Welcome to 2026 and the 14th year of You Found a Secret Area. It’s kind of weird to think about for me. Over the past decade or so, I’ve seen a shift more towards video and streaming content, with long-form writing being shoved away. While I had dabbled in such things in the past, there’s been one thing that’s been constant, and that’s me sitting down at least once a month to put down a bunch of words about… stuff.
I don’t really have any super strong goals for the blog this year, besides to keep writing. Even in the age of AI slop, where cheap fly-by-night blogs scrape the internet to make blogs full of SEO marketing drivel that’s not even correct half the time, I’m not giving up on writing. It’s arguably one of my strengths, I don’t wanna offload my work to the plagiarism machines, the human element is most important thing to me.
That being said, back in June I said I’d make a “rest of 2025,” and here’s me fulfilling that promise. I know I did a separate post for Portland Retro Gaming Expo 2025, but this is the stuff I bought outside the convention. Here’s Some Stuff I Bought through the rest of 2025:
This first one was a case of a happy accident. In October, I decided to roam around the area and spotted a small resale shop called Village Merchants. Funny enough, a taco truck is also parked right next door to it, and they used the signboard to use “Who Wants a Taco,” which I think is sage advice we can all agree with.
Village Merchants is a quaint little place, mostly full of clothes, but also knick-knacks and other assorted things like music CDs. And I spotted one that really caught my interest.
$2 – Bob Miller’s Polkarena
Okay, I’m gonna be talking about local Portland, Oregon stuff here, so skip on if you’re not interested in knowing about local personalities from my neck of the woods.
This is a Christmas album made for 1190 KEX, an AM talk radio station that had a handful of local radio personalities, but nowadays is just a place if you wanna hear right-wing talk radio and Coast to Coast AM all day.
Bob Miller was a longtime personality for the station, starting in 1979 and continuing until 2003, moving on to KPAM until retiring in 2014. 35 years is a hell of a run for any radio personality, honestly. For a good chunk of the late 90s to the early 2000s, KEX would put out these charity CDs for the holidays. According to Discogs, this has a 1998 copyright, something I couldn’t easily find on the disc itself.
I bought this only because of the concept of a polka version of the famous “Macarena” one-hit wonder sounded appealing. It’s silly, mostly Bob talk-singing about German related things while trying to get Horst Mager, a famous Portland celebrity chef at the time, to sing. It’s not nearly as interesting as I was hoping, but it’s goofy even if they’re massively late to the party.
The rest of the album is various sketches and songs featured on Bob Miller’s radio show throughout 1998, including adding lyrics to the Olympic Games theme, A blues track about traffic on Interstate 5, and even some other Oregon themed tracks. There’s even a bit where Dennis Nordin, part of the KEX traffic chopper, talks about a tale of a woman stuck in a tree. Guess Portland has always been weird even in the late ‘90s.
While writing about this, I found out about Wes Cooley, a former Oregon Republican infamously for lying about his military record (not to be confused with the motorcyclist); and Jake O’Donnell, a former NBA referee who seemed to have a massive beef with Clyde Drexler, a basketball player who was a longtime player for the Portland Trailblazers. I’ve been living in Portland, Oregon all my life and I suddenly learned more about my city and state with this album. Thanks, Bob Miller.
For being a typical radio station charity CD made for the holidays, it’s Perfectly Fine. Nothing to write home about. It’s no Z100 Evil Barney Christmas, that’s for sure.
Fun fact: The track listing on the back of the CD doesn’t match the actual CD track listing. A performance of Heywood Banks’ “Diddly Squat” had to be yanked at the last minute due to licensing issues, so instead we have a silly little Christmas-themed song by Bob Miller instead.
My next journey was with my partner in late December. Two local thrift stores that are in my neck of the woods, of which the both of us found some really interesting things. But here’s what I bought for about $14, give or take a penny:
Flubber Multimedia CD-ROM Press Kit (sealed)
You remember Flubber, right? The 90s era remake of Disney’s The Absent Minded Professor with a cute CG little blob thing. Also Robin Williams being at his absolute Robin Williams-ist.
I bought this mostly because I wanted to see what silly little things it had on it, which were likely screencaps from the film alongside some Windows 95 themes. But mostly I bought this because it reminded me of my friend mavica, who absolutely adores this movie, primarily because of Weebo, the small little robot friend Williams’ character Philip Brainard talks with throughout the film.
