computers are descended from hand looms.  Now I’ll be able to pile on the pedantry and tell them allllll about it.  Just call me Cliff.

Tomorrow?  1 minute and 27 seconds longer.  We will get through the winter, trust me.