A busy afternoon on old Sam Adams's calendar tomorrow. The Portland city commissioner has a 1:30 with Homer Williams, the city's largest consumer of real estate developer welfare. Civic-minded Homer wants to talk about the Burnside-Couch couplet. There must be some more tens of millions of our tax dollars in that one for him somehow.

Oh, well. He doesn't have Neil the Fixer yanking Vera's chain for him any more. Nor can he whisper sweet tax abatement talk in her ear over dinner at Paley's. These days Homer has to deal with a cup of lukewarm Boyd's in Adams's office. I wish I could be there when the commish looks at his watch about 15 minutes into it.

As if that's not enough of a scene, at 2:30 Sam the Tram gets a visit from one Gianna Lupo. This is the realtor who had the 10 meals on the public tab with then-PDC director Don "the Don" Mazziotti, all purportedly to discuss the emergence of a Little Italy district, perhaps in Old Town.

According to Adams's calendar, Ms. Lupo has "prospective business" she wants to talk about. No doubt.

And at 1 on Friday, lame duck OHSU prez Peter "Kilowatt" Kohler stops by with a posse to "check in" on the aerial tram [rim shot]. That's as in, check in your wallet.

I can't believe how the tighty righties are attacking anyone who would have the nerve to wish them happy holidays instead of a merry Christmas. Especially the umbrage they're taking about the tree being called a holiday tree. The tree belongs to Christmas, they're insisting. If you call it a holiday tree, you're violating my First Amendment rights as a Christian, and blah blah blah.

Really? Do you think baby Jesus was born under a canopy of Doug firs? Wrong, my friends. He was born in the desert, and he probably looked a lot more like Osama bin Laden than like Lars Larson. I'm looking in my New Testament for references to the tree -- hmmm, can't seem to find them at the moment...

So now the nattering nabobs of the right are going to spend the next four weeks using the word "Christmas" as a weapon. Let's spend the season brooding about our political differences. What a pitiful group.

Lost in the turkey coma of holiday weekend news was word that developer Tom Kemper has pulled out of the proposed Killingsworth Station development along Interstate Avenue. And so another Portland Development Commission project for north and northeast Portland hits the skids, there to join Vanport Square and the agency's many other big-talk-no-action plans for the Idaho side of the river.

When it's time to slap up condo towers and "luxury apartment" bunkers on prime real estate, running roughshod over established neighborhoods in the process, there's no stopping the PDC. But when it's time to help sagging neighborhoods on the east side, these guys pull out their crying towels and whine about "how hard these deals are to do." They can't get anything going even when they're literally buying the property and giving it away. The best they can come up with is a handful of cats-and-dogs storefront rehabs, while the big bucks pile up (literally) in places like SoWhat and the Pearl.

For $200 million a year, and 19 cents of every dollar of property tax collected by the city, this is the best we can do?

One of the great "cat ladies" of Portland is packing it in.

Patty Davies of the Animal Rescue & Care Fund has announced in the group's latest newsletter that she's "taking a break" from animal rescue starting in January. She's been doing it for more than 20 years.

When we first got our two pet cats nearly 10 years ago, we had all sorts of questions and concerns, some of them quite urgent, and we were lucky to discover Patty and her organization. She spent large amounts of time with us on the phone, and the advice she dispensed was invaluable. In the past year, Animal Rescue has taken more than 500 such phone calls, placed more than 250 cats in new homes, and provided complete vet care for more than 60 strays. They are great promoters of spaying and neutering, mailing out more than 200 discount coupons for such services this year. They've got a remarkable network of vets with whom they work to make life better for hundreds of animals, nonstop.

Other volunteers will try to take up the slack, but there's no replacing Patty. Let's hope she gets a great rest for a year or so, and then decides to come back and resume helping our remarkable feline friends as only she can.

We had a long outage overnight and into this morning. The server on which this blog resides has been sick.

Thanks for your patience. Regular blogging will resume shortly.

Last week we picked up on a column by Steve Duin of The Oregonian, in which he lambasted the Archdiocese of Portland for what appeared to be its suggestion that children who were sexually abused by priests were themselves guilty of "sexual misconduct." Duin quoted from a court brief filed by the archdiocese's lawyers in the pending bankruptcy case involving the church and the victims of abuse.

