All the news that's fit to dish

The NYT's fallen, and fallen hard, for Portland, aka foodie heaven. Go figure.

This is a golden age of dining and drinking in a city that 15 years ago was about as cutting edge as a tomato in January. Every little neighborhood in this city of funky neighborhoods now seems to be exploding with restaurants, food shops and markets, all benefiting from a critical mass of passion, skill and experience, and all constructed according to the gospel of locally grown ingredients.

And later...

“This is one of the very few places on the West Coast that has been an affordable place to live,” said Andy Ricker, who in 2005 opened Pok Pok, which started under his obsessive eye as a ramshackle Thai takeout shack and now has a hip little dining room as well. “There are a ton of people here who are going at it in sort of an indie rock way, mostly because they can.”

Ah, the indie rock thing in Portland. We're ground zero for that, too, apparently, but that's a whole different story. But both the food and the music scenes (and many other things shaking out in this city) today are clearly being driven by the much hyped "young creative class," which has been flocking here for years, as it starts to influence in very tangible ways what traditionally has seemed to be a very old-guard city.

It's all part of why we love it so much here. But at the same time, you have to wonder what unintended consequences this kind of swooning coverage will end up having on our adopted town.

Down, set, crazy

Like I've always said, I don't think anyone takes their football as seriously as Oklahomans. And this guy's not even the coach of the good school back home.

Mo, Mo, Morocco

It was a year ago this evening that I sat atop a sand dune in the Sahara and watched the sunset, as shown in the photograph at the top of this blog and below in a painting by our friend Jim Torson.

To commemorate the anniversary of the trip, Amy made us a great dinner using spices we picked up in Chefchaouen.

Then we watched Hitchcock's "The Man Who Knew Too Much," which was filmed in Morocco, and includes the original version of the famous song "Que Sera, Sera."

Que Sera, Sera,
Whatever will be, will be
The future's not ours, to see
Que Sera, Sera
What will be, will be.

Words to live by, no?

Closing out summer

The leaves are starting to turn, the morning air is crisp and we've been on vacation only once this year. With that in mind, we took some much-needed time and carved out a long weekend in the other Vancouver with friends the Slighterallis.

I'll leave the foodie discussions to Amy over at the Dinner Hour. But suffice it to say that Dan and I think Juliana and Amy could talk about food 24/7 if given the chance. So it was only fitting we took our foodies to Granville Island, where they met a couple of hunky guys over a pile of raspberries.

I hope to write more about the trip later this week. But whether or not I get back to that, it was a lot of fun. I especially enjoyed the time when Dan and I crawled down to the waterfront along Burrard Inlet on Stanley Park's west side and played with the stacked stones, a tradition that I believe was started by the First Nations people. Here, Amy investigates whether they are truly stacked or actually cemented together in some fashion.


Not long before that I'd done the same thing, on another stack, and managed to knock over the pile. So after feeling like a cultural trespasser of some sort I'd embarked on a re-creation projection. I'll be the first to say that mine was nothing like the originals, but it did go four stones high. I'm pretty proud of that. Attempt to put one together and you'll quickly learn it's a Zen-like exercise in balance and patience.

Here, on the right in the foreground, is how mine looked. You'll see many more of these in a couple of years, when Vancouver hosts the 2010 Winter Olympics at Whistler.

Thanks, Dan and Juliana, for a great trip. And happy anniversary.