Too funny.

But it's not the Oregonian editorial page editor. It's some other guy named Robert Caldwell, apparently an export broker of some sort, operating out of the 97209 zip code. And he's accused of trying to buy batteries for Hawk missiles, for sale to Iran.

Big no-no, Bob!

The City of Portland's official water bureau blog reports today on an old soldier who's finally retiring after 112 years of service.

Today is payday where I work. Due to the Christmas holidays, our last payday was December 22. That means it hasn't "rained" in 40 days and 40 nights. The holiday credit card bills have come and gone since then. And so, as of yesterday, at our house we were officially running on fumes.

Remember three years ago, when the Oregon Legislature scheduled a vote on a tax increase for January 27? That was one of their better ones. Good times.

The O's reporting on this letter from Portland police union boss Robert King to Mayor Tom Potter. In it, the union accuses the mayor, a former police chief, of joining a media effort to undermine public trust in the force:

lnstead of providing leadership to broaden people's understanding of what we do, you followed the lead of the media and their single-minded focus on controversy. Instead of helping build the trust you say is so important, you are helping to erode it.

I hope Grampy runs for re-election. It will be the most fun any of us has had since ex-Chief Foxworth's "chocolate thunder" e-mails came out.

Oh, man. Bob Miller sent me this, which he picked up from Oregon Media Insiders. It's a site with a ton of old Portland TV and radio clips. Old, as in the early '80s.

Goodbye, productivity for the day! Check out this one.

For what it's worth, Sunday's rant about the unavailability of coupon-discounted items at our local Costco warehouse has been responded to by a staffer at the warehouse chain's Northwest regional office. Here it is:

We apologize for being out of stock on the Huggies Baby Wipes and the Western Digital Hard drive. The warehouse should have offered you a rain check. It sounds like it was not handled properly. Please let me know which warehouse you shop at and I will let you know when the warehouse will receive the product. I will also make sure you get a rain check.

The wipes and the hard drive should be in the warehouses by the end of the week. We had under projected on the quantities needed for the wipes and the vendor only shipped us 1/2 the quantities projected on the hard drive. We know you don't want excuses, you just want the product in stock when you shop. It is not a case of bait and switch. The vendor covers the coupon discount so it's to our advantage to maximize sales on the coupon items. We don't want to be out of stock! Thank you for your comments and again we apologize for the inconvenience.

Gary Giacomi
Costco Wholesale
Vice President, GMM Non-Foods
NW Regional Office
Phone: 425.313.8380
Fax: (425) 313-8445
Ggiacomi@costco.com

It's going to be hard to make the diapers-and-wipes thing work. We already bought a supply of the diapers, and a supply of a different brand of wipes, and the user of those items in our house is almost through needing them. I may go for the hard drive, but I've been warned by a commenter on Sunday's post that that particular model doesn't have a good performance record.

Anyway, Costco has responded. I still give them an 8.

In the Portland blogosphere, it doesn't get any better than Dan Haneckow's Cafe Unknown. Today he's got up one of his best posts ever, on the history of the Ladd & Tilton Bank Building -- including a fantastic twist involving a certain city to our south.

Best wishes to Vice President Dick Cheney, who turns 66 today.

How do you think he's celebrating?

Interesting story in the Trib today. The city's parks are crumbling, with no improvement in sight. No wonder Dan "Profiles in Courage" Saltzman is trying to sell them off. They're broke.

Just like the schools.

Just like the police bureau.

Just like the transportation department.

But hey! Streetcars!

Aerial tram, people! New York Times! Whee!

Shiny! Snazzy!

How about a convention center hotel? What, you don't want it? O.k., we'll do an end run with Metro!

Linchpins, baby! We're heading for bankruptcy, but boy, do we ever have linchpins!

I woke up this morning from a technicolor dream. I was walking through my childhood neighborhood on the east side of Newark, seeing the old haunts with new eyes. I walked past the gin mill where my dad and his buddies used to hang out. The place was still there, open for business in the gray hours before dawn, and one man who was walking up ahead of me turned in there. "They're open that early for guys who work nights," my parents would say. Not this guy. He was an all-day boozer on his way to work.

I crossed the street with my dad next to me; he was limping along, grumbling about something. The tenement house across from the bar had been torn down, leaving a grassy lot with a dog house on it. Just then I noticed that I had a large, but incredibly light, stuffed animal draped over my shoulders. I looked down the street, across the railroad tracks, toward the three-story walkup where an old girlfriend lived. It was raining, and the street was flooded. The walkup was gone, and there were rows of apartment buildings up there in the distance. Cars slowed down to try to get through the water.

