First tuna, now salmon—sushi menus get smaller every week.

[March 19th, 2008]

Winners

1 Yoink! Over the objections of the Portland Development Commission, Mayor Tom Potter and fellow Commissioner Dan Saltzman, Randy Leonard brought the PDC’s in-house legal department under the city attorney’s supervision (See “Hostile Takeover,” WW, March 5). Suggestion for the PDC law shop’s last memo: OK’ing use of duct tape during City Council interrogations.

2 Portland high-school hoops dunked the state last weekend with the Grant boys winning the 6A tournament and the Jeff boys taking the 5A title. BTW, could somebody in City Hall lift a finger and get this tournament moved from Eugene back to Portland? Here’s the deal, Eugene: You can have Hacky Sack. But we get basketball.

3 State Sen. Brad Avakian (D-Bethany) had the luck o’ the Irish last week. Avakian, a workers’ comp lawyer, was facing a tough primary race for secretary of state. Then he got the call from Gov. Ted Kulongoski to head up the Bureau of Labor and Industries. The current BOLI chief, Dan Gardner, is quitting to be a union lobbyist in Washington, D.C., where no one plays Hacky Sack.

Losers

1 Lay off the sake: Fishermen have been banned from catching any salmon off Oregon’s coast until April 30. Last week the National Marine Fisheries Service and the Pacific Fishery Management Council announced the ban to counteract the dramatic decrease in Chinook in California and Oregon waters. Changing ocean currents, pollution and hungry sea lions have been blamed—but SoCal water hogs are the chief suspect.

2 There’s no chicken shortage—yet—thanks to the diligence of the federales who busted 63 suspects in a Washington-Oregon cockfighting ring last week. The fowl players were apparently even less discreet than the Emperors Club VIP.

3 Blind folks must go elsewhere for their news fix, now that Oregon Public Broadcasting is axing a service where newspaper and magazine articles are read aloud for the vision-impaired and otherwise disabled. Four OPB employees are losing their jobs—and the print media loses still more eyeballs.