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The Librarian

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Why is Bee Pollen considered a health food? Why is Ginseng considered a health food? Why is Royal Jelly considered a health food? In-N-Out improves the quality of their food The Gulf. The strait is shut to normal shipping, so the oil leaves three other ways: across Saudi Arabia by pipeline, through the UAE's line to Fujairah, or through the strait on small shuttle tank… The Black Sea, the second front. Ukraine's long-range campaign against Russian oil infrastructure has hit refineries, terminals and tankers; the Sochi fire is the newest entry. Russia says sea dron… Brent through the war: two round trips, and now a third leg up. ICE front-month settlements via Yahoo Finance. The loop repeats until buyers and sellers are within 10,000 ounces of each other. The point that matters for manipulation: only what is standing at the end of a round counts. Four protections people mix up. Only the first three interrupt this particular attack. The three places to look on an iPhone, in order of effort. Blue is the plumbing and the math, orange is the money attempts. The line only turns into Bitcoin at the right-hand edge. Drawn for this entry. Six markets in, one number out, one cash-settled contract at the end of it. The dashed line is the whole second half of this piece in one glance. Cash in, Bitcoin out, and it never comes back — the mechanism in one picture. The dashed line is the point: a 2017 buyer's coins eventually returned to the order book. This doesn't. The trick has four steps and none of them require the underlying asset to cooperate — which is exactly why it isn't obviously harder to attempt on a Bitcoin order book than a gold one. The differen… The cube most American kids got that first year: made in Hungary in 1980 and sold in Ideal Toy's clear plastic canister, with no logo on the white center. Read the gold label. Photo: Racomi, Wikime… Every table full, more people standing than sitting, and a kitchen working through a backlog it didn't have the ingredients to keep up with. Still queued, still waiting — the window sign behind them advertising a phone number nobody was going to get through on tonight. What two hours actually buys you. The peanut shells on the floor aren't a mess — they're the point. Risk weight sets how much capital a bank must hold against an exposure — 100% means capital equal to the exposure itself. Group 2b crypto sits more than twelve times higher than ordinary bank equit… Seven weeks ago this same committee voted 9 to 3 to do nothing. On Wednesday it voted 12 to 0 to act. Federal Reserve vote records. Drawn for this entry. Two real, shipping chips, and one number from a single tweet with nothing behind it yet. The gap FutureBit is claiming is real math against real hardware — it's the "if scaled to real organic neuro… A majority voted for it. It failed anyway. Source: Senate roll call, September 15, 2026. Drawn for this entry. Three problems that would normally cover for each other, all happening at once. Figures from the Independent Lubricant Manufacturers Association's May 2026 member briefing; Costco figures from The… Steve Perry at seventy, on a conference panel about how musicians write through loss, Seattle, April 2019 — the year after Traces. Photo: Joe Mabel, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. The band I didn't know existed. Journey circa 1977 — Gregg Rolie, Neal Schon, Ross Valory and Aynsley Dunbar — the year before Infinity, in the trade advertisement for Next. Photograph public domain. What was there two days later. Ground Zero, 13 September 2001. Photo: Andrea Booher, FEMA, public domain. The two doors. The northern one leads to Suez and Europe; the southern one leads to Asia, where 84 percent of Gulf crude used to go. Split and transit times via AP and Lloyd's List; chokepoint volu… The same town, 289 years ago. View of Mocha from the sea, 1737, with a key to the French, English and Dutch trading posts — and, at the far right, "the place where the French landed to attack the f… The reason for the second purchase. Sony's original Walkman, the TPS-L2, 1979. Photo: Binarysequence, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Two lines that walked together for two years and parted in March. The gap between them is, almost entirely, the Strait of Hormuz. BLS data via FRED. Drawn for this entry. Portland, December 1973, two months into the Arab embargo. The Fed raised rates three points into this and then cut four and a half as the recession arrived. Photo: David Falconer, DOCUMERICA, Nati… Same clock each time, started at month zero. In 1990 the Fed cut into the shock. In 1979–80 Paul Volcker did the opposite. In 2022 the shock landed on top of an inflation the Fed was already chasin… Where the demonstration will be staged on Wednesday afternoon. The Eccles Building, Washington. Photo: Federal Reserve, public domain. Twenty-four of the twenty-five, on the day each was switched off. The twenty-fifth (a rotation idea called