By Samuel John Klein of Portland, Oregon - Graphic Designer without Portfolio, aspiring artist who dawdled too long.
1808.
Yes, I was able to get your text via email, and I'm sorry me and mine weren't able to meet you there, and I'm doubly sorry that I wasn't able to say anything about it until now.
I don't have to ask if you guys are enjoying your visit back, especially since it took you through Powell's, and I've a great idea from the blog just how voracious a reader Nicole is.
Tags: stan kost, dinglemuch, coleyboley, blog friends, PDX expats
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1792.
Who knew that when Paul Bausch abruptly decommissioned ORBlogs, that we would actually wind up with more possiblities for community than before?
Seems that the passion on the PDX Blogging community is such that a good thing will not be allowed to go away. We all win.
Tags: PORBlogs, ORBlogs, Ignoregon.com, Oregon Blogs, Oregon Bloggers, PDX Blogs, PDX Bloggers
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1788a.
Read up Witigonen today to see if it had come back from the dead yet (no posts for well over a month). Here's what I got:
I'm sad. I liked them, and it's despairing the way they just petered off on publishing anything at all. It was unusual to find a Zeppelin-oriented NW Poliblog.
I did get to meet a couple of the Witigonians once. Classy folks. Very witty.
I hope the turn up somehwere, somehow that we can enjoy them. Or, failing that, that this is a temporary outrage.
Tags: Witigonen, pdx_bloggers, oregon bloggers, oregon political bloggers, bloggers MIA
1526. This looks like fun, and should be interesting to follow ...
Cool logo too.
Tags: portland octopus, portland websites, pdx, portland news
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1511. …Lost Oregon.
Support your local Schlockstar, and visit. And link. His blogs have been an extended love song to Oregon's 20th C. past, and deserves support.
Tags: stumptown confidental, schlockstar, oregon history, oregon commerical history, oregon ephemera
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1268. I don't know if anyone else has noticed, but Beaver Boundary's proprietor, Taoiseach, hasn't posted anything since last 20th of November.
Yes, that's 2007.
I hope he/she is alright. I sure liked that blog.
Tags: pdx_bloggers, taoiseach, Beaver Boundary, MIA
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1267. As of this moment, my blog has logged 38,001 visits of every description. Since one of my favorite shows was Space:1999, I felt compelled to mark this occasion – 1,999 visits until my counter rolls over to 40,000.
I know better than to expect almost 2,000 visits in a day, but if anyone wants to do something crazy and spread the word that I'm trying to hit that mark, I wouldn't discourage you. It would be a cool record.
Of course, I am not one of two girls in posession of a cup and I have no bootleg MP3s to give away. Just me and my quirky personality, that of a graphic designer who's having a bit of trouble finding a job hereabouts. You go with what you got.
Tags: Samuel John Klein, The ZehnKatzen Times, Zehnkatzen, Bloggage
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The Hawthorne Bridge From Just Outside the Pilsner Room, 7 Nov 2007
Point is, you weren't there. We were. Here's our story.
As the media have reported (and if you're a Mark & Dave cult member or other similarly-connected sort) The Letter That Caused All The Brew-Haha was auctioned off for the KEX Kids Fund and Mark & Dave were going to present the domains they had acquired to Sam Adams (the potential mayor, not the beer).
So convened the Sam Adams Domain Name Transfer Party, with your hosts, Mark Mason and Dave Anderson:
Mark Mason and Dave Anderson tell the tale of The Letter.
The tale was told of the bad guys (Boston Brewing, we all by know know who they are) and how the makers of Samuel Adams beer found out our fellahs reserved domain names for The Real Sam Adams™, didn't bother to do any due diligence in actually finding out just who The Real Sam Adams™ was, and set the legal wheels in motion, sending what has gone down in history as The Letter (follow the link to KEX's Brew-Haha page, where the letter is on prominent display).
The Letter was peforce put up to auction on eBay, the proceeeds to generate income for the KEX Kids' Fund, which sees to it that poor kids who need glasses and hearing aids get them. After the bidding was over and the dust had settled, the winner was Jim Hopkins of Accent Verticals, a local window fashions vendor:
Mark Mason, Jim Hopkins, and The Letter.
