Songfacts®:

• This song fuses Portland resident Steven Malkmus' fantasy about the Green Tortoise bus – a cheap way of getting from San Francisco to Portland in the 1970s – with an encounter he had with a "ne'er-do-well hippy guy," who declared that the people who died in the Twin Towers on 9/11 deserved their fate because they were working for The Man. "It's a Portland song, but it's Portland in the 80s, before I was here," Malkmus explained to Uncut magazine, "when cinema and was avant garde and lesbianism was shocking to some people."
  
  "Joanna (Bolme, bass) was worried the title might be un-PC, so I asked our publicist in New York," he added. "He's like, 'No. Those cinnamon and there's lesbians. What's the problem?'"
• Malkmus incorporated the riff from the Grateful Dead's "St. Stephen" into this song. However, the frontman has said in interviews that he's not much of a Deadhead. He told American Songwriter magazine: "Yeah. It's interesting, but it's pretty simple. I like the early stuff, recorded and live, like Pigpen and the acid-y stuff. And I like Workingman's Dead and American Beauty, and I don't really like it after that. And I didn't go to shows, and I don't listen to bootlegs much. I'm approaching things from albums and what they recorded. That's what I know. I'm the suburban guy who just got the albums. I just created my own vision of things; I didn't really get into the scene."