This video compilation over at Gawker (shiver) presents, in ninety wonderful seconds, the best cat memes of 2010, including a list of all the links.

Personally, I'm dropping three Oxycontins, snorting five bumps of coke, swilling a gallon of tequila, and spending the remainder of the evening in the back of a Chiers van... but that's just me. WHAT ARE YOU UP TO?
If you're still searching for the fun, here are a few maybes for your list.
Get your sheets wet, listenin' to Keith Sweat! Boost your booty-gettin' chances by 94 percent this New Year's Eve with one of the sultriest, sexiest, suavest R&B crooners of the New Jack Swing era. Sweat will undoubtedly get your date's blood boiling (in a good way) with bedroom classics such as "I Want Her," "Twisted," and "Nobody."
w/Mint Condition, Tracy Harris, Mike Phillips; Crystal Ballroom, 1332 W Burnside, 9 pm, $55
If you want to dance and do not like fucking around, Lazer Sword are here for you. The Berlin/LA duo of Lando Kal and Low Limit are all business when it comes to dropping thick slabs of pure bass, pulsating electronica, and a cavalcade of hyper-mixed beats that will make you leave it all out on the dance floor.
w/Elliot Lipp, R/D, Virtual Boy, Tyler Tastemaker, plus more DJs upstairs at Rotture; Branx, 320 SE 2nd, 9 pm, $20
Adam Shearer might be one of the finer songwriters around, but the Weinland frontman knows what you want from a New Year's Eve party—to dance like a motherfucker. That's why Weinland sheds their sad-bastard stylings for one night of the year, and transform into a roof-raising party band like no other.
w/Sallie Ford and the Sound Outside, DJ Safi; Doug Fir, 830 E Burnside, 9 pm, $15-17
The band that once offered to "rub you down with brandy," Strength is a hip-thrusting trio whose swirling disco-pop sound can raise the temperature of any dance floor. Joining them is an army of diverse Portland talent, from the restrained, delicate folk sounds of Benoît Pioulard to the crate-digging LP collection of DJ Beyondadoubt.
w/We Like Cats, Benoît Pioulard, DJ Beyondadoubt, DJ Copy, DJ Zac Eno, Sex Life DJs; Holocene, 1001 SE Morrison, 8 pm, $12
While they remodel their longtime home, Ground Kontrol's temporary location two doors down has the same great games and fun (and bar!), but with blacklights! Play free games all night with admission, while DJs Ghostdad, Capcom, and Epor keep the energy up.
10 NW 5th, 5 pm, $15, 21+
Bummed that you didn't win our auction to have Langhorne Slim play at your private party? Yeah, we know, but don't worry buddy, you can still catch him at this public show!
w/Sassparilla, Jessi Adele; Mission Theater, 1624 NW Glisan, 9 pm, $20-25, 21+
The First Annual Galaxy Blood Drive runs tomorrow from 9 am-2:30 pm at the Red Cross' Portland Donor Center (3131 N Vancouver), with representatives from the 501st Legion and the Klingon Assault Group in attendance. Blood donors will be able to vote for either the stormtroopers or the Klingons (the winning group gets a "Galaxy Drive Trophy"), and can also score buttons, shirts, and stuff like "a one-night stay at the Columbia Gorge hotel, a 'Tauntaun' sleeping bag, two $25 gift certificates from Gartner’s Meat Market, a Mary Kay package, and more." (Snicker all you want; while Klingons wouldn't be caught dead with Mary Kay products, Odo uses 'em all the goddamn time.) Naturally, there'll also be photo ops, just in case after giving blood you want a photo of your pale, trembling self next to some dude who keeps loudly insisting he's Worf's long-lost brother.
Should be fun, as long as Alexander doesn't show up. Or TK-421. I hear that guy's a dick.
Sorry for the late start, but I had to beat the lines at the liquor store, right? HERE'S THE NEWS!
CRAP! Apparently while I was at the liquor store, people around the world already started celebrating the new year! HURRY! DRINK FAST!!
