FACT NUMBER ONE: Portland is a filthy pigpen of butter abusing hogs.

FACT NUMBER TWO: The Mercury is the ONLY weekly paper that gives a shit about people who use more than their weekly allotment of butter. That's why we have once again selflessly taken it upon ourselves to "out" Portland's most flagrant butter abusers, here in the 26th edition of our "Butter Hogs" Issue.

FACT NUMBER THREE: While the average Portland household ingests only a tablespoon of butter a day (or roughly 2.5 "pats"), Butter Hogs greatly exceed this usage—sometimes by three or four pats! This flagrant zeal for churned milk products places the rest of us in the GRAVEST OF DANGER (of perhaps eventually running out of butter). That's why the Mercury is exposing these gluttonous butter freaks for what they REALLY are: disgusting sub-humans that deserve to be decapitated, dumped in a ditch, and covered with lyme. Or barring that, publicly humiliated in front of thousands of readers.

FACT NUMBER FOUR: "BUTTER" WATCH OUT, BUTTER HOGS! YOU'VE BEEN BUSTED!!

[Note: In fairness, if we discovered that the person had a legitimate medical excuse to eat that much butter, they were taken off the list.]

CITY COMMISSIONER RANDY LEONARD

Somewhere in East Portland

BUTTER USED: 2,645 pounds—enough to double Portland's firefighting crew, if the butter was sculpted into human form, given life by a Disney-branded fairy, and made impervious to melting.

ANNUAL BUTTER BILL: $4,800

PREFERRED DISH: "With a spoon."

City Commissioner Randy Leonard may use his position at city hall to push for things like biodiesel and bans on trans fats and smoking, but on his own time Leonard is among the biggest consumers in the city. He's successfully managed to keep his butter addiction a secret from his constituents—until he was forced out of the closet by the harsh light of the Mercury's Butter Hogs squad.

When we first spotted Leonard in the Safeway at SE 122nd and Powell, he tried to shield his buttery booty from our cameras, dashing to his car in an attempt to evade our watchful eye. But then he realized that no one—not even powerful city commissioners—can outrun the TRUTH... especially when your arteries are clogged with enough cholesterol to kill an elephant.

"I know I have a problem," he sobbed to the Butter Hogs squad. "But I can't help myself. Look at all these varieties of butter! Cubes, tubs, sprays, salted, unsalted, creamy—the list goes on. And look! Look! They even make butter in a squeeze bottle!"

REGAL CINEMAS

Six Portland Locations

BUTTER USED: 100 billion gallons (liquefied)—that's enough to fill every ocean in the world... 97 times.

ANNUAL BUTTER BILL: $234,208.41

PREFERRED DISH (TO BUTTER): Popcorn

While you enjoy the thrills and chuckles of Hollywood's latest big screen release, the butter-mad folks behind Regal Cinemas are working on their own big-budget butter blockbuster! My review? Two thumbs down! While simple common sense has proven that popcorn only needs a tempered dash of salt to be a delicious snack, these pleas fall on deaf ears at Regal, who smother the very life from the popcorn with sickening doses of pump-dispensed butter. When reached for comment, calls were directed to Regal's legal counsel, who were quick to respond with a countersuit for slander—one that will surely bankrupt this paper and cost this ace reporter his job. Luckily for me, my parents have a finished basement.

SAMANTHA WRIGHT

1855 NW Lovejoy

BUTTER USED: About one stick of butter a day—that's enough to comprise... an entire stick of butter. A DAY!

ANNUAL BUTTER BILL: $350

PREFERRED DISH (TO BUTTER): Toast

"I just have toast in the mornings," Samantha Wright, a lonely widow, age 64, lamely tells us. "And I make a lot of other things. Cookies. Mac and cheese. My hobby is cooking, so I use a lot of butter."

"Oh, really?" we asked her, surprising her at 6:45 one morning, toast (glistening with butter!) in hand. "Hitler had a 'hobby,' too—IT WAS KILLING JEWS! Now, what do you say to all those people who can't eat butter because of all the butter you've eaten?"

"C'mon," she said dismissively. "There's no butter shortage." That's beside the point, Mrs. Wright! If you'd stop cramming your mouth with BUTTERED toast and making batches of BUTTERY cookies (Her weak defense? "They're for my niece's birthday."), maybe you'd realize you're one of the hoggiest of Butter Hogs! Lucky for you, your husband is too dead to read about your bitter humiliation.

NINA BARLOW

NE 31st and Wygant

BUTTER USED: 312 pounds per year—that's enough butter to bake 14,976 pot brownies and go on a marijuana-induced killing spree, murdering 214 babies in daycare.

ANNUAL BUTTER BILL: $1,872

PREFERRED DISH (TO BUTTER): Pastries and local veggies from her CSA. Hippie.

