Three’s company

Compare & contrast positions

The Portland, Ore., mayoral race is boring, pundits say, because you can’t tell the candidates apart.

To bring a little life to the proceedings, Willamette Week held a fake mayoral smackdown in which it pitted local favorites against each other — a bacon maple bar, for instance, and a Paul Bunyan statue.

The bacon maple bar won two rounds of voting against real, live human beings, only to be defeated by the statue in round three.

(I stopped following the race when the fake campaigning got nasty. In round two, the beloved, born-in-Portland elephant, Packy, lost to Jack Bogdanski after the blogger accused the pachyderm of elephant-on-hippo sex — and posted the photos to prove it.)*

But real politics should be interesting, too, and Portland Monthly helps voters tell Portland’s actual candidates apart with this tabular, compare-and-contrast article:

Do you have people, places, things or positions to compare and contrast? Distinguish them from each other with tables.

* Timothy Hutton eventually won Willamette Week’s fake mayoral race. Hutton, a New York City-based actor, plays Nathan Ford in the TV show Leverage. The show takes place in Boston but is filmed in Portland, so it only makes sense that Portlanders would name Hutton our new fake mayor.