It looks like "the Nose" had a few pops before sitting down at the keyboard this week. He should do it more often.

One hundred grand would go toward the purchase of about 2,000 pairs of high-rise jeans, enough to cover the approximate number of those "ass antler" tattoos adorning the haggard lower backs of too many Portland women.

I had another in-the-flesh encounter with a Portland-area blogger today. This time it was ace observer Chris Snethen, whose wonderful blog with the unfortunate title "Undecided Resident" graces the OregonLive.com website.

A while back, Chris had challenged my assertion that "you can get there faster by walking" than by waiting for, and riding, the Portland Streetcar. He had conducted his own test of that proposition, and had asserted that it was faulty. He had tried to race the streetcar from Northwest Portland to Portland State, and the streetcar won hands down. I took exception to his methodology -- I thought he should have put himself in the place of someone who had just missed a streetcar -- and so we arranged to conduct further empirical research together.

We met at the OregonLive offices, where Mr. Velveeta and the Velvelettes were hard at work on their site. Alas, the Big Cheese could not join Chris and me for lunch as planned, because all hands were on deck to pitch in on coverage of the Nawlins disaster. So Snethen and I scored a Baja Fresh and headed out on our own.

Our test began at NW 18th and Lovejoy, where we waited briefly for a streetcar heading downtown, and let it go by. Once it was a block away, we put ourselves in the position of a hypothetical rider who was trying to decide whether to wait for the next one. How far could we get before the next one passed us? Wherever that was, we would get there faster by walking.

We headed east. The time was 1:15 p.m.

"Of course, I'm stacking the deck against the Streetcar," I confesssed as we meandered down Lovejoy. "Once you let one pass you by, you can always get somewhere faster on foot. The real question is how far you can get."

I knew we'd never make it to Portland State before the next streetcar did, but I was convinced we'd make it to about the Central Library. And so along the streetcar route we walked, at a normal pace, obeying traffic signals more or less.

It was a beautiful day -- brilliant sun, temperatures in the mid-70s and climbing. Snethen and I continued the conversation that had been going nonstop since we met in Velveetaville an hour and change before.

We see eye-to-eye on many things. And we know a lot about each other. This is why blogger "meetups" can be so intense: There's no need for much preliminary factfinding about the person you're with. You already know tons about them from their blog. So you can dive right into topics that you would never touch with a real stranger.

It was only 1:26 p.m. when the next streetcar caught up with us. We had made it to NW 11th and Glisan -- a mere 12 blocks. I had to admit, we hadn't gotten too far before The Toy had matched us. "Well, they've got ideal traffic conditions right now," I harrumphed, and they did. It was a sleepy late summer day in the Pearl, and there were few cars on the streets.

We kept going, just for kicks. We covered all sorts of topics as we walked -- blogging, careers, the Portland power structure, bosses, The O, both of our radio days, sports, the San Francisco cable cars, the 'Couv. The day grew a little hotter, and we got a little sweatier, as we sauntered south on 11th.

We made it only as far as Main when the next streetcar caught us. It was 1:43. And so if you had just missed the car at 11th and Glisan, you could have gotten to 11th and Main faster by walking than by waiting for, and riding, the next one. But 13 blocks -- that's not that long a stretch.

"Oh, well. I guess it's my week for apologies and retractions," I sighed. "I was just wrong again."

We headed back to our starting point a different way, back past the Mallory Hotel and the Oregonian printing plant. "There's my first apartment," Snethen pointed out, a block off our path, in the direction of Lincoln High. Great memories, except for the cockroaches.

"There go the Civic Apartments," I mused as we passed the bulldozers and crane at the demolition site across from the Civic Stadium. "Those babies were quite the eyesore, but I don't think I'm going to like what's going up in their place much, either."

"I remember going to a game at the stadium and seeing drug deals going on out the window of that place," Snethen recalled. "It was a drive-through."

On our way from there back to 17th and Northrup (where we had stashed our two cars), it dawned on me what a good time I was having, and what a great place Portland still is for goofing off and taking a nice long walk. My whole attitude about the city had taken an optimistic shift. We have spent way too much money on toys and Californication, but if you're just wandering around, not thinking about how it's being paid for, it looks and feels quite fine.

There's a real danger of getting too negative after blogging for a while. Look at how many journalists suffer from alcoholism, family problems, depression. The activity of writing about public affairs attracts intensely critical minds -- minds already inclined to look for what's wrong -- and it has the distinct tendency to kill the spirits of the writers as they stay professionally focused on society's warts.