In my post, I wondered if Duin could possibly have been quoting that brief correctly. But then I got a copy of the brief, and sure enough, it said just what he said it did. I posted the entire document and highlighted the quotation in question:

C. Even If There Were a Third Party Exception, the Tort Claimants Are Not Third Parties. The TCC has never established that the tort claimants here are third parties or strangers to the Church. Indeed, the evidence is the opposite. After reviewing complaints by 206 sexual misconduct claimants, Margaret Hoffman testifies that "[i]n every single one of these Complaints, the claimants assert that, at the time of their alleged sexual misconduct, they were members of or associated with the Roman Catholic Church, primarily through attendance at a Catholic school and/or parish church within the Archdiocese." Sec. Hoffman Decl. at ¶ 2. This, too, constitutes evidence that was not before the Spokane Court when it articulated a "third party" exception to the Church Autonomy Doctrine that the tort claimants had never impliedly consented to Catholic Church Doctrine or polity. [Emphasis added.]

Well, today I finally got hold of the Hoffmann declaration, and it turns out that she did not say what the brief said she said. I've posted the entire declaration, dated Nov. 7, 2005, here. And here is the passage in question:

Attached to this Declaration are copies of the Complaints that 206 tort claimants previously filed in various state circuit courts, alleging sexual misconduct by agents of the Archdiocese of Portland in Oregon. In every single one of these Complaints, claimants assert that, at the time of the alleged sexual misconduct, they were members of or associated with the Roman Catholic Church, primarily through attendance at a Catholic school and/or parish church within the Archdiocese.

That's a relief. So much of what the archdiocese has done in connection with these sexual abuse claims has been deeply troubling to me. At least the sickest comment attributed to the church elders so far turns out to be an apparent misunderstanding.

Living under the jurisdiction of the Multnomah County commissioners is like eating lunch in a middle school cafeteria in a rough part of town. You're sitting there trying to consume your burger and fries in peace, when all of a sudden somebody yells, "Fight!" and you turn around and a couple of the bad kids are wrestling and throwing the plastic chairs at each other.

Today's instigator of fisticuffs is Commissioner Lisa Naito, who, reminiscent of Helen of Troy, has sicced former County Sheriff Dan Noelle on current Sheriff Bernie "the Intervenor" Giusto. As best I can tell, Giusto wants a bunch of money out of the commissioners for jail beds, but Naito brought in Noelle to say it's a bad idea.

It didn't stop there. Noelle basically yelled "Yo mama" at Bachelor Bernie by pointing out that his plan would cost the county big bunches of money in overtime, and that's just what the officers' union wants. Then Noelle threw in a comment about how the union had dumped a bunch of dough into Bernie's campaign coffers the last time he was running, and he pretty much came right out and said that the sheriff was in effect bought and paid for.

"Was not!"

"Were too!"

"Come over here so I can kick your a*s."

"No, you come over here."

"Like ths?"

"Say your prayers, punk."

Meeeeooowwwww! Maybe they can go upstairs and settle this, man to man, amid the wildflowers on the eco-roof.

Interesting little throwaway piece in the O this morning about the latest official survey that shows that Portlanders continue to appreciate their city, but their opinion of local government continues to slide downhill.

In a display of extremely shallow analysis, O reporter Anna Griffin decides that the dichotomy is all just a "marketing" problem. Here's the lead of her article:

The city of Portland needs some marketing help.

Portlanders, it seems, love their city. In the annual customer satisfaction survey conducted for the city auditor's office, three out of every four residents rate the city's livability as good or very good.

Yet when asked whether city government was doing a good or bad job, nearly a third of those polled said neither, the statistical version of shrugging their shoulders. About 16 percent said bad or very bad -- double the figure from a decade ago.

Sure, Portland's a great city, but how much of that greatness is thanks to the people on the Portland City Council over the last decade, or even the last two decades? I think many of those polled agree with me: Not much.

The Portland Development Commission has posted all the comments it has received over the internet about the proposal to move Saturday Market to make way for a condo tower with a snooty "public market" attached.

The clearly expressed view of the majority of commenters is to leave the market where it has been for the last 30 years.

Now we'll see what impact that has -- if any.

The whole 43-page pdf file is here.

I saw a story on the tube the other night about the upset neighbors of the new methadone clinic that's about to open in the Salmon Creek area of Clark County, Washington. The clinic will bring scores, if not hundreds, of heroin addicts -- all supposedly recovering, but some not -- into the neighborhood in the dark hours of the early morning most days every week. There the clients will drink their daily doses of methadone, a synthetic opiate that is highly addictive and fatal if misused, under supervision. The joy juice lets them function without heroin. (It's not to be confused with meth, which is another drug entirely.) They're also supposed to get counselling, but just ask them -- it's mostly about the juice.

