One of the raps this blog gets is that it's too negative. Trust me, I really try to keep on the sunny side, but I've always had an angry, cynical streak -- I was "snarky" before that word even existed. And when you live in a place with, ahem, shall we say, an eccentric local government, it doesn't always bring out the best.

Let me give you an example. When I read one news story last week, I started off penning some nice, innocent, light-as-a-feather commentary:

Congratulations to the beleaguered Buckman neighborhood in southeast Portland. The city has committed to repair the community pool in the Buckman School, at a $400,000 price tag. I wish the city hadn't hemmed and hawed about it all summer long, but it's nice to know that the pool will be fixed, and it is expected to be reopened this coming spring.

Gee, whaddya know, that will be right around the time that a certain parks commissioner will be in the heat of a serious re-election battle. I'm sure he'll be glad to show up and cut the ribbon. Maybe he can even dodge questions about whatever happened to the community center that was supposed to be built in the old Washington High School. That place can be turned into a refugee center (er, I mean "displaced-citizen-who's-just-as-good-as-you-and-me-and-deserves-our-respect center") in a matter of a few days. But finding money to make good on an old, old promise to the neighbors seems to take decades.

They have $3.3 million an acre for contaminated parkland in the SoWhat district, but they don't have money for the Buckman community center. Maybe they ought to have the PDC start building condo towers in Buckman -- then you'd see some quick action. Opie would dash off an application to the Kroc Foundation, and next thing you know there'd be a swell workout joint for the condo dwellers fresh in from Marin County -- complete with city-subsidized botox injections and free wine and cheese.

The Oregonian's anti-meth zeal morphed into a really nice piece of journalism yesterday, as investigative reporter "Maximum Maxine" Bernstein masterfully revealed that the Portland Police Bureau's recordkeeping system is state-of-the-art for the turn of the century.

Unfortunately, it's last century.

People are still writing things out on paper, often by hand, cranking out faxes if they're in an ambitious mood, and having paid staffers run around driving dead-tree written reports all over town in city cars. (Be thankful they're not still on horseback.)

If someone steals your property, the only way for our bluecoats to work on your case is to sift through piles of written forms manually. Little is being collected, compiled, or sorted with even a minimum of electronic aid. We're way, way behind other bureaus in the region -- especially the smaller ones, which seem to have their tech houses in relatively good order. Our police appear to be at about a seventh-grade computer literacy level.

And there's not much hope for improvement on the horizon in Portland. Rather than buy a proven, off-the-shelf product, the city's apparently decided it's smarter than the market when it comes to computers. And so it's custom-designing its own system.

I repeat: Portland. Is designing. Its own. Computer software. Can you say, "Water billing system fiasco?"

Meanwhile, we're going all out to create a cloud of wi-fi so that bloggers can blog from the sidewalks, and the kids can send instant "U R so hott" messages to each other all day long. But when it comes to giving our frontline law enforcement officers even minimum computer assistance in solving and preventing crime, we can't get our act together.

Wow. Thanks, Oregonian, for an important story. That alone made this Sunday's paper worth buying.

Wyman Winston, a key figure in the Portland Development Commission "Coachgate" caper of last summer, is out of his $136,940-a-year job as deputy director of the PDC. Winston was the guy who needed a "management coach," and when his in-house coach hired an outside coach to help with the coaching, well, the baloney hit the fan. All three of them are now out the door, along with the executive director and two of the board members who were supposedly overseeing the whole thing.

Thanks again, Mayor Potter. But now let's see the PDC bring in some real urban renewal and economic development for the parts of the city that need renewal the most. (Hint: A bad-news convention hotel and more condo towers aren't impressing anyone.)

"Is there a law against a bear running around in your yard?" Perkett says. "Doesn't she have rights as a bear?"

My archives are getting a lot of Google hits on this post today -- for obvious reasons.

Amanda Fritz's candidacy against Dan Saltzman for Portland city commissioner is for real. Her website says that she's got 551 of the 1,000 contributors' checks for $5 she needs to qualify for the city's new "clean money" taxpayer subsidy of her campaign. She was hoping to get all 1,000 by tomorrow; it looks like she'll miss that deadline, but come up with the requisite number of checks fairly soon.

