Great question in the fanposts from Yawnie: What's the Rose Garden like?  A number of you stepped up to the plate to knock out solid "insider" answers to his query. To complement these, I present the following  "outsider" accounts from two very talented writers.  It's our chance to feel like microscopic third world natives in an anthropologist's snowglobe.  

Recently, in the comments, Sherman Alexie dropped some thoughts about his first Rose Garden experience, including: 

6. I never thought it would happen, but yes, there is an NBA arena that is even paler than Key Arena. Wow, there is a distinct absence of melanin in Rose Garden.

9. HARDLY ANYBODY LEFT THE GAME EARLY! At the Key, those first five rows usually started emptying at the four minute mark, which led me to dream of an NBA rule wherein you had to take a basketball knowledge quiz in order to sit in the first five rows.

19. The curvy bathrooms with the artsty exits are a little bit Dungeons & Dragons. I didn't know whether to pee or roll a twenty-sided die.

Sidenote: regarding point #6, I'd like to enter Salt Lake City into evidence. [Thanks to Sean at O Live for that.] 

Today, novelist and Opera fan Marc Acito described his first Blazers game -- which just so happened to be Brandon's miracle shot against the Rockets.  

Perhaps it was the teenage trauma of trying not to jiggle gelatinously while playing shirts-and-skins in gym class, or simply my natural aversion to having projectile objects hurtle through space at me. But I'd pretty much written off basketball as a bunch of overpaid pituitary cases running around gratuitously.

Then I saw the Jumbotron.

"That's what opera needs," I told Whitey (Ryan White) as I gazed at the high-def screen like it was a god. Likewise for the radio-controlled blimp, which periodically torpedoed coupons like cow pies onto the crowd.

Funny stuff.  He also takes shots at the Blazers Dancers.  Don't miss that.

Here's background on Marc and here's his official site.  Here's Sherman Alexie's official site as well.

-- Ben (benjamin.golliver@gmail.com)