And as technology enables us to engage in such activity in our own little cells, there's an isolation that makes the internal challenges even harder than in the days when the reporters all sat together smoking cigarettes and pounding out the stories on manual typewriters in big newsrooms. We now have all the heartbreak, and little or none of the face-to-face cameraderie -- not a good formula.

Racing the streetcar on a gorgeous day with a great guy like Snethen is the perfect antidote.

Portland's own Oh Dog, You Sleuth has some valuable links and thoughts on the tragedy in New Orleans.

UPDATE, 1:03 p.m.: An alert reader sends along this additional link.

The scope of the disaster has grown beyond comprehension. There's no way to keep up with all of the chaos at this point.

Buried in yesterday's Trib was a provocative tidbit. The day after he won the Pulitzer Prize for outing former Oregon Gov. Neil Goldschmidt for statutory rape, Willamette Week reporter Nigel Jaquiss was summoned by a phone call from The Neilster Himself to an impromptu meeting in the latter's car outside the Double Dub offices. According to the Trib, Jaquiss "confirms the encounter ... but will not disclose the nature of their discussion."

Readers of the blogosphere know that will never do. And so here now are the --

Those hard-hitting investigative reporters at The O were at it again on Sunday. Fresh from combing through ex-PDC chief Don "the Don" Mazziotti's expense accounts, where they found Bluehour galore, our "practically indispensable" muckrakers cranked up another front-page game of "Who had the pickle?" -- this time over at the Port of Portland.

Golly, wouldn't you know it, it looks like there were some questionable parties thrown on Port credit cards, of which there are something like 170 floating around in various Port employees' wallets. And hold onto your seats! Alcohol! Alcohol was purchased with some of them!

The level of detail that the Stickeler Temperance League went into this time is truly humorous. Gems like these:

A March 15, 2005, dinner for 14 Port firefighters during Salt Lake City training. With appetizers, steak and shrimp main courses, midnight cake a la mode and a $94.22 bar tab, the bill came to $491.53. Two weeks later, a group of 13 Port firefighters ran up a $455.08 bill at the same restaurant, including $58.75 for liquor.

Thirteen firemen spent $4.50 apiece on drinks at that second dinner -- can you believe that? And in Salt Lake City, no less. Scandalous!

The first dinner looks like a little more fun: 20 drinks for 14 firefighters --

Included in the $491.53 firefighter dinner were entrees, 13 beers, three glasses of Scotch, three Jack Daniel's with Coke, two appetizers, six desserts, three coffees and a coffee laced with Bailey's Irish Cream.

Coffee "laced with" Bailey's -- I love it. Soooooo evil-sounding. I'll bet some of the other coffees were laced with half and half! The cocktail sauce for the shrimp cocktails? Dosed with horseradish! One guy even did a line of Sweet 'n' Low on the taxpayers' tab.

Now this kind of writing is fairly harmless, and it may serve a purpose, even if it does resemble a high school newspaper project with a budget. But the sad thing is, it's as close to investigative journalism as The O ever seems to get at places like the Port. There'll be an editorial about the credit cards in the next day or so, and then our fine local daily will go back to sleep. All's well at the Port, folks, just a few no-good-niks overspending on meals. Same conclusion they tried to leave us with at the PDC.

As if the precise number of beers that the staff is drinking were all our media should be asking about. Here's a largely unwatched agency, with an annual budget well into nine figures, run by an unelected board appointed by the governor, with a strong odor of cronyism about it, doling out pork project after pork project, and the only hard look it gets is to send a reporter out to pick over some firemen's credit card bills? Ain't that the Portland way.

What next? Maybe they'll go over to Tri-Met headquarters and demand to know why the aspirin in the first aid kits is name brand rather than store brand. Other than that, I'm sure everything's fine over there, too.

It may sound strange, but I think more highly of Martha Stewart now than I ever did. Unlike a lot of folks (including my prosecutor brother, as I recall), I think she deserved the punishment she got. But now that it's over, I wish her renewed success.

And I have no doubt that it's coming. She's handling everything perfectly now. By Christmas she'll be a hotter ticket than ever.

If you ever want to see who's walking the streets because Multnomah County can't get its act together to have anywhere near the right number of jail beds, go here.

And don't miss this one -- no, it's not her.

Last week's Portland City Council denial of the tax abatement for the proposed luxury apartment tower in the SoWhat district continues to provoke thought and commentary. Here's today's installment.

I am reliably informed that in his comments before he led the charge to kill the abatement, Commissioner Randy Leonard borrowed heavily from a post (or perhaps this one) that Isaac Laquedem had put up the day before. The blogosphere strikes again. Bully for Isaac.

The other angle I'd like to cover today is what's next. There are doubtlessly many more City Council decisions coming up on which we nattering naysayers opposed to SoWhat may want to get in our licks.

