Here's a Google search that led to this blog. Alas, the searcher found no answer to the query here.

But I'll bet some of you have suggestions...

As a card-carrying boomer, I've been enjoying the classic Motown singles for 40 years or more now. There's something about the music of your adolescent days that sticks with you forever -- at least it does for me -- and I count myself extremely lucky to have the Motown sounds among the ones I still carry around with me, with the Beatles, the Stones, the Beach Boys, and their contemporaries. Want to hear me sing Edwin Starr's "25 Miles"? I didn't think so -- but I could.

Having had decades to collect the entire Motown catalog, I now have at my fingertips (everybody say yeah) nearly every single that company produced during its heyday, and there are times when a browse through those songs really brings me back to life. Just the first few bars of so many of those numbers can turn my head around.

One downside of playing the tunes over and over is that the recordings can become fossilized. When you know the song and the singers' interpretation so well that you could repeat it in your sleep, sometimes you don't completely listen to it any more. You hear it, it evokes memories, it stirs the soul, but the mind no longer fully processes the sounds of real human voices or real instruments.

Fortunately for me, the last few years have provided a number of wonderful opportunities to listen to the old voices with new ears. The first was the movie about the Funk Brothers -- the Motown house band. It was called "Standing in the Shadows of Motown," and I blogged about it here. If you are a Motown fan and you have not seen this, you must drop what you are doing and get on the trail of the DVD. After viewing it, you will never listen to your Motown collection the same way again (particularly the bass lines).

Another nice treat these days is the fact that whoever has control of the master tapes of the Motown singles has begun to let outsiders remix them. There's a Four Tops box set out there now called "Fourever" that's got a number of remixed versions of the great songs by that group. For example, on "Reach Out (I'll Be There)," the reverb has been eliminated from the lead vocal, and you can hear the drummer -- Pistol, maybe -- count off the start. Levi Stubbs's voice sounds even more raw than in the original, and you're transported to a real recording studio, rather than the ghostly Phil Spector-esque hall that the classic version seems to emanate from.

Now, that's not to say the new mix is better than the old. But it's just different enough from the familiar. For a second you feel a slight wave of novelty -- as when this record first thumped out of the bass-heavy radio in dad's old car, or squeaked out of that tinny two-transistor radio, made in Japan.

This week I came across yet another box set which does much the same thing with classic songs by many of the other Motown artists. It's caled "The Motown Box," and it contains, among other things, quite a few extended and remixed versions of the classic singles. If you're a Motown fanatic, several of the features of this collection fill in missing audio information from those legendary sessions in Berry Gordy's "snake pit." The tracks don't fade out as quickly as the originals do, and you can second-guess the decisions that were made about how songs should end. A few sneaky edits are removed. And many of the inputs are mixed differently, with nice results. In some of the Temptations' numbers, for example, the new box turns up the mikes on the background singers and the Funk Brothers, so that they're not drowned out by the lead singer. You hear instruments and voices that were somewhere in the original performances, but given such little volume in the original mixes that even top-notch audio equipment could never have brought them out of your stereo.

With many of these singles, the groove is so strong that you've always been sorry to hear it end. And so anybody who can tack another five or 10 seconds of the real thing onto it -- and bring the Funk Brothers' and background singers' contributions into clearer focus -- is aces in my book.

Here's the best part: If you live here in Multnomah County, you needn't shell out 60 or 80 bucks to hear these box sets. Our county library has them in its collecton, and you can have them all to yourself for three weeks if you're willing to put your name on a list and wait for them. I knock local government all the time on this blog, but you won't catch me bashing the library. That's where I go to get my Marvin Gaye.

An impossibly busy schedule (including an upcoming appearance at Candidates Gone Wild this Monday evening) has combined with other considerations to cause the Complete Internal Revenue Code Podcast Project to go on hiatus.

However, this important project continues to inspire others, even in its dormant state, and now our moving reading of one of the early tax code sections has been put to music, with spectacular results. As Neil Young says, there's no holding this back -- let's get it out there on the internet to the whole world right away. Go here for the mp3 file, and be transformed. As always, it's free. (Courtesy Tom Ono.)

Yesterday the mailman brought us a much-deserved rebate of some of the property taxes and astronomical water and sewer bills that we pay to the City of Portland.

Unfortunately, it took this form:

Wonderful use of taxpayer and ratepayer dollars. It did have some laugh value on the inside, though:

Now that's taking the high road.