On her site, she also takes a swipe at the OHSU aerial tram, which is encouraging, and despite her obvious fondness for the "clean money" system, she makes a very intriguing contrast to her opponent. This one's going to be fun to watch.

Speaking of "clean money," I keep hearing that the Arlington Club set -- no, wait, excuse me, the face cards fronting for the Arlington Club set -- have a petition drive going against "clean money" under the name "First Things First." But I haven't seen hide nor hair of such a group on the web yet. Anyone know where they are or how they're doing?

UPDATE, 11:15 p.m.: Her contribution meter just went up to 601 today.

You runners, bikers, and walkers out there: Here's a neat tool that takes the guesswork out of estimating the distance you cover on your favorite routes. I was pleased to find out that I had underestimated my favorite loop by two-tenths of a mile, although I had overestimated one of my more ambitious runs by more than a quarter-mile. (The website may still have some bugs, but the basic pedometer feature seems to be running fine.)

Another nice thing about the site is that it's so much easier to think, talk, and write about getting exercise than to actually get it! (Via Frenzied Daddy.)

In neighborhood graffiti cleanup news, there are a couple of positive developments to report. The Qwest folks have cleaned up the collection of inane tags that they had picked up on the back side of their "phone hotel" building on NE Stanton Street between 23rd and 24th Avenues. Thank you!

And closer to home, the green Postal Service utility mailbox on our block -- a prime target for vandalism over the years -- has been removed. I have a can of drab green paint that I have been using to cover up the mess every so often, and I just bought a new refill. I don't know what I'm going to do with the paint now. But I'm not complaining.

I sure hope that the post office, and not some meth-crazed metal thief, is responsible for the disappearance of that box. Either way, I'm equally hopeful that our mail carriers can get along fine without it.

Sources at the White House are whispering this evening that President Bush has already selected his next nominee for the Supreme Court seat being vacated by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. "It's a true conservative -- someone the President trusts implicitly," one high-level administration official reported. "And it's another woman, which should help with the nomination."

The sources said the nominee had already been cleared with leaders of the far right element of the Republican Party. "When we circulated a bunch of names on the hill, a few of the more conservative members responded back with this name as an alternative. The more the President thought about it, the more he liked it." And although the candidate's experience with constitutional law is limited, the aide said, "she'll bring the fresh outlook that we're after, without all the baggage of trying to protect White House secrets. It's clear from her career background that she's decisive and authoritative. She's recognized around the world as a prime mover in law and policy within the executive branch. She's guided our country at the highest levels for nearly 20 years."

I must admit, it's a dynamite choice.

It's property tax time again. Miraculously, this year's tab is down 8.18 percent from last year -- based on the expiration of some Portland school district levies. So there's a few extra hundred bucks we get to send to the oil companies (and a few more bucks that the feds and the state are going to get, since our income tax deduction for property taxes will decrease).

You wonder whether the school board will try to get those dollars back on the property tax bill; I doubt it, since Super Vicki & Co. say they want to try for a regional income tax for schools instead. I'd support such a tax, but I doubt that it would have much of a chance of voter approval. We'll have to see.

Getting back to the property taxes, during the last tax year (July 2004 to June 2005), we noted how large a chunk of the property tax dollars that we pay to the City of Portland goes toward "urban renewal" and the police and firefighters' pension fund. Things haven't changed much in that regard this time around. Here's the tale of the tape for the current year, and last year:

"City of Portland" - 46.68% this year, 46.43% last year
"City of Portland Child Loc Op" - 4.14% this year, 4.11% last year
"City of Portland Parks Loc Op" - 4.01% this year, 3.99% last year
"Portland Police/Fire Pension" - 23.76% this year, 24.30% last year
"Urban Renewal - Portland" - 19.17% this year, 18.99% last year
"City of Portland Bonds" - 2.24% this year, 2.18% last year
Total - 100.00%

It's still 19 cents on the dollar for "urban renewal," and 24 cents on the dollar for bluecoat pensions and disability.

The check's due November 15 -- a sure sign that the holiday shopping season is about to begin.

A truly hectic week has precluded my mentioning here that I had coffee a while back with an old acquaintance for whom we're most likely to be voting in the future. It's Rey Ramsey, who's gone on to fortune and fame since I knew him as a rookie lawyer two decades ago.