Seesaw) was killed on its backtest and never ran, so it has no date. The three at the righ… The whole problem in one photograph. The Musandam Peninsula points up at Iran; the Persian Gulf is to the left, the Gulf of Oman to the right, and everything the Gulf states sell by sea goes throug… The escape routes. Left, the world as it was on 27 February; right, the world as it was on 10 September, an hour before the drones. Ribbon width is barrels per day, drawn to the same scale in both… Same satellite, same ground, two days apart. NASA Worldview, VIIRS on NOAA-20, 8 and 10 September 2026; public domain. The rerouting. Dashed ribbons are pre-war flows that have been cut back; solid ones are flows the closure created or enlarged. Routes are schematic. Figures from the EIA, Reuters, CREA and Rio Time… Dependence. Import shares from Kpler via Al Jazeera, Vortexa, India's petroleum ministry and the EIA. Drawn for this entry. Brent, the world's benchmark crude, through the war. Daily settlements from the ICE front-month contract via Yahoo Finance; the intraday spike in March was reported at $126. Drawn for this entry. The last time. USS Hawes, the tanker Gas King, USS William H. Standley and USS Guadalcanal in convoy in the Persian Gulf, 21 October 1987, during Operation Earnest Will — the US Navy escorting refl… The whole thing needs a log scale to fit on one page. The shaded band on the left is each minute's high and low; in minutes four through nine the tape shows trades clearing at seven cents and at $2… The gold line is the launch Biden described; the blue line is the pool an hour later. Read across at $339: on the gold line it takes about $203,000 of buying to get there. On the blue line, $10 mil… Not one of these is a wallet. Every one of them is a company Trezor or Ledger hired to do something that had nothing to do with holding your keys. The part customers worry about is in the middle. Every actual breach is in one of the boxes around it. The debt doesn't shrink. It just moves from a shelf marked "2043" to a shelf marked "in about three months." Both bars are the same scale. The buyback is the small amber block — and the dashed line shows how little of even the 10-year auction alone it covers. The Marriner S. Eccles Building on Constitution Avenue — about a mile from the Treasury, and holding the one lever the Treasury can't pull. Photo: AgnosticPreachersKid, via Wikimedia Commons, licen… Same starting point, two destinies. The lower line is the cheapest model that matched GPT-3 on a standard benchmark, from a16z's analysis; the upper line is the list price of the most capable model… Each bar is everyone. The divide of 2000 ran between people with a connection and people without; by 2025 nearly everyone is inside the bar, and the line runs between people with broadband at home… The house Pho Hathanh operates out of. The drinks board out front covers boba and Vietnamese coffee; the food menu is inside. The porch sign. The same crest, lit up on the wall inside. The bar, and the rice-terrace mural behind it. A quieter nook, and that water buffalo photo. The herb plate — bean sprouts, Thai basil, perilla, cucumber, and enough jalapeño to matter. Not my plate, but worth a photo. Whatever it's actually called, it looked great. The map I drew for myself before I could say anything sensible about the risk. The left circle is custody. Everything inside the dashed line is liveness — and today it is all one man. His recovery taxonomy, redrawn. "Your own address" means the plain one any BIP84 wallet finds from the twelve words — no provider anywhere in the delivery path. The picture I'd want in front of anyone installing their first Lightning wallet, this one or any other. His name for the thing is more honest than most. The same components, in the two arrangements. An obtuse angle screens what is behind you and leaves the approach open; a right angle closes the approach and puts your back to it. Diagram drawn for… Panel heights from furniture-industry sources, set against a seated adult's eye height (roughly 47–50 inches). The moment the panel drops under that line it stops screening a seated person and star… Eleven days connect an entry I'd already written to one I hadn't planned on writing. The IMF's headquarters at 700 19th Street NW, Washington, D.C. Photo: Tony Webster, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY 2.0 (cropped). The World Bank Group's headquarters in Washington, D.C. Photo: Ifly6, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped). Confidentiality hides amounts from everyone, including the fifteen companies whose whole job is deciding whether a withdrawal is legitimate. The sign out front — a bowl of noodles worked right into the logo. A full room, mid-service. Dozens of steamer baskets, just for decor. Dumplings, buns, and xiao long bao. Noodles, wontons, and the rest. Scan, order, and the vinegar and soy sauce are already on the table. Xiao long bao, straight out of the steamer. Steamed pork buns — the pillowy Q-Bao style. The taste test — fresh, unfiltered, and not yet