Along the avenue that ran behind ours, there were slices of processed American cheese scattered on the wet pavement. I looked inside some garages that lined the sidewalk, and there was solid cheese everywhere, six inches deep. "They are going to have a mouse problem," I thought as I picked up my step. It was that marbled blend of white and orange cheese.

I passed another tavern on the corner. The one where the black people used to drink. The place with the apartments upstairs -- where people had died in a wintery Friday night fire. The place was still there, painted green, but the windows were all boarded up, most of them with a neat, white X painted on the boards in the window.

I don't know what any of that means. And I'm pretty sure I don't want to.

They've started ripping the bus shelters out of the transit mall in downtown Portland. They're still perfectly good, of course -- the whole mall re-do is a nine-figure waste of money -- but the old shelters are going to be dismantled and recycled. Replacements will be in place when the stops finally reopen a couple of years from now.

The grand old shelters were around for just short of 30 years, by my count. I recall standing beneath them, looking up at those TV screens with the schedules and staring at the bus route maps, many a night on my way home from my downtown job. All kinds of times, good and bad. They kept out the rain, they let in the light. They had pay phones in them -- remember those?

Farewell, friends. They weren't kidding when they said, Sic transit gloria mundi.

Al Franken's leaving Air America, the lefty radio network that's been looking for (and apparently has now found) a buyer. Franken's to be replaced by Portland's own Thom Hartmann.

The Electoral College is a drag, but I don't think this is the answer. Although it would clearly be a field day for lawyers -- could even result in a Bush v. Gore-style constitutional crisis.

Who says there aren't enough jobs in Portland for the creative class? The city is looking for someone to provide "management and financial services" in connection with extending the inane streetcar system over to the Idaho side of the Willamette. Apparently the goal is to get a "small starts" grant from the Federal Transportation Administration. (The Lake Oswego streetcar is also up for such a grant.)

The pay for these services? Estimated at a cool $270,000, for 12 months of work beginning in March.

And don't forget this:

For purposes of review and in the interest of the City's Sustainable Paper Use Policy and sustainable business practices in general, the City encourages the use of submittal materials (i.e. paper, dividers, binders, brochures, etc.) that contain post-consumer recycled content and are readily recyclable. The City discourages the use of materials that cannot be readily recycled such as PVC (vinyl) binders, spiral bindings, and plastic or glossy covers or dividers. Alternative bindings such as reusable/recyclable binding posts, reusable binder clips or binder rings, and recyclable cardboard/paperboard binders are examples of preferable submittal materials. Proposers are encouraged to print/copy on both sides of a single sheet of paper wherever applicable; if sheets are printed on both sides, it is considered to be two pages. Color is acceptable, but content should not be lost by black-and-white printing or copying.

I love virtually everything about the Multnomah County Library -- particularly the great staff over at our branch in Albina -- but last week's story in the O about how many items walk out of the library and never return is cause for concern. In this day of bar codes and tattle tape, there must be something that can be done -- why is nobody coming up with a solution?

Let me start this post by noting that generally, I am a highly satisfied member of Costco. I've written about it on this blog a few times. But my experience of the last week and a half at our local Costco warehouse has caused a downgrade in my opinion of the place -- from a 9 to an 8.

The problem is a coupon book that arrived at the house shortly after Christmas. It included tickets for all sorts of great deals from Jan. 8 to Jan. 28:

Two items in the book caught my eye. One was $8 off on diapers and baby wipes -- our littlest one is just about out of dipes, but we still need a supply. The other was $15 off on a 160GB external hard drive. One of my New Year's resolutions is to get all of our digital photographs in good order, and a USB add-on drive is a key part of the plan.

I went out to Costco three times during the three-week special deal period to try to buy these items. Not only were the hard drive and the baby wipes not in stock, but there wasn't even a place anywhere in the store that looked as though they had ever been in stock. On the 19th -- my second try -- I was assured that shipments of both were supposed to arrive on the 25th. They weren't certain what time on the 25th, but some time that day.

I showed up first thing in the morning on the 26th, and neither item was anywhere to be found. A young man in the electronics department told me that some of the hard drives had arrived on the 25th, but they were all pulled for customers who had rain checks. When I then went to the member services desk to inquire, however, I was told that no rain check could be issued to me. (Of course, no one said anything to me about rain checks the first two times I asked after these items, either.)

