Here's some pictures from the Portland march. I tried to get a photo from the top of the march all the way down but couldn't do it. By the time I got to the middle of the march the top was turning the corner and the end hadn't turned the corner into view yet. Also b/c everyone was wearing white we all kind of blurred together. Anyway from what I'm hearing from organizers the Portland march had about 40,000 people. That seems high to me but I could never see the whole march and people who started didn't finish and lots of people showed up late. I'd probably put it around 17,000.

Now you might be asking, "Antonio, I appreciate your estimate but you suck at math. You're not even that good at counting. When you heard the Yogi Berra quote 'Half this game is 90% mental.' you said, 'Totally!'. So what's the official count?"
Well I went looking at the Oregonian, official newspaper 'round these parts, and they're saying 8,000. The march was over twenty blocks long. There's no way that's right. But, I guess we all do look the same so they probably just lost count. My second guess is that there were 8,000 people there with the last name Gonzalez and then another 9,000 people with other last names.


On top of lowballing the estimate it's in a small box underneath some story about the Trailblazers. Didn't the trailblazers finish last? How is anything they do more newsworthy than a huge march in Portland and a second, equally huge march in Salem. I'm going to go get a paper later on today. If the newsprint version is as crappy I'll be pissed. I might even write an angry missive. I just checked NY Times and the Washington Post and it didn't make either websites' front page.

The second order of business I want to discuss is Flickr as a form of political protest. I took a few pictures of the march, but nowhere near as many as Cindy did. She uploaded her pictures to Flickr and with tags you can see, now this is a technical legal term, craploads of photos. All the most popular tags today deal with the rally. Now I am not a member of Flickr b/c they are owned by Yahoo and I strongly disagree with Yahoo's policy of helping the Chinese government to lock up dissidents. But I think this is a legitimate purpose. I'm going to join up and post my few photos so that there's one more voice being heard one more way.