cider-cider. Ondus — the logo is a wave, which tracks, for a restaurant on a river. Before the room filled in — clean, modern, a little hotel-lobby-adjacent in the best way, since that's exactly what it is. Appetizers on the left, entrees and sandwiches on the right — worth reading slowly, because almost everything on it sounded good. The POG Rum. Good drink, better view behind it. The Shrimp + Toast Cazuela. This is the dish that earns the drive across town. First plate down, dining room going about its evening behind it. The Mediterranean Salmon — blackened crust, orzo salad, a swipe of hummus. The Waterfront Burger — Tillamook cheddar, bacon, and truffle-parmesan fries on the side. The bar, mid-service, blue light and all. The board. Meats by the half-pound, sides, banana pudding — I went straight for the ribs. They didn't have to convince me, but the wall of clippings backs it up either way. Indoor seating under a wood-beamed ceiling, with HEIST spelled out in salvaged metal on the wall. Green leather chesterfield couches in a lounge corner. Good luck getting back up once you sit down. The bar, for anyone who wants more than a Coke. That's a lot of taps for a building that used to count money for a living. The Tacos Fita plate from the same visit. Carne asada, pickled onion, cotija — the same combination that made the earlier write-up a five. The whole menu, hand-lettered. Cheesesteaks down the middle, cold subs on the right, and a homemade mango honey habanero hot sauce for sale at the bottom of the board. "An East Coast Deli." The shirt on the right says 25 years — they opened in December 2000. Order at the counter, sit anywhere. Chips, a fountain, and a cooler of bottled beer and soda. "El taco es más rico a la parrilla" — the taco is tastier grilled. Their words, and they're right. The full menu — asada is the protein to get, and the tacos build exactly the way they taste. The order window. It moves fast, even with a line. The case, mid-afternoon rush. Whole pies under glass, each one labeled by hand. The back room. Pinball, video poker, and a TV over the machines. The oven, working through the afternoon's orders. Slices, pies, pasta — and a happy hour list on the chalkboard next to it. The dining room. The lanterns are doing a lot of the decorating here, and they're doing it well. The bowl, the spoon, and the cup of hành dấm off to the side — everything the bite above needs. The vegetable tray. Untouched by me, but there for anyone who wants it. The logo on the door. Two Portland restaurants share it — this one and the original on SE Powell. Baggage claim, not a departure lounge — you don't need a boarding pass to see this part. The skybridge to the garage, under the same canopy, with a living wall running the length of it. Sheridan Fruit Co.'s airport outpost, under the mural telling its own history. NE 117th Avenue, a little after 8:30 on a Friday evening. The Sourdough Jack. Toasted sourdough over a regular bun, every time. Held up for inspection. The shell holds together better than the question of what's inside it. July, from the outside, at the wrong hour. Note the opening times on the glass: Tuesday – Sunday, 4pm – 9ish. I like a restaurant that admits to an "ish". Rigatoni, house meat sauce, parmesan, parsley. Sixteen dollars and no adjectives. Three pastas, total. The one on the bottom line is the reason to come. Ten inches, crumbled fennel sausage, and a rim that has clearly met a wood fire. Two ovens, one lit. The clock over the hood said 6:42. Corkage $10, and half-bottles for two. On a list at a pizza restaurant. July, midday, through the glass. Thursday, half six, from the inside. The birthday burger. Free, and — I'll get to why — slightly better than the one I grew up on. A surfboard on the wall, a long way from any water Habit Burger started next to. The dining room, patio umbrellas visible through the door — brighter and more open than most fast-food seating. Not a packed house. The bartender was working alone and the wait still added up. The Campfire Feast — a package for two, not what we had, but worth knowing the price of if it's your kind of night. Ribeye, prime rib and filet mignon each carry a $7 upcharge over the base entrées. One of the steaks that came out — the ribeye, a $7 upcharge over the base entrées, and the thinner, drier plate of the two. And the New York strip, from further down the table. The better of the two plates. The menu cover. The tagline is a real claim, not just marketing — see above. The seasonal specials card. The dessert program runs through the Cheesecake Factory Bakery. Starters and the full steak lineup, prices included, if you're planning ahead. $12.99 for the gyro that made this whole trip worth it. The deli case runs most of one wall. Armenian by way of the wall art; Eastern European by way of the window signage. Outside: a shared lot, and a sign about it. Inside: nicer than you'd guess from the lot. Eighteen dollars. The bleu cheese is not a garnish. Fries or a side salad. The salad is worth taking. Thursday, half past six. Not a quiet