WINNERS 1. A couple of rookie county commissioners made good on campaign promises and came up with some cash for homeless youth. Lisa Naito forced the issue when she proposed a county hiring freeze to free up money for street kids. That idea didn't sit well with some county officials, who last week rallied around Diane Linn's proposal to spend $500,000 from contingency funds for shelters and other services. 2. Hot Oregon bands Everclear and the Cherry Poppin' Daddies just got hotter. On Sunday night MTV's 120 Minutes, which often influences radio programmers and helps songs become hits, aired the bands' new singles--Everclear's "Father of Mine" and the Daddies' "Brown Derby Jump." 3. Talk about a nice plug. The Beach, the latest book by the local literary couple Lena Lencek and Gideon Bosker, wound up on the cover of the Aug. 2 New York Times Review of Books. Reviewer Alexander Frater raved about the "eccentric 'history of paradise on earth,'" calling their chronicle of surf culture an "entertaining, handsomely illustrated book."

LOSERS 1. Critics of outdoor ads took a hit from Portland's daily newspaper last week. In an editorial calling for an end to the city's ban on new advertising murals, The Oregonian (which uses such advertising itself) wrote: "Painted walls or blank walls?...heaven forbid that dull, blank walls suddenly become colorful, informative, interesting additions to the streetscape!" We'll send the kids with the spray paint right over. 2. This month's edition of Brill's Content exposes the cynical manipulations of local flacks at Waggener Edstrom, the spin-meisters who helped Bill Gates master the universe. Having been compared to Hitler's propaganda machine by one former employee, the firm may be in need of its own image-building services. 3. It's bad enough screwing up in public, but Oregonian columnist Margie Boulé had to suffer through her error being noted three times in her own paper. Boulé's Aug. 9 column told the gripping story of a woman robbed at gunpoint during Tom Curtis' crime spree. As it turns out, Curtis isn't a suspect in that robbery. The paper ran a correction Aug. 12, Boulé penned a mea culpa Aug. 13 and, finally, public editor Michele McLellan noted the "big mistake" in her Sunday column.

 

originally published August 19, 1998