PORTLANDIA MEETS THE CURSE OF CHIEF NIWOT

UPDATED NOV. 8 2012!! Welcome, new readers!

My current home city of Portland Oregon seems to be slightly better known to the world than many cities of similar size.  If people know anything at all about Portland, the one thing they do know is this - COLLECTABLE COMMEMORATIVE FIREARMS.  Right?  That's what really says Portland - a thousand dollar plus Mossberg 30-30 with decorative plaques screwed onto it that is so fancy you would never even shoot it - an object which utterly betrays its own primary function and is almost perfectly useless.  Strangely that really is very Portlandy, even if only by accident.  Why am I even writing such crazy things, you may ask.  Because of the latest Stupidest Advertisement which graced our doorstep yesterday - The Portland Heritage Rifle.  Here are clickable, enlargeable images of the wonderful thing:

As it says, "Portland has emerged from its muddy roots as a logging center and major seaport to become known as one of the most beautiful 'green' cities in the world.  It is this proud history that inspired us to include Portland into our Heritage Rifle special edition collection." Emphasis and grammatical error their own.  Except that Portland wasn't really that much of a logging center - the logs came through on the river but once the townsite was clearcut not a whole hell of a lot of logging took place here after the first fifty years or so. That's the sort of thing people think about Portland who don't actually know much about its real history.  I mean, it started off that way, but it didn't stay that way for long. Okay it was a logging center.  I admit it.  You just don't encounter the lumberjack theme here very much is all I am saying. But it wasn't really that much of a seaport since it is on a river and the sea is way off yonder thataway about a day's drive by log wagon - it was a port, yes, but a river port.  You kind of have to be on the sea to be a seaport.  It's true there was once a Lewis & Clark Centennial Pavilion here, a temporary Spanish Renaissance style structure built in 1905 which promptly vanished once the festivities ended, well over 100 years ago. The Oregon Steam Navigation Company originated in Portland, that is true, but its purpose was primarily to transport goods up the Columbia river, not the Willamette which is the river that actually flows through Portland - I am starting to quibble a bit here so I will just stop. Oh let's face it, this is all quibbling.  So what the hell.  What on earth did they get right on this distinctly Portlandy decorative collectable $200 down and $100 a month for an unspecified number of months unshootable firearm?  Eh?  This of course:

Portland's Aerial Tram!  Celebrated for its Portlandyness by absolutely no actual Portlanders, given appropriate pride of place on the rifle's BUTT, it is a folly and boondoggle built to connect two widely separated portions of the Oregon Health & Science University, which no average person ever has any reason to use. Significantly absent is any truly Portlandy scene, except for the 100 year old Steel Bridge dating way back to heritageous 1912. Even in the promotional photograph all iconic features are invisible or carefully covered by the gorgeous product.  Where is Portlandia, our beloved Fifty Foot Woman, reaching down as into the shattered roof of a seedy honky tonk to crush us in her vengeful grip?

 

Alas, nowhere.  Where is the Portland Oregon sign, a garish advertisement originally built in the 1940s for White Satin Sugar, to progress through various incarnations, its mercantile origins forgotten to become a beloved icon and garish advertisement for Portland itself, and its quaint miniature skid row of Old Town?

Carefully concealed behind the upper gun, that is where it is.  And who the hell is Chief Niwot?

The most wondrous thing about this glorious farce of advertising is the way it connects the two ends of my life - I was born in Fort Collins Colorado on October 11 1957, my birth heralded by a green fireball that lit the skies and vanished into the west.  There is a half-jesting tradition there of  The Curse of Chief Niwot (pronounced nye wot) - if you ever live in Fort Collins you will always return. I don't know anything else about Chief Niwot.  I lived there three separate times and now that I am determined never to return, it follows me.  Once or twice a year a ludicrous circumstance or ridiculous product or atrocious socio-political movement comes to my attention which is so absurd and deranged it can only come from Fort Collins as I did.  Like this ridiculously decorative, atrociously mark-missing rifle and, I assume, many similar products from American Legacy Firearms of Fort Collins Colorado.  Chief Niwot strikes again in his usual crazy way, bringing my silly life full circle.


