WINNERS 1 Last week's Power play ought to keep sports conspiracy theorists busy for weeks. Last year, star center Natalie Williams bid a tearful goodbye to Portland and headed to Long Beach. As part of the deal, the Power got a first-round draft pick. Last week the American Basketball League shut down the Long Beach team, sending Williams back to Portland, which inexplicably got to keep its first-round pick. 2 Minor party candidates usually wind up boasting of some pretty obscure endorsements. Not Blair Bobier. Last week the Pacific Party's gubernatorial candidate got the backing of Harry Lonsdale, the former Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate. Lonsdale, who was never a party loyalist, is also backing Karyn Moskowitz, the Pacific Party's U.S. Senate hopeful. 3 Reed College students have reason to party, and we're confident they'll know how. According to the 1999 Princeton Review survey, the liberal-arts bastion ranked number one academically. Coincidentally, the school also ranked number three for pot usage, losing out to UC-Santa Cruz and the New College of South Florida.

LOSERS 1 More bad news for Tom Curtis. It turns out that while the ex-Grant High student-body prez was partying in Mexico, the choirboy was singing in Portland. Ethan Thrower, Curtis' partner in crime, cut a deal with prosecutors last week in exchange for testifying against his buddy. 2 In July, WW chastised Measure 59 foes for sending out a press release stating that the anti-union measure might inadvertently gut the voters' pamphlet. We called the argument a red herring. What do we know? Last week the Oregon Supreme Court agreed that Measure 59 will indeed restrict voters' pamphlet statements. 3 Pride comes before a fall, and when CEO Fred Buckman put a full-page picture of himself in PacifiCorp's latest annual report, he became a marked man. His grandiose plans for a mega-takeover of a U.K. utility flopped, as did PacifiCorp's electricity trading venture. Still, Buckman's abrupt dismissal shows just how much the utility industry is changing.

 

originally published September 2, 1998