Lately all of our time has been tied up in efforts to redesign our website, and, last night, while taking a break from alternatively studying CSS/XHTML textbooks and banging our head against the wall, we decided to assemble our blogroll. We've got links like gangbusters -- celebs, mp3s, movies, the funny haha, and lots of other coolness -- but we could not for the life of us find any good Portland blogs.

Seriously, where are they? The Portland Mercury, which in its newsstand edition has been boring us to death of late -- there is only so much of their brand of "journalism" that we can take -- has a blog, and it's quite good. The blogosphere seems to be the perfect place for their bizarre maneuvers against good taste and Strunk and White's Elements of Style. Other than that, we've got nothing. One of our favorite Portland blogs is Cowboyz 'n' Poodles, written by former Mercury escritora Julianne Shepherd; but it doesn't actually count, because she moved to New York like two years back.

So we've got nothing. At this point, we'd link to halfway-decent blogs by cool-looking people. Hell, we'd even link to Flickr. Or LiveJournal. Anything. We're desperate; we love Portland, and we want to know that Portlanders are out there right now tearing it up on the bloggernets. Please, send us your links.

We're pretty sure this is actually a terrible idea, but we still love it. Plus he can do this:

Portland newspapers have hella beef. Why? What a good question! Maybe it's because nothing ever happens in the 503—and when seriously newsworthy, Willamette valley-shaking bizness does go down (like, once a decade), there's invariably a scramble to scoop the story. Feisty contender Willamette Week's uncovering of the Goldschmidt scandal was huge—like, Pulitzer Prize huge—and a hefty body punch to the Oregonian, the heavyweight champion of the local rag scene.

So where does the Portland Mercury figure in to this news/boxing metaphor? In our estimation, they're a sort of midget pugilist (does midget boxing even exist?). Like, it's fun to watch them flail around, but it's hard to take their jabs seriously. Occasionally, however—think now—they get in an uppercut to the nuts.