Word of the Day
Ardor (n., ARR-door)
Intensity of emotion, enthusiasm, or passion. Good luck in the Super Bowl, Philadelphia.
Gif of the Day
AnimalsGroundhogsNom nom nomAllan?Rise and shine and don't forget your bootiesWhat if you see each other's shadows?
Link of the Day
Grantland - Katie Baker on Bridal Veil, OR
Bill Simmons changed internet sportswriting, then he got bored, so he built a website. It was modeled after his own interests: sports, pop culture, and good writing. It's to his credit that the site, Grantland, didn't just focus on the first two at the exclusion of the third. Grantland had as good a writing staff for all subject matters as existed on the internet. And while there are many pieces we could point to (it really hurt not to use something by Rembert Browne), Katie Baker's feature on Bridal Veil, OR is our pick today, capturing a town, the semi-madness around it, and a person who helps keep it alive:
New York always has the biggest weddings,” Canzler says. “I would say probably 10 batches from New York, they were all at least 400 per batch. Unbelievable, the size of their weddings.” She shows me a photo of what things look like in the early summer, her busiest time of year, when corrugated postal boxes filled with neat stacks of envelopes make it difficult to even walk to her desk. “When the sun comes, the brides come!” she says, with a singsong cadence that makes it sound like a mantra.
From March to August, Canzler processes about 150,000 pieces of wedding-related mail, for about half of which she also sells the postage. That amounts to roughly $40,000 in stamp sales, she says. In general, wedding-related work (and the odd Valentine) accounts for about 80 percent of the Bridal Veil post office’s income. The other 20 percent is a patchwork of small revenue streams. The gift shop at nearby Multnomah Falls, for example, does a brisk business on eBay, and Canzler handles the mailings for that. She does the same for the Oregon Stamp Society.
We are briefly interrupted by a rare visitor: a diminutive nun, one of several who live in a Franciscan convent in town, comes in and checks her P.O. box.
GrantlandKatie BakerWeddingsBridal Veil, ORBest of the internetI Canz stand it any more?