One Of The Most Oregon Things You'll Still Ever See

3707There is a thing called dimethlyl sulfoxide. It is, as I learned when I was but a neat thing, is a "solvent degreaser". It was a byproduct of paper manufacture, and we had a paper plant on just about every corner through the 1970s, so it was all over the place. It also has alleged medical properties, and is or maybe was-has-been touted as an 'alternative' treatment for cancer.

Sort of an Oregonized laetrile, if you will.

And there was a time, back in the 1970s, when stores from the drug to the hardware variety, all thoughout northwestern Oregon, would sell it to you. But they couldn't sell it as a drug, because that was illegal. So they solid it as that 'solvent degreaser' that the average home just couldn't do without and it's-a-suppressed-miracle-drug-but-you-didn't-hear-that-from-the-person-behind-the-counter-at-the-Coast-to-Coast-if-you-catch-our-meaning-here.

But, back then, you could find DMSO just about everywhere because, well, power to the people, I guess.

It's hard to find now, not so much because the nanny-state suppressed it but because, just like anything, it's fallen out of style. We've moved on. But there are some places you can find it:

The sign on the top of a local mailbox somewhere around the corner of SE 117th and Market is similar in shape and format to the signs peering out of store windows back in the day beckoning you in for some of that sweet, sweet, DMSO anodyne. Actually, DMSO has some very interesting properties: it is absorbed readily into the skin, and can become thereby a transdermal transport vehicle for some other pharmaceuticals. Also, when you apply it, you taste garlic at the back of your throat because of science science neural transport biochemistry science (hand wave). But it hasn't changed medicine or liberated the peoples thereupon, and, as I've said, we've moved on. Mostly.

The sigh of a The Oregonian paper tube, in this era of a light tabloid daily that isn't even delivered seven days a week any more, just ups the poignancy of years gone by.

Oregon Highway Signs Are Pure Visual Bliss To Me

3584

I adore the Oregon state highway shield, as those who know me know, and as those who only read me now know.

I've spent a great deal of my life watching Oregon highway shields go past. The current day design may seem odd ... like a chicken's egg on its point that decided to try become an oval as it got to the top. There's a reason for that. The original Oregon highway shield was adapted from the state's armorially-styled seal which can be found on the front side of the state flag. The word OREGON and the route number were surrounded by the outline of that shield with a silhouette of the eagle, sheaf, and arrows that surmounted it (a lovely photo of a battered old Hwy 99 sign can be found here: https://www.aaroads.com/shields/show.php?image=OR19550993&view=3.

I was born near Hwy 213, have lived most of my life near Hwy 213, live near it now, and will probably die in proximity to it. So it goes.

So to someone else, this might be just a banal roadside marker, but to me?

Visual poetry.

I also just like the way the number 212 looks like in that font that the State uses.

[liff in OR] True Oregon Facts! Volume 1

3366.

There are a lot of 'facty' facts about Oregon. As a native son, I know quite a few of them. Additionally, as a native son, I know a great deal of facts about Oregon that are so true, so down-to-the-bone, that one actually has to create them.

When it comes to True Oregon Facts!, you've come to the right place. As a trained Oregon explainer, I am prepared to Oregonsplain them to you. Get ready to rock your knowledge of Oregon with True Oregon Facts!

