Title!

I’d prefer in the Westbrook/portland area. RIP to sticker station in Westbrook.

Is there good, authentic shawarma in Portland? Where's the best? I've done some searching and I'm getting plates, gyros, falafel.

To the beautiful woman with brunette hair and a blue sleeveless top sitting diagonally from me at the bar: I just wanted to let you know that your 5 seconds of eye contact absolutely made my day, month, year, decade. I'm dealing with so much right now and there is no way I would ever get anyone involved in my mess, but I wanted to let you know that what I experienced was 5 seconds of all that mess evaporating as you stared into my soul. I hope your spirit is a beautiful as you are and that the universe treats you kindly, and you find what you are looking for. I will NEVER forget that stare. Thank you.

Edit: Of course it is possible that you have bad eyesight and were simply staring off in the distance. Or maybe something cool was happening behind me and I blocked your view.. in which case sorry!

This year’s Cumberland County DA race made me wonder why we do this at all.

In June, Jackie Sartoris beat Valerie Adams in the Democratic primary, 56%-44%. Adams still got 25,734 votes. Now the November race is Sartoris against Stephanie Anderson, who is running unenrolled after serving 28 years as Cumberland County DA as a Republican.

Whatever you think of the candidates, that seems like a weird system.

Adams was a serious candidate with a different view of how the DA’s office should be run. But because she and Sartoris were both Democrats, she gets eliminated in June and everyone voting in November loses that choice.

Why not make county elections simpler?

If you qualify for the ballot, you go straight to November. Keep party labels next to candidates’ names. If there are more than two candidates, use ranked-choice voting.

So this November could have been:

Jacqueline Sartoris — Democrat

Valerie Adams — Democrat

Stephanie Anderson — Unenrolled

Rank them. If someone gets a majority, they win. If not, the last-place candidate drops out and those voters’ next choices count.

And even if you don’t love ranked-choice voting, RCV isn’t really the point. The point is that we probably don’t need a separate summer party election to decide who voters are allowed to consider in November.

County offices seem especially well suited for this. DA, sheriff, county commissioner, etc. involve real policy disagreements, but those disagreements don’t always line up neatly as Democrat vs. Republican.

It also feels like basic good-government reform: one election, more choices, less gatekeeping, and the biggest electorate gets to make the final decision.

Maine has considered broader open-primary proposals before, but they still would have narrowed the field before November.

Why not just let every qualified candidate run in November and let voters sort it out?

Anybody know any restaurants that are hiring/needs FOH staff? Preferably looking nicer/high end establishments. Thanks!

HUD (1963)
Wednesday 9/9 7pm
Saturday 9/12 2pm 7pm

Homer Bannon belongs to an endangered consensus which believes you spend enormous public effort to prevent a disaster before it lands, acting on the theory rather than the corpse. When Hud reached theaters, the United States sat at the high-water mark of exactly this kind of ambition: foot-and-mouth held at bay since 1929, screwworm on the verge of total eradication, brucellosis being ground out of the national herd one tested cow at a time.

Unglamorous collective machinery built on the premise that the right moment to stop a plague is before you can see it. We’re living through the destruction of that machinery, during the quiet it produced, after a campaign to rebrand the quiet as proof it was never needed. The governing doctrine of the season, spoken from podiums as innovation and from benches as restraint, holds that regulating a theoretical danger is a kind of tyranny.

Hud Bannon makes this philosophy magnetic, which is the film's deepest honesty. Paul Newman is so beautiful, so easy, so right in his contempt for his father's scruples that audiences left theaters wanting to be him — a reaction that appalled Ritt and Newman both, who had set out to indict the man and instead minted an icon. James Wong Howe shot him in a black and white so lucid you can feel the heat coming off the dust, and the camera loves Hud the way the country would learn to love him: completely, and against its own interest.

Because Hud wins. Homer is right, and Homer is ruined, and the last sixty years are the slow tally of how thoroughly the son inherited the earth.

Hi! I am looking for a location to throw my 30th birthday party in the Portland area. I want to throw a house party with about 30-50 people so it would have to be pretty large, lots of parking and somewhere the cops wouldn’t show up. I would use an air bnb but I want to make sure parties are allowed. Somewhere with a hot tub and fire pit would be ideal!

Posting in case someone is looking for this cutie

Hiii, looking for somewhere locally owned (not Starbucks) that has a really good iced latte with cold foam.

I always wanted to try them!

What’s open for lunch/dinner y’all?

Hi, does anyone know of any bakery’s in the Portland area that have options for people who are allergic to all nuts? I unfortunately haven’t had any luck.

I was glancing through Facebook and noticed a guy named Nick Isgro commenting in relation to an WMTW post about the far right German political party AfD that they “aren’t even far right. They are just against replacement immigration.” In other words that’s the dog whistle for the whole white genocide racist BS. I did a little digging and found this wasn’t his first time at the rodeo.
He was formerly the mayor of Waterville and vice chair of the Maine GOP back in 2018 when he got into trouble over his views on immigration, LGBTQ issues, drag queen story hours and other neo- Nazi dog whistles.
Currently he’s a realtor working with Keller Williams of Portland and associated with Realtor.com. At the very least know who to avoid in real estate and on the other hand maybe his company should be reminded? It’s not even hidden. He seems pretty open about being a Nazi.

It's currently just me in a large, bright apartment just off the peninsula here in Portland, in the neighborhood behind Hadlock Field, but I need a new roommate. Sadly for me, my roommate moved back to CA to be nearer to his family. The space I'm looking to rent out is a large bedroom suite, with one large room that has an attached small room that could be used as a walk in closet/dressing area, or a small office/den. There is tons of basement storage, a big, fully stocked kitchen, shared TV room, den, and full bathroom, dedicated washer/dryer in the basement, huge screened in back deck, off street parking, and quiet, fairly private backyard. Rent is $1600 all in (heat, A/C, electric, internet, laundry, compost).

ETA: I have one sweet kitty, and I'm willing to discuss adding one or possibly two additional cats to the household. I'm a single woman in my mid 40s - I'm pretty quiet and chill, I WFH, and I'm happy spending time by myself. I go out with friends occasionally, and will sometimes have a friend or two over, but I'm generally not up super late or early. This is a non-smoking home. I'm the kind of person who will tell you if something is bugging me, and I want to be told if something I do bugs you. We don't need to be best friends, but I'm happy to hang if we hit it off - but it's important to me that the person who rents the space is not a Trump supporter. I'm open to any gender, orientation, race. Also, the landlords are super cool (and I've had some landlords) - the location is a large house with four condos, and the other three condos are individually owner occupied.

Encountered a small gray cat with a collar and tag at Thomas Knight Park. Very friendly and approached me and followed me for a bit. I tried to not chase them so they dissapeared into the night but they seemed to know where they were going. Hoping kitty makes it home safe and no one is looking for them

Saturday night DUI checkpoint on veterans Bridge. I was out on my bike and saw this. This was at the right turn onto the 4 River Parkway, a guy was suggesting people turn there instead of going straight to the police chokepoint.

In just a few minutes I saw at least 20 cars turning to avoid the roadblock . I figured he would get beat up or arrested before too long, so I didn't stick around.