Here's a headline sure to get readers' attention in these parts. (Via Bean.)

"Portland Trail Blazers" and "first place."

O.k., maybe in sentences like "I don't know why the Portland Trail Blazers traded for that idiot [fill in name of Jail Blazer du jour] in the first place." But this time, it's something completely different.

When was the last time the Blazers were tied for, or in sole possession of, first place in their division later than Christmas? Seems like a l-o-o-o-ong time ago.

Here's an interesting Whole Foods story.

While most folks were enjoying the holiday weekend, a couple of items relating to OHSU made the O.

One was a screamingly funny editorial yesterday about how the institution's aerial tram [rim shot], like its new health club building in the SoWhat district, is a smashing success. Whoever wrote that one must have joined the rest of us and cancelled his or her subscription to the paper, because he or she missed the story two months ago in which the highly overpaid head of the organization declared a fiscal crisis, and talked ominously about some sort of 20-month period, at the end of which he hinted that the place might be out of cash.

That being the situation on the hill -- with the med school selling off its graduate campus to raise money, and putting its plans for a glorious new campus on the Schnitzer property on indefinite hold -- the ridership figures for the tram would seem like mighty cold comfort. Even if they're real.

I remember when the O editorial page (overseen by the spouse of an OHSU flack, I kid you not) was pushing the Goldschmidt-Katz-Williams-Hoffman propaganda line that SoWhat would be the "linchpin" of the state's economic future. Ten thousand biotech jobs, and all that. Now that it's clear that the soulless condo jungle and mud pit is nothing like what was promised, they've just changed the tense on their editorial from the future tense to the present, without regard to the facts. Farce of the lowest order.

Given the mess that the condo market's in these days, you wonder how the developers down there can make the payments on their construction loans. If there's one thing the tram isn't creating, it's positive cash flow.

The other big OHSU news, of course, was that they lost their big lawsuit. On Friday the state Supreme Court threw out as unconstitutional the obscene $200,000 liability cap that OHSU docs have tried to hide behind after they commit malpractice. The OHSU boys and girls are screaming that the ruling is going to bring all of state and local government crashing down, but that seems unlikely. The folks who are most worried about huge liabilities are the docs, not the street sweepers and park rangers.

As some of the justices on the court complained, this is something that the legislature should have taken care of a long time ago. Even if it's going to take a constitutional amendment to get this fixed, the legislature is where that process ought to start.

In theory, state lawmakers could attend to this in their upcoming regularly scheduled "special" session. For one thing, a $2 million cap, automatically indexed for inflation, could be in place by this coming spring. But alas, that would require a degree of responsiveness and professionalism that many of the members of the legislature do not appear to have.

Maybe they thought that the court would rule in OHSU's favor, and they could wash their hands of it. But now it's clear that that isn't going to happen. The court threw it right back in their laps.

While they're messing around with it, good for the malpractice victims who might actually get their due from the money-obsessed tramsters. As Granny Bogdanski used to say, "God don't punish with a stick."

It's established that two people met at a party. One, A, says that at that party, he told the other, B, a disturbing fact. B says that neither A nor anyone else ever told B the fact.

Now, only one of their accounts can be accurate. But even if one can't figure out which one that is, can both A and B still be "credible"?

"Mr. Leonhardt and Gov. Kulongoski have differing recollections of events that occurred more than a decade ago," Mullmann wrote. "I find that both Mr. Leonhardt and Gov. Kulongoski are credible in their recollections."

A federal judge's ruling suspending Oregon's domestic partnership law, which was supposed to take effect this coming Tuesday, is a bitter disappointment to so many people. Thank goodness, it is only a temporary setback. Even if the folks seeking to overturn the law get the matter on the ballot, Oregonians will vote to support it. And so by this time next year, if not sooner, there will be domestic partnerships in this state, as there should be.

That's cold comfort today, of course.

One maddening question that bothered me when I first heard about the judge's injunction yesterday -- it must have been an oral ruling, as I don't see links to a written opinion anywhere -- was how he could forbid implementation of a state law that had been duly enacted, just because of some hassle over signatures on petitions seeking to repeal that law. Upon further reflection, I see how the judge could reach that conclusion. Under Oregon law, if I'm getting this right, when enough signatures are turned in to challenge a new statute by referendum, the law is automatically suspended until the ballot measure is voted on. (That is, unless the legislature had declared an emergency, which it apparently did not do in this case.) And so if the opponents' signatures are good, which they claim they are, there will be no domestic partnerships until after the November election, anyway.

