If you ever see that this Portlander is playing somewhere nearby, run, don't walk, to catch his act. It's world class.

Here's an Oregon teen who believes in diversity. (The oil was a nice touch.)

Who epitomizes the "spirit of Portland"? That's the question the city government's currently asking, as it prepares to present its 2006 awards of the same name. Nominations are open now, and they close on October 27.

Here's some of the official announcement:

Awards will be given this year for Humanitarian, Independent Spirit, Community Harmony, Large Business, Small Business, Non-Profit Organization, Neighborhood of the Year, Outstanding Partnership, Employee Volunteer, and Youth Volunteer of the Year.

The selection committee -- comprised of representatives from the Mayor's and City Commissioners' Offices, the Office of Neighborhood Involvement, each Neighborhood District Office, and past award winners -- will determine the winners from among the nominees by evaluating them in each of the following five categories:

- Assistance with implementing outstanding projects

- Enrichment and revitalization of our community and neighborhoods

- Provision of a special service to citizens

- Demonstration of overwhelming responsiveness, creativity and civic values

- Raising cross-cultural awareness

Sometime in the next couple of days, I'm going to read and grade a guy's term paper.

Ashamed? Me too.

A reader writes:

I am fairly active in my Piedmont Neighborhood Association. Yesterday, Dan Saltzman met with us to discuss his decision to push for renaming a stretch of Portland Blvd (from MLK to Willamette) Rosa Parks Way. This has been pretty controversial for us, and many neighbors feel that it's being shoved down our throats and curiously, in an election year. I asked Dan what the cost would be to change all the street signs, the Interstate signage, reprinting public documents, and all the other tasks involved. He replied that no one had studied the costs, but stated that it should be between $12,000-20,000. Judging from what it costs to get public projects built, does that price range seem ridiculously low? Many of our neighbors think the money would be better spent on projects that would be less symbolic but more effective at helping disadvantaged citizens. What's your take on this?

Among the things you can no longer get in downtown Portland: Unemployment compensation.

The number of Oregon legislators implicated in Maui-gate continues to grow, and now we have a couple from the D side of the aisle busted. Time for a different topic on BlueOregon, heh heh.

Here's a shot from a happier, simpler time. Hit it, fellas.

KGW's got a story up about how no one informed Portland Mayor Tom Potter of the police killing of unarmed civilian Jim Chasse on Sep. 17 until after the medical examiner's report on Chasse's death was released last Friday, Sep. 22. The mayor was on vacation in Germany that whole week. (As mayor, Potter runs the Police Bureau.)

Potter's says he's unhappy with the decision by his staff, and I can see why. Charges of police brutality had been filed and reported in The Oregonian on the night of Wednesday the 20th. What was his staff thinking at that point? This isn't important? "On Friday when the medical examiner's report came back and the cause of death was not what we anticipated, we made the decision to call the mayor at that time." Had they thought that the medical examiner was going to find drugs in Chasse's system, and that this could be used to downplay the entire incident? If so, they thought wrong.

I'm curious, however, as to why Potter, whose every word on this incident will be carefully crafted, is now talking about the staff notification issue to the media. It's a somewhat interesting sideshow, but a sideshow nonetheless.

It remains to be seen what, if anything, the mayor is going to be able to do to wipe out the mean streak that runs through the Police Bureau. Word on the street is that he's afraid to take on the police officers' union. I hope that isn't true.

You wouldn't know it from the mainstream media, but there's still a Multnomah County commissioner position up for grabs in the November election, and the runoff is between Jeff Cogen and Lew Frederick.

Back in the spring, when Diane Linn was still nominally in the running to stay on as county chair, this race had a different look from what it has now. Now it's clear that Ted Wheeler is going to be running the county board, and to me Cogen (left) looks just like Wheeler. More representation for the West Hills moneybag crowd. Plus, given how little I think of the performance of Cogen's former boss, Dan Saltzman, as a Portland city commissioner, it would be really hard for me to say I want him representing me on the county board.

Frederick does not come across as a real ball of fire as a candidate, either. He's not a highly skilled politician. But his supporters tell me that's one of the best reasons to vote for him. One writes:

I learn more about Lew's values and goals every time I hear him speak. He brings perspective and depth. He talks about issues like he cares about them, from the perspective of someone who actually knows from life experience rather than having just heard about social problems. Reading about high school dropouts in a report is one thing. Hosting a group for kids in your home every week for five years, one month per student group, is doing something about it. And it was doing the most he could, with the resources available to him. He hasn't been in a position to help run the Children's Fund, for example -- but he would do a great job if he were elected and helped oversee it, because he knows where and how the money can be spent best.

And since I've been volunteering with his campaign, I'm even more impressed. He's definitely not a showman despite his years on TV and as a spokesperson -- there, he was scripted, in real life he's thoughtful and has broad knowledge and experience that's difficult to can into 30-second soundbites. He listens and has conversations, even during the campaign, instead of giving pat responses.

One issue that the two candidates ought to be talking about front and center these days is the county's rickety mental health service "system" (if it can be called that). Here in Portland, we just had the police kill an unarmed schizophrenic man, Jim Chasse, who was guilty of "looking strange," and the initial reaction from City Hall has been to deflect criticism of the police with, "We need to start a conversation about mental health."