The opening of the Clark County clinic is good news for Portland's Buckman neighborhood, which for years has unwillingly hosted hundreds of Washington State heroin addicts on their daily methadone runs. Back in 1986, the Clark County commissioners passed an ordinance that prohibited methadone clinics from operating within its borders. Thus, many addicts had to come to Portland from as far away as Central Washington State if they needed methadone. From 1986 to 2004, the nearest methadone clinic north of Portland was in Tacoma.

I know about this because I lived in Buckman when a private, for-profit methadone clinic sneaked into a Belmont Street storefront there over Christmas of 1997. I was among the neighbors who, like the neighbors of the soon-to-open Clark County operation, set up a picket line to show how displeased we were with our new neighbors. In our case, the siting of the methadone dispensary was particularly galling, because the neighborhood was given no notice at all of the relocation of the clinic from the Hollywood district, which was all too happy to see it go. The city washed its hands of the matter; I remember the Scone coming down and making his pained face for us one day, but he didn't do anything to help us. Multnomah County (which funds much of the methadone treatment) quietly promoted the site (I believe Mr. Lolenzo Poe was in on that one); and the State of Oregon growled a little but didn't want to stop it, and couldn't as a practical matter.

Anyway, I moved out of there a year later, and my long protest story isn't worth retelling in its entirety here. (Suffice it to say there were several outrages besides the stealth siting, including a medical director who was a raging alcoholic with an obscene monetary conflict of interest.) Methadone wasn't the only thing that prompted the move out of Buckman, anyway.

What's noteworthy now is that the opening of the new Clark County clinic is exactly what I and my then-neighbor Mark Senffner urged the Clark County commissioners to bring about when we testified before them in the spring of 1998. Senffner and I drove up to the 'Couv one weekday morning to urge the local solons to repeal their ordinance which made it illegal for anyone to operate a methadone clinic in Clark County.

Because of the Clark County ordinance, at that time an estimated 160 drug addicts journeyed to Portland on a daily basis to take methadone -- about 60 of them on county welfare funds. Dozens of them came to the clinic on Belmont, which brought an estimated 400 addicts overall into the neighborhood. (And Buckman hosted a second one on Burnside Street, too.) Many of them showed up in taxis, and the number of cars of all kinds with Washington plates that pulled up to that place was astonishing.

The Clark County commissioners politely told us they would have their mental health advisory panel look into the possibility of changing their ordinance. The stated reasoning behind the county law was that Clark County did not have a heroin problem, and that it did not support methadone as a means of treatment. With the growth of the Vancouver area, and a rise in heroin use there, these circumstances had clearly changed. Anyway, as far as I know Clark County never did get around to changing its ban.

But Washington State officials in Olympia strongly supported a push to open a clinic in Vancouver and stop the daily flow of drug addiction problems across the river to Portland. In 2001, the Washington legislature made it illegal for counties to ban methadone within their borders; at that point, the Clark County ordinance became void.

The first Clark County methadone clinic opened a little over a year ago. And now a second one is going to happen. Good for Washington State taxpayers, good for Clark County, and good for Portland neighborhoods.

Bad for the Salmon Creek neighbors. Not as bad as they think it will be, but very unsightly, and very sad. Methadone's supposed to be the treatment of last resort, because it's so addictive. There are other treatment options that are supposed to be tried first. But methadone's relatively cheap, if you don't have to taxi people all over the state to get it, and it's the easy way out. Private clinic operators make a nice living keeping people hooked on it. State and local social workers love it, as it makes their lives much easier.

Most of the methadone patients lie very low on their way in and out of the clinics. They hate being there (as Neil Young once sang, "She hates her life and what she's done to it"). And some of them are there on the major QT -- they would lose out big time, career-wise or socially, if word got out that they were reformed junkies. They'll creep in and out of the 'hood very quietly at 4 and 5 in the morning.

But there will be a few wise a*ses in the crowd. A few will sit on your lawn while the methadone buzz kicks in. A few will head from the clinic every day straight to the nearest convenience store, and down a 40-ounce malt liquor on top of the juice. A noticeable percentage will not really be off illegal drugs just because they take methadone. Most of them drive in and out, which really makes you wonder about safety, since methadone is a powerful drug. They park illegally. And as heroin users, they're all admitted felons.