Seen in this light, the judge's action yesterday is at least slightly less outrageous than it first sounded. But it's still a shock. And of course, highly ironic coming from a Bush appointee, what with the administration's supposed deep respect for the sanctity of the actions of state elections officers.

The other thing I'll say is how once again, the electoral process in this country is showing itself to be badly, badly deficient. Not only can't we count votes securely and honestly -- we can't even agree on how to check the signatures on the petitions by which we decide what we'll be voting on. Nearly every election -- even every potential election -- turns out to be a lawsuit. It's a disgrace.

Here's a Christmas story that's far from the North Pole.

A large, bright, unfamiliar yellow ball has appeared in the skies to the east of Portland this morning.

At Powell’s Books in Portland, Ore., religious groups have been hitting the magazines in the science section with fliers featuring Christian cartoons, while their adversaries have been moving Bibles from the religion section to the fantasy/science-fiction section.

Just a note that some new information has come to our attention that causes us to re-set our City of Portland debt clock, always ticking in our left sidebar. The actuaries who estimate the city's unfunded police and fire pension and disability liability have determined (page 15) that the amount of that liability as of July 1, 2007 was $1,919,501,000. That's a mere 6.5 percent increase over the year before, which is pretty good considering that the three-year compound growth rate was 14.63 percent a year, and the seven-year compounded growth rate was 10.14 percent annually.

The new numbers were disclosed to the city in late September, but they were apparently just made public a couple of weeks ago.

We've re-set the police and fire pension portion of the clock to the new July 1, 2007 figure, and ratcheted the annual growth rate down to 6.5 percent, which is probably optimistic. The city still owes close to $8,100 for every resident, and so I wouldn't break out the champagne.

In a city as "green and sustainable" as Portland says it is, I can't help but wonder why something still hasn't been done about an obvious environmental problem. A reader writes:

Just a heads up that the Qwest Dex delivery people are out in full force. They dumped 20 bags of phone books at my building on SW Curry on Christmas Day. Just this afternoon I caught them trying to drop some phone books off at my building on 17th and Hawthorne. I turned them away, and then they lied to me that they had talked to my tenants and "they all told us that they needed new phone books." I insisted that we certainly didn't need any and they moved on. 30 minutes later I went out to check the mail and -- sure enough -- there were 30 bags of phone books neatly stacked in the entryway of my apartment building. Happy Holidays from Qwest, I guess. They were driving a 1980s white van with Ohio plates PFF 1799. If you see them around let me know as I have 330 pounds of trash for them.

Why can't the city come up with a system under which, at a minimum, people can opt out of getting new phone books unless and until they ask for them?

You know that mess that appeared when hundreds of Oregonians discovered that the computer software (such as TurboTax) they used to prepare their state income tax returns mistakenly donated their "kicker" refunds to the state school fund?

It hasn't completely gone away.

A new page has appeared on the state Department of Revenue (DOR) website, entitled "Kicker Donation FAQ." It indicates pretty clearly that some folks who claim they didn't elect to donate their refunds still aren't going to get them back.

Here's the line, right at the top, that's gotten people's backs up:

If the return you submitted shows the kicker box checked, you did make the election, whether you intended to or not. By law, the department cannot issue your kicker to you in that case.

3. I filed using 2-D Barcode. Will this apply to me?

We won’t refund 2-D and other paper returns showing the box checked. A 2-D barcode return is paper so the taxpayer must sign it before sending it to us. If the taxpayer checks the "donate" box and signs it, that confirms that the taxpayer chose to donate their kicker.

We've been through this before in several installments, but let's see if we can get the pertinent details out in one place to make the situation clear. If you use TurboTax to print out a paper return and manually sign it, there are three different screens on which you can check the box -- the interview, the information worksheet, or the on-screen return. And on one of them, the on-screen return, the box is not labeled in any way. A user could easily check that box inadvertently. Ever had your laptop register a click when you were just trying to move the cursor with a touchpad? I know I have, many times. If you did that in TurboTax, and it checked that box, nothing on any of the three screens would alert you to what you just did. There would be an "X" floating alone in space on the on-screen return -- even the word "kicker" does not appear -- and nothing would be checked on either the interview or the information worksheet.