Not to mention all the Photoshop fodder we'll have for the November runoff:

I love the sound of that: "November runoff."

It's funny. Now that I'm registered as an independent, this junk mail came addressed only to my wife, who's still registered as a Democrat. I guess all that "nonpartisan election" malarkey only goes so far.

The urban planning gurus at Portland State University have announced a new standard for excellence in local government:

"If you want to make out city government as dysfunctional, you make out the city as dysfunctional. Is that right? I don't think so," says [PSU planning professor Ethan] Seltzer, a longtime observer of city government and a former Planning Commission member. "This ain't Detroit. It ain't New Orleans. . . ."

It's allergy time in Portland, and something is really starting to irritate our nose for financial trouble. Now the city is issuing 25-year bonds and using some of the proceeds to pay operating expenses:

About $3.75 million will go into what bureau managers are calling "strategic investments," including adding a maintenance crew to handle sewer line breaks, treating contaminated sediment in the Columbia Slough and increasing the amount of biosolids -- otherwise known as sludge -- Portland treats.

Bureau leaders will use another $3.75 million to slow the rate of increase of city sewer bills, among the highest in the nation. The bureau had estimated a 6.1 percent increase in the fiscal year that starts July 1. The additional cash will keep that to 5.6 percent.

City Commissioner Sam Adams and Marriott say they're trying to strike a balance between taking care of the immediate pain of higher bills and the long-term risk if the city doesn't put more money into maintenance.

Then, of course, there's the rim shot to cap it all off:

Utility customers, for example, contributed $284,000 this year of the estimated $1.3 million for public financing of City Council campaigns.

With all the flap going on about Multnomah County Chair Diane Linn's calendar and schedule, it might be worth re-reading this March 2004 profile from the Trib about a day in her life.

I blogged about it here, and a fellow by the name of Dave Lister wrote in:

Two things struck me about the Diane Linn profile. First off, I wondered how she was able to take time out of her busy schedule to tend to any county business at all. Secondly, not once during that busy day did she interact with any business people or concern herself with any matters of commerce.

Leave it to the blogosphere to provide a laugh when it's most needed. I was messing around last night after a tough day, and I decided to pay a visit to a site I used to link to, Grouchy Old Cripple in Atlanta. After the Bush-Kerry debacle, I removed Denny from my blogroll, because I decided the tighty righties didn't need my help getting their misguided word out.

But lately the G.O.C. is runnning some truly funny cartoons (mostly about gas prices) and jokes. Like this, for example, on Easter. I had to laugh. Just be careful what you click on over there, because a few of his links are to not-work-safe, horrible photos of women with their bare breasts showing.

But if you are not offended by male chauvinism and extreme political incorrectness, and if you need some yuks, go.

There it was on the O editorial page yesterday -- the Old Boy Network's dream slate of officeholders. Big goofy pictures and all. Makes you wonder if Neil Goldschmidt himself wasn't sending this one in from Dundee in a "rare, emotional" fax.

Kulongoski vs. Saxton -- a West Hills dream come true. You want more trams, scams, OLCC shenanigans, out-of-control Lottery, SAIF corruption, OHSU manure, Port of Porkland, Matt Hennessees, Bernie Giustos, and Don Mazziottis? Either Ted or Ron will bring you all that and more.

Burdick and Saltzman -- straight out of Homer Williams's back pocket. Sure to satisfy the linchpin-heads, as it were.

And there are the new kids, Wheeler and Cogen. They've got that Arlington Club musk on them, too.

Oh, and in case you missed it, they're all "for the children."

I have well-meaning, smart friends who are voting for some of these candidates, but I just can't.

Then over in the sort-of-news magazine, the O's quasi-objective City Hall reporter column pretty much decides for us that "clean money" is not in trouble, just needs tweaking. Nobody's really complaining much, except some nut cases on blogs, so really, she guesses, it's here to stay.

Sure. Unless and until it's ever voted on, when it will be beaten down like a sales tax in John Day.

That's The O -- one odd perspective after another. Like their lead in the big front-page story:

Oregon Supreme Court Justice R. William Riggs announced Wednesday that he will resign before the end of the year, a move that probably will end its all-male lineup.

Unlike the venomous bloggers, however, the O does have those Pulitzers.