Rey's now got two incredible gigs. He's the CEO of something called One Economy, whose mission is largely comprised of helping low-income people access technology. Among One's projects is an interesting website called the Beehive. He's also the chair of the board of directors of Habitat for Humanity International. Before this, he was the president of a Maryland-based nonprofit outfit known as the Enterprise Foundation. He splits his living time between Portland, where he has a (gulp) groovy condo in the Pearl, and Washington, D.C.

Rey is the ultimate political animal. On the blue side of things, he's connected all over, every which way. Here in Portland, the voter's choice these days seems to be limited to the socialist world of Erik Sten and the old boy network epitomized by Neil Goldschmidt. Ramsey's got it covered on both sides. He served in Goldschmidt's gubernatorial cabinet as housing director. But he's also buddies with Sir Erik, and he was right on board supporting Sam the Tram. When it comes to being on the inside in Portland and in Oregon, you can't do much better than that.

Hanging out in D.C., Rey's playmates include the top echelon of our bedraggled Democratic Party, and he appears to be something of a front man for Hillary. Wow, Goldschmidt, Sten, and Hillary -- the complete trifecta of politicians I wouldn't miss. But there's something about our personal contacts that puts Rey in a different class. When we talk, it's a Newark guy talking with a Philly guy. We both get it.

One of these days, he'll finally run for some office or other around here, at which time he'd be a hard candidate to resist. So if you didn't already, now you know about him. You read it here first.

Gotta dig out my copy of "She's Gone," by Hall and Oates.

Or "Eve of Destruction." Something tells me the next pick is going to be even worse for us lefties.

The Portland City Council is so funny. A week ago today, the commissioners were making a big deal about their calling a six-month moratorium on property tax abatements. Commissioner Sten was pouting, doing his best Opie imitation, about how he couldn't promise anything to the developers any more, now that Dan Saltzman is up for re-election and actually has to vote against the most egregious tax giveaways once in a while. A six-month cooling off period was just what the doctor ordered, to make sure that no more votes came up between now and the primary election, which coincidentally is just over six months from now.

That was comical enough, but it gets better. Yesterday comes news that Trammell Crow, whose abatement application for its proposed Alexan luxury high-rise apartments in the SoWhat district went down in flames a while back, somehow, miraculously, through a stroke of amazing good fortune, just so happened to get an application for a new abatement filed one day ahead of the start of the moratorium. By golly, they squeaked in under the wire, they did -- lucky them. Which means that there will indeed be a vote on whether to give Trammell Crow a new abatement. Only after we've made that decision will there be no more for six months.

Isn't it rich?

When it comes to developer welfare, our elected representatives really aren't very good con men. I remember the day they voted to allow construction of the aerial tram [rim shot]. Old Vera strutted around clucking, "You'd better come in on budget! Fifteen million dollars, and it had better be a picture postcard, just as you've promised!" How ludicrous. Everyone knew the $15.5 million was a bald-faced lie. (Actually, the first lie was $10 million, but at least Governor Neil and the other pushers of the project had owned up to a 55 percent overrun before the crucial council vote.) Now we're up to a $45 million black hole, and they haven't even put up the first girder.

The same with last week's big show: Look, everybody! Moratorium on property tax abatements!

Sure, until just after the next election. Oh, and by the way, here's a pet group we'll let in at the last minute. Everybody else, though, listen up, we're getting tough!

You have wonder why the Portland Development Commission loves Trammell Crow so much. In my last round of commentary on the Alexan, I discovered that that firm manages the so-called Merrick luxury apartments over by Burgerville on NE MLK Boulevard (also tax-abated, thank you), and many ex-tenants of that facility apparently are unhappy with the service they received there.

So what does Trammell Crow have its hand out asking for this time? A rehash of its Alexan proposal, but that's really just frosting on their cake. It will go along with the spectacularly sweet giveaway they're getting on some fine downtown real estate at SW Third and Oak. The PDC bought the property for $1.2 million, but all of a sudden, an appraisal has come in that says the parcel is in fact worthless because of some vaguely stated problem or other. And so Trammell Crow gets the property for free -- free! So that they can renew our urbs by putting up, just what Portland needs, another condo tower! Great. And we property taxpayers, who see a huge chunk of our property taxes go to "urban renewal" (it's roughly 20 percent of what I'm paying the city this year), in effect are just giving them the land.

