This week pun-free!

[January 28th, 2004] WINNERS

Local fish were doing cartwheels last week as reports of heavy winter rain and snow-pack combined with a federal judge's ruling limiting pesticides near waterways to ensure that our finned friends will be swimming in a clean aquatic wonderland come summer.

Defenders of Portland's open-water reservoirs made a variety of celebratory gestures after another monkeywrench got tossed into the city's plans to cap their beloved open tanks. The reservoirs won placement on the National Register of Historic Places, putting even more bureaucratic obstacles in front of the city's bulldozers.

The federal government provided a much-needed boost to Portlanders living with AIDS, in the form of a $1.3 million grant to Our House of Portland. The grant money will go toward expanding the number of beds at the care facility and providing rental assistance for about 20 late-stage AIDS patients.

Democrat David Wu could only smile as GOP challengers Tim Phillips and Goli Ameri trashed their filters and let the spam fly in the 1st Congressional District primary election. Though both Washington County Republicans support new policies calling for foreign travelers to be fingerprinted and photographed when entering the country, Ameri--an Iranian immigrant--criticized similar initiatives back in '98. Phillips now accuses Ameri of secretly working for the Evil Iranian Regime, while Ameri says her opponent is demonizing her ethnicity.

LOSERS

While the Blizzard of 2004 is just a white-knuckled memory for most motorists, PDX cyclists eager to take advantage of streets sans slush ran into a new challenge: shoulders and bike lanes coated inches-deep in the gravelly detritus of yesterday's snow banks. Portland's got 54 snow plows, but not a single push-broom?

Portland public-school students may not get off as easily as they hoped after the legendary blizzard apocalypse. Commissioners Dan Saltzman and Randy Leonard--both of whom played a big part in saving the district from chopping its calendar last spring--wrote to the school board and teachers union this week politely demanding that three teacher in-service days this spring be converted to instructional days.