Once a year, Portland streets are decorated with duct tape

If you don't live in Portland, you might not know about the Tradition of the Tape. This is the annual ritual of heading downtown the night (or several nights) before the Rose Festival's Grand Floral Parade to mark off choice curbside spots with duct and masking tape. Most rely on the honor system, leaving their space empty until morning. Others come in the wee hours and plunk down lawn chairs, coolers, blankets, and the occasional overstuffed old couch hauled in for a last hurrah before the landfill. This taping (sometimes chalking) is a ritual defended with all the energy an orthodox cleric would muster if threatened. To backtrack a bit: The parade is one of the fav events in the city's biggest blowout, the Portland Rose Festival. No offense meant to SeaFair boosters in Seattle, but the Rose Festival, marking its centennial year, is more floral, more spirited, and has better looking main characters. Princesses can outshine pirates any day. Sorry. So, the taping. It seems that some locals are peeved about non-Portland interlopers staking out claims to streetside seating. City Commissioner Randy Leonard, apparently unafraid to take on the tough issues others shun, has proposed an ordinance to forbid that nervy behavior. "Only a guy born and raised in Portland can do that," the native told the Oregonian. (Surely he meant only a person born and raised in Portland, but let's not lose sight of the real issue here.) A blogger chiming in after the Portland Tribune's coverage of Leonard's proposal asked, "Don't you people on the council have bigger fish to fry?" Clearly this blogger never arrived to find his favorite parade-route squat occupied by some border-crossing Vancouverite. Staffers at the Portland Mercury, meantime, are threatening to take matters into their own hands. The alternative weekly's bloggers are a bit more, uh, outspoken about the tradition, urged on by the pub's editor, who "commands" all readers to pillage and rip up tape. With breathtaking optimism, the Merc assures readers that they will fly under law-enforcement radar for tape crime, claiming "the Portland Police Bureau says it will not arrest members of the Mercury Clean Up Squad™ on Friday night, when they go out ripping up tape from the sidewalks in advance of the Rose Festival." (Update 6/8: Portland Commissioner Leonard's notion gets plenty of ink and airwaves, as The Oregonian reports.)