• True Oregon Fact! Oregon's current motto is "She Flies With Her Own Wings",changed from "The Union" (1957-1987). Other mottos we used include "Between Washington and California" (1901-02), "Pull My Finger" (Most Holiday Seasons Between 72 and 76), "Not Idaho" (Jun-Aug 1943), "No, Cut The RED Wire" (37-39), "Take the Red Pill, Neo" (Odd numbered months in 97), "Home Of Leverage" (Sundays 8pm, 7pm Central) and "Nadine, Get Me A 6-Pack of Beer At the Plaid Pantry" (incomes of $30K and under)
• True Oregon Fact! The first mayor of Madras was a sasquatch. Her name was Nancy. Nancy Marie Sasquatch.
• True Oregon Fact! Oregon's beta-development code-name was "uh, Clem".
• True Oregon Fact! Ken Kesey was, in reality, a hobbit. Yeah, we know that one's a bit obvious maybe, but still.
• True Oregon Fact! Wy'east, the original Multnomahn name for what we call Mount Hood, actually translates as "Suck it, Tahoma, YOU'RE GOIN' DOWN!"
• True Oregon Fact! The approach of the annual session of the Oregon Legislature is heralded by the State Senators and Representatives swimming up the Willamette River to spawn.
• True Oregon Fact! Sam Elliott's mustache served one term on the David Douglas School District's school board.
• True Oregon Fact! All of Oregon is in the Pacific time zone, except for Malheur County, where it's later than everyone thinks.
• True Oregon Fact! Former Governor Vic Atiyeh's tears could balance the state budget without having to call the legislature into session. Sadly, he never cried. Peter Courtney wasn't having it.
• True Oregon Fact! Legendary Statesman Journal political columnist Ron Blankenbaker, who passed away in 2011, was kept in a secure location whenever the Governor and the legislature were in session for the State of the State address, to ensure continuity of commentary should anything happen to state government during the event. Even today, it is said he sleeps, Charlemagne-esque, in a cavern beneath Mount Jefferson, ready to ride to the rescue of the state of Oregon when the need is dire.
• True Oregon Fact! An original name for Seattle was "New York Alki", meaning, in a hybrid of emigrant and native, "New York, By-and-by", envisioning Seattle's prospering into a major metropolis in time. Similarly, the name of the original people of the Portland area, Multnomah, was misunderstood by settlers to mean "San Francisco, As Soon As We Can Sell The Land From Underneath The Natives And Jack Up The Rent."
• True Oregon Fact! While Mount St Helens' historic eruption was thought to have been caused by pent-up gas causing a massive landslide, subsequent research by the USGS has suggested it was really pent-up resentment and aggravation over Vancouver's being treated as 'merely a suburb' of Portland for decades.
• True Oregon Fact! The transmitter tower for KPTV Channel 12 was built, single-handedly by Ramblin' Rod Anders over a course of an 18-hour stimulant-fueled binge in 1954. There was nothing amiss about the stimulant; Rod was such an easy going guy all he needed were three or four cups of really, *really* strong coffee. Well, that and his super-human level of hustle. Reports of Heck Harper handing him up the materials remain unconfirmed for the foreseeable future.
• True Oregon Fact! Gilliam County was created for the express purpose of aggravating Morrow County.
• True Oregon Fact! Tom McCall, Oregon's legendary governor, wasn't a single Republican man but actually two small moderate Democrats and one liberal Republican in a specially-designed suit. That's why he was so tall.

That's the first batch. As you can see, you can know Oregon, or you can know Oregon … or you can "know" Oregon.

"Know" Oregon. Read True Oregon Facts! and don't blame us when if you don't pass your Oregon citizenship exam.

[branding] John Oliver Shoots Messenger, Runs Them Over, Looks Behind Car, And Backs Over Them, Just To Make Sure They're Down

3077.

Thus spake ZehnKatzen: this is what comes of being the face of an initiative and, naturally, leading with your chin.

It's writ large in more than one place: success has a million parents; failure, an orphan. And, when something huge pancakes like Cover Oregon did, a failure that's going to be talked about for years after the last lawsuit is settled, it sits at ground zero of a field where every nuclear-tipped satire missile has its gimlet-eyed guidance trained on. So, perhaps it's something we should have expected when the ads for Cover Oregon … which just begged to be called totes adorbs … became, essentially, the face of failure for those looking for the cutting gag.

The ads, which featured a sort of living diorama of Oregoniana and were peopled by members of the Portland Cello Project and folk singer Laura Gibson, were kick-ass and I enjoyed them. Easy and delightful on the eye as well as the ear, and as Oregon as f##k, had Cover Oregon been the success it ought to have been, would have been fondly seen as the face of a great, good thing.

But Cover Oregon … well, what didn't go wrong? The State of Oregon will have to assemble several new agencies to invent things to mess up just to even out the shambolic mess. Of all the state Obamacare exchanges, only Oregon's never worked. Never signed up a single person. Of course, the alternative, the paper application route, did the yeoman's job … and had the CO site worked, they would have been more than half-way to their enrollment goals within the first week. The problem with, and the reason the media let us way down about all the state Obamacare exchanges, is because the narrative was kept stupidly simple: it was all about the website. Websites, websites, websites. Obamacare is a failure because website website website.

This should not be seen as a high point in American journalism. The reportage from just about every outlet was shallower than a children's wading pool, insight-free, and only grudgingly seemed to accept that anyone was getting access to health care at all. But for every minute of reporting that progress was getting made, we seemed to get a half hour of how the IT sucked. And since Cover Oregon never worked, well, we got poster kid right here in River City. Governor K and Oracle are pointing so many fingers they have to rent extra hands just to get the job done.

Recently, it is writ, John Oliver, who made his satirical bones as Jon Stewart's relief on The Daily Show, got enough notice that he was given his own satirical news show on another network. And, judging by his performance, Cover Oregon was low-hanging fruit that was just too good to ignore. His show produced a spoof commercial that  … well, to call it acidic would be gilding the lily.

