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.
(more…)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.