Gaiety and mirth trip lightly from their pages. Imagine the jocular banter and good-natured horseplay taking place in those offices.

Tightassed dweebs livid with rage because the new Hootie and The Blowfish CD isn't sonically evocative or because Booty Call lacked a cohesive narrative. Failed musicians trashing someone's band. Failed writers trashing someone's book or film, etc. Sniffing disdain and snorts of derision brought to you by Fred Meyer and Kitchen Kaboodle, a business geared to people for whom an ordinary, run-of-the-mill spatula just won't do.

In an interview, some hipster "indie" (unsuccessful) rocker once said his favorite album is The Beatles' Revolver "because it's a very focused piece of work," adding, "maybe too focused." Please! Turn it off! It's too focused!

"News with an edge." EEK! Don't Portland Mercury boxes say something like (God forbid I go look): "Art, Culture and Trouble?" GETthefuckouttahere.

So, Willamette Week actually begins each issue by telling us, "We're, like, really irreverent and shit." And the weekly pose-fest is on. So their audiences can make differences. Send this paper a case of Fleet enemas.

The Oregonian. Whatever. Portland's sole daily. Cursory wire-service distillations of national and international news stories. Whitebreaded homogenizations of local stories by reporters no one wants at real papers in real cities. Liberally biased editorials except when the token conservative gives us the conservatively biased position. White homosexuals sniffing at the arts and entertainment. The usual. Even the black people are white.

Then there's that, that Portland Tribune thing, the alternative to The Oregonian staffed almost entirely with people from The Oregonian. Let's bore people in a new format!

The spectacular indifference to this thing says a lot about Portland''s "journalism community." All these illustrious "seasoned professionals." Jesus--read Phil Stanford.

Inexplicably, they recently did a couple of articles digging up non-pertinent, purely voyeuristic dirt on the families of the two missing Oregon City girls to entertain their yuppie readership.

One of the girl's grandfathers responded: "We have worked hard to get the children over the rough spots in their past and were making headway until this article. The pain and suffering you caused these children has set us back years."

Despite that, as they await news of the missing children, this paper continues to harass both families by phone just so they can print blah blah "didn't return calls from the Tribune."

There you have it all--the classism, elitism, pious self-righteousness, and utter disregard for the pain and suffering of people they see as undesirables.

The above-mentioned articles were written by Jim Redden, a fifty-something guy born with a silver spoon in his mouth, the son of a judge, Willamette Week-spawned, who's never held a legitimate job until this paper, who has a very skeevy background himself and appears in print simply due to his social milieu. Like all of them.

There they are. A strangely bitter and dissatisfied lot who seem to want to take it out on us every chance they get. Each of them with a dust-covered manuscript at home called "Tapestries of My Life."

It's all just The Blueblood Press, mouthpieces for the smug ivory-tower politics and prejudices of white millionaires and their sycophants.

Hippie/"Beat" icon Jack Kerouac, who hated the hippie movement and fell out with beat-generation cronies over their contempt for rank-and-file humanity, spoke of "a sadistic facetiousness and 'sickjoke' grisliness about human affairs, a grotesque hatred for the humble and the suffering heart."

Bingo. He called them "the sneerers."

We'll be looking at the sneerers right here in River City.

Contrary to their belief, free speech isn't just for those with access to a printing press and millionaires.

Tell the judge's boy to leave the Pond and Gaddis families alone. Here's his home phone #: (Jim--you can get this, can't you?)

This is "Shifty" Henry reprazentin' for the City of The Trout. Mighty kootie fiyo. Jockomo feena hey.