We’d sure like to meet you!

Come to Acme after about 5:30 on Thursday and we’ll be there! Come by and say hi, we’d love to me you (and you and you and you…) A good bunch of us will be there, and you can check out our pictures on the authors page and find us at Acme. We’ll be there till they run out of Onion Rings, or we all have to go home.

So come see us, and Acme, and the Onion Rings Of Lore! We’d love to have you.

I’m not a regular reader of the Portland Monthly, but for a relative newcomer to town, the latest issue, which features “150 Years of Visionaries and Villains,” is a good primer on some of the history of our town. I haven’t finished the whole article yet (and some parts bore me to tears, like the sports part), but here are a few of the nuggets that are now lodged into my brain:

-In 1929, there were fewer than 2,000 African-Americans living in Portland among a population of 301,000+. This held true until the years between 1941 and ‘45, when the African-American population bloomed to about 18,000.
-The leading advocate for women’s suffrage in Oregon, Abigail Scott Duniway, was the sister of Harvey W. Scott, a long-time editor of The Oregonian, who vigorously opposed the voting rights of women and blacks.
-This town sure does attract folks with interesting, original, and even downright hi-larious names (which then get turned into funny-sounding streets and parks and sometimes even Simpsons characters). Just to name a few: Denorval Unthank, John Couch, E. Henry Wemme, Marie Equi, Henry Failing, Terry Schrunk, LeRoy Vinnegar, the Schnitzers, Ursula K. Le Guin, James Terwilliger, James Beard, Ion Lewis, Tempest Storm. Other funny Portland names not in the article: Chuck Palahniuk and Storm Large. There’s comedy gold in them there stumps, people.
-And speaking of stumps, I know I’m going to get railed on for this one, but I never really gave too much thought to why one of Portland’s nicknames was Stumptown. After all, “land of ports” does not exactly equal Portland, but apparently “land of stumps” does.
-Portland had its very own Hatfield (Mark) and McCoy (Bill and Gladys) family sagas, though there doesn’t appear to have been any sort of feud.
-Mel Blanc, voice of Bugs, Daffy, Elmer, and all the other WB greats, is from Portland. (and is another original name to boot!)

While this is obviously an incomplete lesson, focusing on the people who made the town is a pretty good hook to help personalize some of the long ago and not-so-long ago history of Portland.

Looking at a calendar, I see this is 2006. The internet has been part of our daily culture now in the mainstream for around 10 years. Finding someone knowledgeable to setup a web site and web server is very easy, with thousands of such folks to choose from just in the Portland area.

Why then, I wonder, can’t I go to http://katu.com in my web browser? A couple weeks ago I blogged about the newly-relaunched KATU website. Looks like someone overlooked setting up their machine name aliases correctly, and the only way to get to their site is by typing in the WWW part of the URL. Just plain ol’ katu.com won’t work. Nobody mentions the www part in a URL anymore… because it’s really not necessary, assuming you have a competent web admin who wants their website to be available to folks in the easiest manner possible.

It’s a fairly simple fix from a technical standpoint, but again I have to ask the question, if the mainstream media wants folks to take them seriously, why do they continually display amazing sloppiness with their websites?

Originally uploaded by PAgent

Could you believe how beautiful it was today? Contemplating the gray rainy days ahead, I just had to go for a walk up the Willamette at lunchtime. I wasn’t alone, either. A lot of folks were out walking, jogging, cycling, or just eating lunch outside.

It was hot enough in the sun that I broke into a sweat in short order, but if you stepped into the shade the breeze felt cool and refreshing. It was also a beautiful day for a Willamette Jetboat ride and I was envious of the barely-occupied boat that I saw speeding upriver.
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My daughter and I dropped by the Polish Festival yesterday afternoon – I was having a powerful craving for some ‘gwumpkie’ (stuffed cabbage for you non-Poles – note that’s the phonetic pronunciation, of course), plus I wanted to share a little of my kid’s heritage with her (she’s got several different nationalities she can lay claim to, in true mutt fashion.)

And while the festival’s clearly a labor of love – I saw hordes of volunteers working double-time to keep up with the demand for pierogi and kielbasa, stuffed cabbage and sauerkraut – well, I didn’t see anyone working on a sorely-needed element: crowd control/line management. The end result? I had plenty of opportunity to talk to my fellow line-waiters as we snaked around in a wacky circuitous line waiting for our food (one woman had waited for over an hour the night before, she said) – while others could cut through, end up in a different partially-hidden line, and emerge with a plate of food in record time.