A "suspected" tornado kills three in Missouri. So they're saying it could've been a guy with a leaf blower?
A Texas robber rings in the New Year by robbing a bank and taking three hostages.
Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico refuses to pardon wild west gunslinger Billy the Kid. In response, Billy the Kid said, "Like I give two shits... I'm dead."
John Mellencamp and wife Elaine are splitting up; no word yet on who retains custody of the little pink houses.
There's so much sexual misconduct going on in this story, I don't know where to begin.
A house fire in Seattle traps six on a rooftop, forcing a 70-year-old woman to jump into the arms of a fireman. (I'd jump even without the threat of a fire.)
Now here's what's going on in your neck of the woods: JESUS CHRIST, IT'S COLD TODAY with a high of 37. Expect more of the same sunny cold conditions until further notice.
And finally, from all of us here at Blogtown, we wish you all the Happiest of New Years! Let's try to make 2011 the best yet, and let's start it all off with a little "Electric Boogie," shall we? GET CRUNK!
It's twenty-eleven, you guys, and Jack Stuef explains why.
And here we are! It's the final installment of the fuckiest retrospective ever, "The Fuckiest Things of 2010!" And while we may be tempted to go ahead and preemptively write off 2011 as "fucky" as well—I would ask you to hold your goddamn horses, and remember the words of fucky nominee Chad Goldwasser who told us all back in November to MAKE... THINGS... HAPPEN! Here he is again, and whenever he mentions the word "sales," I want you to substitute it with "2011"—the year all of us are gonna... MAKE... THINGS... HAPPEN!! YEAH!! TNT!! DYN-O-MITE!
(Or at least don't kill yourself, okay? Have a great and safe New Year.)
So I have been dating a girl for the past five months and things became pretty serious pretty fast. She is 29-years-old with a professional career, and I am a 22-year-old graduating from college in May and heading into the Army as an officer. Things have been going very well, the sex was great, conversation was awesome, we seemed very compatible. I had just visited her family for three days out of state and then she met mine again for the second half of Christmas day. We spent the rest of the weekend together and had dinner together monday night. I slept over and woke up on Tuesday and could tell she was distant, possible in a bad mood, I didn't know, so I just gave her her space.Six hours later she text messages me saying, "Sorry for acting the way I did this morning, I'm just freaking out." I asked what about and she responded saying, "I'm scared of our future and how serious we have become." She now says she doesn't want to waste her time in a relationship with an expiration date as she feels that she will not be able to handle long distance. I told her that I don't leave for a long time and as time progresses we can figure out what to do. We had talked very briefly about her moving out to wherever I get stationed, but I kind of figured that it's too early to make that decision.
I love this woman more then anyone I have ever been with and she makes me very happy. I don't want to lose her but I don't want to fuck with her head. She said she was going to see a therapist about her relationship issues after the New Year, something she had just mentioned to me. I told her that's a great idea, and I'll be here to help her through anything she's going through and we can figure out our long-term situation as time progresses.
Should I let her go? Or do I try and stick around so we can work it out together?
Older Women Problems
The narrator in this scare documentary from the 1950s is totally shit-talking the gays getting down in this Parisian homo club—but goddamn it, if it were around today, I WOULD BE SO THERE.
First, the headline:
Greensburg Middle Schooler Fondled Girl, 12
Yikes, that sounds terrible, doesn't it? People shouldn't run around fondling 12-year-old girls, for crying out loud, and I sure hope they caught the middle schooler who fondled that poor girl and—wait a minute. A 12-year-old girl is a middle schooler. So... what we're talking about here is one middle schooler fondling another middle schooler?
