You may recall a recent article in The Onion, Moving To New City To Solve All Of Area Man’s Problems.

“Moving to Portland is going to make all the difference in the world,” said Shepard, who, just by putting 2,500 miles distance between himself and years of destructive behavior, will suddenly turn his life around. “It won’t be anything like Chicago, or Boston, or San Francisco. This is exactly what I need right now.”

Boston Globe correspondent Jennifer Schwartz has re-written the article, but her version is not quite as funny nor succinct. Head down, looking for a smile is, however, full of those wonderful Portland cliches (editorial comments and Portland stereotypes and cliche emphasis mine):

My plane was heading to Portland, Ore., where I’d be visiting my best friend and other Boston expats who now live there. Kali and her boyfriend, Matt, share a spacious two-bedroom townhouse in the hipster-heavy Southeast section, and pay a grand total of $700 a month in rent.

Ordering a craft brew on tap costs less than a mass-produced light beer elsewhere [seriously? is that true?! Remind me never to leave Portland]. Strangers are actually friendly. Many people are in flux, and they’re openly OK with not running on the career treadmill. The music scene lives up to its reputation. Bars don’t play host to meat markets. (They also stay open past 2 a.m.) [um, another 30 minutes?] And, oh, those blissful bike lanes.

Anyway, you get the idea. Nothing, though, about the unicorns . . .

An automatically generated list of possibly related posts:

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2. Hair of the Dog is Moving
3. The Globe and Mail gives a shout out to Portland Poutine
4. 2007 Twilight Criterium moving to North Park Blocks
5. New site raises awareness of TriMet ticket machine problems