Now granted, when you printed out the paper return and signed it, there would have been a box that said "Donate Kicker," and it would be checked. But should a taxpayer have to read the printed return form all over to confirm that it matches exactly what he or she already saw in the on-screen return? Apparently, the DOR is saying that he or she must. To me, that sounds unfair.

"If the return you submitted shows the kicker box checked, you did make the election, whether you intended to or not." Is that really true? If you checked an unlabeled box with a stray click and didn't notice the error, did you really "make" an "election"? An election is a conscious choice, not one made by mistake.

"If the return you submitted shows the kicker box checked, you did make the election, whether you intended to or not." Isn't that every bit as true of an electronic filer as it is of a paper filer who used software? It's hard for me to see how a taxpayer who filed electronically has a better claim to correcting a mistake than a paper filer who used TurboTax.

"If the taxpayer checks the 'donate' box and signs it, that confirms that the taxpayer chose to donate their kicker." If they inadvertently clicked on an unlabeled box, did the taxpayers "check" the "donate" box? Or did they just check "a" box?

If the DOR is indeed making a distinction between e-filers and paper filers, and if it indeed holds up in court (where it will surely head), I'm sure there will be some taxpayers who will be looking to the deep pockets of Intuit, the maker of TurboTax, for a remedy. I can't say that I'd blame them. That on-screen form should have matched exactly what was going to be printed out. Either that, or clicking on that box should have opened a big electronic dialog box seeking the user's confirmation.

On a broader scale, any such distinction would make for some fairly shaky precedent. Is an electronic signature on a tax return somehow less valid and binding than a manual signature? Stay tuned.

Given the weather forecast for Portland, and the paucity of bloggable news items coming from governments at all levels, here are the words to a little ditty by Portland jazz great Dave Frishberg that combines those two themes:

Just for the record, yesterday the last of the checks went out to the charity beneficiaries of our Buck-a-Hit Day fundraiser on December 18. Including matching contributions from three of our readers, the final totals were as follows:

Thanks again. And don't forget to head over here today and say something nice in the same spirit.

The streak continues! No, not that other one... I'm talking about two weeks in a row in which I have picked winners in the pro football underdog pool. I knew the Redskins could take the Vikes, and I picked up 6½ points for getting that one right. With that victory, I jumped a few spots in the rankings. There's no way I'll win the money for the best year, but the pride is back.

Now it's on to the last weekend of the regular season, where most of the games don't mean much, and so just about anything can happen. Most of the best teams have little to gain if they win, and a lot to lose if somebody important gets hurt or worn out.

The Giants-Patriots game is the headliner, of course, since the Patriots are going for the perfect season record. Do you think it matters enough to the Giants, who are guaranteed a playoff spot, to want to spoil that?

As best I can tell, there are four other games to watch. Tennessee will make the playoffs if it beats Indy (playoff team), and won't if it doesn't. Cleveland will go if Tennessee loses, but it doesn't matter whether Cleveland beats the Niners (season long since over) or not.

Washington, Minnesota, and New Orleans all have to win to make it. If Washington wins over Dallas (playoff team), they're in and the other two aren't. If Washington loses and Minnesota beats Denver (going nowhere), Minnesota is in. If Washington and Minnesota lose and New Orleans wins in Chicago (done for the year), New Orleans is in.

The pool will go on in the playoffs, but the spreads will be smaller and there won't be many games to pick from. So here's the last real dance. Do you see an underdog (in caps) who can win its game outright? For convenience, I've placed an asterisk on the four teams with something potentially on the line, and a pound sign next to playoff teams who may want to rest up for the money games ahead:

14 NEW YORK GIANTS# vs New England# (Saturday)
10.5 SAN FRANCISCO at Cleveland
9 DALLAS# vs. Washington*
8 OAKLAND vs. San Diego#
7.5 BUFFALO at Philadelphia
6.5 TENNESSEE* at Indianapolis#
6 JACKSONVILLE# at Houston
6 ST. LOUIS at Arizona
6 KANSAS CITY at New York Jets
3.5 DETROIT at Green Bay#
3.5 BALTIMORE vs. Pittsburgh#
3 DENVER vs. Minnesota*
2.5 TAMPA BAY# vs. Carolina
2.5 MIAMI vs. Cincinnati
2.5 SEATTLE# at Atlanta
2 CHICAGO vs. New Orleans*

That wedge in there with Dallas, Oakland, Buffalo, Tennessee, and Jacksonville in it is pretty intriguing to me. And remember, I'm on a streak! Readers?

