Scoop: Department of Corrections

1. MARTIN CIZMAR would like to correct last week’s Scoop, which said Cascade Brewing Barrel House’s 12.66 percent alcohol Bourbonic Plague is the strongest beer brewed in Portland. Turns out, Tugboat Brewing Chernobyl Stout is 13.5 percent ABV. He discovered this on his own and felt terrible as he sipped a half-pint of it. He also thinks The Wurst might be a doubly ironic hipster bar disguised so perfectly as a dive that even he was fooled. He is still occasionally awakened by a nightmare in which he repeats his mistaken claim that Lardo uses duck fat, instead of high-grade pork fat, to cook its fries. Also, he would like to apologize for any confusion caused by a joke about Cascade Station (better known as “the stores by IKEA”) replacing Division Street as the city’s culinary promised land.

1. MATTHEW KORFHAGE would like to place egg on his own face for incorrectly attributing Stone Barn Brandyworks’ Golden Quince Liqueur to its rival from across the river. Clear Creek Distillery makes no quince-related items. This mistake was especially regrettable because the Golden Quince was the best local liquor he tried this year. (He also regrets that someone stole the bottle from the WW office, in apparent agreement.) Additionally, he offers sincerest apologies to Casa de Tamales—our winner in a recent tamale taste-off—for not (yet!) returning a steamer pot he’d borrowed from the Milwaukie shop. He also still has a sex-toy box that doesn’t belong to him, and a whistle made out of a bullet. 

1. REBECCA JACOBSON must confess that after Portland Center Stage stopped offering press tickets to the Portland Mercury, she may have subconsciously pulled a few punches with A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It was respectable and occasionally luminous, but those incongruous costumes? Those daffy sound effects? That hamming up of Shakespeare’s language? Come on, audiences are smarter than that. But she also thinks It Ain’t Nothin’ but the Blues might have deserved a more favorable assessment. It was a powerfully performed jaunt through musical history and closed the PCS season on a high note.

1. MATTHEW SINGER wishes to retract a few grades he handed out during his brief tenure as movie editor. Although he stands by his reviews, upon subsequent screenings, Prometheus deserves a B+, as does The Dark Knight Rises, which should get dropped a full letter grade for the Marion Cotillard death scene alone. He also regrets giving Café de Flore the equivalent of an F. It deserves an as-yet-invented symbol denoting the desire to go back in time and blind the writer-director before the movie was made. Oh, he also feels bad for throwing an octogenarian Rose Festival queen under the bus, though he defaults to the excuse all journalists use when faced with their bad decisions: His editor made him do it.

1. RUTH BROWN regrets nothing.

WWeek 2015