The gal behind the desk gave me her best helpless peon act, mumbling something about it being a manufacturer's issue, as if the lack of adequate supply in the warehouse was somehow the manufacturer's fault. Of course, it wasn't a manufacturer's coupon I was holding in my hand -- it was a Costco coupon. But that did not appear to register with her as a fact of any significance. She also asked whether I had driven around to the other Costco warehouses in the area to seek out the bargains there. Of course not, and I wasn't about to.

Of course, there were plenty of other hard drives and baby wipes on the floor, ready for purchase. But there were no deals to be had on them, and the coupons wouldn't work.

The hard drive coupon says that that item is also available on costco.com. But by the time I got home on the 26th, at least, it wasn't. No sign of it there.

So there you have it, my first bad Costco incident in memory. Obviously, they lured people into the store and onto their website with coupons that they knew they'd never be able to fulfill. The staff gave conflicting advice -- or no advice at all -- about the availability of rain checks. And they tried to pass the blame off on the manufacturers of the goods, when from all appearances the extreme shortages were all Costco's doing.

Bait-and-switch coupons, even if legal, are bad business practice. The $23 in savings that I didn't get, despite three trips out there to get them, pale in comparison to the hit to customer goodwill that this kind of thing causes. The next time a Costco coupon book shows up, I'll be taking its claims with a large grain of salt.

A while back, the place that cut my hair at the time sold me some "product" -- their word for hair goo. When I got it home, I learned something they didn't tell me at the salon: This stuff smells like mangoes. Now, I'm not talking slightly like mangoes, people -- I'm talking major fruit-fly magnet. Unfortunately, I was looking for an everyday do-maker, and I definitely couldn't handle being identified as the guy who always smelled like that. And so to the back of the lower regions of the bathroom cabinets went the garishly colored tube of whatever it was.

Until tonight. Tonight I was feeling kind of frisky, and given that I just had my ears lowered yesterday, I figured I could use a little extra grippage on the ever-thinning mane. And so, on my way out to a geezer birthday party, a little dab did me.

Well, that was going to be that, until I got to the function and they handed me a cocktail made of some kind of white hooch and a combination of pomegranate and mango juices. "Mango! Wow!" I said, and I explained how my hair dressing matched the night's libations. "Smell my head!" I blurted out gleefully.

A good old friend of the female persuasion looked at me with thinly veiled scorn and responded, "I don't think that line is going to work for you."

One of our far-flung travel correspondents files this report from the Emerald City:

There is no escape, Jack. Here my friend and I are in Seattle for a relaxing weekend getaway, and lo and behold on the newspaper that shows up outside our hotel room door there is No Escape. FRONT PAGE FEATURE: our Silver TRAM.

Then we go down to Pike Street Market for breakfast and start reading about our wonderful silver bubbles in the sky, and the couple at the next table ask where they can get a paper. I offer them pieces of ours including the front page, and the lady utters that unmistakable phrase for Portlanders in the know, TRAM SCAM when she sees the front page. I ask, "From Portland, are you?" They were. Next question: are you a fan of Jack's Bog's blog? Of course. So you see, Jack, there is no escape.

While walking down Pike Street near the market to find a restaurant, we would highly recommend the one we found, 97 Stewart, run by a couple of refugees from bad times in the Longview, Washington economy. Really close to the Inn at the Market. Their restaurant in Longview was the Rusty Duck. The place was full, toney, and absolutely divine.

There are condos galore popping up all over the area, and the homeless population is exploding according to the count done yesterday. We were accosted on our way out to dinner by a street person, obviously off his meds, and in a brand new blanket from the night before's homeless head count exercise. He called my card-carrying ACLU friend a Nazi Fascist Pig, when he wouldn't fork over any cash.

The downtown looks like the Georgetown conversion I witnessed over the years, from owner shops with really neat stuff to the same old Sharper Image mix that you find at every mall. Not much fun any more to shop. I talked to some of the market vendors; the Pike Street Market proper still has a lot of regular folks. We chatted and bought some things, they asked about our market in Portland, and I said we were worried they were going to be hurt by the relocation. They said our Market people should fight like they did; they were able to keep their space.

Well that's about all, we have a 1 p.m. checkout, so have to go.

The guy who separated a panicked passenger from his two small kids told his side of the story to the Register-Guard, and they published it today. For me, the only way his story hangs together is if the guy's hearing is so badly impaired that he couldn't make out what the passengers were screaming. Even after the incident was over, he still didn't realize what had happened. Should drivers be that oblivious to what's transpiring behind them? You've got to wonder if maybe another line of work wouldn't suit him better.