I'll be honest, at first, I giggled a bit. Some of the humor is dead-on. We do get a bit too twee for our own good out here; if the Olympics are ever held in Oregon, count on Oregonians taking silver, gold, and bronze in smug patting-ourselves-on-the back.

I thought that dude carrying the spinning beach-ball cursor across the set was genius.

But if we Oregonians are a bit too smug about our adorableness, I've got to point out that Oliver's commentary got a bit too smug about pointing out how smug we all are.

Welcome to honorary Oregonianship, Mr. Oliver.

Doubling down on the perception-as-reality tip, it really went to town on mixing up the idea that the commercials promoted Cover Oregon with the idea that the commercials were Cover Oregon before going in for the delicious, gory, satirical kill. In the end, it was clear that he was enjoying calling the entire state of Oregon idiots maybe just a little too much. 

Here's the sort of news that gets lost when the satire is as shallow as the reporting (emphasis mine):

You may think it’s especially unjust because our work helped delivered the numbers: awareness of Cover Oregon through advertising increased nearly 70% in only four months prior to the first enrollment window in 2013. And on that first day of enrollment, a third of a million people came to the website to sign up. Had it been working, it’s a safe estimate we would have been more than half-way to enrollment goals within the first week. Relative to the marketing budget, along with the many efforts of the Cover Oregon marketing team, we created real return on taxpayer money.It’s also never mentioned that as portal delays and bad press persisted, we hunkered down, responded with ads that were transparent, honest and informative. We worked especially hard with the Cover Oregon team to move people toward paper applications through agents and sign-up fairs.Most importantly they fail to mention that, despite the broken portal, more than 250,000 Oregonians who previously had no access to health insurance were still able to shop for, apply for, and obtain coverage. Even with no online portal, Oregon is in the middle ranking for state enrollments. Remarkable, given the circumstances, and also a tribute to the tireless efforts of Cover Oregon’s communications and marketing staff.

The agency that produced the ads is North, an agency that did a very effective job with your tax money, Oregonians. You should be proud; they took it seriously, did a sincere job, and got the word out effectively.

But failure is an orphan, and North gets the blame for being the bad parent, even though it ain't so.

But if you insist on sticking them with the blame, then nobody gets to complain when they own the good parts, too … people are right to be upset that CO was such a disaster, and now North has to live with the fact that their honest, passionate deft work is going to be permanently associated with a broke website, but that's life.

North is proud to be stupid f##king idiots, given the world today.

More power to 'em, I say.

[design] Dept Of Rose Valley Butter Corrections Dept.

3063.

I might have gotten my last post's subject bass-ackwards.

When I blogged about the new-look RVB package, I did so because the familiar, homey, farmey, yellow package had suddenly been replaced on the WinCo shelves by the buff-colored package with the single red rose.

This page (h/t, +Ben Rippel ) suggests I somehow have it all backwards. It speaks of the yellow package as the new design, and the one with the single red rose as the old one. While that doesn't explain why a bunch of the old design boxes showed up in the dairy case last week, it does make the equally-sudden mix of majority-yellow packaging on those same shelves make a bit of sense, maybe.

Commerce is a funny thing.

The yellow box (see the screenshot illustration) is designed, apparently, to harmonize with boxes with red and blue backgrounds (which see), which is their variety of rBGH-free butter, and form a coherent brand 'look', which is important in a product family like this.

I'm also told, by various correspondents, that Rose Valley Butter is indeed available in unsalted, although the nearest seller I can identify is Roth's … but the nearest Roth's to our house is in Canby, nothing wrong with Canby, but our carbon footprint's big enough as it is. And gas at such prices. And the FLAVENS. 

So, there's that.

Rose Valley's product page is at http://www.rose-valley.org/our-products/.

[design] Rose Valley Butter's New Package Design

3062.

There's lot of good local to be bought in the stores of Oregon. A lot of it is provided by producer-based coöperatives; Darigold is one, and Tillamook's cheeses is another. There's one that I find many people haven't heard of perhaps: it's the Farmers' Cooperative Creamery, based in McMinnville, Wine Country's capital city.

Their brand, which one can find in the dairy case as WinCo, is Rose Valley Butter. Here is how it, until recently, was packaged:

… and, as of about 2 weeks ago, here's how we started seeing it:

Quite a change. Let's give it a little look-see…

Old package, left: New Package, right.