They're there nearly every day. The Belmont shop was (and still is, for all I know) open Monday to Saturday (at least they knocked off right after lunch). Few patients got take-home doses, a situation which led to the sustained daily traffic flow. You don't know which is worse -- the clean-cut ones, who you suspect could get off smack with something less destructive, or the long-time veterans, whose bodies are ravaged.

The neighbors up north are right to be wary. And if you ask me, some picketing in the early days of the clinic's operation is actually a healthy thing for everyone involved. But get used to it, folks. As long as there are clients, that clinic is going to stick to that location like glue. Put a smile on your face and live with it, or do like we did and call your realtor.

As for the methadone clinic operators in Portland, who will lose even more paying customers -- well, it couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of people.

Over on Portland Commissioner Sam "the Tram" Adams's blog, he actually has a thread going on what would happen if the city pulled out of the aerial tram project [rim shot] between OHSU and the SoWhat district.

A pretty gutsy move on his part. Recent news accounts of the ever-expanding budget for this monstrosity ($45 million and counting, and that's for construction alone -- who knows how much it will cost to run the thing) have many of the city's taxpayers asking the same question. Recent revelations that there isn't much biotechnology being built in SoWhat despite the sales job, and that the first "OHSU" building down there won't be owned by the university, but rather by a private, "nonprofit" association of rich doctors, aren't helping the p.r. situation much, either.

So (1) how did the city get into this mess, and (2) what would happen now if it pulled out?

Adams's responses can be boiled down to this:

(1) Don't blame me. Though I was Mayor Katz's economic development expert at the time, I had nothing to do with it. It's all Jim Fracesconi's fault -- he was the transportation commissioner.

(2) Walking away from the project would force the city to pay extensive damages and wreck the city's credit rating.

Have some grains of salt ready and read the whole thing here.

UPDATE, 8:35 p.m.: The gods must be following this thread. A sign from heaven, Portland!

And while you're doing your tram reading, don't miss this.

Set the alarm clock (or more likely, the Tivo or VCR) for the Nick Fish talk show "Outlook Portland" tomorrow morning. His guest will be Portland City Commissioner Sam Adams, Fish's rival in last year's brutal, expensive council election.

The Fish tells me that the topics of the interview (recorded earlier -- even Nick probably doesn't get up that early on a Sunday) include "the tram, charter review, school funding, public power, Wal-Mart, Tom Potter, Vera Katz, tax relief, and the cell phone tax." I wonder if they'll be any on-air mention of Adams's floating some of his gobs of campaign cash to help Fish pay off his campaign debts -- an odd, if magnanimous, gesture.

It starts at 6:30 a.m. on WB (cable channel 3 around here).

The debate over whether Portland should have major league baseball is heating up again, with news that the owners of the Florida Marlins team (halfway decent, National League East) are saying that they would like a new home.

When last we left this saga, the State of Oregon had enacted a financing package whereby the state would put up around $115 million, paid for out of income taxes on the players' salaries, toward a new public stadium in Portland. About another $235 million would be needed, and the city and local baseball fans have roughed out a financing plan that would come up with the rest out of a 10 percent ticket tax, special licensing fees on businesses within the stadium district, a tax on stadium concessions, a reallocation of the some of the local hotel tax, rent paid by the team on the stadium, and some assorted additional odds and ends.

The state part is a done deal, having been adopted by the Legislature in 2003. The city part is so far just a brochure with some smart, energetic, and influential supporters. City Commissioner Randy Leonard's loosely on board with the baseball types, although he's still holding out to put the stadium out along I-205, which seems unlikely. Mayor Tom Potter has sent out some decidedly negative signals on the whole idea, and the other three commissioners are anybody's guess, with two of them up for re-election and the third trying to distance himself from his former boss, ex-Mayor Vera Katz, who was enchanted with the major league baseball idea.

Everybody's got an opinion on this, of course. I personally think it would be a great addition to the city, well worth the public investment.

Certainly a better investment than a convention center hotel that will be mostly empty, most of the time.

Certainly a better investment than a traffic-worsening light rail line running from Union Station to PSU, a route which already has the most extensive bus connections imaginable.

Certainly a better investment than a streetcar down lower MLK Boulevard.

Certainly better than a re-do of a transit mall that would get along fine with some new bricks and some spit polish on the existing bus kiosks.

Certainly better than a condo-and-chi-chi-public-market complex that will wreck the Saturday Market.

