Otherwise known as a "Scott Moore."

Please, PLEASE explain to me how the Mercury can pretend to be a local paper when one of their staff writers cannot even understand the one thing that unites all Portlanders, regardless of age, sex, economic class, or hipster level... Don't you actually interview your writers?!?

Matt, you poor, poor boy. You should demand that your employer send you to the proper training for a man in your position. I believe there are several options around town for your education.

Do you want to get me started on Portland being full of fat stoner losers again? Shall we talk about Knocked Up? Puh-leazzze.

Incidentally Scott's not a loser. Or fat. Or a stoner. So he says, between tokes on that doobie.

No way you could cover politics and not do the stuff.

Have you noticed that 4:20 has become a banned time, on the news? They'll announce something happened at 4:35 and then say something else happened "just before 4:30".

Seriously, I was watching a cricket game at Lord's in London, the "home of cricket". They have a way of recalulating the score/wickets/time to bowl, after a delay in the game. The new innings cut-off time was 4:20, and it was posted on the scoreboard. About 7 minutes later, it was changed to 4:23. The commentators are nit picky and experts on the game, and, obviously not having been clued in, began yelling about, "hello, what's this. Why'd they change the time. There's no bloody reason. That's the strangest thing I've seen in 50 years at Lord's".

Before I was suspicious, but that seemed like a pretty obvious case. The addition of the three minutes to the innings was never explained.

I had an apartment manager once that walked into my kitchen and smiled when she saw the dead clock set at 4:20. She said her mother is convinced that there's some wierd phenomenon going on in the PNW, with clocks being stopped at 4:20.

Can someone please, without personal reference or lame antidotes- please please explain what 420 means? I know marijuana use, but why? Why not 421? or 227? Shit, maybe I should be asking wikipedia instead of a bunch of stoners (I'm a loser too..)

Courtesy of Wikipedia:

"Although many diverse theories exist to explain the origin of the term, it is widely accepted that in 1971, a group of teenagers at San Rafael High School in San Rafael, California, calling themselves "The Waldos", used to meet after school at 4:20 p.m. to smoke cannabis at the Louis Pasteur statue. The term became part of their group's salute, "420 Louis!", and became popularized in the late 1980s by fans of The Grateful Dead."

The worst thing about switching from pot to Scotch whiskey is having to wait until five o'clock.

(There's some more campaign mailer fodder for you Amy!)

filing it away...

I thought it was originally a NARC code to describe marijuana use. Thats what I remember from my GD/hippie days.

The weird thing is that in the UK, there's a Nigerian hiphop collective called the "419 squad." 419 is the police code for internet fraud, and this bunch of Nigerian kids decided to reclaim the term or whatever.

So to find out that 420 also has significance is really funny.

That "Waldos" thing looks like Wiki vandalism to me.

I'd always heard the term came from the 3-digit response codes used by the LAPD. "187" means homicide, "420" means marijuana use, etc.