Another Portland Blog began as a weird psuedo-blog in January of 2003. When I first started this thing, I only updated the site once a week and didn't even know what Blogger was. Many of those old "articles" are weird and embarrassing, or at least more weird and embarrassing than what I'm cranking out over five years later. That rejected McSweeney's submission from March of '03 is probably the worst of the lot.

You'll have to track that one down on your own, if you're curious. It's somewhere in the archives. I don't think some of the other ones are all that bad. In the early days of the Iraq War, Portland activists hosted a protest practically every other Saturday and stormed the streets with costumes and paper machete puppets. In response, I went into full bore citizen journalist mode and dived in with a notebook, a digital camera and a pocket full of snark.

The night a group of demonstrators took over the Burnside Bridge, I stood on the sidelines with a group of onlookers as PPD dragged them away one by one. There wasn't much we could do but watch. Later that night, I returned to my car to find a homemade "bombs!" sign tucked under a windshield wiper. Two friends, then supporters of the war effort, had spent the evening taunting the crowd with the sign before running into Rasheed Wallace at Hung Far Low's old location in Chinatown.

Another, more bizarre article covered a night when a group of us decided to create a new version of golf with fireworks replacing the balls. In hindsight, this probably wasn't the smartest of ideas. To the best of my knowledge, none of us have attempted a second game. There's also this epithet for the late, great Henry Ford's Restaurant and Lounge, possibly the last Portland establishment we'll all ever see with a bubble fountain out front.

And I somehow managed to write two articles about my old Toyota van getting stolen by someone who used it in a low-level crime spree. Ahh, memories.

When I switched domain names over to anotherportlandblog.com a few months ago, all of these articles turned into broken links. I'm slowly going back through the archives to fix them. It's a tedious process and I've got about thirty or more of them to get through. Given the hassle, I figured I could at least squeeze a blog post or two out of the whole thing.

Labels: archives, nostalgia