Certainly better than spending tens of millions to turn West Burnside into a one-way street.

Certainly better than spending $1 million or more a year to pay for TV ads for politicians' campaigns.

Certainly better than paying $3.3 million an acre for contaminated industrial land, so that it can be a park for million-dollar-condo dwellers in the SoWhat district.

And of course, certainly better than paying to build and operate (and constantly worrying about) an aerial tram [rim shot] to some rich doctors' private offices and the latest Homer Williams apartment ghetto.

When I was reminiscing about my early days of Bruce Springsteen fandom last week, I posted some photos from the mid-'70s and early '80s of Bruce, me, and some others. But in a hurry I was unable to come up with all the photos I had of that era. I've got boxes and boxes of memorabilia, and like the memories they evoke, they're not all that well organized.

Never say die, though. When something old is misplaced, you say a prayer to Saint Anthony, the patron saint of lost things, and keep looking. The other night, while avoiding work, I decided to take another look through some of those boxes, and lo and behold, a few more Bruce photos, which I had taken, emerged.

Here's how close we got to the Boss on Halloween night 1975 in Oakland. This was in the Paramount Theater on Telegraph Street. There was an orchestra pit in front of the stage, and we were in the front row (through the magic of mail order Bruce concert tickets). The show started right on time, because it was a Bill Graham show. We walked down the aisle about 15 seconds into the first song.

The first or second number was "Sprit in the Night," and there's a stop about two thirds of the way through (at "Killer Joe gone, passed out on the lawn"). At that point Springsteen dives into the pit, the lights all go black, and he disappears. After a couple of seconds, he pops up on the other side of the wooden rail right in front of me, and a spotlight quickly finds him. We were actually too close to take a decent picture with my little Kodak flash camera. But I did manage to click off one shot, and this is it:

When he appeared about six inches from my face, here is the guy he saw. Remember, it was Halloween, I was out with the boys, and I was trying my best to be in the costume of a Jersey Shore greaser:

Yep, that's the same t-shirt I was wearing in Winona, Minnesota a year and change before.

Bruce wore his bowler hat for the first few songs, but those sunglasses stayed on for much longer than that. They may have been the same shades I saw him in at Kean College a year or so before. Later on, when the show got to the sweaty parts ("Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)," "Devil With a Blue Dress On," etc.), off came the leather jacket, leaving us with this:

The other photo I was glad to find was one I took at the Performing Arts Center in San Jose on June 29, 1978. This was when "Darkness on the Edge of Town" had just come out, and we got a new, clean-shaven Bruce, whose dream had been realized, as he was finally a star:

After that show, my buddies and I from the Stanford campus radio station got backstage, where I ate a piece of the band's pizza (drawing puzzled looks from "Miami" Steve Van Zandt, as he was then known) while we waited for our brief audience. And it was there that my second and final Bruce handshake took place. It was fan's dream.

One thing I've thought about in the week since my other post was that I neglected to mention Springsteen's main sidekick, the saxophonist Clarence Clemons. Also known as "the Big Man," Clarence was a perfect foil to the little skinny Bruce. He was black, big and beautiful, and the two of them clowned around gloriously while they were on stage together. There was a subtle racial harmony message there that resonated with some of us. I've blogged about Clarence before, but it's about time I got his picture in the mix here, also from San Jose, as he and Bruce were playing off each other:

When I moved to Portland six weeks later, I had a few of the pictures from San Jose blown up by a fellow who had a photo shop on the south side of East Burnside, around 29th -- upstairs from where the thrift shop is now. His business was called "Sometimes the Magic Works." It was well named. He was helpful, and he seemed like a nice man.

There was an interesting article in The New York Times a couple of weeks back (gone now, unless you're a subscriber), about how parents of college freshmen are often disappointed, if not rudely surprised, when their sons and daughters come home for a break around Thanksgiving. Often the parents' plans and visions for several days of family togetherness are quickly and unceremoniusly dashed by their newly emancipated offspring, who want no part of it:

At the core of the conflict are often-unspoken expectations on both sides. Parents are still aching over their child's departure as well as the sense that the nurturing stage of their lives is over. To allay that sadness, they focus on Thanksgiving's reassuring rituals -- the elaborate meal, the hang-out time, the late-night leftover pig-out. But students, who have spent the past three months exploring new intellectual and social terrain and reveling in the freedom of dorm life, often find it impossible to step back into their old roles.

