Hawthorne Blvd.
Portland, OR

Hawthorne Blvd.
Portland, OR

Was at a bar playing pinball with some friends and the bartender put on Pinball Wizard

Which honestly pinballers hate because it’s like the ONE song, we get that all the time, can’t you find something else?

(I mean, I guess one of us had a monkey paw when we said that, ‘cause the Barenaked Ladies released a pinball concept album a few years ago)

But then it ended… and came back again… but different, and it turned out he queued up like 4 different versions/covers, and actually? That was kinda neat.

ilgreven:

kontextmaschine:

There was a state court ruling a few years ago that made it harder to prove theft - like, the fact you caught a strung-out dude driving a stolen car with a shaved-down key isn’t enough if you didn’t see him take it and he says “uh, some random guy gave it to me”, which such dudes know to say by now.

Most states have closed that loophole with a “Receiving Stolen Property” charge (looking it up, Oregon’s is called “Theft by Receiving”). The threshold for that is simply that a normal person would have a reasonable suspicion that the goods they have…ahem…acquired are stolen. Any competent district attorney would have the “random guy” or “my buddy” defense destroyed in a heartbeat.

I would say the culprit is more likely that the police don’t have the manpower to go after car thieves anymore, and they’ve said as much to local news.

The law thing is real. I’d heard of it before that article was published, even before my motorcycle was stolen out of my driveway this year.

NOW, it’s absolutely possible that those defenses could be “destroyed” with enough effort - more extensive interrogations, detectives beating the bushes of the homeless transient communities (where people do barter with others they just know as “this one guy”) to undermine the claim, court time with a good prosecutor to undermine the story on the stand – but that that consumes more resources per conviction than the DA’s office’s resources/priorities/culture can support, while the previous open-and-shut, show-the-judge-the-burglary-tools approach was sustainable.

It’s also totally possible that the PPD is under-resourced - I’ve heard suggestions to that effect, that they weren’t as fluffed out after the last budget crunch ended, that they haven’t kept track as the city boomed and the low cost of living that kept it livable for the poor came to an end, that the #resistance energy is pressing to divert more resources away from criminal justice.

But the law thing is absolutely real.

Portland, OR

SE Foster Rd.
Portland, OR

oh there was also Senator Bob Packwood and that congressman in the Tigger suit and that Seattle mayor who just got forced out, if you’re thinking of politicians in scandals about pressing themselves upon teenagers in Portland

Look at THIS shit though

This worries me. For all the lefty image from afar, up close Portland had a pretty broad polity underlaid by a sense of aggressive reasonableness and an establishment secure and supple enough to adapt on its own terms rather than under threat, I’ve talked before about how great it was that government communications didn’t talk down to you

And now this, and not just this, after the election I started seeing Facebook ads from actual government arms – Place Matters Oregon which was nominally a health initiative, and some other ones – that used this chiding woke tone to tell me to be angry about social justice issues and like WHAT THE HELL

and there’s a candidate running in the next election on some sort of platform that it’s her opponent’s duty to clear the way for her, a black woman

And I just don’t trust the “aggressively reasonable”, yuppie Californiaizing bobo establishment to have the antibodies to fight this off. Meanwhile the conservatives are at the point of indignantly demanding that establishment defend them from political paramilitary street gangs.

Apparently they’re wokemail resistance at Reed, that’s promising, but.

Really it is past time the less white, more immigrant areas east of 82nd got a bigger share of power, there was a good chance to do that within the establishment a few years ago but the downtown/inner eastside froze Jefferson Smith out, but spilled milk.

Like I say, the key is gonna be uniting the evangelical Russians and the anticommunist Asian immigrants. Get ‘em angry at the hidden curriculum at PCCC, maybe unite through church networks with emerging Hispanic Pentecostalism and the established infrastructure of the Christian colleges?

Hand the public sphere over to exotic Christianity, keep the yuppies in material comfort while the thinky ones rationalize how to be a respectable liberal while scoffing at radicalism from their perches. Beat the 70s with the 80s.

Which brings us to the ‘90s I might pine for now but at the time was boring normie Office Space Applebee’s, that I wanted to leave and find a place like Portland was.

Fuckin’ A, wonderful. What a world, what a world.

LOOK at this shit

Also in this 1970 issue: some great monorail-era architectural design in the “rapid transit” feature, an ad introducing the “asthma inhaler” (like a portable version of those breathing machines you might have used in a doctor’s office)

look at this shit

Clinton Street Pub
Portland, OR

Clinton Street Pub
Portland, OR

Clinton Street Pub
Portland, OR

the fact that the bum district downtown has these in lieu of “RESTROOMS FOR CUSTOMERS ONLY” signs is one of my favorite Portland details

just saw men with particular waxed mustaches and tattoos and ways of playing Big Buck and had an insight to how all the antifa stickers on Foster play into the way it’s being settled both up from (red)neck Clackamas/Oregon City AND from the queer and local kid diaspora cuz at least it’s not North

“petty local real estate issue presents as broad identitarian nationalism” is SUCH a huge bullshit thing

I mean MAYBE I’m overthinking things but maybe you’re underthinking them

At the insurance claims office, out to 82nd and south a bit. Christ, past a certain point Portland might as well be Florida

someone stole my motorcycle right out of my goddamn driveway

Just got spanked in bar league pinball by the butch team

As distinct from the Millenial women’s league team, which collapsed in internal drama they they blamed on men from other teams