One of my pet issues is who is going to pay for the operations of the ridiculous aerial tram that's going to be built to serve the project. Although it's going to benefit no one except the medical school, it's been cast from the beginning as "public transportation," Vera-speak that means that the general population, most of whom think it's ridiculous, will be footing the bill to run it year after year.

How much is the tram going to cost to run every year? To give you some idea, I'm told that the existing streetcar boondoggle runs up a tab of around $3 million a year. Of that, $2 million comes from Tri-Met, and $1 million comes from the city. Most if not all of that $3 million is local tax money -- the Tri-Met payroll tax, the city's share of property taxes.

How much will the tram add to that burden? Have you read a word about that anywhere? I sure haven't. But it's going to be enormously expensive -- the insurance alone is going to be a bank-breaker -- and there hasn't been even an educated guess in the media. I'm going to stick my finger into the wind and say $300,000 a year.

Who should pay that bill, year after year? The present value of $300,000 a year forever, discounted at 5 percent, is $6 million. Who pays?

I'm assuming it's the city, and that's just disgusting. Especialy in light of all of the city's other screaming transportation needs that are left untended to. Did you catch the story about the Thurman Street Bridge in the Trib the other day? The city's watching it slowly decay, and doing little about it:

But for now the city has more projects on its plate than it can pay for, among them extending the Portland Streetcar, renovating Burnside Street, building the aerial tram and rebuilding the downtown transit mall. The Thurman Street Bridge, beloved as it may be, is barely on the city’s list of priorities.

So far, through smoke and mirrors, the city's been able to say with a straight face that it doesn't have much money into the construction of the aerial tram. I think they've been saying something like $1 million.

But nobody's been talking about the many, many additional millions behind the curtain, and it is high time for that discussion to begin, as serious construction on the city's Goofiest Toy Ever is reportedly about to begin.

Ah, the sweet sound of rain on the roof. We Portlanders haven't heard it for weeks until today.

If you're enjoying the brief break in the string of (relatively) hot, sunny days, you've got me to thank. I finally got around to washing my car yesterday.

Thanks to Rob Kremer for having me on his radio show yesterday on KXL. I got to fill in for his vacationing co-host, Marc Abrams.

It was a fun experience, and an educational one. For example, while on the show I learned:

1. There is no such thing as man-made global warming.

2. The fact that the United States government is borrowing $1 billion a week from the Chinese government is no cause for concern.

3. Most of the problems of the world today are caused by the teachers unions.

4. Randy Leonard's Humvee does not have a rifle rack in it.

Thanks to the listeners who phoned in, too.

"Maybe someone or two is wondering," she writes, "about how i managed to get arrested in Ontario."

Those crazy kids at KNRK had me cranking up the volume in the Accord again tonight -- on the way home from church, no less. The song: "Alex Chilton," by the Replacements. Righteous, people!

My ophthalmologist, Dr. Merritt Linn of Portland, has announced that he's retiring in October after 40 years in practice. A careful, skilled, and thoughtful doctor, he is also the author of a deeply moving novel entitled A Book of Songs, which was published in the 1980s. You may never hear him say "Look at my light," as I have many times, but if you find his book and open it up, he'll be saying the same thing to you in a different way.

We wish him the very best in his retirement.

It was 42 years ago today, and here's what you need to do: Put aside a little time, go here, and click on the streaming audio. Read along. Think.

Now is the time.

Here's a great idea from Onfocus.

Because The Backstreet Boys? Suck. Seriously. It's like, you think you know how bad they're going to be, and then it's so much worse than that.

For the better part of 20 years, I have been a subscriber to The New York Times. Have it delivered, every day. I'm too busy for the whole thing -- I leaf through most of it every other day. Once a quarter or so I'll read a whole Saturday edition cover to cover, which is very satisfying. There are some truly wonderful discoveries to be made on those pages. When I'm through with the paper, about once a week I'll toss it to my next-door neighbor, an ex-New Yorker, who enjoys even day-old coverage.

It ain't cheap. It runs about $10 a week, and so when the quarterly bill comes, I write a check in the $130 range. Until a few months ago, I did it gladly.

But now my long romance with the daily Times is coming to an end. Why? Disagreement with the paper's editorial policies? A desire to switch all my news gathering to the internet? Loss of interest in the wide spectrum of events and trends that the paper chronicles?

Nope. Believe it or not, I'm quitting the Times over labels.

Several months ago, the trademark blue plastic bag in which the Times is delivered (typically double-bagged to protect against Oregon rain) started showing up with a label on it. A paper label, with my name and address on it. A label that's impossible to remove without ripping the bag.

