Scoop: Staff Mistakes and Regrets From 2013.

1. MARTIN CIZMAR regrets everything about a story on poisonous berries this summer, which needed more clarity to even be funny. He will never assign another story about wild edibles that doesn’t include at least three interviews with experts. He also regrets the timing of his screed about Oregon’s uninspired IPAs, which hit newsstands just before the recipes for Boneyard RPM and Laurelwood’s Workhorse were tweaked. Also, forgetting to include the review he wrote of Fire on the Mountain’s brewing operation in last year’s Beer Guide. (On the plus side, he already has one never-before-published listing done for this year’s guide.) He also regrets not sending former staffer Ben Waterhouse the $50 he won at the state journalism awards banquet sooner—it’s in the mail now. He also regrets leaving Pearl Jam’s Portland concert before Sleater-Kinney reunited for the first time in almost a decade to join the band’s closer, “Rockin’ in the Free World,” and not finding the giant weed tent outside the Seattle Pearl Jam concert.

1. REBECCA JACOBSON regrets confusing Seattle-manufactured (and thus inherently inferior) Utilikilts with locally produced Stumptown kilts favored by Roadside Attraction patrons. She’s grateful, though, for careful readers who catch her mistakes, and she expects an invitation to Rich’s birthday party in 2014 in hopes that this year’s costumes will be just as fabulous. She also regrets calling Mike Daisey a “weaselly talker”—he’s an outright weasel, no hedging required. She regrets nothing she wrote about Streetcar Bistro & Taproom. 

1. MATTHEW KORFHAGE regrets leaving Pacific Pie Co. out of the Cheap Eats guide, as he considers the Anglo-Celtic meat pie one of history’s greatest inventions. He regrets not treating Lee Daniels’ The Butler as a more lurid and interesting example of camp than he’d first taken it for. Conversely, he regrets giving a solid B to a C-plus movie, namely Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine. He regrets not being much crueler to Old Town in the Bar Guide; friends with drinking problems sometimes need tough love, and the entire marauding suburb of Gresham is no exception. He also regrets taking part in our taste test of pumpkin beers, as it has forever damaged his relationship with nutmeg and cloves, and probably made it so he will never drink a pumpkin beer again. He does not regret killing a rabbit.

1. MATTHEW SINGER regrets growing up at the beach and never learning to surf. And there was that one time he could’ve gone to an Oscars viewing party at Melissa Etheridge’s house but skipped it for some reason he can’t even remember. That was definitely a mistake. And the older he gets, the more he wonders what his life would have been like if he’d gone to engineering school. Oh wait, you meant regrets for 2013 specifically? Well, drinking that dog beer was pretty gross.

WWeek 2015