What’s worse, you could end up at the front of the line, only to discover that they were out of pierogi yet again (I went through twice in search of pierogi) – or that the fruit pierogi were actually offered over ——>there instead. Or that the jump house actually doesn’t take the tokens you stocked up on – you need to first go to the table next door to get a ticket instead.

So when you only have three hours to spend at a festival and you end up spending two and a half hours of that time in line somewhere? Well, your eight year old gives the whole experience a huge two thumbs down.

Except for the cotton candy, of course…

Last week, while leaving my office for the last time before a brief vacation, I was in the process of locking up when I heard what sounded like whistling. I had already walked through the building to be sure no one was left inside before I set the alarm, as I’m usually the last one to leave for the night, but the whistling prompted me to yell out, “Is anybody here?” As I got no response to that, I went ahead and set the alarm, locked the door, and left.

Or did I– lock up, that is? I was so distracted by the thought of possibly locking someone in the office to possibly deal with the ringing alarm, not that that person wouldn’t have the code and be able to turn it off, that, as I got on the MAX train headed for home, I began to doubt whether or not I had actually locked the front door. “Of course I locked it,” I told myself. “I do it every night, there’s no way I didn’t lock the door.” But I wondered– had I been distracted enough by the whistling that I would have forgotten to lock the door? And where did the whistling come from? I had been told before that there was a ghost flitting around the office, but had chosen to scoff at this. It probably wouldn’t have bothered me so much if I wasn’t going away the next day, if I were instead returning to the office to be sure that everything was okay. But I wasn’t, and knew that it would haunt me (no pun intended) the whole time I was supposed to be on vacation (yes, I’m that neurotic), and so my paranoia, and visions of a ransacked office, got the best of me.

After my roughly half-hour MAX ride and quick bike trip home, I hopped into my truck to go back downtown. I had to know if, A, I had locked someone in (maybe the whistler was in a bathroom?) or, B, if I had locked the door at all. So in the rain, in a huff, back downtown I went. Fifteen minutes later, less than an hour after I had left initially, I was back at the office…

…and all the lights were off, no alarms were ringing, the office was empty, and yes, the door was locked. And no one has yet complained to me that they were left alone to deal with clanging alarms. I am an idiot, but a ritualistic door locker. Ghost, 1, me, 0. Let me never doubt again. But at least I was able to enjoy my vacation.

From alert reader David R:

It appears that Portland Public Schools is hiring for a “Senior Strategic Communications Officer.” I’d never heard about the old one leaving.

The fact that PPS is hiring is nothing to write home about.

However, I find it interesting to note that the opening was being advertised through Craigslist.

That’s right, everyone’s favorite place to find a used car, a nice couch, or a bike mechanic now offers you the chance at major placements in the State of Oregon’s largest education service district!

This just strikes me as another reason Portland is backwards on many occasions. Who’s with me? (Or who’s not?)

Originally uploaded by russ.

While strolling through the Portland Craig’s List this morning, I found lnterns-wanted listings for this new Portland-based Website called Art Face Off.
I wouldn’t be interested in the Interning opportunity, but if you are an artist or photographer, you may want to check this site out.
The concept, in a shellnut:
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The Screen Actors Guild is the main union for movie performers. You may be wondering why those talents who earn millions of dollars per film need a union, but let me assure you. For every rich and famous actor, there are so many who are getting by waiting for a break, or who take bit parts hoping for a return to some measure of public recognition.

And SAG- which was once headed by Ronald Reagan- is indeed a legitimate union. It’s even a member of the AFL-CIO.

Last week, SAG announced 24 new Board of Directors. One of the new selectees is from Portland. You may not have heard of her, but I am betting you have heard her.
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I’ve been on a vacation for the past week, and as I look over the week’s Metroblogging posts, it looks like it was an interesting week in Portland, both online and off.

Despite the fact that Metroblogging Portland broke the news of Charles Henderson’s judicial candidacy, Willamette Week is claiming they reported it first, even though they didn’t. Betsy called them on it. You can read Rusty’s original post here, or the follow-up interview here.

Rusty went beyond the usual shallow joke-making involving Zach Randolph’s brushes with the law, and posted a detailed analysis of what went down, and the decision not to prosecute.

Continuing our recent theme of supermarket discussions (use the search box on the right, you’ll find plenty), Russ shared his dismay of a recent trip to “Mild” Oats, lamenting the loss of Nature’s.

And don’t say that Metroblogging never taught you anything. The folks at Metroblogging San Francisco have a handy tutorial on how to pick a Master Lock using a BART transit fare card…