Gossip Should Have No Friends

[December 7th, 2005] TREATMENT CENTER Brandon Brown, one of the gents behind East has transformed the old Stephanos club at 1135 SW Washington St. into an ultra-sleek restaurant and nightclub cheekily named Bettie Ford . I think huge banquettes, 1960s Palm Springs flair, and a dance floor ringed with stadium-style VIP seating, all courtesy of Colab 's Mark Engberg . The club isn't slated to open until Dec. 15, but rumor-generating emails have already been flying that one of Bettie's silent partner/owners is the White Stripes' Jack White . "I'm not commenting on the investor list," grumbles Brown.

FOR ART'S SAKE Since 1980, Portland's Percent for Art Program has required the city to allocate a percentage of the cost of building projects to public artworks like Portlandia (it's been set at 1.33 percent since 1989). Now, in response to an August City Auditor report revealing the program's implementation is "murky " and "informal " and "may not fulfill requirements for public art, " everybody's favorite city commish, Sam Adams , is proposing some refinements. Most significantly, the new ordinance, to be introduced Jan. 4, would raise the allocation to a whopping 2 percent, an increase that would cover the rising cost of maintaining existing works in city's $6.8 million public-art collection.

COUNTDOWN TO FREEDOM We rarely pimp products outside the pages of our Gift Guides (check out our fabulous Holiday Fashion pullout this week!), but the BackwardsBush keychain ($9.95), a credit-card-sized timer that counts down the days, hours and minutes remaining in Bush's presidency to a 10th of a second, gives us cause to break the rules. The folks at Balloons on Broadway nabbed 'em from Vince Ponzo and his partner, Merry Stricker, who make the timely doohickies in their New York City apartment. Ponzo says he invented the keychain as an antidote to political despair: "Watching the days, hours, minutes and seconds ticking away, it can only get better." Don't want to carry it with you? Download a timekeeping screensaver at www.backwardsbush.com.