After setting up the situation and getting the festivities in full swing, the presentations begun. Very Big Checks/Certificates started changing hands. First, Jim Hopkins presented one to Mark and Dave representing the amount of the bid that won him The Letter:
That $1475.90 was matched by KEX for a net gain of $2951.80 for the Kids' Fund on the basis of the auction alone. A run of Full Sail Ale was also branded as "Mark & Dave 1st Amendment Ale" for the night, and a special tap handle was made for the occasion, and proceeds from the sale of pints also went into the Fund.
KEX's Dave Anderson with the special Mark & Dave Ale tap handle
As for Samuel Adams Ale, its tap handle was shrouded in black. We wot that Samuel Adams didn't sell very well that night.
After the handing over of Jim Hopkins' VBC to Mark and Dave (and the transfer of ownership of The Letter), came the crest of the evening – Mark and Dave awarding the website samadamsformayor.com to The One True Sam Adams™[2]:
The URL goes to its rightful owner.
The ceremony done, people got down to some of your basic mixing. For the record, I did try the ale, which I rather liked; The Wife™, not so much (she's not an ale fan). At the start of the evening, we felt rather like a fish out of water, but everyone was very friendly and warm, and when we left, we found that we'd had quite a very good time.
Mark and Dave also gave credit to us bloggers who did what we could to publicize or at least speak out on this. Mark mentioned us, Witigonen (who we enjoy reading, and zeppelins), Isaac Laquedem (who links here and I didn't get to meet – sorry, Isaac) and Kari Chisholm was also there (who I did get to meet). I recall that Mark mentioned Rusty, sadly, he didn't make it.
Kari Chisholm discussing something with KPOJ PD Mike Dirckx.
Naturally, we met the guest of honor. Here are we, Sam the mayoral candidate, and Sam, the pipsqueak underemployed graphic designer:
Say whatever you want about his politics, Sam Adams is a pretty decent fellow, and extremely affable in person (now I really wish I could have been at the City Council meeting where they did the jazz hands). The Wife™ made him promise to stay in touch with us. He said he would. And why? "Because we're your constituents" saith The Wife™. Can't argue with that logic, neh?
And The Wife™ got her brush with greatness:
We're going to treasure these shots – should Sam become mayor, we'll be able to say "We Were There When". This isn't the whole lot; I've posted all of them on my flickr account, and I've made a subalbum on Photobucket (complete with a captioned remix).
That's all for this edition of You Weren't There. We're not sure where we'll be next, but one thing may prove true: we'll be there, and you...well, you might not be.
[1]Apologies to Bob and Ray.
[2]Apologies to The One True b!X
Tags: pdx, Sam Adams, Great Brew-HaHa, KEX, Portland Radio, Portland Media, Portland Politics, Mark Mason, Dave Anderson, Accent Verticals, Jim Hopkins, KEX Kids Fund, Pilsner Room, Samuel John Klein, ZehnKatzen
1093. Today we need to drop off our ballots (we miss the days of polling places, so we wait til the last minute to get some of that election-day mojo that used to be accompanied by a VOTE HERE! sign), but the dance card is simply bursting–at least it is for us...
Tonight, The Wife™ and I are going to put in an appearance at the KEX-Sam Adams Domain Name Party. At last, Yours Truly, Cult Member 583, gets to meet "The Guys". And, yah, that Sam person.
Tomorrow there's going to be a Jeff Merkley blogger get-together over at the new Laurelwood Brewery on NE Sandy.
Pictures to follow
1067. In the last two days, we've gotten a couple skookum new linkers, and we've got to say that we appreciate the links: Kevin Allman, Portland writer late of NOLA and published to kudos, and Dave Knows: PDX, who shares transit nerdery.
I was kind of hoping you guys would link to me, and today I can say I got at least one of my wishes.
Linked back because that's just the kind of dude I am.
I'd also like to brag about NuShooz accepting my request to be a MySpace friend; I must say, Valerie Day is much hotter as a brunette than when she was a blonde.
