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Good Afternoon, Portland! We received two signs from the gods today. 1) this morning's blood moon. 2) My friend's dog went in for a biopsy and the mass wasn't cancer—it was a PENIS. The dog is intersex! This feels auspicious. This feels like we're back.  Let's gooooo to the news!

IN LOCAL NEWS:
• TONIGHT IS THE NIGHT we've all been waiting for: It's Live Blog Election Night! Forget about Twitter—you don't need it! You can follow live updates on tonight's races here on our very not-impressed-by-Elon-Musk live blog! We'll go live at 7 pm, reporting from a series of scattered political soirees. I am told there will be puppies.

• AT THIS POINT YOU HAVE TO HAVE VOTED, right? If not, you've got a couple hours left to slip your ballot into a ballot box or even a mailbox. This is the second election where Oregonian votes will still be counted as long as the ballot mailed is postmarked no later than today—November 8. To get that sweet, sweet postmark, be sure to drop your ballot in a blue USPS mailbox before mail is picked up this afternoon. Cue the track: 🎵RUNNING WITH THE DEVIL🎵.

• Clackamas County Clerk Sherry Hall she·nan·i·gans UPDATE! This morning Clackamas County announced that it would report a first round of ballot results tonight at 8 pm (like all of the other counties), but withhold updating those results for 22 hours. Now a new schedule, released this morning says that they'll provide an update at 8 pm and 10:30 pm! Fancy!

• So much juicy bike world news this afternoon—thanks to the good people at Bike Portland, we now know that PBOT DID NOT give permission for anyone to drive this Jurassic-Park-color-schemed sports car onto the pedestrian-only Blumenauer Bridge. Also, here's some news of even more use to cyclists: there are tentative plans / discussions about building a freight bridge in St. Johns, which could either a) allow for bike lanes on the St. Johns Bridge or perhaps a more direct route from Kelly Point to Sauvie Island? Johnathan Maus is dreamin'.

• Can people care about art on election day? If there's any hope of that, it'll be found in Like Liquid, Cut Loose, an immersive fluorescent ocean grotto, created by paper-focused visual artist Morgan Rosskopf and electronic musician Ashlin Aronin. Mercury arts writer Martha Daghlian says that if you can handle the immersive, sensory chaos you may—like she—leave with a feeling of “warm-hearted apocalyptic acceptance.”

• In this week's Savage Love: Dan cannot know how your sexy friend feels. Only the friend can know that. Oh wait, the advice-seeker gave Dan his friend's phone number! Juicy!

NATIONAL / INTERNATIONAL NEWS:
• "Too often we base the story of rising crime on increments of time that are statistically meaningless," writes NPR reporter Sandhya Dirks, as she sublimates a series of interviews with law professors and and scholars studying crime statistics. Dirks explores the things statistics can tell us and things they can't, the influential media departments of police forces, and why we find ourselves once again subject to a "frenzied narrative around rising crime," and presented with "tough on crime" solutions that we know don't work.

• Cue the schadenfreude, Twitter is glitching. Mass layoffs at the behest of the company's new owner Elon Musk have left the teams primarily responsible for keeping the platform free of misinformation weakened—as we go into midterms election night. 

@nbcnews NBC News' Ben Collins breaks down the impact that #Twitter ♬ original sound - nbcnews

• One of us! One of us! Associated Press reports that Arkansas, Maryland, Missouri, North Dakota, and South Dakota all have recreational cannabis legalization bills on their ballots. 

• I rustled myself out of bed this morning to stare that blood moon in the face, and it was exactly like this:

@washingtonpost A total lunar eclipse turned the moon blood red in the early hours of Election Day. #BloodMoon ♬ оригінальний звук - Viktoriaa🌸