Oops, that naughty, naughty Ginny Burdick has spent more than $150,000 of private donations on her Portland City Council primary campaign! That means, yes, you guessed it, incumbent Erik Sten gets another $1,387.57 in city tax dollars to spend on his campaign. And for every additional five grand Burdick spends, she's got to report it, and Opie gets to go to the tax trough for another slurp.

Isn't the new public campaign financing "system" working great? Really "levels the playing field," doesn't it? It brings all kinds of new people into politics, and now no one has an advantage.

I'm so glad we didn't get to vote on it.

Multnomah County Chair Diane Linn really can't do anything right -- anything.

First she allegedly has her staff doctor up her appointments calendar before releasing it to the public, to make her look busy. Then when she's busted for it, today she mouths off in The O to the effect that any action against her by the county d.a. must be politically motivated because assistant d.a. John Bradley supports her opponent in her upcoming primary.

Slight problem: wrong John Bradley.

Now the main d.a,., Mike Schrunk, is turning the matter over to the state Department of Justice for investigation.

Would a Linn perp walk not be the best local TV Portland has produced since Tonya Harding? Bernie himself could put her in her cell and turn the key. (Just not at Wapato, of course.)

Now that we've all learned how to put the [rim shot] in after every mention of the OHSU Medical Group aerial tram [rim shot], it's time to get to work implementing another important style suggestion made by a regular reader here. That is, whenever the word "linchpin" is used to describe the latest Portland development swindle, replace it with "UNDERPANTS" (and I'm thinking all upper case).

So far, it's not quite fitting. Here's a quotation from this morning's OHSU Apology Journal (a.k.a. The Oregonian):

The tram, a $15.5 million linchpin in the $2 billion redevelopment of South Waterfront, has tripled in price and spun into an election-season nightmare for Saltzman.

The tram, a $15.5 million UNDERPANTS in the $2 billion redevelopment of South Waterfront, has tripled in price and spun into an election-season nightmare for Saltzman.

The tram, a $15.5 million PAIR OF UNDERPANTS in the $2 billion redevelopment of South Waterfront, has tripled in price and spun into an election-season nightmare for Saltzman.

Maybe not. Thoughts?

Well, here's another clue for you all...

The Stennies are all abuzz with the news that the city has come out with a couple of additional charges against Emilie Boyles in the Portland "clean money" taxpayer campaign finance scandal. "Bad, bad Emilie, we're coming down hard on you now, but thank you for showing us how we need to 'tweak' this wonderful system," yada yada yada. Even Nigel Jaquiss is bleating along with the "progressive" sheep on this one.

Notice that there's still no charge related to the apparently phony signatures that she turned in. I guess that part of the system's fine, huh?

The funniest aspect of the latest demand letter from City Hall is that the city gives Boyles until July 3 to pay back the $145,000 in "clean money," plus thousands more in penalties and interest. As if! In the meantime, she can spend whatever of the taxpayers' money she's got left on trailer rent, lawyers, Doritos, laptops, and cell phone minutes.

I'm starting a pool. How much will the city actually recover from Boyles? Closest guess gets a free lunch, on me, anywhere south of East Burnside and east of 82nd. My guess: Zero.

Here's a wild one in today's Willamette Week -- a former aide to Multnomah County chair Diane Linn says Linn had her fake entries in Linn's appointment calendar before turning it over to a reporter who had made a public records request. According to the aide, the changes were both additions and deletions, but all were designed to make Linn look busier with official business than the real calendar showed:

Bridges recalled taking out references to phone calls between Linn and her former chief of staff, John Rakowitz, a longtime Linn boyfriend who had gone to work for the Portland Business Alliance; some notes pertaining to discussions of Wapato Jail; and indications Linn had taken several days off for vacation.

Bridges says most troubling was that she was asked to make Linn's work schedule look more robust. Bridges says she added meetings that never took place, some scheduled earlier in the morning than Linn typically arrived, and added a boilerplate notation to make it look like Linn was returning calls and emails and available in her office on Friday afternoons when, according to Bridges, she was often gone.

Start with no. 10 and work down to no. 1.

From Snethen:

GWB has no more interest in finding any sort of shenanigans with the oil companies than I do in finding out how many calories are in the Mandarin Chicken at Safeway.

