Portland Comes in Last in Recent DOEW Poll

Detroit, MICH. (The Detroit Picayune) -- The results are in, and this year's loser is: Portland, Oregon. The Department of Education and Welfare released its latest annual Quality of Peace of Mind Index Poll results, a nationally-administered test designed to measure the Department of Education and Welfare's relative confidence in the educational, cultural, and economic health of 100 major American metropolitan areas. This year, Portland edged out Detroit for last place, placing Detroit in the unprecedented 99th position, a high this city has not seen in the last 70 years.

Some factors which the DOEW cited as being of primary concern, and which caused Portland to slip into 100th place (from last year's 97th), are the following:

1. 9 out of 10 Portland high schoolers could not locate the United States on a map of the United States. 7 out of 10 did not understand what the name "United States" referred to. 5 out of 10 did not know they lived in Oregon. 3 out of 10 smoked marijuana with poll takers, after which they (both poll takers and students) completely forgot why they were meeting, and so went to a weekend party at Molly Mallory's in the West Hills, who puts out for Seniors if they have access to their parents' BMWs, or so the poll takers were led to believe. In fact, Miss Mallory (Class of 2012) does not put out, as DOEW poll takers learned to their chagrin mere moments before narrowly escaping incarceration as police arrived at the scene to investigate complaints of excessive noise and reckless vomiting.

2. Fully 87% of respondents were reported to be in a state of "advanced inebriation" during poll taking. Pollsters for the DOEW reported numerous instances of respondents inviting pollsters into private residences for the purpose of late-morning or mid-afternoon "snack times," which refers to the local custom of imbibing as much beer as possible on one's lunch break, or, in the case of the nearly 15% of Oregonians who are unemployed and the nearly 55% of Oregonians who are mere slackers, at any time of the day or night, and, preferably, at all times of the day and night. The number of poll takers actually participating in this local custom was not released, but unofficial estimates put the tally at 100%.

3. 10% of Portlanders admitted to owning a pair of toe shoes, the recent fad of hideous-looking footwear designed for no other purpose than to offend decent, fashion-conscious, upstanding citizens. 10% also admitted to owning a pair of Birkenstock sandals, but unofficial reports from participating pollsters puts that number closer to 99%.

4. Homelessness has risen to an alarming 33% of the population. One local resident attributed the cause of this to "all those fucking bums," which admittedly puts the cart before the horse, while another said, rather unhelpfully, that "it's worse than it used to be." DOEW workers investigating the problem report that the number of homeless has risen a drastic 1,327% in the last ten years, with the majority of new homeless describing themselves as "entrepreneurs" who have discovered a new system of requesting alms which involves rotating 8-hour shifts on freeways exits and entrances. One homeless man interviewed by an off-hours DOEW pollster said he was earning an unbelievable $95 per hour, tax-free, by working such a system, and invited said pollster back to his sleeping bag to share a celebratory bottle of Chateau LaTour '87 which he said he had been saving for the day he "broke a hunnerd an hour, dude."

5. The Home Pricing Index in Portland sunk to an incredible .00006785, which means that homes purchased in 2009 are now, in 2010, worth .00006785% of last year's purchase price. Local residents of Portland's condo-heavy Pearl District have reported medical problems due to the labor involved in opening and shutting doors heavily-laden with realtor's lock boxes. One man interviewed was recovering from shoulder surgery resulting from a strong gust of wind slamming shut the back door to his condo building, a door whose handle held 77 lock boxes of various weights and sizes. Doctors estimated that the force of the extra weight was the equivalent of having one's arm torn from the socket by 17 bull elephants at the high point of musth detecting the presence of an ovulating female withing ten yards' distance.

6. The Portland Art Museum, when interviewed, bragged that they had "the country's 87th-largest collection of Thomas Kinkade paintings." Pollsters felt that no further comment was necessary here, and so retired to the nearby Virginia Cafe for Bloody Marys and tater tots.

The DOEW report went on at length, citing 17,342 reasons why Portland ranked last in their poll. This reporter lost interest after the sixth point, preferring instead to retreat to his local watering hole to celebrate his city's ascension to 99th, finally being able to look down on somewhere else as the shittiest place in America.

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Comrade X, We Hardly Knew Ye

Portland, ORE. (AP) -- Beloved blogger Comrade X died early last week from ignominy sustained while trapped under a local streetcar. This reporter would like to present Comrade X's obituary as it appeared in the New York Times (2/14/11):

Internationally-unknown blogger Comrade X, one of the last crusaders in the struggle against capitalism, died last week from a severe disinclination to live, coupled with heightened boredom and the stress of finding his rather corpulent body trapped under a streetcar. Raised during the height of the Cold War by fromageurs on an artisan cheese farm in then-barbaric Minnesota, Comrade X was exposed early to communist ideology and lectured constantly about the evils of capitalism. His parents, Mr. and Mrs. Comrade X, were locally famous sheep-cheese artisans in a state whose prime source of revenue consisted of cow cheese manufacture, and were consequently marginalized by the local populace of Uddertown, MN. Comrade X excelled in school despite the incessant taunts of his lactose-infused schoolmates. He graduated from at least three universities before this reporter lost count, then spent years riding the rails, criss-crossing the United States in order to fully understand "the extent and utter imbrication of capitalist ideology in the vacuous minds and dessicated souls of everyday Americans," as he put it in his recently-unreleased autobiography, Too Fat To Live, Too Ugly To Die: The Untold Story of the Incessant Struggle for Freedom of One Comrade X, American.