I lived at home all through college, and so I didn't move out until I was 21 years old and in law school. In the first year of law school, I was too broke to go cross-country for Thanksgiving, and instead I spent some quality time with my mother's sister and her wonderful family down in L.A. But in my second year, I did head back east, for interviews with law firms in New York City as well as a long weekend with the folks over in Jersey.

And I had my new girlfriend in tow.

This was one of the hottest romances that had ever been seen on the planet, and it had been that way for several months. We were joined at the proverbial hip, rarely apart and determined to stay fused together forever.

Oh, and were we ever the idealists. She was a vegetarian, and of course I had become one, too. "Lips that touch meat will never touch mine," was her statement. We both laughed, but she was only half-joking. And so I had become a strict veggie as well.

This was quite a sacrifice. I was living in a frat house, where I was the resident assistant that year, and just about the only nourishment among the items that passed for food in the dining room there was meat. Oh, there were vegetables, all right, but never the kind that had any protein in them. Moreover, the house cook was from the south, a wonderful lady, but she boiled every last vitamin out of those vegetables long before they made it to your plate. I dropped a good 10 pounds in no time, and it wasn't as though I could afford it. I think I bottomed out in the 130's somewhere, on a frame of 5 feet 10.

Mary's and my dietary code allowed us to eat dairy products and eggs, but "nothing that had eyes." And so it was that we headed over to my Aunt Margaret's for Thanksgiving dinner, which included us two law students, my dad (who was separated from my mom at this point), Margaret and her husband Andy, and maybe a couple of others.

I forget exactly when it was during this event that we broke the news, but I remember that it had not been announced beforehand. Our refusal to eat the turkey, the gravy, or the stuffing was, shall we say, not well received. We were used to explaining ourselves to the many heathen non-vegetarians among our acquaintances and friends -- we had the whole "animals are people, too" rap down, along with the observation that raising animals for slaughter was an inefficient use of land. We delivered it with our trademark sincerity.

But my father and his sister, both raised during the Depression in Down Neck Newark, were having none of it. Particularly from me. They didn't care that much if the girlfriend would starve herself out of goofy sympathy for animals, but what the h*ll had gotten into Jackie? "You're kidding," they kept saying. But I wasn't. Finally, Dad put a steaming Polish sausage in front of me, horrifying my new amour, and with widened eyes, he commanded: "For chrissakes, Jackie, eat the kielbasi! You know you love it!"

That romance made it only until the following summer, but I stayed the vegetarian course for almost two years. I finally broke the ice with some nice fish at a restaurant called Chez Jay in Santa Monica. When I got to Portland, it was on to chicken, and eventually back onto the hard stuff, red meat.

Anyway, Pop, Buggsy, wherever you are: Yeah, I knew I loved it. But at the time, I loved her more.

The four-plex I grew up in on the east side of Newark (in the Ironbound, or "Down Neck," section) had an alley behind it. Along the alley were the American Legion post (which used to be a blacksmith's shop), a big empty lot that belonged to the post (and used to belong to my grandfather), and a half dozen or so houses.

In one of the houses across the alley from us lived a working-class couple with a son who was a little older than my brother and I. The father of the house, who was a blue-collar guy just like the rest of the neighbors, always had a nice car, and he always took really good care of it. You'd see him out there all the time, with the bucket and the hose, keeping a clean machine. He'd also get involved under the hood. "He takes better care of that car than he does of his kid," the folks at our house used to say. We didn't really know if that was true, but it sounded good to say. Unlike many of the folks who lived around there, that family kept to itself.

One year back around 1960 or so, the Man Who Took Better Care of His Car put up for sale his current auto, a black 1951 Ford. I don't remember the model -- it might have been a Custom -- but I distinctly recall it being in great shape. My dad jumped on the chance to buy it, for 100 bucks, or maybe 200. The Bogdanskis, then a family of four, put the car right into heavy usage.

At that point, the car's days of being pampered were over. It was parked out every night on the sandlot along the alley now, instead of being safely in the driveway of the MWTBCHC. The signs of two spirited young boys began to appear in its upholstery. But it was reliable as all get-out. Compared to other vehicles my father had owned, it ran like a dream. In those days, the dads would let the kids sit on their laps in the driver's seat while the car was moving, pretending to steer. My brother and I both got a few turns at the wheel in that ritual.

