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The Mercury provides news and fun every single day—but your help is essential. If you believe Portland benefits from smart, local journalism and arts coverage, please consider making a small monthly contribution, because without you, there is no us. Thanks for your support!

Good Morning, Portland! It’s Friday. And looking at the weather, it’s just gonna be nice forever now. High of 66-degrees today. 72 on Saturday!  Mid-50s to 70s all next week. Remember, don’t let your drunk bros swim in lakes and rivers just yet. Our mountain-fed streams are just too cold, no matter how tough and brave they feel. Enough with the PSA, let’s hit the NEWS.

IN LOCAL NEWS:
• The second issue of Say Nice Things About Portland—our guide to great things in this city—hit stands this week. Find it inside coffee shops, bookstores, bars, et al. You can also read the web version of the guide. Yes, we WILL have a page with a list of distribution spots! No, I can’t find it right now. YES, I will come back here and link it, later today.

• Breaking: New Job Day Bob Day is here to stay.

• Earlier in the week, I was leaning back in my chair, cynically musing that while I had been walking past the downtown Buffalo Wild Wings semi-daily since the mid-20teens, I couldn’t remember it ever looking busy in there. I’ll tell you what. The restaurant had a vent that all but submerged those passing by in hot chicken vapor, so I noticed the place. However, I didn’t remember what Oregonian food world reporter Michael Russell noted in his piece: “The downtown Portland bar was the second sports bar opened by World Wide Wings,” and “for its first five years, its corporate offices were located behind the bar.” At some point, Buffalo Wild Wings became a joke about consumerism, loud places where no one can actually talk to one another, and locations uncles wants to take their vegetarian nieces for lunch. But at one point it was just a fledgling franchise owner, keeping offices in a parking garage. I’m not sure if I’m being serious either, but I was interested to learn this.

• I mentioned right to repair when Oregon lawmakers made it a law, but here’s a more thorough explainer on it from TechCrunch:

• Your Friday morning ticket drop is arriving shortly and our Mercury EverOut calendar team has drawn up a list of notables for your perusal. Of notice this week: Rayland Baxter at Topaz Farm, Comedy Bang! Bang! at Revolution Hall, and Red Fang at Crystal Ballroom—neat!

• Our bodies are ready for the weekend, and there’s plenty we’ve recommended on the docket—not just the aforementioned ticket drop, but the shiz we’ve written about all week. You could see Nassim at Portland Center Stage or The Beast at Cinema 21. The Filipino food month we wrote about recently, Sobrang Sarap, is on its second week—adobo week! Delicious. Our Mercury Music Picks still have some cool shows to feel hot about. And you know what’s still in theaters? Monkey Man, Problemista, Love Lies Bleeding, and Dune: Part Two. Guess we were right about those.

IN NATIONAL / INTERNATIONAL NEWS:
• This upcoming Monday, three survivors of Abu Ghraib prison will bring their claims of torture before a US jury, in US District Court in Alexandria. It’s been 20 years since the “photos of abused prisoners and smiling US soldiers guarding them at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison were released, shocking the world,” Associated Press reports. After 16 years of litigation they’ll have their day in court. 

• We’ve heard stories from the Russia’s invasion of Ukraine where Russian troops surrendered to drones rather than continue to fight, but it’s not all popsicles and cake—with war it is almost never popsicles. Associated Press interviewed six Russian military deserters, finding that “each is waiting for a welcome from the West that has never arrived. Instead, all but one live in hiding.”

• The Biden administration says they’re canceling more student loan debt… (I don’t know how this applies to my debt)… yay!

• This headline: NPR in Turmoil After It Is Accused of Liberal Bias feels ripped from the Onion, or better yet NYT Pitchbot. You may recall that earlier in the week NPR business section editor Uri Berliner wrote a 3,500 word essay for Bari Weiss’ Substack 🙃 about NPR losing the trust of its conservative listenership. If I weren’t a critic, I would have changed the channel at “Bari Weiss’ Substack” (though then I would have missed that super cool photo of Berliner in a leather jacket). But it’s immediately noticeable that while Berliner founds his argument on data from NPR listener surveys (no, he doesn’t link to them) where a higher percentage of listeners identified themselves as liberal in 2023, than 2011… he doesn’t seem to consider: How were the concepts of liberal, moderate, and conservative explained? What were the overall sizes of both surveys? And also, like, the term conservative has shifted in the past 13 years, and I’m not surprised the people who thought of themselves as conservative in 2011 looked at the January 6 insurrection and thought Y’know? I’m probably more of a moderate. In the coming days, we’ll see if anyone comes out and identifies Uri Berliner as the business department’s dumbest boi who they all knew would eventually write something long for a site with a color background. He’s certainly not self aware enough to look in the mirror and recognize how cliched it is for an old white dude to be miffed about DEI.

•  And now for your reminder about IG birthday wishes—promptly at 6:30 am, Stef. Don’t make me remind you again, or you might just not make the Girl’s Trip.

Suzette Smith

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