After college(s), Comrade X devoted his life to teaching, hoping, in his words, "to educate these poor fucks who never had a chance, due to the utter contempt towards education in this country, and the resulting disdainful and self-hating and utterly worthless people who go into that particular occupation." After years of struggling in academia, Comrade X succumbed to a regimen of anti-depressants, anxiolitics, and alcohol, which caused, in the words of one of his closest friends, Comrade Y, "a kind of, you know, what do you call it? Umm, like, break in his ... umm, his, like .... you know?"

Comrades X and Y met one sultry summer afternoon in the Brokeback Bar in Venice Beach, called by many "the darkest, dankest, fucking dirtiest bar in the country." Comrade X was vomiting by the jukebox while Comrade Y was trying to play a Tom Petty medley. A friendship was instantly struck, and Comrades X and Y then went on to create the world-unreknowned Irritable Blog Syndrome blog, established for the sole purpose of defeating capitalism in all its various insidious manifestations.

After almost a year of hard labor, writing the blog and pursuing an unrewarding career path, Comrade X began to exhibit symptoms of depression worse than those he was known for. "That dude was fucking depressed, man," one of his former students commented. "Fucking depressed!" Loss of income, constant job stress, and the myriad pressures of daily blog writing forced Comrade X to seek psychiatric care. "Yes, he came to me, seeking help," said his former psychiatrist, Dr. Nowan Sowat, "but I could do nothing for him. He was too far gone." Comrade X then sought refuge in alcohol and sugar-based food products. "Oh, yes, he would come in and buy a week's worth of beer and Sara Lee, and then come back the next day and buy the same again. I wondered what he was up to, but of course I couldn't refuse to sell to him. I saw he had a problem, but I have kids to feed, you know? I thought, let him eat cake, so what?" said local merchant, Singh Flamabel, whose bodega Comrade X frequented daily.

Drinking and dessert-binge-eating took its toll, until that fateful day when Comrade X screamed those memorable words, "I don't wanna live!" and threw himself under the streetcar, his ice cream cone akimbo. The rest, as the Bard says, is silence.

Memorial services will be held somewhere at some point. The real memorial is, as always, in the hearts and minds and souls of Comrade X's ever-vigilant, ever-revolutionary followers. Viva la révolucion!

Sort of Funny Show Gets It Kind of Right

Portland, ORE. (Reuters) -- Every Sunday night the Baghdad Theater and Pub keeps its doors open late to screen for eager beer-drinking viewers the latest installment of the not-quite-hit, not-quite-original, not-quite-funny new show Portlandia (IFC). This new series takes on Portland, Ore., in all its -- as the show would have you believe -- charming eccentricity. The truth, however, is far more alarming. This reporter has compiled the following list of must-know top-ten factoids about this self-styled Doorway to Nowhere that any viewer of the show should know in order not to be cajoled by its catchy theme song and suggestive meretriciousness:

1. The dream of the 90s is by no means alive in Portland. Portland is a city whose clock stopped somewhere in the early-to-middle 1980s, and has yet to realize that the Do Not Resuscitate order the rest of America has, by dint of its attempt to stay current with world trends, imposed by proxy upon this sluggish Rain Belt city has yet to be rescinded. Portland is a place where the 80s came not to die, but to live out a superannuated existence, untroubled by the realities of fashion or good taste or even (this reporter hates to say) good manners.

2. Portland is a city where tipping in excess of 20% is expected (and, it is shameful to say, violently remarked upon in its absence) without the concomitant belief in good service, or, in fact, of service of any kind.

3. Public education in Portland still operates on the macaroni-and-hand-tracing paper plate Thanksgiving turkey decoration model. In high school.

4. Funding for public education has been whittled down to 0.0001% of the GDP of the state. Students are required not only to provide their own materials and textbooks, but to provide their own teachers.

5. There exist 35,362 forms of mold in Portland alone, ten times that in the rest of the state. Fully 95% of them are toxic.

6. Alcoholism was recently redesignated from a public health concern to a city sporting event.

7. 9 out of 10 recent tourists interviewed in a New York Times poll couldn't tell the homeless from the residents. 10 out of 10 found both equally annoying.

8. Portland's Chinatown now contains no actual Chinese residents.

9. In Portland, one can wear harachis, balloon pants, an orange taffeta vest, and a hat made of toilet seat sanitizers, and NOT be making a fashion statement.

10. 6 out of 10 Portlanders don't know that the river that runs through the middle of their city -- the Willamette -- is a Super Fund site. 2 out of 10 were surprised to learn that there was a river running through the middle of their city. 2 out of 10 were too stoned to answer the question.

This reporter hopes that the information provided here will serve to offset any misrepresentation created by the new series Portlandia. But, of course, as in all things, you should really see for yourself.