room, and better for it. Seven burgers, $16–$25, served with fries or a salad. The drinks list is the length you'd hope for from a place with a cellar. The consomé, on the left. Thinner than it wants to be. The torta, halved. Tortas are $10.89–$11.59. Combination plates, $14.29–$16.49. Everything else. Burritos start at $7.79. A quarter past eight, Fourth Plain Boulevard. You could look right at it. Two of three left. $13.49 on their own, or the appetizer half of the "2 for $25" deal. Off the skillet and onto the table, still sizzling. $16.49 on its own, 1,500 calories before the fries. A quieter corner, still holding some of the old wall photos. The newer stretch, closer to the bar. Louder, and a lot more screens. What's there now. Perfectly functional. Not, anymore, a water hole. The door policy, printed and taped up — you don't wander a shared practice building unescorted. The lobby, stone fireplace and all. Self-serve water, sun through sheer curtains, and a hallway where the actual work happens. The flyer, and pinned over the corner of it, her card. Seven days a week, seven till four. The whole business closes before dinner, which tells you which meal it cares about. The covered patio at half past nine. Heaters overhead, bistro chairs, and not one free table. The choice, in print. I went right, to the salmon. The ham one is two dollars cheaper and, I think, the better dish. The salmon Benedict, on a table carved with the restaurant's own name. That is the corner of the sauce bottle at the top right — we will get to the bottle. Twenty-four ingredients, reportedly. You can count perhaps six of them by eye and the rest is their business. The mezzanine, the chandelier, and a rack of croissants the size of a door. CAFÉ, set into the mosaic. The espresso comes off an Illy setup, and the latte in the picture had been on the counter about ninety seconds. Petit Déjeuner, Bon Appétit, and a pain perdu recipe nobody asked for. Bonjour, and the soup of the day: cream of broccoli. Handwritten cards on every single one. Nothing here is printed from a template. Les Canelés de La Provence, plus baguettes, mini brioche, and — genuinely — a Porsche Studio Edition macaron collaboration. Kouign-amann five dollars. Ham and cheese croissant seven fifty. Cookies three. "Vancouver Special." A pastry that exists here and, as far as the card is concerned, nowhere else. Sucré. The far end of the counter, where the resolve fails. Lunch, desserts, and the panel about the farm in Canby. The flights are $22 and come four to a board. Consider your afternoon. Fuhrman and Eastlake. Underneath, the building itself — Burger & Spirits Emporium, and the old bird in the circle. Bar to the left, ball game on, booths round the curve. Friday, and the lobby bench was full behind me. Off the tray and onto the table. The cheese is already going over the side of the patty. The BYOB column is the real menu. Pick a protein, a cheese, a bun — or a lettuce wrap at no charge. Five dollars, plus two for the goat cheese. Not for me — but handsomely done. Mid-week, early evening. The yeti is a nice touch. The board's own description. Notice what it doesn't say — more on that below. "Ask for your sub Fully Involved" is printed right on the board — just not next to the Steamer. Captain Sorensen's holds down the mild end of the rail — deliberately, given who it's named for. "Founded by Firemen" isn't a slogan tacked on — it's printed on the sauce bottle itself. The dining room's mural — a Vancouver Fire Department engine, the Interstate Bridge, and fireworks over the Columbia. The theming goes well past the napkins. The door sign, on the way in. The tagline underneath the logo is doing more work than most café slogans bother to. Sunday, mid-morning. Every table taken, a line still at the register. The retail corner. Beans, drip-filter packets, and a still-life of cinnamon and dried orange that's purely for show. The whole ritual: glass, hot-water bowl, and the card that tells you what you're about to drink, in case the foam didn't already give it away. The counter — digital menus overhead, a line the whole time we were there. Ottoman Ice Milk Coffee Set Roman Ice Milk Coffee Set Ube Coffee Legend Milk Tea Oatmilk Matcha Ice-Blended Sesame Coffee Ice-Blended Coconut Coffee Almond White Coffee Sparkling Espresso Yuzu Coffee Orange Peach Tea Royal Pomegranate Thiền Coffee The order line, late Sunday morning — a good sign for a bakery this far from downtown Portland. The case at the counter — baguettes, viennoiserie, and the sandwich board overhead. Everything in this photo is made in the building. The Brie Bartlett Panini, off the grill. The cheese had gone all the way through the bread by the time it reached the table. The sandwich board — three columns, the Brie Bartlett Panini second from the top of the middle one. The July specials board, chalked by hand, next to the retail jam and wine. The counter, mid-scoop. The board above lists this season's specials. The corner entrance, downtown Lake Oswego.

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