The original illustration is the real star of the old package. The color yellow is perhaps expected but really makes it a cheerful, sunshiny thing. The choice of illustration does play a little havoc with the choices the typographer had to make and therefore affects the hierarchy a bit: you see the word BUTTER big and proud but the brand name, ROSE VALLEY, kind of takes a supporting role. Not ideal, but understandable.

I love that illustration, seriously. It's charming and a little corny, but well-executed for all that. It fits the image of a country creamery. The arranging of the letters inside the scroll ORIGINAL almost give it a hand-layed-out feeling.

On the back panel of the package you'd find this charming bit of history:

This brand is the most Oregon thing you'll look at today, seriously. Hits all the positive notes, family, local, purity … it doesn't say sustainable, but it doesn't have to. Passionate? You bet. The Wife™'s world would be complete if only they marketed an unsalted version.

Please do this, FCC. Make my The Wife™a happy woman. She'd buy that stuff so hard, man.

The new package is rather subdued, though. Here's a close up look.

The new design is a more dialled-back, quiet presentation. The sunny yellow is gone, replaced with a rustic buff tone; the charming farmscape banished in favor of a simple illustration of a generic rose; the omission of rBGH (as well as a note which I understand is Federally mandated about boasting about omitting rBGH) are both much more prominent. All four panels of the box now look like this.

The hierarchical problem is well-solved here, however, the solution of putting the brand name in Chancery script does not satisfy. Each majuscule letter of ROSE VALLEY here is fine as a drop cap or some similar application on their own. With each individual glyph having such a broad-shouldered personality, though, they all want to be the star. The ultimate visual effect is uncomfortable, optically discordant. Not only is a proper kerning between the initial V and the A in VALLEY impossible, the swash on the top of the A suggests that it's foolish to try (and an apt demonstration as to why headline type in this style is pretty much a bad idea).

The big improvement is the FCC logo there. I enjoy it. It's a cool, simple logo, type with a graphic fillip, that is a bit rustic and proud of it. Letting the logo flag fly is definitely a positive development.

I'm reluctant to bag on a brand I genuinely like. But I've come to the definite conclusion that the new-look Rose Valley Butter package is kind of a step back. If the brand needed to be refreshed (and I'd debate that), I think they should have tried a few more ideas.

But we're not going to quit you over this, FCC. Far from it. You have fans in this household.

But get on that unsalted butter, okay. We're so there for that. 

[pdx] Moon Over Downtown Portland, or, Sunset Over America's Most Photogenic City

3056.

I wonder, when Henry Pittock built Portland's most famous residence, now a museum and grounds held in trust for all the citizens of the city he helped build, I wonder if he knew, somehow, just what a view would eventually obtain from that perch?

As The Wife™ pointed out aptly, it was undoubtedly a gorgeous view back in 1913. It's built on a geographical prominence that obviously affords a spectacular view naturally. But Portland's a very very photogenic city. It's almost as though she grew with the idea that she'd be seen from this viewpoint.

How did he know?

Adorably miniaturized Portland. Built of tilt-shift simulation settings, not of LEGOs.
To see that sort of thing, yo, go here.

I'm a native Oregonian, as I've smugly said ad nauseam. Silvertonian by birth, Portlander by choice. At this point, though, I've lived in Portland for longer than I've lived anywhere else in my life. While I've made my peace with a rather unhappy childhood in Silverton, and am in fact a little proud to be able to say I was born there, if I had my life to design over, I'd change my place of birth to Portland.

I love Portland that much. It's because I respond so intensely to the visual, I suppose. The cityscape here has always stirred me.

We all have our favorite places, and that's cool too, of course. But our hearts know what home is. For me, there could never be any other place.

[pdx] Rewind: Extreme Makeover - Made In Oregon Sign Edition

2867.Stumbled upon by The Wife™, of which I am grateful (both for the stumblage as well as the wifeitude) …

I am usually of torn mind about most politicos, and when it comes to Commissioner Leonard, I'm positively schizy. That said, one of his moves I liked the absolute most was when he got Ramsay Signs to donate the famous Made In Oregon sign on the White Stag Block at the west end of the Burnside Bridge to the city - so as to prevent the U of O from putting its name on a beloved landmark and, not coincidentally, to make the sign a landmark for all of Portland, not just the Duck fans.

Go Beavers.

Anywhozzle, the ensewage from this stumblage is an article at Commissioner Leonard's blog, which actually showed some behind-the-scenes looks at Ramsay Signs as they pieced the new look together. I've always been obsessive about signs, and seeing them up close is something cool to me. Views like this:

The rest of it is here: http://commissionerleonard.typepad.com/commissioner_randy_leonar/2010/11/portland-oregon-sign-coming-soon.html (posted in 11/2010).