Anonymous Blogger Calls It Quits

Portland, ORE. (AP) -- The anonymous blogger known to the world only as "Comrade X" decided late yesterday afternoon to take his own life in what many observers thought a fashion well in keeping with his flamboyant and outrageous online image. One witness to Comrade X's publicly-staged yet apparently spur of the moment suicide noted that the controversial and lately mostly silent blogger had "ballooned out on antidepressants," gaining what another observer termed "a shitload of weight." This witness further noted, "Dude, he was like, walking down the sidewalk with one of them triple-decker ice cream cones in his hand, the strawberry-chocolate-vanilla kind? With sprinkles? And he, like, said, 'I don't wanna live!' and threw himself under the streetcar. And his ice cream cone flew up in the air and the ice cream scoops rolled up against the curb and this girl ate them!" This report was corroborated by another witness who remarked, "Yeah, this girl said, like, 'I'm gonna eat that!' and she totally ate his ice cream while he was like, lying under the streetcar." It seems that Comrade X's attempted suicide did not initially succeed, as he was of rather large proportions and the clearance under the streetcar measured a mere six inches. Yet fantastically, he managed to roll under it and become trapped there (interestingly enough, it seems that on average, 47 Oregonians per year become trapped under light rail public transportation and live; 1, 237 become trapped and die, usually due to the fact that no one cares that they're under there), and when rescue workers from the Oregon Department of Public Transportation arrived to take out the floor panels of the streetcar and pull him through it, he screamed, "Let me die with dignity!" and refused to be moved. A grueling 72 hours later, after the Portland police rushed in negotiators, suicide hotline volunteers, a score of psychotherapists, a team of Ben and Jerry's employees, and Comrade X's own mother, the usually indomitable blogger succumbed to the elements and died, his face frozen in a rictus of utter disdain. Said one observer, "Dude, his face was ALL fucked up! I'm not gonna forget that any time soon. Not for, like, a week, at least!" Services were to be held at Grace Memorial Chapel until someone found a copy of Comrade X's will, which stipulated that his body be cut into one-inch cubes and dropped from a height of 100 feet onto downtown Portland. The date of the carcass dispersal has yet to be announced.

The Worst College in America

Portland, ORE. (AP) -- US News and World Report recently listed their top picks for colleges in 2011. They listed their bottom picks for the current year, as well. This year, as in most previous years, the college coming in at the absolute bottom is (no surprise to long-time readers of that periodical): Portland State University. Some of the reasons given for this ranking of that particular institution are these:

1. 95% of PSU faculty fantasize about being students in their own classes; the remaining 5% fantasize about being students in other professors' classes, hoping desperately that they might learn something.

2. 77% of PSU faculty masturbate to the thought of watching themselves teach; 22% masturbate to the thought of watching a video explaining what teaching is; 1% masturbate without realizing it (often in the classroom setting).

3. 17% of PSU professors have had sex with their students; 83% have tried and failed to have sex with their students.

4. 11% of PSU faculty have had a scholarly article rejected by a refereed journal in their field in the past year; 52% of PSU faculty were unable to name a refereed journal in their field; 3% of PSU faculty were unable to define the term "journal"; 87% of PSU faculty described themselves as "resting on my laurels, man."

5. 54% of PSU faculty have been drunk within 24 hours of teaching; 44% of PSU faculty have been drunk while teaching; 2% of PSU faculty are Mormons.

6. Tuition rates at PSU have risen 150% within the last five years. Faculty workload has decreased 3,550% within the last five years. Faculty productivity (calculated as a measurement of written work [both published and unpublished], courses taught, amount of papers and exams given and graded, time spent developing lecture content, committee work, public service, and course development) has declines 127,342% over the last twenty years.

7. The average PSU tenured professor teaches 4 classes within any given year. The average PSU student enrolls in 4 classes within any given year.

8. PSU faculty have been accused of the following malfeasances: gross incompetence; inability to speak a language recognizable by the majority of the students; inability to understand the rudiments of the required curriculum they are teaching; inappropriate conduct; inappropriate language; inappropriate intelligence; inappropriate attire; general inappropriateness; gross ineptitude; moral turpitude; intellectual laziness; general laziness; fucking laziness; absolute hippieness; partial hippieness; obsolescence. [All charges taken from grievances filed by students and faculty members 2009-2010.] In only 2% of these cases has any faculty member bothered to dispute such charges. In only 0.000000000000000001% of those cases have the charges been taken seriously by a panel of equally inept and morally bankrupt peers.

9. PSU restrooms have been labeled "the worst in the country" by Washroom Attendant Monthly, a peer-reviewed journal of scholarly inquiry into restroom-related issues.

10. PSU received votes of "no fucking confidence" more often (97% of all votes tallied) than any other university in America by currently matriculating students (it is interesting to note in this context that the current [i.e., school year 2009-2010] breakdown of grades by student by course at PSU is the following: 63% A; 6% B; 0.5% C; 30.5% Incomplete).

These are merely a few of the interesting statistics recently published by US News and World Report about this university. Certainly as this reporter investigates further, even more astounding facts will come to light.