A while back I discovered that one of my favorite sweet snacks, Dagoba Organic Chocolate Eclipse 87% bars, had been recalled for unsafe lead content. The company was stonewalling completely on the results of the tests it had performed on this product, and I had a half-eaten bar of it, still in the wrapper, sitting on top of my refrigerator. And so I took it in to a food testing lab here in Northeast Portland to have it checked out.

The results came back today, and they are truly alarming. The bar I had contained 4.5 milligrams of lead per kilogram. That's 4.5 parts per million. That's nine times the regulatory action limit on lead currently imposed by the federal Food and Drug Adminstration for candy likely to be consumed by children (0.5 ppm), and 45 times the most recent proposed standard for such candy (0.1 ppm).

No wonder Dagoba's not showing whatever test results it has. And you have to wonder how these products legally got to market when they're that badly contaminated.

If you ate Dagoba Chocolate Eclipse bars over the last six months, you really do need to have a blood test for lead. If you need additional anecdotal evidence, read this.

Then there's the question of whether Dagoba is going to pay for your blood test (and whatever else may ensue from the results). I called the company on April 5 and asked that question of a person named Jessica. She told me to call Jeff Wilson, Dagoba's liability insurance representative at an outfit called Ashland Insurance. I did so on April 10. On that date Mr. Wilson took my name, address and phone number and promised that someone from Dagoba would call me back with an answer.

I'm still waiting.

An interesting side story to the lead contamination is the hate mail I have received for speaking up on this issue. One outraged organic foodie even foolishly thought he could get somewhere by complaining to my employer, who has nothing to do with this blog or this issue, about my comments.

It's truly bizarre. I was sold contaminated food, and I'm in the wrong to say anything about it because it was a small, lefty Oregon company? I call major b.s. on that.

The primary ballots will be here any day now. Time to figure out whom I'm voting for in the Multnomah County races.

County Chair: Whatever you thought of incumbent Diane Linn's whole gay marriage thing, the subsequent degeneration of the county commission into a junior high school screechfest is grounds for dismissal. I don't care if she emancipated the slaves, she is so gone in my book. But Ted Wheeler doesn't exactly thrill me, either. He's buying the election, and with his gobs and gobs of timber money and treks to the North Pole, his "regular guy" schtick is mighty thin. He reminds me of the time when Packwood was passing himself off as Jewish. I'm kind of leaning toward the Fred Meyer produce guy, Terrence R. Smyth.

District No. 2: Everybody and his brother is urging a vote for Jeff Cogen, but his associations leave me cold. He's the brains behind Dan Saltzman? Endorsed by Vera Katz and Bev Stein? You're losing me, people. Xander Patterson's just way too out to the left for me, and so that leaves Lew Frederick and Gary Hansen. Hansen's a state legislator (strike 1) and endorsed by Sam Adams (strike 2), but he's got Randy Leonard and a couple of neighborhood activist types in his column. Frederick's a Ph.D. candidate in the Portland State urban affairs program (strike 1) and endorsed by Serena Cruz Walsh, whose seat he's running for (strike 2), but he's backed by Bud Clark, Avel Gordly, Joel Shapiro, and the letter carriers. Close call -- I'm leaning toward Frederick.

County auditor: This is the undercard to the nasty smackdown for Metro auditor. The current county auditor's leaving to slug it out over there, and her assistant, Lavonne Griffin-Valade, is looking to step up. Despite some scary names in her endorsement list, La GriVa's got a slight edge over Steve March, a state legislator (strike 1) who's been working as a "policy analyst" for Lisa Naito, one of the "mean girls" currently on the commission (strike 2 -- I like Lisa, but not what she's been doing lately). For an auditor, March sure knows how to write one impenetrably vague resume. College professor, substitute teacher -- what the heck does this guy do for a living?

County sheriff: Write in Derrick Foxworth. Seriously.

Several members of the Oregon Legislature began physical therapy this week after dislocating their shoulders patting themselves on the back after last week's special session. This organization did next to nothing in the regular session, which dragged on through more than half of 2005, but suddenly reconvened to pass a few nuggets in a few hours in the off-season.

The pollsters must have told them that they were in danger of losing their jobs in the approaching primary election, and so they needed to do something quick. There's talk of making the Legislature a year-'round affair, but from last week's performance, a much cheaper solution to the Salem gridlock is apparent: Just schedule the regular sessions in election years, when the lawmakers have to answer to the voters immediately. I suspect you'd see much more accomplished.