Sheesh. I wouldn't mind so much these guys' ruining Portland, if they weren't making us all pay for it.

What public good will come of the Third and Oak handout? Why, if the new condo monstrosity on that corner is a hit, it will pave the way for that other condo tower that's planned for down by the Burnside Bridge -- you know, the one that's running Saturday Market out of the only home it's ever known.

No development proposal in Portland is complete without some obviously bogus design story, and the Third and Oak tower comes with the recurring snow job about the super-duper "narrow design" that will make it light and graceful. "These buildings will be so skinny -- like needles! Or the teeth of a comb! It's like Vancouver, B.C.!" Wonderful. I seem to recall the same line being thrown around about the SoWhat towers. Take a ride down I-5 and see for yourself, folks. They look like big, fat ugly boxes to me.

Yep, it's a funny show here. All that's missing these days is Randy Gragg's Pimm's-Cup pretention. Oh, well. You laugh to keep from crying.

I remember it well. I was standing over the teletype machine at my place of employment, The Jersey Journal, when the bell on that big black box started ringing off the hook, and it printed out the news, one letter at a time, the way it did only for a "flash."

Like many Americans, I have been growing progressively more worried about the increasing influence of China over America's future. But having seen this, I now feel a lot better. (Via Almost 30.)

Thank God, the last dirt street in the Pearl District has been paved over. I was starting to get a little worried, but they did it. Sam the Tram cut the ribbon on it himself last week. I saw the picture in The O as I took the recycling out last night. (I can't wait 'til that paper actually gets a website so that some day we can actually look at photos like that on our computers.)

Anyway, three cheers for the City Council. We wouldn't want any of the beautiful people to get their Blahniks muddy running between Starbucks and the wine and cheese places. And how sweet, they put the railroad tracks they dug up over in the new "park"! You know, the one that can't handle dogs?

Now, all you folks out in Portland's neighborhoods who have been living with unpaved streets all these decades, don't be jealous. This is a sure sign that we'll be getting to you soon. I believe we've got you in the budget for fiscal year 2082. If you would like to see the asphalt rolling out sooner, I'd suggest you sell your house to Homer Williams for a condo development, which reduces the wait time to roughly six weeks.

He was determined to stay in there forever, apparently, but Gus Whitman has finally made his entrance into the world.

His dad cried.

He's a lucky boy.

There are so many goofy things to blog about in Portland. I didn't even get off the pickup curb at the airport after a long weekend away before inspiration hit me. I looked up, and there, blocking my view of the multi-million-dollar glass canopy that we taxpayers built over the airport driveway (part of a $147 million construction juggernaut), are yards and yards of heavy black canvas netting, draped above to save us from being rained on by -- yes, bird poop.

You see, when designing the airport garage project (which literally turned fatal at one point -- three guys died in 1997 building the thing), no one among the Port of Portland's dozens (if not hundreds) of engineering geniuses realized that every sparrow for 50 miles around would love a perch (and a toilet) like this. Nice and dry, well-ventilated, plenty of light, soothing hiss of traffic below... mmmmm, really relaxes those birdie muscles.

So they saved us from getting rained on by rain six months out of the year, only to have us rained on by bird feces 12 months out of the year. We build a glass canopy, then have to install black canvas low ceilings so that you can't see it. Only in Portland.

Not to mention what would happen if, God forbid, some kook decided to drive a truck in there and blow themselves and the rest of us to kingdom come. All those shards of glass raining down would make one heck of a killing field. And what's to stop that from happening? Um, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security? Our well-funded, well-trained, high-morale local police force? Our seamless local mental health crisis system?

As we wait a while longer for our ride, we ponder: Now we'll spend another $160 million, for yet another airport garage. Because we've got nothing better to do with Port money.

Our ride comes, and we come home and see that there are a few bucks right in our face, on the old property tax bill, for the Port. Must be for something important.

And so right back into the blogosphere we slide. It's too easy, really.