Until one rainy Thanksgiving Eve in the early '60s. I was at home with Mom while Dad was off on some errand or other. I believe my younger brother was with him, although I might be misremembering. I recall clearly that there was a junior Bogdanski in the car, but it might have been my cousin Timmy from upstairs.

It being the night before Thanksgiving, they might have been headed off to pick up some last-minute dinner items for the next day -- maybe bread from Pechter's Bakery over in Harrison, or a kielbasa from somewhere. (No holiday meal in a Polish household Down Neck would be complete without the kielbasa.)

They were headed west on Fleming Avenue, passing by the Catholic grammar school we attended. Just as they were crossing Freeman Street, a car came speeding down Freeman headed north. Although Fleming was paved with asphalt, Freeman was a cobblestone street. Everyone who lived around there, and all the drivers who worked at the Ballantine brewery, which dominated the street, knew that it got extremely slippery when wet. You had to take it slow on Freeman when it was raining. But the driver zooming down Freeman that night wasn't from the neighborhood -- he was from one of the nearby towns. Irvington maybe, or Bloomfield. Anyway, he couldn't stop for the stop sign, and he plowed into the front of our Ford, on the driver's side.

Nobody was hurt in our car, but the two vehicles were in pretty bad shape, especially the Ford. Although it was built like a tank, it was totalled. Somehow my dad and brother (or cousin) got home -- maybe they walked to a pay phone and called my father's brother to come pick them up in his car, or maybe they just walked the third of a mile or so back to the house.

My father was pretty calm about the whole thing. He told Mom and me that the driver of the other car had had his two sons in the car with them. One of them might have suffered a bump or two. They were Italian-American, I remember -- the grownups in that neighborhood always identified each other by nationality before anything else. And apparently there was some indication that the driver of the other car had been drinking beforehand. Back then, that wasn't seen as a criminal offense, even if a property-damage accident ensued. It was the night before Thanksgiving, after all; of course he had had a couple. No blood, no foul.

The guy had insurance, and we got the book value of the car. But its loss really hurt. We had gotten such a good deal on it, and "it always started right up." It was worth way more to us than what the insurance paid.

Our next car, as I recall, was a Buick of similar vintage. Black again, of course. It was o.k., but it wasn't as good as the car we bought from that guy across the alley. "Jackie, that guy took better care of that car than he did of his kid."

This month, there was a clear winner. Nobody comes close to this.

Portland City Council candidate Amanda Fritz has announced that she has gathered all 1,000 individual $5 contributions needed to qualify for taxpayer financing of her campaign to unseat Commissioner Dan Saltzman. She's planning to file them with the city on Monday. Apparently this means that she'll get $150,000 out of the city's coffers to pay for political advertising and other campaign needs between now and the May 16 primary election.

It was harder to get that many checks than Fritz first estimated, and I'm not hearing that any of the other candidates who hope for public financing under the "clean money" system are anywhere close to getting the 1,000 contributions they would need. Saltzman is not taking the "clean money," and neither is Ginny Burdick, who's challenging Commissioner Erik Sten for his seat.

And so if Sten doesn't take the "clean money," Fritz could wind up being the only candidate who gets it. And I do mean only, because repeal of the "clean money" system will also likely be presented to the voters in May, on the same ballot as the local income tax for schools. Now there's an interesting juxtaposition. It's still early, but if I had to predict, I'd say that for better or worse, "clean money" and the tax are both heading for defeat. (Via Also Also.)

In the newspaper business, the midnight-to-8-a.m. shift is known as the "lobster shift." Nobody knows why for sure, although there are several theories. Whatever the real etymology may be, back in my reporter days I would sometimes draw lobster shift duty in the summers, when the regular denizens of the dark were on vacation. There was a little extra in your paycheck for working those hours. Under our union contract, it was called the "night differential."

I still do work that shift, but there's no differential in it for me any more. Observant readers of this blog have noted on occasion that the time stamps on the posts here are often during the wee and not-so-wee hours of the morning. And I've been known to fire off a flurry of e-mails just before calling it a night, which hit the inboxes of the people I work with in New York just as they're sitting down to start their workday.

Anyway, it's been a rough lobster shift this morning on the server that hosts this blog. It's been up and down all night like a newborn baby. If you've been trying to get through and couldn't, be assured that the crack technical wizards at my web host are on the case trying to uncrash the thing. And if that bad case of the e-hiccups should recur the next time you're trying to get here, please don't give up.

Set the Tivo, kids: Oprah's going to be on Letterman next week.