AND NOW A NOTE FROM "SIR DAVID COVERDALE"

TO THE MERCURY: Even in London we're aware of your shite little JIZZ-RAG of a paper and it's lame cheeky snark, so when I read ur birthday wishes to Jimmy Page [RE: Up & Coming, Jan 5], the intended spirit was obvious. Cor blimey, ya lollies! It's the D-Man himself, David FUCKING Coverdale calling you muppetheads out!

Yoose jus' jealous, yoose is! Jealous of my 14-octave vocal range and the fact I nail that C sharp! (Take that, you bloody little poof Robert Plant!) Jealous of my 47-inch rock-hard MAN-CHEST, which I'll have you know, still makes the teenage birds moist up their KNICKERZ! Jealous of the fact I'm here, sippn' tea in me leopard-skin mawashi, surrounded by my solid gold records, a gaggle of hot groupies (in various states of dress and inebriation), an albino tiger, and four llamas on loan from the London Zoo! SO knock if off before I fly over there and grind your twiggy little hipster bones into Marmite!

-Sir David Jackson Coverdale

BOW, WOW... WOW!

DEAR HUMPY: I've only gotten as far as the first "letter" in this week's paper and must drop everything to write you to say that this is why we love you and want you to bear our children (if we weren't already involved and didn't already have cats). ["Another High-Minded Debate Between the Editor and a Mercury Reader," Letters, Jan 5, in which the editor engages in a verbal sparring match with a reader, ending with him barking, "BOW WOW WOW WOW WOW!"]

-Robert Triptow

THE EYE-ROLLING ARGUMENT OF THE WEEK!

First of all, technically the Woods is in Westmoreland, second, both Sellwood and Westmoreland are within the city limits of Portland, so therefore, not suburbs ["Into and Out of the Woods," Jan 5, in which Music Editor Ned Lannamann grieves the closure of the Woods]. But if the hipsters think it's too far to come, that is okay by the residents.

-posted by xmass

Really you guys [Mercury] don't know Sellwood is a neighborhood? There's more to Portland than the central Eastside!

-posted by Portland resident

The Woods is in the neighborhood of Sellwood-Moreland, and I used "Sellwood" as shorthand for that, as almost all Portlanders do. And I meant "suburbs" both in the textbook definition of "an outlying part of a city or town" and the colloquial sense of any part of town that is primarily residential, as opposed to the denser, taller buildings of downtown. If I meant to suggest that Sellwood was a separate city from Portland, I would have called it the "suburb of Sellwood," not "suburbs."

-posted by Ned Lannamann

The only thing I'm seeing here is that you guys are acting like idiots arguing about a completely irrelevant side detail. Who gives a fuck if Sellwood is a suburb or not? It's so small it doesn't even matter anyway. If it disappeared no one (or maybe one) would even notice. Even Portland is a small little town. You can't even get a direct flight to most places a person would want to go to. Probably because it's assumed that most people just want to listen to metal and eat cheese, which you can pretty much only do in the backwoods here. So there is no reason to have clothing stores with good style, or airplanes that fly to places of good taste. It's too small to even have a suburb, and it's pretty clear to me that you're all pretty "small town" as well for even giving a shit about Ned's semantics.

-posted by notaportlander

NOTAPORTLANDER, for that game-changing argument, you win the Mercury letter of the week, and two tickets to the Laurelhurst Theater, which is centrally located in the emancipated sovereign island state of Laurelhurst.