The ensuing, deafening silence from Wheeler on this subject has been a disappointment, and we don't need the same from the new commissioner. There are still a few weeks before this one is decided. Let's hear what Cogen and Frederick have to say about Chasse and the larger issues raised by his death in Portland's "open air mental health treatment" program.

Drop what you're doing. You absolutely have to read this: a Q&A between Randy Gragg of The Oregonian and Pearl District developer Bob Gerding. It's another truly memorable piece of journalism -- so patently sycophantic that it borders on the obscene.

The yuppification of the Portland Armory is all about the environment, you see:

The environmental ethic, the sustainability ethic began back then in a bigger way in the civic consciousness of such things as the Bottle Bill and the public beaches and the Oregon view, in general, of protecting and nurturing the environment -- of stewardship.

I hope it's a leading light for other arts organizations around the country, that the process we are starting will be a new model.

Fireman Randy sure is going all out on his new Mr. Green Jeans kick. Biodiesel this, biodiesel that -- what next, hemp uniforms for all the Water Bureau workers?

He gets all hot if you suggest that there's ever a political motivation for what he does, and I'm sure in this instance his motivations are relatively pure. But at the risk of incurring his wrath, I can, shall we say, see the shrewdness of his leadership moves in the alternative fuels arena. As the last municipal election showed, you need the backing of only two groups to stay in office in Portland -- the Bus kids and the government employee unions. Randy's already the representative of the latter, and with a few well placed lefty crusades like Canola Gas, he'll have the former sewed up, too.

"This is a beginning," he said at a recent greenie photo op. Of his re-election campaign, perhaps?

Now that Paul Allen's Brain Institute has produced a complete genetic map of a mouse brain, his researchers expect to turn their attention to the next smallest brain among mammals -- that of Trail Blazer forward Darius Miles.

Tony makes the scene at the second best baseball stadium in the world.

The Oregonian's occasional game of "Who had the pickle?" is always a fun read. They're constantly checking public officials' expense accounts while they ignore the much bigger scams in which our government leaders are often involved.

Today they came up with a big catch, though -- state legislators flying to Maui on lobbyists' dime and not reporting it as state law requires. The offenders' responses are pitiful.

It's become pretty clear that they're not just incompetent in the legislature. Some are crooks.

A frequent commenter on this blog, Frank Dufay, left an interesting post last night. It read in part:

The challenge is to do what's right in an environment where a hundred opinions each think they're right. Is Homer Williams "the City?" Nope. Melvin Mark? Nah. Steve Shoppe? Jack Bogdanski? Mr. T? Cynthia? Markdaman? Me?

We are ALL the City. THAT's the hard part to understand, as is figuring out how best to serve us all.

Here's a mission -- visit all the McMenamin's brewpubs (etc.) and blog about them. Good luck, kids! (Via Welcome to Blog.)

They're changing the access rules a bit at Portland City Hall. The entrance is changing back to the original Fourth Avenue side, starting Monday. And now, "[v]isitors to the building will pass by a security officer who will inquire about their destination and business while in the city buildings."

Already FBI operatives are practicing saying, "I'm here to see Sam Adams about my condo project." There'll be so many guys saying that, they'll blend right in. Another one: "I'm going up to see Randy and Tom's pensions."

This is so Rich Guy Portland. Positively Goldschmidtean.

There's a big furor over the medical examiner's autopsy finding that the death of Jim Chasse, who died in Portland police custody on Sep. 17, was "accidental." The Trib's all over it here, and b!X is pretty worked up about it, too.

What are the distinctions, in the medical examiner's rule book, among death by "accident," "homicide," and "legal intervention"? Particularly, between "accident" and "homicide"? Does it have to do with whether the death was caused by another person, as b!X states? Does it have to do with that person's intent, as the M.E.'s office vaguely implies?

It seems to me that there's often no way to determine either of those categories of facts from an autopsy -- intent in particular. And with broad-based blunt force trauma to the chest, which is listed as the cause of death here, what are the possibilities? That the broken ribs and internal bleeding occurred if and when Chasse "fell"? Or when the officers reportedly jumped on him, beat him, tasered him, and kicked him?

I think the medical examiner needs to get out of the business of making this call. Or at least, to be given the option to not make a call when the autopsy doesn't reveal a clear answer. Apparently, there's no way to conclude from this autopsy whether the officers or the supposed "fall" physically caused the injury, much less what was going on in the officers' minds. Certainly you can't conclude in the officers' favor at this point (although I suspect the official exoneration won't be far behind).

In any event, maybe Grampy needs to come home from Oktoberfest now.

It's time to wrap up our participation in Mayor Tom "Oktoberfest" Potter's "vision quest" survey. We've run the first three questions from the questionnaire here, here, and here. The last of the four is a followup on No. 3, and so we'll start here by refreshing your recollection about that one. It asked, "Imagine Portland 20 years in the future and all your hopes for the city have been realized. What is different? How is our city a better place?"

And so now here's No. 4 and Final. In addition to weighing in on the question posed, feel free to comment on this strategic planning process generally:

Darn that Bob Herbert -- shooting his mouth off in The New York Times and getting it wrong again:

This is a spooky time in history. It’s one thing for tyrannical regimes like the old Soviet Union and Communist China to bulldoze the very idea of human rights and human decency by engaging in such atrocities as detention without trial, torture and other forms of state terror. It’s something else completely when the United States, the greatest symbol of liberty that the world has ever known, begins to head down that hellish road.