Yes, that's exactly what we're talking about. The fondler—who's made to sound like sexual predator in that headline—was a 13-year-old middle schooler. He's a classmate of the "victim," in fact, and the fondling was consensual. And you'll never guess what happened next:
Police have charged a 13-year-old Greensburg Salem Middle School student with fondling a 12-year-old student when they sneaked away to a band equipment room during school hours. Greensburg police aren't identifying the suspect charged in Westmoreland County Juvenile Court. They said his actions are criminal even though the younger female student consented to the fondling because, under the law, she is deemed too young to consent. Police said the incident happened Dec. 16 after the students met in a hallway and walked together to the band room at the school.
So now it's a crime for a couple of middle-school students to make out in a band equipment room. It's not just ill-advised, it's not just worryingly precocious sexual behavior or appropriate sexual exploration (depending on your POV), and it's not a matter for parents and school administrators to address. It's a crime.
We've lost our minds.

Live from the Rose Garden as the Portland Trail Blazers break out the fine dinnerware and welcome the Utah Jazz. As you probably already heard on this very blog, Brandon Roy is not playing tonight. Or tomorrow night. Or any night for that matter. The Blazers franchise player will be out until "indefinitely," which I believe is the month after Smarch.
Well, I'm sure you already knew Fox News should be obliterated from the face of the earth, but just in case you forgot for a moment, I'm here to remind you.
Supposedly if you participate in dog-fighting you should be executed. At least, newscaster Tucker Carlson believes such of NFL player Michael Vick.
It's really difficult to not bring up the "H-word" (hypocrisy) at this point. You don't want animals to be treated inhumanely, so you treat the human inhumanely?
It's no secret that Fox is geared towards the right. Of course meaning the Republican and Christian population. The man even admits his Christianity while endorsing the idea. Yet these people have sat completely sidelined on the subject of the massively successful food companies that abuse and mistreat the animals that they later butcher and make millions off of.
Why are those companies not held accountable or called out to answer for themselves if Tucker believes so strongly in being humane? There are so many other sources of people that mistreat animals it makes no sense to call out one man to bear the punishment of that.
In an update from my previous post, Blazers GM Rich Cho has informed the O's Jason Quick that Brandon Roy will be out for an unspecified "extended period" of time.
Ferguson, a registered sex offender battling mental health issues and substance abuse, according to court records, was the fifth person shot this year by police. Police initially responded to Ferguson's apartment complex at 122nd and Burnside after they were called about a drunken dispute between neighbors. They left after they were told the matter was resolved but came back after another call said one of the neighbors was making threats with a 9mm handgun.
Police said that when they knocked on Ferguson's door he answered while holding what looked like a black handgun, and officers Jonathan Kizzar and Kelly Jenson opened fire. Neighbors say as many as 20 shots were fired. Autopsy results released this month said only that Ferguson "died of multiple gunshot wounds to the chest and abdomen."
One of the questions raised by Ferguson's sister, according to the Oregonian, was whether police identified themselves as such before knocking on Ferguson's door. The district attorney's office, however, said only that it "determined that the shooting was justified under the criminal law."
A judge will decide whether to release transcripts of the hearing on Tuesday. If the judge allows it, transcripts will be available next Friday, January 7.

I've been thinking about Patton Oswalt's essay in Wired about the death of "geek culture" for a couple of days now—trying to separate what Oswalt actually said from the fleet of straw men that immediately marched out of his article and into the blogosphere.
As I read it, Oswalt is asserting that geekiness—as he knew it in the '80s, as defined as a subset of the population devoted to obsessively ferreting out the minutiae of certain books, comics videogames, and movies—is dead, thanks to an instant-gratification pop culture landscape that allows anyone to pursue any interest immediately. This easy access, he argues, leads to a watering down of experience—without the added value of the difficulty in obtaining certain items and their relative scarcity in the culture at large, the experience is diminished and the pride nerds used to take in being masters of their little corner of the universe has been stripped away. And now anyone can get anything and experience has been trivialized and that muscley dude at the gym wears a Boba Fett t-shirt and it's all just ruined.
