And so we crawl ever deeper into our own surprisingly roomy navel.

(Someone make a Portlandia sketch about grudging alt-weekly coverage of Portlandia, please. Alternately, the several agonized "I want to like it, but it just isn't funny" hipster-on-hipster conversations that took place in my living room while we watched season one on Netflix instant last week.)

Fred and Carrie were on Fresh Air yesterday.

A Good editor (and former Portlander) writes about "why the Portland backlash is good for Portland."

Slate's June Thomas, whom I love because I am embarrassingly addicted to their Culture Gabfest podcast and she has the best accent, offers a longtime Seattleite's perspective on Portland and Portlandia:

Like bigger, stronger, cooler siblings everywhere, Seattle doesn’t worry too much about Portland. It’s just a place to go to when you want to buy something without paying sales tax

Salon interviews Brownstein for a "Portlandia guide to Portland," the first paragraph of which actually makes me want to die, right here, just fall down dead at my standing desk:

Portland, Ore., has plenty of reasons to be smug. It’s a bohemian wonderland where, despite high rates of unemployment, homelessness and hunger, sensitive Subaru-driving beardsmen can consume Rogue Voodoo Donut Bacon Maple Ale, enjoy a crispy pig-head roulade, share trailer-refurb workshops with other craftspeople and meet tattooed girls who DJ, knit shrugs and ride custom-made bikes.

The Wall Street Journal reviews the afterparty for the New York premiere of the show:

The room, which flickered orange-ly from low-set lights, incorporated elements from the show’s second season, like jars of pickled items, a huge rainbow parachute suspended from the ceiling, bicycles and a sign that read “Women and Women First Bookstore” (it’ll make sense once you see the episode).

I'm sure there are plenty more stories out there, given season two's launch and the subsequent tour (the New Yorker article is a great read no matter how you feel about the show). But the feelings of compulsion and self-consciousness I have upon reading all these stories lands somewhere between Facebook stalking my ex-boyfriend's current girlfriend, and spending a whole afternoon trying on dresses that don't fit (or maybe just Louis CK's "three kinds of shame glaze"), so I'm gonna stop.