On Fri, May 20, 2016 at 7:50 AM, Bill Ricker <bill.n1...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Contrary to local opinion in PDX, there are other Portlands. > Since posted to talk-us, i can discount Portland, Dorset. (The original > Port on an Island.) > But Portland ME (PWM) has buses and is in USA. > Pretty sure that on talk-us, I'm about the only one here who is likely to ask for disambiguation if the context is unclear, as I may likely wonder if you mean the big one everybody means if they don't automatically disambiguate, the Lake Hefner area suburb in Oklahoma City or the Arkansas town of zip code 71663 (which, thanks to my family's atrocious handwriting, "Portland, OR 97229" would get mistaken for "Portland, AR 71663" with alarming regularity, in which Christmas gifts sent in November wouldn't arrive until around spring break). > When speaking of Portland (or Springfield, etc), if one fails to specify > which, one communicates ones parochial bias, not ones intended meaning. > > Folks in the several Springfields are well aware of this - only the > Simpsons fail to specify which Springfield unless for strictly local > consumption - but PDX seems to think being the #1 city in a pacific coast > state that isn't California but doesn't border Canada either makes it > obviously "the" Portland. > Matt Groening (who is originally from the Ainsworth District in the Oregon one) has already made mention that it's named after the one in Oregon and the whole show takes most of it's names and (in the first dozen seasons especially) plotlines based on local current events in the area. Springfield Nuclear Power Plant stopped being such a recurring thing after Trojan NPP finally closed; the Monorail episode was Groening's (subtle as an anvil to the face) protest to light rail expansion; many locations are directly ripped from southwest Portland. It goes on, go dig up his ~2002ish interview in the Portland Tribune, it took up most of the issue. > In this case, 'TriMet routes' buried in 2nd graph will confirm for someone > in the local region that it's their Portland ... but i don't know how > either Portland's transit has rebranded in recent decade, i'm still > wondering. > This alone with knowing that TriMet was directly influential in the development of, and the first to use, the GTFS format and among the first system in the US to use OpenStreetMap made it fairly unambiguous...but I digress...
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