This film deserves to win the Academy Award for best live-action short subject.It's certainly a beautiful piece of work—its flash and quick cuts make it look a little like a commercial to me, but what do I know. It is the best presentation of the storm (which I witnessed firsthand) that I've yet seen, even if this film doesn't capture the beauty of what the storm looked like outside the city.
(1) Because of its wonderful quality. (2) Because of its role as homage. It is directly inspired by Dziga Vertov's 1929 silent classic "Man With a Movie Camera." (3) Because it represents an almost unbelievable technical proficiency. It was filmed during the New York blizzard of Dec. 26, and Jamie Stuart e-mailed it to me with this time stamp: December 27, 2010 4:18:18 PM CST.You can tell from the cinematography he knew exactly what he was doing and how to do it. He held the Vertov film in memory. Stuart must already been thinking of how he would do the edit and sound. Any professional will tell you the talent exhibited here is extraordinary.
On the one hand, the streetcar makes neighborhoods better for walking, which can slow down traffic and make streets safer for bikes. It also keeps some people from driving for short trips, which means less cars on the road. On the other hand, the tracks! The terrible tracks!
Earlier this month, fledgling local transit advocacy group Active Right of Way (AROW) put together a list of immediate requests to fix safety problems for bikes on the new streetcar loops, including lack of signage of track-crash potential on the new NW Lovejoy tracks and that the new Eastside tracks will lead to wheel entrapment and slipping.
Maps of the bike detours for streetcar construction and more thoughts on this below the cut!

YOU'RE WELCOME!
via
The Portland Police Bureau this afternoon identified eight Central Precinct officers involved in the shooting Monday of Marcus Lagozzino, a mentally ill man wielding a machete outside his parents' Southwest Portland home.
The shooting—which also included so-called "less-lethal" weapons like a Taser and beanbag shotguns—came less than a minute after officers first made contact with Lagozzino and just more than 20 minutes after his mother called 911 to warn that her 34-year-old son was threatening "suicide by cop."
Police officials previously declined to specify how many times Lagozzino was shot. But today spokesman Sgt. Pete Simpson said in a release that he was hit at least three times. Officer Bradley Clark, a four-year veteran, fired his AR-15 rifle four times. He has been placed on paid leave until a Multnomah County grand jury weighs the case, a process expected to begin next week.
Simpson says Lagozzino is recovering from gunshot wounds to his chest; the Oregonian is reporting Lagozzino's condition has been upgraded from critical to serious.
Police officials also said that officers Ralph Elwood and Scott Foster, with 14 and 17 years in the bureau respectively, fired a total of seven beanbag rounds. And Officer Jamin Becker, with the bureau just two years, also Tasered Lagozzino once.
The bureau also identified the supervising sergeant, David Michaelson, and the three officers providing cover as the shooting unfolded, Sergeant Rick Stainbrook, Curtis Pak, and Daniel Spiegel.
The police shooting in Portland is the sixth this year—all of them involving men dealing with mental illness and/or addiction issues—and the third within a four-week span that began in late November. If Lagozzino survives, he'll be the only one of this year's shooting victims to do so. One of the other five, Craig Boehler, was ruled to have died of smoke inhalation after a fire erupted during a shootout at his mother's home.
This is one of those instances where I think it's perfectly fine to watch the following video, calmly close your laptop, fling it out the window, and declare, "I FUCKING QUIT. NOT JUST MY JOB... I'M QUITTING EVERYTHING."
EBossWatch, a group that every year comes up with a list of the 100 worst bosses, slotted a somewhat familiar name down at No. 99 in this year's iteration.
That would be John Minnis, the ex-Portland cop and East County GOP legislator who lately had been in charge of the Department of Safety Standards and Training. In charge, that is, until Governor Ted Kulongoski booted him out he resigned last year when a female employee accused him of sexual harassment.
Minnis, who was included on eBossWatch's most recent list apparently because the state filed a formal complaint against him this year, finds himself in good company. The list includes several alleged serial sexual harassers and assorted power-abusers, from low Starbucks and Little Caesar's Pizza managers to big names like actors Steven Seagal and Casey Affleck, and U.S. Representative Eric Massa of New York.