ADDENDUM: Having taken five seconds to do a search on Chief Niwot, I find that his curse is associated with Boulder Colorado, not Fort Collins at all!  I was lied to, LABORING UNDER A CURSE THAT DID NOT EXIST.  Fort Collins, I am free of you forever!

UPDATE NOV. 8 2012!!  The Portland Heritage Rifle finally got some press in the form of an article on the Oregonian website.  Thanks go to Journalist Eric Mortenson  for covering this vital story and for showing the wisdom to pluck one of my finest quotes from this slapdash farce of an essay.  I am that howling blogger as you know. My wife said, "Taken out of context, your quote makes you sound like some kind of 'anti-boondoggle' crank."  Boondoggles have a bad reputation it is true, and how could anyone imagine the deep and abiding love I have for them?  Let the world think what it likes but my affection for them is strong and eternal.  I was startled to learn the actual two thousand dollar price tag for this wondrous product, and delighted to see a photo of a person who would really buy one - very much as I imagined, except I imagined him clambering out of a nine foot tall pickup truck with Tea Party bumperstickers in the parking lot of the Home Depot, a bluetooth phone dealy clipped to one ear.  I was just thinking of this fabulous firearm again the other day, and what I thought was, "I sure hope that is a Build On Demand kind of thing because I hate to think they had a couple hundred of them made..."  The fact is, it's only a hundred but still, what I continued to think was, "... because someday someone is going to find a whole stack of mysterious cases way in the back corner of the warehouse and when they pry one open they will say 'Who the hell ever thought this crazy thing would sell?'"  Looks like that is what may really happen, though none of us may live to see that day. As for the Curse of Chief Niwot - true or false, up he pops again in the pink and weeping form of cute/sad Abigail Evans, the "Bronco Bama" girl, resident of funny old Fort Collins Colorado, calling me to return to the sun kissed, snow-laden rolling plains of my birth, and cry.

ADVERTISING IS GOOD AND FUN

Every Tuesday morning someone comes by and throws a plastic bag of  Food-Day into our yard.  That is the weekly lifestyle/advertising supplement to our city's major newspaper. It consists of a few pages of newspaper containing recipes too complicated or unhealthy for me to want to cook, gardening tips which rarely have anything to do with getting edible radishes to grow, a few unfunny comics and a crossword puzzle my wife regards with disdain.  The part I like is the ads.  I usually ignore the ads for stores I never go to or don't even know where one is, but avidly search the pack of general product ads for the Stupidest Ad of  Them All.  Like this recent treasure:

 I thought the Black Football Grandma with Photoshopped-On Sombrero was going to be the worst ad of the day until I saw this. I don't know what a normal person would say to that but what I say is oh my god why would anyone want that crap in their house.  Little dog shaped boxes just big enough to put one or two tiny useless pieces of crap in.  Crap in crap.  A whole shelf full.  Then I look closely and see this:

 I don't know what a normal person would say to that either but what I say is oh my god that is not even a picture of the product, it is a picture of an actual dog all photoshopped up to make it look like a crappy useless miniature box.  And then I think about the person whose job it is to take a picture of a dog and make it look like a crappy useless miniature box that is being held open by fingers that look like they are picking up  one of those little paper discs from a paper punch if they still even have those, and which certainly do not look like they are opening a miniature dog box.  I think about that person putting those sparkle gleams on that collar and sticking that ball in there and wonder if they ever think about what they are doing the way I think about it.  It is not fake miniature dog boxes which are the stupidest ad this week, but Lizard Walker.

I thrust this at my wife and watched with delight as she tried to figure out what the hell this is an ad for.  I will tell you now this is an ad for paper cups.  A room full of people all agreed that this Lizard Walker was their best idea and it would really make people want to buy their paper cups.  It would lend a tone of daring eccentricity and strange competence to their paper cups.  I admit it's a good picture - the yellow-green-beige color scheme is beautiful.  She is really striding along there to keep up with her blatantly immobile iguanas, which are scrambling along at the ends of their taut pink leashes, without actually moving, and the leashes merely touch her perfect fashion model hand and magically vanish.  She is in control of her lizards and her life and she brings her own coffee in a stylish paper cup.  Make a note of it on your shopping list please - paper cups (lizard walking kind).