I GUESS WE'RE NOT IN KANSAS ANYMORE: CARS ATTEMPT TO SCALE STEEP PORTLAND STREET

Cars Sliding on Icy Hill

Portland man's video of slip, slidding, spinning cars a smash

It was bound to happen.

Whenever the Portland area gets waylaid by snow, there's always an amateur videographer, usually living near a steep street, who captures some poor driver's agony of defeat on the ice. The video is then uploaded to the Internet and that sucker goes viral.

This week's winner of the award for "Best Portland Slip, Slide and Spin Seen 'Round the World": Southwest Waterfront resident Bob Cronk.

Monday, Cronk looked out his condo window and spotted a set of cars trying and failing - and trying and failing again, and again, and again - to get up a little hill to Southwest Macadam Avenue. Up and down, up and down they went.

For humorous effect, Cronk, a business manager for a local law firm, sped up the video and added some goofy chase-scene music courtesy of "Yakety Sax." He then posted it to iReport on CNN.com. As of this morning, 159,863 people have viewed the video.

He's getting rave reviews on the iReport site. One poster says it's among the best videos of 2008 on iReport.

"This is such an amazing video," comments "scanneec," "The amazing thing is that there is not ONE accident that occurred. And there are several times were vehicles are sliding down the hill and others are passing by gunning up the hill. Being an employee of an auto insurance company I am truly amazed that there are people that can drive out there!!"

Oh yeah, well just wait until the amateur videos starting landing from Seattle today. If there's one place that has a harder time steering through the snow than Portland, it's our big sister to the north.

Cronk isn't letting the sudden popularity of his video go to his head. His Facebook status this morning: "Bob Cronk is thinking his 15 minutes are over."

Still, my all-time favorite continues to be "Volvo Driver Learns How to Brake and Fill Out Insurance Forms" from 2004.

-- Joseph Rose; josephrose@news.oregonian.com