We're blogging from an undisclosed location tonight. Haven't done that in a while. Here are your hints -- don't click on the links until you've guessed where we are:

1. The baby was asleep.

2. New Orleans looked fine from above.

We'll be back in Portlandia late Monday.

UPDATE, 10/24. 11:26 p.m.: Sorry if that first link hangs you up. You can't go back from it (at least not in Internet Explorer) without triple-clicking the back button really quickly. I thought it was just the lame hotel computer I was on last night causing the problem, but I see now that the page in question gets you in its grip and won't easily let go.

I am not making this up: Michael Jackson has been called for jury duty.

Here's a good one. A professor of public administration from the University of Texas is coming to town today to debunk the rosy projections that are being tossed around about the Portland Convention Center Hotel -- the one that you and I are going to pay for as the city continues to throw good money after bad at the White Elephant.

The professor, Heywood Sanders, is the author of the important study that the Brookings Institution put out earlier this year, which shows that convention centers are bad bets for cities. They haven't panned out anywhere, St. Louis being a recent example of major disappointment.

Unfortunately, our city commissioners have all been hypnotized by the hotel deal, and it's going to happen no matter how wrong it is, and no matter how little the people of Portland want it -- just like the foolhardy Convention Center expansion. It's like addictive gambling -- rather than admit you did something stupid, you do something even more stupid trying to win your money back. And the fix is in, with Mr. Lloyd Center getting the pork. Hundreds of millions of public dollars, most of it probably local tax money, and complete property tax forgiveness -- rumor has it, the hotel will pay no property taxes at all for 30 years. This is what we're spending our hard-earned city revenues to create.

The flyer for today's talk says that the event is an attempt to relate to the "local debate" about the hotel. Boy, if Sanders can find a genuine opportunity to "debate" this, he's one smart professor. This deal was done long, long ago, most likely in one or more smoke-filled rooms, back in the Vera-Neil-Mazziotti days (when Commissioner Sam Adams was the mayor's economic development guru). There's simply no stopping it, which is such a sad statement about our city. If it's such a good idea, let's put it up for a public vote! In your dreams.

Anyway, Professor Sanders will be speaking at 2:00 at Portland State. I hope the poor fellow can at least get in and out of our downtown without being shot, violently attacked by a roving gang, stabbed, menaced, or involuntarily fondled. As for his message, it's dead on arrival.

Another fun night in downtown Portland. Go by streetcar!

Neat interview with, and good picture of, probable Oregon Supreme Court Justice candidate Jack Roberts -- here.

I hope people in the path of this new monster storm are more prepared than the people of New Orleans were. Here's a model approach to hurricane preparedness.

Growing up in a Polish-American household (one quarter, at least), we ate golabki pretty regularly. This is traditional Polish fare -- cabbage leaves stuffed with ground meat and rice, usually with some vaguely tomato-based sauce lightly spread over them. Cheap and good.

Polish is such a funny language. Consonant sounds that aren't contained anywhere in the actual letters creep into words. When spoken by a true Pole, "Bogdanski" came out sounding something like "Boydangski." And "galobki" sounded like "gwumpkie." I never learned how to spell the word correctly until a visit to the Portland Polish Festival a couple of years back.

There was even some sort of neighborhood joke (the details of which I forget) that ended with the punchline, "We want gwumpkies, we want gwumpkies." I think it might have been somewhat racist, as many of the jokes circulating around that neighborhood were in those days. I distinctly recall that it got quite a few laughs as we dug into the rolled-up meat and vegetable entrees, made of ground beef, maybe a little onion and rice, and generic store-bought Jersey cabbage, baked in a dish (Corning Ware in those days, no doubt). You got everything you needed for this meal down the street at the Foodtown, from that produce guy "Hy" (you talk about your ethnic slurs -- ask my relatives what they thought of "Hy").

Although we appreciated the gwumpkies (and their cousins, green bell peppers stuffed with the same ingredients), after a while they got a little too familiar. One evening, my brother (then maybe 8 or 10 years old) decided to go on strike against gwumpkies. He hated them, he said, even under the thick layer of catsup that he insisted on applying to every dish set before him. He was determined. He would never eat gwumpkies, ever, ever again.

Mom was equally adamant. "Those are perfectly good gwumpkies. Eat t