Oregon: It’s Too Wet to be a Dust Bowl, Exactly.

[April 15th, 2009]

• NOBODY WORKS ANYMORE (REALLY): Oregon’s unemployment rate hit 12.1 percent last month, the highest since the Employment Department started publishing rates in 1947.

  

• SIGN OF THE APOCALYPSE : City Commissioner Randy Leonard compromised with University of Oregon officials to change Old Town’s “Made in Oregon” sign to read simply “Oregon.”

  

• THE TOWERING INFERNO: Even Tom Moyer can’t get a line of credit. The Oregonian reported the powerful developer halted construction on his 32-story Park Avenue West high-rise, sending home 350 workers with the downtown project just 15 percent finished.

  

• 15 MINUTES OF FLAME : A Tillamook logger was sentenced to 60 days in jail after confessing to a prank gone awry: setting a co-worker on fire during a lunch break.

  

• INFURIATINGLY PERCEPTIVE QUOTE OF THE WEEK : “I love Portland; it seems very familiar to me. Like Brooklyn without black people.” —New York magazine columnist Kurt Andersen, mocking our city’s homogeneity on OPB’s Live Wire!