According to Webster's dictionary...
work:
1. exertion or effort directed to produce or accomplish something; labor; toil
This concept of actual labor, is something with which the folks at city hall are obviously totally unfamiliar.
Perhaps the 'Weird isn't Working' team should reverse the saying to read, "Working isn't Weird".

“We are in the process of creating what deserves to be called the idiot culture. Not an idiot sub-culture, which every society has bubbling beneath the surface and which can provide harmless fun; but the culture itself. For the first time, the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norm, even our cultural ideal.”

Carl Bernstein quotes (American Journalist, b.1944)

America: I give you PORTLAND ORYGON!

Weird is taking three kids under the age of five downtown for an outing to the Hilton pool, and finding a meter maid writing me a parking ticket as we get back from getting a parking pass from the nearest automated dispenser around the corner.

Weird is a park system that only opens its pools to kids from 1-4pm, when they are at school, and from 7.30 pm on, when they are having dinner, doing homework, and getting ready for bed.

Weird is talking to the mom of a newly diagnosed schizophrenic teenager telling me that she was hoping that a homeopath and naturopath would be able to help wean her child off of meds.

Weird is going to a police union contract negotiation with the city, at a time of turmoil and tension over the unnecessary and inappropriate killing of mentally ill/alcoholically demented/suicidal citizens, and seeing the police chief's gun in his holster and handcuffs hanging out of the pocket of his suit pants.

Weird is at the same contract negotiation, witnessing the union lawyer refuse to open discussions in front of the public, suggesting a certain hotel, (which, he was careful to point out, employs union labor), as a private venue to keep the public out.

Weird is collecting signatures to recall a corrupt public official, and canvassing “Union manor” a union-related retirement apartment complex, where an elderly man getting out of his car tells me- “my wife has had a stroke and doesn't understand anything- let me get her upstairs and settled in and I'll come back and sign that petition”; and then being kicked out of the parking lot under threat of a call to the police, by the apartment managers.

Weird is a city with a lot of citizens who think sexual activity between a city official and a teenager in the city hall restroom constitutes protected private behavior, and furthermore, will go to lengths to brand people who disagree with them , as homophobic.

Weird is a city where a local journalist agrily defaces a recall petition sheet after pretending to be interested in signing it.

Weird is being told by an older Jewish tanguero from the midwest, who travels frequently on business, and has visited most of the major US tango communities, that he finds Portland to have the coldest tango community of them all, hands down. On his first visit here, I was one of only a few people in Portland who accepted his invitation to dance, over the two nights he tried his luck. Ironically, I found him much more charming to dance with than most of the locals, because he practices a humorous Argentine form that involves little or no physical contact. Go figure.

Weird is writing a charter school proposal, and then sitting through hours of negative public testimony, only to be told later, by the most intellectually prepared anti-charter testifier, that, oh, BTW, he actually home-schools his kids, because, well, who knows why PPS didn't work out for him.

Weird is the enormous student-teacher collaboration mural covering the whole hallway of my erstwhile K-5 neighborhood school, depicting, among other things: the Titanic sinking (with the Little Mermaid in an adjacent lifeboat, smiling); the Oklahoma city bombing, planes racing toward the Twin Towers,
and a host of other sickening images not constituting appropriate daily visual fare for kindergarten children, or adults, for that matter.

Weird is the post-9/11 encounter in the Lloyd center cinema bathroom with an older woman in braids, tie-dye shirt, and jeans, who yelled at me “Osama Bin Laden is a FREEDOM FIGHTER!”

And I think I have only started to scratch the surface.

Weirdly self-involved and ridiculously eager to find fault with Portland is someone who thinks this meaningless personal story somehow characterizes the city as a whole. Go figure:

"Weird is being told by an older Jewish tanguero from the midwest, who travels frequently on business, and has visited most of the major US tango communities, that he finds Portland to have the coldest tango community of them all, hands down. On his first visit here, I was one of only a few people in Portland who accepted his invitation to dance, over the two nights he tried his luck. Ironically, I found him much more charming to dance with than most of the locals, because he practices a humorous Argentine form that involves little or no physical contact. Go figure."

Richard, isn't experiencing Portlandia's Weirdness mostly a personal experience? Go figure.