NEW SERIES! FEMALE PRISON PEN PALS!
RE: A recent package in the mail containing requests from several female inmates that their solicitations for pen pals be printed in the Mercury. We’ll be running one each week until we run out. Please, drop them a line! They’re bored!
Hi, my name is Tabitha. I am 29 years old, I’m 5’5″ and 150 pounds. I have brown eyes and brown hair. I’m serving a little bit of time in the Madison County jail in Rexburg, Idaho, and I’m looking for a good pen pal. If interested, please write to: Tabitha Wilson, 15 N 2nd East, Rexburg, ID, 83440.
SYMPHONY GUY: STILL ANGRY
RE: Music Listings [May 17].
DEAR MERCURY SHIT-FOR-BRAINS—Really?! Our brilliant Oregon Symphony crams close to 90 musicians onto the Schnitzer stage for their final blowout concert of the classical season, but you can’t be bothered to bestow one of your measly little recommendation stars on the event? I swear to fucking god I am never reading your so-called newspaper again.
-Brian Horay, Angry Symphony Guy
OMG SO GOOD
RE: The @endhits Twitter feed, your portal to the Mercury‘s music blog—the bestest music blog in Portland—and more!
DEAR MERCURY—You know, I sometimes really love reading your End Hits tweets. And then there are the in-concert tweets, which are just so fucking awful. “This band is so good.” “This band is SO good.” “No one on earth understands how fucking good this band is.” We got it the first 15 times: You love the fucking band. So could you please just split those off into a separate feed?
-Peter
MUSIC EDITOR NED LANNAMANN RESPONDS: No. Thanks for following!
MEAN STREETS
RE: “A Field Guide to Portland Canvassers” [Feature, May 24], a rundown of common companies that donation gatherers represent in Portland, how such organizations work, and what it’s like to work for one.
The salient fact missing from this article is that canvassing companies take a percentage of the charitable donations. After the Do-Not-Call list went into effect several years ago, a lot of telemarketing companies transitioned to soliciting donations on behalf of charities. If these canvassing companies work on the same percentages, the actual charities see only around 20 percent of the donation money. If you’re feeling philanthropic, make a mental note and donate directly to the charity on their website.
-posted by Crowsby
QUAKING IN OUR BOOTS
RE: “Shaking Behind the Scenes” [News, May 24], regarding disagreement among experts as to the ability of Portland’s harbor wall to withstand an expected earthquake.
Good article to start explaining the amount of work that lies ahead of Portland and Oregon for us to prepare for the Cascadia earthquake. The costs are high to do such work, but the costs of not doing so are much higher.
-posted by argocb
Clearly it’s worse than the rosy story that politicians paint. After having earthquake insurance for a year, my premium just got upped by 300 percent (!!!!). We were told that the rates for Oregon had been “adjusted” and that was now the “normal” competitive rate for the state. Since it seems obvious that all insurance carriers will probably declare bankruptcy in the case of an 8.0+ Cascadia event, we told them that we would just cancel the policy and hope that our seismic retrofit can prevent total loss of our home.
-posted by squarepeg
BATMAN SANITY
RE: The Team Suzette comic [Fun Page, May 24], in which she states that WiFi and Batman top the list of things “crazy people care about.”
ALL RIGHT MERCURY—This Team Suzette thing is funny in that cute/quirky I-have-a-cat-and-totally-thought-Jess-and-Nick-would-at-least-smooch-by-the-season-finale kind of way, and here I was blindsided. Batman fans are now crazy? Surely anyone holding to the relevance of Morrissey could perchance grant us the awesomeness of Batman.
-Hazard Leigh
THANKS FOR NOTICING the latest wee addition to the Mercury Fun Page, Hazard! (And look up: Suzette’s work also adorns the Letters page on a weekly basis.) You win two tickets to the Laurelhurst Theater—maybe you can save them for the new Batman movie.
Batman is an image of the aristocratic “hero” carrying out convoluted personal vendettas against laughable villains (reassuringly removed from the moral complexities of real crime) in the name of his unilateral notions of “justice” that are unaccountable to civil society but in a fictional world can be held up as blameless in ridiculous fictional scenarios but that in our world, as popular myth, inspire the misdeeds of people like George Zimmerman.
Geyser, clearly your writing ability is wasted here. That is a thought provoking statement (and really succinct). Now have a cup of coffee and relax buddy! Batman is a fictional character, whether hero or vigilante. We have no more proof such a thing inspired an alleged vigilante such as Zimmerman or western movies and El Kabong were responsible. You are clearly well educated and intelligent but I think you are reading into this just a little too much. What fictional characters and myth do you suppose Taliban fighters are inspired by? People are ultimately responsible for their actions
Geyser, in the words of George Kennedy’s character in “The Eiger Sanction” : “Go get yourself laid, it’ll do you some good….”
^^you’re not THAT OJ, are you? I thought what happened in Vegas stayed in Vegas?
@3: I’m guessing that insult was a lot less played-out back in the ’70s when some screenwriter stuck it into a mediocre Clint Eastwood action flick.