Portland’s Courteous Drivers
So Portland has the same new parking meters that we have in Seattle—actually, Portland had them before we got ‘em. You put in your dough, the meter/kiosk spits out a sticker, which affix to the inside of your car window facing the sidewalk. Or the street. Or something.
Anyway, walking around Portland today I noticed that drivers removing the stickers from their cars and slapping them on telephone poles and occasionally on the parking meters themselves, leaving their stickers—and any unused time that might be on them—for the next driver who comes along. I haven’t seen anyone do this in Seattle, but I think it’s a behavior we should adopt.
In other Portland news, you can still smoke in bars and clubs down here—and it fucking blows.
In national news, QWest—which refused to cooperate with the Bush administrations illegal spying—explained why today. From the NYT:
The telecommunications company Qwest turned down requests by the National Security Agency for private telephone records because it concluded that doing so would violate federal privacy laws, a lawyer for the telephone company’s former chief executive said today.In a statement released this morning, the lawyer said that the former chief executive, Joseph N. Nacchio, made the decision after asking whether “a warrant or other legal process had been secured in support of that request.”
God bless QWest.
People do this in Seattle all the time, seek and ye shall find...