Funny thing is, I found out later that this was already preserved on the Internet Archive. Now I just need to find period-appropriate hardware (or a Virtual Machine) and see what’s on this thing…
1999 by Prince
It’s Prince. What else is there to say? The absolute king of the Minneapolis sound. There’s a dire lack of Prince albums in my personal collection outside of one half of a Greatest Hits compilation, and I figure outside of Purple Rain, this is probably the Prince album to get. Unless there’s other, better choices, I don’t know my mid-80s funk R&B that well.
Oliver and Company DVD
To continue the unintentional Disney train, I decided to grab this movie. Granted, it might have already gotten a Blu-Ray release years ago, but whatever.
One of those late 80s Disney animation films when the animation department was in a major slump before the Disney Renaissance. Has Billy Joel playing a character named Dodger, complete with probably one of the best Billy Joel songs, “Why Should I Worry.”
I had the soundtrack for this on cassette, and it has been a long time since I last seen the film, so maybe it’ll be good. It even has a DVD minigame, because hey, it’s the 2000s and we gotta make use of this fancy new DVD technology!
The last place was a local mom-n-pop thrift store. The interior hasn’t really changed since the 1970s, and doesn’t even have proper fitting rooms. But I’ve found a treasure trove of stuff there, including the time I bought a bag of board games and found my copy of Home Alone 2: Lost in New York the board game had three video games packed inside it: Road Rash for the Genesis, Double Dragon V for the SNES, and Mortal Kombat for the Genesis. I’ve probably recited that story here a few times, and I still think it’s the most interesting surprise find in my years of thrifting.
For five dollary-doos, I got this stuff:
Music from the Motion Picture The Departed
Ah yes, the Scorsese film that finally got him a Best Picture Oscar. Only other thing I know about this film is it has Dropkick Murphys’ “I’m Shipping Up to Boston,” probably their signature song at this point.
The rest of the track selection is full of bangers too. A live performance of “Comfortably Numb” by Roger Waters of Pink Floyd with Van Morrison and the Band. The Beach Boys’ “Sail on, Sailor,” probably one of the best Beach Boys songs post-Pet Sounds. Even two score tracks by Howard Shore, “The Departed Tango” and “Beacon Hill” are really good in their own right.
Martin Scorsese is one of those directors who I know is an important man in the film industry, but I haven’t watched much of his work. I think I might actually watch The Departed, heard it was a pretty good flick.
Original Motion Picture Soundtrack: Reservoir Dogs
Another soundtrack, based off of Quentin Tarantino’s earliest hit. Yes, it has George Baker Selection’s “Little Green Bag” and Stealers Wheel’s “Stuck in the Middle with You,” along with a trove of dialogue from the film – why did soundtrack albums like doing that – and a bunch of radio interstitials by Steven Wright, covering K-Billy’s Super Sounds of the Seventies Weekend featured throughout the film.
It’s a perfectly okay soundtrack, but something that bugs me is that the versions featured seemed to be edited to fit the feel of the soundtrack rather than the original releases of the songs. As someone who takes songs from soundtracks to put into her personal song collection, this just makes the album more a novelty than a convenience. Oh well, didn’t pay too much for it, so can’t complain too much.
Tom Wilson: Bigger Than You (signed)
Ah, Tom Wilson. Biff Tannen from Back to the Future. “Maniac” from Wing Commander. And of course, a slew of other roles, but most people know him as Biff Tannen. So much so that he always performed a song during his stand-up routine about being known only as the guy who played Biff Tannen. He tried to stay away from that role so much that he didn’t even voice Biff Tannen when Telltale Games did that Back to the Future: The Game episodic series. (He eventually came back for the re-released “25th Anniversary Edition.”)
Outside of Biff’s Question Song, I know very little about Tom Wilson’s comedy routine. I fully expect there to be at least one (1) questionable joke in this package, and I figure his routine is probably gonna be somewhat goofy. But who knows? I don’t usually watch comedian stand-up specials, I wasn’t one of those Millennial kids who watched Comedy Central when they were airing every stand-up special they could get their hands on in the ‘90s, but I bet this might be a good time.
But the one thing that surprised me was that this copy had Wilson’s autograph on it. Someone who presumably asked him about something in Back to the Future, got this autographed and then dumped it onto this thrift store. What a tragedy.
That’s about it. I apologize that there isn’t a lot here, much like last year, but I think that might change this year. I’ve been improving my mental health at the tail end of 2025, so I believe the 2026 edition of this will be chock full of stuff. Hopefully.
Here’s to 14 years of writing pop culture fluff. Whether you’ve been around for a long time or are just being introduced to my work, I hope you enjoy reading. I’ll have something planned for later this month, surely.
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