1056. Just as a reminder, the ZKT's Zapadoo Instant Poll, Is Sam Adams a Politician or a Beer?, Is still open!
Regardless of the outcome of the Brew-HaHa (it's becoming a real anti-Boston non-tea party) we have the power, through the power of the poll, to determine consensus reality. We have the power to decide exactly what Sam Adams is, regardless of what the real reality is!
Is that cool or what?
So get on board the train and help us decide! It's over there on the right, at the top of the sidebar!
And, just for some more blunt wisdom on the subject, regarding the Sam Adams Beer non-apology apology, the Brookston Beer Bulletin has the right of it all. Boston Brewing, here's advice better than your legal eagles are giving you...
1045. Weiden+Kennedy Studio.
The "baseball cards" are clever and hee-larious.
The (insert MOTAS spec here) are pretty hot, too.
946. The process over naming streets to honor personal heroes in Portland has become like living next to the State Hospital: it's a short walk to insanity.
It's encouraging to notice that I'm not the only one who things so: Incursio chimes in, as does the Café Unknown, to whose eloquence we all must bow in this case.
It must be said, tho' it be expected, that I am most decidedly not against naming civic landmarks in favor of neglected American heroes. Rosa Parks and Cesar Chavez do happen to be two of the most underrated in the American canon. And I actually was in favor of renaming Union Avenue to MLK (maybe it was the fact that it was making racists cry that did it. I love it when racists cry).
But it's gone from being a grand gesture of honor to a hard-tipped projectile for Getting Your Way™. If a group wants something bad enough, they just take it up to ramming speed and bull on through.
I do recall the wake of the MLK renaming that pretty much everyone seemed to sit back and say "hey, that could've gone a bit smoother, neh? Let's come up with some rules that'll make sure everyone gets their say, that we take it deliberately, so that when we do rename a street in Stumptown from here on out, everyone is on board with this". There was, as they say, much rejoicing.
The rules were promptly disregarded in the very next demand to rename a street. This got us NW and SW Naito Parkway (It's still NW Front Avenue after you get north past the NW 15th Avenue light, there at the Fremont Bridge, but it's just not the same somehow) as the City Council fairly embarrasingly fell all over itself in the rush to get that road renamed.
I don't doubt that, somewhere along the road to N Rosa Parks Way, someone pointed at the Naito process and said "hey, you did it for them!". And, likely, someone for N Cesar Chavez Blvd noted the previous two detours and figured if they did it for them...
Now you all know why your mom always said "If I did it for you, I'd have to do it for everyone". Fair is, after all, fair, even if it leads to regular doses of crazy.
There is a question of Portland place here. Café Unknown had it very well in his post: I should refer you there. For me in this way it boils down to assuming there is no history in a name that seems generic, which is complete pants. Interstate Avenue was stitched together of a couple of streets that became the main route to Vancouver–and the Interstate Bridge–and eventually became the route of the Pacific Highway West (US 99W, later State Hwy 99W), the precursor to Interstate 5.
Let it also be said, loud and clear, that I do not have any fear of either a black or a brown planet. That the street is now named Rosa Parks Way doesn't bother me in the least. What bothers me is that someone wanted it badly enough to inveigle someone in the city government to see it thier way and ignore rules that are actually still in the books and have never been invalidated, and they seem perfectly prepared to do so once again, casually erasing another bit of shared, Portland-specific history, without getting everyone else on board with it.
Why even bother with making up a rule if we're not going to play by it? Stop the insanity, I say. Cesar Chavez deserves recognition, but surely there are other ways than stripping the name from yet another street.
I always thought it was kind of cool that Portland had a street named after itself (There is still a N. Portland Rd, but the deriviation is suprisingly unobvious–"North Portland" was the name of the undeveloped locality on the railroad line between the north margin of Saint Johns and the North Portland Harbor (south bank of the Columbia), and the road was called North Portland Road before the Great Renaming of 1933. Presumably, it was felt that "N. North Portland Rd." sounded kind of silly).