Emily Harris, a correspondent for National Public Radio, will discuss how she became a radio journalist, and her experiences reporting from Iraq, at 7:30 Saturday evening at First Unitarian Church at SW 12th and Salmon in Portland.

A Portland native and Yale graduate, Harris is currently pursuing a journalism fellowship at Stanford. She got her radio journalism start at KBOO-FM (90.7) in Portland, and went on to become an NPR correspondent. She has worked on Bill Moyers's show, All Things Considered and Morning Edition; for a time she served as NPR's main presence in Berlin, and also has been stationed in Russia.

Harris will be speaking to raise funds for and awareness of Young Musicians & Artists, a summer arts and music program for youth. Harris spent many summers at YMA, where she was both a student and then a counselor. Harris eventually met her husband, Collin Oldham, at the camp.

Young Musicians and Artists is currently celebrating its 40th anniversary, and has been on the campus of Willamette University for the last 31 years. Tickets for Harris's talk ($15/general, $10/students and seniors) can be purchased at the door, or in advance by calling Young Musicians & Artists, 503-281-9528.

(And for the current scene where Harris came from on the radio, don't forget this site.)

Ever since Ronald Reagan ordered the application of the almighty Free Market Principles to the U.S. airline industry, the experience of flying on a commercial jet aircraft has steadily declined in quality. Now you go hours without food, are lucky to get served putrid water, rise at 4 a.m. to make your flight, and endure ticket pricing that defies all logic. "Why should you have to pay for something you don't want?" was the dominant mantra.

For years, I have said that by that logic, the next step will be to take out the seats and have you stand all the way to your destination. Why make you pay for a seat if you're willing to go without one?

I was kidding, of course, figuring that a seatless option would be too much of a safety risk. But never underestimate the ingenuity of the selfish Free Marketeers -- lo, it is coming to pass. You'll strap yourself to a board.

Word has reached us that Sid Lezak, ace mediator, former long-time U.S. attorney for Oregon, and one of Portland's great civic assets, has died. Apparently he had some sort of rapidly developing neurological disorder.

Sid even commented on this blog a time or two. He was a great man, and we are very much the poorer without him.

Hmmm... Let's see... Doesn't work well in a town of 28,000... Hey, let's do it right now in a city 20 times that size! Think big! Can you say "linchpin"?

A reader from out in the Lents neighborhood sends along a press release advertising the Portland City Council candidates' forum that's set for tomorrow evening at the Kelly School auditorium. The release notes that the event, with introductions at 7:15, will include 11 candidates for the two open council seats:

Eleven candidates have confirmed their participation in the Q&A forum, and include (in no particular order) Emilie Boyles, Ginny Burdick, Cisco Holdman, Dave Lister, and Erik Sten for Position #2, and Michael Casper, Amanda Fritz, Chris Iverson, Sharon Nasset, Dan Saltzman, and Lucinda Tate for Position #3. Each candidate will get the chance to share their own unique perspective and recommendation on such hot-button issues as education funding, local economies, and housing strategies. In addition, candidates will be dedicated equal time at the podium to recap why they are running and why you should vote for them.

The release also states, "Voter registration cards will be available at the door." But since tomorrow night's the deadline (don't quote me, but I believe your registration must be postmarked by tomorrow midnight), it would probably be too late unless someone then drove down to the main P.O. in time to get it postmarked. And I haven't checked when their last box pickup is. In any event, if you need to, you had better get that baby in the mail today.

Ditto if you want to change your affiliation to "independent," so that you can later sign a petition for Ben Westlund.

And if you're out Lents way tomorrow after supper, I suppose there are worse ways you could kill a couple of hours.

Did you catch that story in The O yesterday about how inmates at the county pen use the plumbing between their in-room toilets as a communications device? They just drain the bowl and talk into it:

But every night, when the deputies go home, the clandestine party line is alive with the echoes of gossip, fear, rage, regrets, withdrawals, proclaimed innocence, sports talk, singing, laughing and some Romeo trying to woo an unseen Juliet on another floor.

Who's been hired to run the OHSU aerial tram [rim shot]? And how much are they going to charge? The bids came in to OHSU long ago (although the city owns the tram, the Pill Hill boys call this shot, apparently), and I suspect that a contractor has been chosen behind closed doors. Where's the dislosure and the chance for public comment on that deal? (Only kidding.)