Thanks to Nina Barlow's butter hogging ways, a local grocery store reports they may have to discontinue sales on butter. Why? Because Barlow regularly cleans out their butter case and stockpiles it at home. It took three of our most intrepid interns, but we finally tracked Barlow down, and demanded to see her secret cache.

"Sure," she said, desperately trying to affect a tone of non-guilt. "But it's not just butter—I also purchase bags of sugar, flour... I'm a pastry chef and have recently started my own bakery."

OH, WHY DON'T YOU KEEP LYING, YOU FUCKING LIAR? Next you'll be whining, "Oooh! I can't make my flaky pie crusts without butter!" If you really cared about the fate of the earth, you would use MARGARINE to make your butterhorn rolls! God, you're disgusting. I fucking hate you.

RICHARD RODGERS

1428 SE Hawthorne Blvd.

BUTTER USED: 1200 lbs. of butter per year—that's enough to build a six-foot-tall Eiffel Tower of butter in every country in the world.

ANNUAL BUTTER BILL: $2,460

PREFERRED DISH (TO BUTTER): None—he eats the sticks raw, licking the paper clean.

Drowning in a Land O' Lakes of butter consumption, Richard Rodgers (a policy staffer for Erik Sten, and potential city council candidate) has taken local butter excess to new heights with his insatiable appetite for all things churned, whipped, and creamy. As a city employee, his vast fortune has supplied himself, his wife, and one-year-old with an endless fix of buttery goodness. When asked to explain his gluttonous behavior, Rodgers got defensive. "Why are you looking in my bedroom window, you perv?" he screamed at us. "Get the HELL out of here!" Due to this political insider's buttering up of City Hall officials (see #1, Randy Leonard), the Rodgers family can continue their flamboyant butter intake without fear of government interference—while their thousands of discarded tubs of Country Crock litter our cities' landfills. For shame! FOR SHAME!

MY STEPFATHER, BOBBY "BOB" LANCASTER

1102 E. Columbia River Hiway, Troutdale

BUTTER USED: Enough to clog my stepfather's arteries and kill him in a flash. I wouldn't care... but it would break my mother's heart.

ANNUAL BUTTER BILL: Probably like $65, at least.

PREFERRED DISH (TO BUTTER): Grandma's Honey Wheat Rolls

Though inexplicably regarded as "good-natured" by many members of my family, my stepfather Bobby "Bob" Lancaster has been an egregious Butter Hog for as long as this reporter can remember. Every Thanksgiving, rather than simply applying an even layer of Country Bob maneuvers the butter dish next to his plate—where no one else can use it!—then slowly draaaags his roll across the stick of butter before taking a bite! YOU SICK BASTARD. Unfortunately, his ugly, mind-numbing selfishness doesn't stop at the dinner table. When we throw the pigskin around after eating, Bob always makes a big production of doing the "Bobby Shuffle"—moonwalking across our front yard and then spiking the ball while the rest of us beg him to continue the game.

Bob, obviously missing the point of the disgraceful designation, was all too happy to hear of his Butter Hog title. "So you're going to write about me? Where do I get one of those Mercurys anyway? Hey—did you get that check I sent for your birthday?" Yes, "Dad," but you're not going to buy me off—Bobby, you're a BIG FAT BUTTER HOG! (See you at Thanksgiving.)

RONNIE JENKINS

2334 SE Clinton

BUTTER USED: 59 bottles of Mrs. Butterworth's Syrup—that's enough to cover every single pancake made in Ethiopia... for 117 years!

ANNUAL BUTTER BILL: $265

PREFERRED DISH (TO BUTTER): Pancakes

"Why are you calling?"

Eight-year-old Ronnie Jenkins was playing dumb when we called him after school one Tuesday afternoon. Tipped off by his older sister Tiffany, we learned that little Ronnie has quite a fondness for Mrs. Butterworth's syrup.

"You're doing a story about how much butter people eat? But I don't eat butter. I eat syrup. Maybe you're confused because of the name—."

Cut the lame justifications, Ronnie! Try as he might to squirm out of being branded a Butter Hog, we have it on good authority (Tiffany Jenkins, age nine and three-quarters) that little Ronnie consumes more than a bottle of Mrs. Butterworth's a week—slathering it on everything from the obvious (pancakes) to the obscure ("Carrot sticks," Tiffany attests. "It is sooo grodie"). What's more? Apparently unconcerned with little Ronnie's non-stop consumption, his teacher, Sylvia Hunsaker, defends him.

"Look, he just has a sweet tooth," she told us after we barged into her second grade classroom. "Besides the fact that this 'Butter Hogs' issue you guys do every year is really annoying, there isn't even any butter in Mrs. Butterworth."

Thanks for the revisionist history lesson, Ms. Hunsaker— but we don't need to hear anything else! Lucky for you we don't do a yearly article called, "Portland's Stupidest Teachers!" Little Ronnie, congratulations on being the youngest butter hog ever. P.S. You make us sick.