For You Consideration...

An Apology to My Readers...

I am sorry for that last post...

So here is something much more benign...

And it is animated as well...


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Sonambulism and Seven-11

Kind of like one of those "People of Wal-mart" websites or "Faces of Gresham" features in the Oregonian, I will never cease to be amazed by things in this city.

For example, when it's after midnight at the neighborhood Seven-11 you never know what the hell you're going to encounter.

I mean, how much worse can it get? Keep reading to find out...

Big Game Little Children

Awhile ago, I posted a single photo of me sitting within petting distance of a young deer. Here are some further images of me sitting running through fields and hand feeding woodland animals.

To this day, I am still amazed that my parents, especially my mother let me do this. 

I figure this is a moment to mention that I will be taking a sixteen month hiatus from Portland to attend nursing school in Bozeman, Montana. However, the Wonderful World of Clutter will continue on. I promise that. 

Big Sky Country will provide me with amply fodder, clutter, and statuary to ride and photograph. In the meantime...

The Art of Letter Typing

In this era of modern communication, it amazes me how little we pay attention to Typewriter Etiquette. We hammer out emails, tap out texts (sometimes "Swype" them), we tweet, we blog, but rarely do we pay attention to the ur-mechanics of our modern communication, the typewriter.

A few examples from this tiny pamphlet explains the wonders that typing can provide, and how it can help reveal the "real you" to your readers. If you click on the image and read the pamphlet's "Dear Reader" introduction, you can learn some vital pieces of information...

With this little introduction taken to heart, I can only imagine how I can improve my blog. And you, Dear readers, you will benefit as well because now you will be able to relate to me. Since I have typed out these words, and because they are powerful, you can relate to them in a unique way. Just like this introduction says, it's kind of like reading The Diary of Anne Frank.

Ahem...

Yep, that's how powerful using a typewriter can be; it will transform your ability to say into something akin to the powerful statements of a teenage girl hiding from Nazi's during one of the most heinous era's of contemporary history. Now that is powerful stuff.

Also, by learning how to use a typewriter, you can learn how to become a cocktease.

It doesn't matter if you're a woman or a man, nothing says you had a very nice date with an individual than giving them a typed out letter on blue stationery. Forget about necking, handholding, chocolates, or even flowers. Let your date pay for the meal, movie, and drinks but don't forget to give them a letter to say that you had a pleasant evening with said person. And if by chance you get lucky on your date, everyone loves getting a plainly typed letter:

        Dear Girl I Woke Up Next To,

      Thank you for the one-night stand. I assure you that I had an STD check last month and everything was clean. I hope the very same for you as well. I hope you had a good time and you are not as hung over as I am.

All the Best,

     Chad

Or you can you use the examples as shown below.

This is why the typewriter is a marvelous tool. Perhaps we all need to learn Typewriter Etiquette. As bloggers become more vitriolic and tweets passive-agressive, maybe some good-old-fashioned manners are needed to make us more civilized. 

Or maybe not. Who knows? 

Repeating Images: The Mayors of Portland

Combing through old photographs as I prepared to pack up my current abode, I came across this old picture of me and one of Portland's greatest mayors, Bud Clark. Mayor Clark, Whoop Whoop, was the mayor of my youth, from 1985 until 1992, shaping how I viewed this city.

While being photographed with a local politician/celebrity as a kid was pretty cool, something about this picture stood out. It was the book I held under my arm. 

Did anyone else notice this at the time? Certainly someone had to have made a comment, but of course, that is probably lost to the ages. Put a tall red cone on Mayor Clark's head and he looks just like David the Gnome! And to this day, I bet he could outfox any troll out there. 

But after Bud Clark, we hit the dark ages of Portland politics. The age of Vera Katz. 

Why she got a statue, and Bud Clark didn't, I will never know. I think Vera Katz can best be summed up by this piece of poster art that popped up around the city in the early part of her reign. An accompanying graffiti stencil soon followed.

As a side note, while I often like to crawl upon bronze statues, the Vera Katz statue creeps me out so much that I have a firm belief scares away herons from the Esplanade. It's that disturbing looking. 

If given the choice between gnomes and jokers, I would take a gnome any time. 

Ride the Bronze Buffalo: Retro Edition

Riding the Bronze Buffalo is a long standing tradition. These images from my sprite-like youth, when I was not soured by the temptations of modern man and the bitterness that accompanies such sirens, were taken at the Oregon Zoo.

But back in those halcyon moments, we knew of the zoo as the Washington Park Zoological Gardens.

I don't recall seeing the warthog or the donkey at the zoo on my last visit. They had been replaced by the lions which I rode on my last visit. Other pieces of statuary are absent from the zoo, a marble hippo, appropriate for a toddler to straddle was also gone. Gone the way of the tapir. 

Somewhere out there, these sculptures probably still exist, that is unless some meth-addicted penguin got out of its enclosure and hacked it up and tried to sell it off at a scrap yard. But that is unlikely because penguins don't have much on organizational skills, let alone skilled use of hacksaws. There is probably a statue graveyard somewhere in Washington Park...I propose a treasure hunt!

Birth of Meme: Unicorns Mating

So the other day, I was trying figure out the best way to describe one of those moments that you encounter in life that are equal parts magical and awkwardly disgusting. Everyone knows what I am talking about...It often can apply to food. Foie Gras or many other pieces of "unusual" cuts of meat may appear to be awkwardly disgusting but turn out to be the true culinary delights that can be described as beautiful to the tongue. Sometimes places have this stigma of being both magical and disgusting. Imagine the charm of the Olympic villages in Vancouver BC and then think of all of the displaced heroine addicts of East Hastings that were shipped away from the region for beautification projects. And modern medicine is rife with magical and tragic moments.

So I was trying to describe one of those instances to someone, I don't even remember what it was, when the term "Unicorns Mating" came to my head. And it explained it all.

Nothing is more magical than unicorns. But nothing is more base than two unicorns mid-coitus. Of course, the iconography of unicorns mating is already plaguing the internet. I will allow those who want to humor themselves to google it on their own and to encounter all of the horrors that they will find. But the discoveries,  of course, are kind of magical and gross by proxy proving the nature of the "Unicorn Mating Meme."