For me, it's just another annoying security and recycling issue that I can do without. Having had my identity stolen once, I don't discard anything with my name on it without first shredding the item or obliterating my name and address. You can't shred a plastic bag in my shredder, so this means a daily trip to the drawer where the black marker is kept, to get the marker to blacken out my name and address.

Then where? The Times bag, which once was easily recycled at any number of Portland locations, can't be recycled with the label on it. And so it's got to go in the landfill, or be kept in a separate pile from our other plastic bags for kitty litter duty. As a religious recycler, I've already got about six or eight different piles going, and starting yet another one is not an option, for mental health reasons if nothing else.

So what is a customer supposed to do? I've called 800-NYTIMES on at least five occasions to complain about this. The folks who answer the phone (who have an accent, but it's not New York) assure me that I can have the labels omitted from my copies of the Times. The delivery person gets the message briefly, at least after some of the calls, but within a few days the labels are always back.

The last time I called, I specifically said I would cancel my subscription if the labels didn't stop. And today, I received not only today's paper with a label on it, but also yesterday's paper, delivered a day late, with a label on it.

The end. I'll pick up The Times at Starbucks once in a while, and I'm sure I'll leaf through the copy that's delivered every day to my workplace. But after a nice long run, my home subscription is history.

Just another one for my ever-expanding Grouchy Old Coot files, I guess.

Every once in a while, this blog gets a visit from a reader interested in a bar band called Holme, which absolutely ruled the Jersey Shore (and some North Jersey bars during the winter) in the early 1970s, when I was a college student. I wrote about them here in May 2003 as part of a piece about the wild, innocent Springsteen-esque shore scene in which I was a weekend participant.

Today comes the surprising word that the band has reunited, and is playing at none other than the famous D'Jais Bar on the beach in Belmar, where I remember them best. I recognize at least three of the names of the band members -- it's the same guys. What I'd give to make that scene on a Monday night.

"Play some T. Rex, man!"

UPDATE, 9/7, 2:35 am: The group has now got a website going, and there's also a fan blog up with some photos. Whoa, the boys look a little older than they did in '74! Can't see why -- I still look the same.

I often rag on The Oregonian, sometimes unfairly. And so it's only right that I also testify to that publication's good points. I must confess that rarely have I enjoyed a reading experience as much as I did spending a few minutes with yesterday morning's article on the Portland City Council's rejection of the tax abatement for the proposed luxury rental apartments in the SoWhat district. It just got better and better as it went along, and coupled with an excellent bowl of Wheaties with bananas and Oregon huckleberries, well, it was just a little slice of heaven.

"Trammell Crow has gone by the rules here, but I do think 48 studio units is not sufficient" to attract families to the city, Saltzman said.

Two prominent Portland developers and a lobbyist from the Portland Business Alliance tried to sway the council. They argued that businesses need predictability and that a rejection could damage Portland's credibility for future projects.

"My fear here is that we're going to have everybody's worst nightmare," [Homer] Williams said. "This is going to be a neighborhood where if you're rich, you can live there. And if you're a worker, you're probably not going to live there."

Cameron Vaughan-Tyler, the Portland Business Alliance's lobbyist, said, "To move the goal posts at this stage of the game is unfair, arbitrary and sends a bad message."

Sten argued against the majority, saying their decision "radically changed the city's policies. . . . I think we should just say this policy is off the books."

A week earlier, Saltzman asked the developers to see whether they could add two-bedroom apartments while setting aside at least 12 percent of all units for moderate-income renters.

Their answer: Adding two or more two-bedroom units would require additional subsidies.

Without their property tax waiver, Trammell Crow executives say the building could become another condo tower. If so, Hinnen said he'll have to find new investors and redesign the building at a loss of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Williams, though, said South Waterfront would move on just fine without the apartments.

"What the hell?" Williams said after the meeting. "We can make more money building condos."

I keep getting scolded for this post. The intended point of it was to kid Commissioner Adams in a silly way about his opposition to Wal-Mart. It was not intended to refer to his sexual orientation. But it is now easy for me to see how it can be taken the latter way. Perhaps subconsciously, I was thinking about that. As I said in the comments to that post, it was a bad mistake on my part.

I'm going to leave the post up (linked from this one) for a little while longer, so people can see what I did and what I'm talking about here. Then I'll take it down.

I'm sorry for any harm that it has caused, and I'll try to be more careful.

A reader writes:

If that $270 million Portland Development Commission budget were used just to build low- or middle-income housing, it could build 1,350 - $200,000 homes every year (40,500 over 30 years).

