WHO THE HELL ARE YOU?

[November 23rd, 2005] How do Portlanders really feel about weed, wine, dogs, politics, high heels and each other? (And, most importantly, where do they stand on the "Brazilian")? With our inaugural come-one-come-all Q/A session, we aim to find out.

Portland may be hard up for high-wage jobs, wild-spawned salmon and cash to keep the schools open. But one thing we have in teeming abundance: opinions. In a city where one political bumper sticker is never enough, everyone has something to say about just about everything.

Somehow, though, the sloganeering-as-dialogue leaves us seriously unsatisfied. Why doesn't anyone ask the important questions, about the stuff that really matters in a city constantly in flux, crawling with transplanted newcomers and locked in a permanent identity crisis?

Like, for example, tattoos, TriMet and the popularity of paganism?

In our quest to figure out the real deal in the City of Roses, WW composed a mega-survey, designed to expose the nethermost regions of Portland's collective consciousness. We added a few jabs of local trivia to find out just how much people actually know about this fine metropolis.

We expect the results to be ugly, but we're going ahead anyway.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it: take the survey by Dec. 14. We'll throw the email addresses of all participants into a cast-off Von Dutch trucker's cap, and we'll draw the names of 10 lucky prize winners. One will receive a dinner and a night in a hotel—and we're not talking tacos and a skeezy room on North Interstate, people. Five folks will receive $75 worth of waxing pleasure (backs and pubes not excluded—Rio de Janeiro, look out!) at Wax On Spa. The rest will receive WW-customized gifts with varying levels of raunch.

A couple of notes:

One, this is not a marketing survey. (We pay professionals to do those.) Your responses will not be used to sell ads, unless we can figure out a really clever new moneymaking strategy that hasn't occurred to us yet.

Two, we'd like to acknowledge the good work of an obscure newspaper called The New York Times: We blatantly stole this idea, and some of the questions verbatim, from them. (We figure the Times' staffers will be too busy beating the crap out of each other over Judith Miller to notice the plagiarism. And if they do—well, maybe they're hiring!)

So dig deep. Unleash. We want to know what you think about this city and your fellow Portlanders. We'll publish the results sometime in January—and until then, you can bask in the knowledge that you're absolutely right about everything.

Take the survey: http://surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=554431518964