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Today a bunch of people in our office, including the publisher and our most serious news reporter, got an email with the subject line "News Story: Oregon's Drunkest Cities." In it was a link to a list of the 10 "drunkest" cities in Oregon. (My boss suggested I write about it.)
The list begins with a disclaimer: "This article is an opinion based on facts and is meant as info-tainment. Don't freak out."
It then goes on to identify criteria for deciding which city is drunkest as follows:
*Number of bars and pubs per capita
*Number of wineries per capita
*Number of liquor stores per capita
*Each city's drunk-related tweets within the last week
*Each city's divorce rate
I'm no scientist, and I know they expressly asked me not to "freak out" but I have a few issues with their methodology. This is how they decided on "drunk-related tweets": "For geo-located tweets, we measured the following raw number of tweets that came from within a city's general area: #Drunk, #Party, #Beer, #Wine and #Cocktails."
I, for one, have never hashtagged a drunk tweet #Drunk, nor have I tweeted about a party with #Party.
The divorce rate number is even more ridiculous: "Studies have indicated that when one or both partners in a marriage are alcoholics, that couple is three times more likely to divorce."
Again, not a scientist, but I am pretty sure assuming from this basis that higher divorce rates mean more people are alcoholics is a logical fallacy. You can't say "if A then B" then go switching it around like that.
The list appears on the website RoadSnacks.net, a real gem of a click factory that includes a lot of great, super fact-based lists like: "These Are The 10 Most Ghetto Cities In California," "These Are The 10 Laziest Cities In Minnesota" and "These Are The 10 Fattest Cities In Wisconsin."
Anyway, according to this list, Lincoln City is the drunkest place in Oregon. Sixty percent of the cities on this list are on the coast, which probably honestly just reflects the high divorce rates on the Oregon Coast, which in turn is probably related to the fact that poorer people are more likely to get divorced and that on the Oregon Coast, people are poorer than they are in the rest of Oregon. In Coos Bay, 21.2 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, as compared to 16.2 percent in Oregon as a whole.
In Lincoln City, it's 20.1 percent. As a side note, we are probably a pretty drunk state—by which I mean "divorced," by which I mean "poor" by this measure—as the national percentage of people living below the poverty line is 15.4 percent.
If you don't feel like giving a click to RoadSnacks, especially since I already gave them some clicks today, here's the rest of the list.
#Party:
1. Lincoln City
2. Astoria
3. Portland
4. Bend
5. Seaside
6. Brookings
7. Florence
8. Ashland
9. Eugene
10. Coos Bay
Willamette Week