A bankruptcy judge in Spokane has ruled that all of the property in the name of the Catholic bishop up there is subject to the claims of alleged victims of priestly sexual abuse. Thus, the court has squarely rejected the church's attempt to hold back valuable real estate and other assets from the victims on the theory that they're held in trust for the faithful.

It's the same theory that the Archdiocese of Portland is trying to hide behind. The Spokane judge's ruling is not binding in the Portland case, but it will likely be influential. Both cases would ultimately be appealed to the same federal appeals court, the Ninth Circuit. (First the Spokane ruling would go through the federal district court for Eastern Washington.) In the end, the matter could wind up before the U.S. Supreme Court, but at this point that's doubtful.

In any event, score a big one for the victims. Glory be.

UPDATE, 8/27, 2:45 p.m.: The full text of the Spokane decision is available here.

The Oregonian has declared that the price tag on the City of Portland's quixotic attempt to buy PGE was $1.5 million. But if you read the story carefully, you see that there's plenty more that was spent, but that isn't included in this tidy figure.

The O reaches the $1.5 million by adding up $663,800, which it identifies as the cost of "its failed, four-month bid to buy Portland General Electric" (emphasis added); and "a 2002-03 go-around [which] cost the city $832,000." But wait! Even if those two figures cover all of 2002 and 2003, and the months of April, May, June and July of 2005, what about the period January 2004 through March 2005? Are you telling me the city didn't spend money on the PGE deal during that period? Hogwash.

Not to mention the fact that the figures appear to omit the cost of those salaried city staffers who spent major hours on the project. Commissioner Sten's time alone, at, say, one-third of his $89,000 salary, would be on the order of $30,000 a year, for something like three and a half years.

You pundits out there, please don't use the $1.5 million figure as authoritative. It's the product of bureaucratic obfuscation, lazy journalism, or both.

Another interesting wrinkle in the story was its mention of the concern, which I blogged about here, that the city could not have purchased the PGE stock without violating the state constitutional ban on state or local government's owning stock in for-profit corporations. Apparently the city's latest $663K worth of lawyers bought some sort of structure that the bureaucrats were convinced would "work" as an end-run around that law:

"We found the nature of the transaction to be very complicated because of the lack of clear legal authority to own stock," [city finance director Ken] Rust said. "It was a threshold question."

After extensive legal discussions, "we believed we had a structure that could work," he said.

Maybe someone in city government who reads this blog can fill us in. Barring that form of enlightenment, we could try a public records disclosure request, but I wouldn't expect too much from that route.

A while back I complained that I couldn't get a legitimate license, at any price, to start my own podcasting service with a music orientation. But here's an interesting alternative. If you're willing to download a particular kind of music player onto your computer, you can go to my Audioscrobbler user page, click on "Start Radio," and then "bojack's radio" as the station. You should at that point start getting (from Audioscrobbler, not me) a stream of music tracks that I've recently been listening to.

But first you have to load the last.fm radio player, and that's the catch.

Loading the player (part 2 here) can be a bit clunky, to say the least. If you're on Windows, any version, anywhere, be sure to pick the option that says "Windows Zip file - for the office." Then unzip and install. Set your browser on my user page (linked above), hit "Start radio," then select the station "bojack's radio."

Of course, do all this at your own risk. Here's hoping that it works, that you enjoy my tracks, that Audioscrobbler doesn't eat your computer, and that neither you nor I wind up going to jail over this.

If you try it, please let me know how it worked (or didn't). Thanks to Betsy for showing me this precious time-wasting resource.

As for real radio, I'm going to be co-hosting the Kremer/Abrams show this Sunday morning at 9 on KXL in Portland -- 750 AM. Abrams is away, and so I'm supposed to play counterpoint to Rob Kremer's rightie musings. Not only will I try to break into Lars Larson's gun locker while I'm there, but I'll also hang out afterward and try to give Randy Leonard a hotfoot during his show, which starts at 11.

Regular readers of this blog are probably wondering how long it's going to take me to get around to the Portland City Council's stunning denial yesterday of a 10-year property tax abatement for a luxury apartment tower in the SoWhat district being built along the waterfront. Well, it will take a while, for a couple of reasons. First, we've been entertaining guests all week, and that and summer's-end activities are eating up time today. But more importantly, it's taken me the better part of the day to wrap my mind around the enormity of this news. In the three-years-plus that I've been blogging, this is the most important, and encouraging, thing that's happened in city politics.

So stay tuned for the extended discussion. For now, let's just say thank you to Commissioners Randy Leonard, Dan Saltzman, and even Sam Adams(!) for finally, at least once, reflecting the will of the majority of people in Portland when it comes to the misguided juggernaut that's masquerading as "urban renewal."