Oh Dog, you Sleuth!

In some brash decision to annoy everyone, Donna, Katherine, Jeremy and I went out to Astoria, OR to see the Goonies house today. In our defense the original plan was to go to Seattle, but I don’t think Donna’s car would make it that far and it barely got us around once we’d reached the coast.

In all the illicit excitement of being there (cause we’d promised so many people not to go without them), I somehow forgot to take a digital photo of us standing in front of the house. I think I took a film shot, but it will have to wait. Like seeing any movie location in real life, it was a little disappointing. Plus is was very sunny and clear today, the exact opposite of the film. If you’re interested in Goonies location scavenger hunting, definitely check out this site.

It was actually a very cute town and I picked up a book at the chamber of commerce that told us how to track down the other locations of Astoria-shot films. Some titles include: Kindergarten Cop, Short Circuit, Some Kind of Paradise and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 3. Not bad for a tiny town that contained the smallest JC Penneys I’ve ever seen.

We caught the happy hour lunch special at Gustav’s Bier Stube today and ate a sickening amount of German food. It put my binges at The Chip Shop into perspective. The fondue alone is still killing me.

The waiter we had was really nice, but it would have been cooler to have an entirely costumed staff. Jeremy swore on the spot that when he opens his novelty restaurant all the waiters will be dressed idiotically.

I just hope the dining room looks like this.

I started reading Chuck Palahniuk’s Fugitives and Refugees last night and got pretty excited about the fun Portland stuff there is to do around here. Mostly, I just long for a car so I can really check things out.

Comments are back! This time with a different server.

So the nickle arcade at the Avalon Theater turned out to be great! I went there on Thursday with my friend Karen, visiting from Chicago and Jeremy.

The majority of the games were from Japan and Korea (some still had the stickers on the coin entry telling you how many Yen they took) and then there were a lot of older nickle operated machines.

This game’s main strategy was just to shove your partner into the way of harm. It was kind of hard to figure out what the hell it was about at first.

In this game, kind of an updated version of Simon, you played electric guitar along with the machine. It was very hard.

This was the Korean knockoff of Dance, Dance Revolution.

I think he accidentally chose a song called ‘Oh No Cindarella’ that had a weird beat. It’s funny what a wide variety of bad music you get to choose from in these games.

I know the neon coverage is getting out of control, but it really is unbelievable here. Jeremy told me beforehand that Portland has refused to rip up its old stores and create nothing but Subways and Gaps and Starbucks. Apparently, Chin’s Kitchen is supposed to be really, really gross but I’m still dying to go. It doesn’t matter because the real gem in Hollywood is the Pagoda Restaurant, which will get its own massive photo shoot.

I love that I can walk to an art house movie theater. I saw Claire Denis’ ‘Friday Night’ last night, which was great.

It’s really spooky inside. I know Portland is supposed to remind you of Gus Van Sant and Elliot Smith (RIP!) but last night as I was walking back to my house through Laurelhurst, I couldn’t stop thinking about Blue Velvet and David Lynch in general. The old Americana vibe here really makes you feel like you’re walking around in one of his movies. And of course there’s the Twin Peaks thing. But my big movie thing is I want to visit the town where they shot “Goonies”. We need a car for that, though.

It looks like we’re planning something terrible but this was trivia at Beulahland last night, which was pretty hard and not so much fun.

Jeremy took our low score particularly badly.

Afterwards we went into Chopsticks Express around the corner to Karoke, but the line was too long.

Katherine stayed behind to page some of her friends and we didn’t see her for hours after that.

The next stop was The Ambassador, which is one of my new favorite places in Portland, because of it’s incredibly sleazy 80s coke dealer Miami vice design and it’s liberal policy about turning the reverb on the karoke mike.

Oh, and there’s a smoke machine on the stage.

Jeremy did Yummy, Yummy, Yummy and Sweat Pea.

Leslie, who along with Steven, actually has a very nice singing voice, did a duet of the Boy is Mine, In Your Room and one other song I can’t remember.

The real star was Katherine, who blew everyone away with a re-interpretation of Alice Cooper’s ‘I Wanna Be Elected’.

I stumbled through through Mary J. Blige’s Family Affair and the Shangri Las Leader of the Pack and pretty much massacred Boston’s More Than a Feeling.

Doesn’t this look like a still from DePalma’s remake of ‘Scarface’?

I looked at my web statics tonight and was kinda shocked by this search string someone used and ended up at ohdog.org. Jeez, they must have been so disappointed. And it was strange to see that the site’s popularity really peaked in July and has been experiencing a steady nosedive in the last three months. What can I do to spice this up? Prizes? More celebrity gossip?

The Avalon Theater on Belmont street. I rode bikes this afternoon with Jeremy in our neighborhood and now wish I would have taken more pictures.

This place is supposed to be really amazing. We also went past a bar that’s decorated like a Swiss Chalet inside. I’m dying to go.

The front yard.

The new faces of Family Business.

On Friday night, Steven and Erin came over and we played a very long game of robot strategies. I was just about to win when Jeremy knocked over the complicated board ‘accidentally’. So we ended up playing Family Business with entirely re-made cards Jeremy and a friend created over ten years ago. It was a lot of fun. The basic premise is you are a mob family and you are trying to kill off your opponent’s mob families. You work from a deck of action cards that starts off the cycle of killing and revenge. This is the greatest game ever created. It’s even better than Time’s Up. There was so much interest that everyone wanted to continue the modification even further by creating all new family gang cards. So on Saturday, all of us went down to the amazing used magazine store and picked up some magazines to make new cards from. Above is a sampling from two of my new families. I made an entire gang of babies that I can’t wait to use in battle.

This site hits the big time today, with a mention in the Boston Globe. Eat your heart out, Jami. This is the entry about Pynchon.

Jeremy pointed out this site to me, just now, it’s a collection of disturbing auction items from ebay.

The view from the front porch.

So far, this is my favorite store in Portland, called City Liquidators.

Despite all the crazy stuff for sale, Jeremy bought folders.

I bought these lamps for my morning room and think they’re great.

We saw 28 Days Later tonight.

Jeremy wasn’t very interested at first.

But the infrared camera shows how terrified he became.