All The News

Print journalism is still alive and well in the UK, unlike across the pond. We tend to favor The Guardian and The Times, but we also pick up a variety of other papers (including the salacious Sun) just to see how the same stories are spun for different audiences. We’re constantly amazed at how erudite most of the reporting is, with vocabulary that you wouldn’t run across in the US dailies. Also, journalists feel free to bandy about words pertaining to sex and body parts that would make the most liberal American reader blush. Some of our favorite stories to date include man slits open mum to see if there’s a reptile inside; health officials ask grocery stores not to display daffodil bulbs in produce sections so consumers don’t mistake them for Chinese vegetables; Cambridge professor assembles glossary of hundreds of obscure nature terms in danger of disappearing (see “zwer,” the whirring sound of a covey of partridge taking flight, or “didder,” a patch of bog); and conservationists call for a ban on tiny “fairy doors” screwed into trees in Somerset woods as the numbers reach into the hundreds. And yes, as with the New York Times, Portland seems to merit a disproportionate amount of attention from the Guardian.

And they love quirky PDX