No surprise, I love the art on the Merc cover this week, one of a series of manufactured photos from French artist Alain Delorme's series Totems. Here's a couple other excellent images from the series, which you can see all of here:

Unless you've been hiding out and avoiding downtown, you've probably seen or heard tell of this year's excellent lineup of downtown pop-up shops, one of which has been occupied by everyone's favorite craft curators, Crafty Wonderland. A combination of efforts from various agencies and entities made the shops possible, giving local retailers high-visibility real estate access and activating the empty retail spaces that dot the downtown shopping corridor, in hopes that it might lure in potential tenants. And hey, it worked! The Crafty Wonderland shop is set to join the Portland Design Collective as one of the pop-ups that's sticking around for good. Er, well, for as long as they've got before the parking garage they're housed under is razed and rebuilt. But still. This is awesome news; if you haven't checked out the shop let me assure you it's as adorable as you'd expect. They'll be closing as originally planned on at 6 pm today, but will reopen on Monday, January 10th. And if you were planning on attending tonight's closing party, don't bother. Instead mark your calendar for the January 10th reopening party. Those are better kinds of parties anyway.

The Crafty Wonderland Shop is located at 802 SW 10th!

I have a real love-to-hate thing with OPB's morning show Think Out Loud. Yes, their format's constant need for fresh content means they give a platform to artists and topics that probably wouldn't otherwise get such broad exposure, and that's great, but... well, I have been known to conduct fake interviews with a sock puppet while imitating Emily Harris. The host's awkward interview practices are a daily source of fascination/horror—plus it's on twice a day, which is just mean. Basically, it's a show crying out for its own drinking game. Here goes:
1. Drink every time Emily Harris allows a guest or caller to ramble uninterrupted for more than a minute. Drink again with every additional 30 seconds.
2. Drink every time a web commenter is referred to by their login name. ("BiGui69 makes an interesting point on our website...")
3. Drink every time Emily Harris takes a long.... pause... in search of just the right word....
4. Drink every time Emily Harris laughs heartily at a line not recognizable as humor.
Anyone else?

Bad news is a brewing at the Rose Garden. First the Blazers released the news that Brandon Roy will miss tonight's matchup against Utah Jazz, it will be his seventh consecutive game on the bench. And then this article from Ken Berger at CBSSports.com:
The Trail Blazers are involved in ongoing discussions aimed at determining how much longer Brandon Roy will have to rest his ailing knees. Among several options under consideration is shutting Roy down for the rest of the season in hopes he can restored to his previous All-Star status, two people with knowledge of the team's thinking told CBSSports.com.
Also, it turns out that Roy's battered knees might be insured. Wait, you can insure knees? You hear that, Oden?
Trading Roy, who signed a five-year, $82 million extension in August 2009, won't be an option until potential suitors gain some clarity about whether Roy will ever return to his previous form. Sources have told CBSSports.com that Roy has a separate, outside insurance policy on his knees that could protect the Blazers — or his new team — depending on the timing and extent of any disability.
The Blazers have fared well without Roy (6-3 so far), but it's been a small sample size and a few of those victories have come against lowered tiered opponents. Also, the condition of Roy's knees determines what this team does in the trade market. Once again, more bad news and unanswered questions for the Blazers. We'll keep you updated if the team makes a formal announcement about Roy later today.
In this, the penultimate episode of "The Fuckiest Things of 2010," we explore a topic that goes WAY beyond "fucky" and into "the most horrifying thing you will ever see" territory. In the video below—which I posted back in late June—a crab slithers out of its shell. Which, okay, doesn't sound all that terrifying... but TRUST ME! Around the :50 mark, what you will see cannot be unseen! And once you DO see this, every nightmare from now until the end of time will feature this horrid abomination crawling all over you naked body!! AND NOT IN A SEXY WAY, EITHER!!
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