Here's an interesting challenge for you sports fans out there. This blogging referee will give $1 to the Special Olympics for every person who says a nice thing about one or more referees in the comments section of his blog tomorrow. He's setting a limit of $250, but are there even 250 people on the planet who have something nice to say about sports officiating? I'm thinking maybe a haiku about Nestor Chylak.

Besides, you would think that a referee would be donating money to assist blind people like himself, heh.

Could be a long day. Then he's going to pick the best comment and give some more dough to that person's favorite charity. I hope he's got instant replay.

I got this for Christmas, and you didn't:

Now the birth of Jesus Christ was as follows: When His mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together she was found to be with child by the Holy Spirit. And Joseph her husband, being a righteous man and not wanting to disgrace her, planned to send her away secretly. But when he had considered this, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, "Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife; for the Child who has been conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit. She will bear a Son; and you shall call His name Jesus, for He will save His people from their sins." Now all this took place to fulfill what was spoken by the Lord through the prophet: Behold, the virgin shall be with child and shall bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel, which translated means, "God with us." And Joseph awoke from his sleep and did as the angel of the Lord commanded him, and took Mary as his wife, but kept her a virgin until she gave birth to a Son; and he called His name Jesus.

In the late '50s and early '60s, we always had a real Christmas tree at our house. And we always got it at the same place: from a guy named Whitey who sold them out of his driveway just up the street from us.

Whitey's real name was Dobrzelecki (pronounced something like Dub-zha-LECK-ie). His day job, as I recall, was somehow involved in selling produce and maybe flowers at a farmer's market in a nearby neighborhood. In those days the dads around our way identified themselves by which branch of the service they had served in during World War II. Our dad, who had been a mailman on Guam in the Navy, always made a little face when he mentioned that Whitey had been in the Merchant Marines.

Anyway, early each December, Whitey would bring a truckload of Christmas trees to his house and sell them there. As soon as the trees appeared in his yard early in December, the place would be swarming with neighbors purchasing theirs. Whitey, his wife, or his oldest son Danny would show them all to you, and then you'd check out the price tags wired around the trunks at the bottom. It was cash on the barrelhead, and definitely first come first served. Like everything else at Christmastime, there was a lot of competition for the choicest stuff. And so everybody got there early and bought their tree the first weekend, if not the first day, Whitey had them on display.

The thing was, few people wanted to put their tree up that early. The things would dry out quickly -- who knows how long ago they had been cut by the time they reached the east side of Newark -- and the prevailing wisdom was that if you set yours up in your house and decorated it too early, you'd have a mostly bare tree and rug full of pine needles even before Santa got there. Besides, Christmas trees were a real fire hazard back then, even more so than they are now. We were past the stage where people lit candles on them, but the electric lights were big and hot, and the wiring wasn't always the best. I remember one kind of light that was a series of narrow chambers of colored glass with a clear liquid in them, which lit up, and then bubbled after they had warmed up a bit. A pretty sight, but I can't believe they'd be UL approved today.

For these and other reasons, our parents were not too eager to get going early on this. But hey, no problem, Whitey would hold the tree for you until you were ready to pick it up. He'd tie it up and lay it on a stack along the driveway there, with your name written on the tag on the other side from where the price was.

Once you had your tree on the pile, you could go back to parties and shopping and whatever else you wanted to do most of the month of December. Our visit to Santa was always on December 8, because at our Catholic grammar school, that was a holiday for the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. You'd go to church in the morning, and by lunchtime you'd be on Santa's lap in Bamberger's. You could put the tree out of your mind. You wouldn't have to go back for it until you were ready for it.

Our folks never waited until Christmas Eve to brings ours home, but there were quite a few December 20-somethings. The lights and ornaments would come out of the basement, and up onto the tree they'd go. We'd have our three Christmas albums cranked up: Mitch Miller, Andy Williams, and that other one.

We used tinsel liberally. In those days, it was made of tin or aluminum foil, cut into long, thin strips. Supposed to represent icicles, I guess. Some people swore that they threw the stuff on the tree, but that always looked like heck. At our house, you placed the tinsel on the branches ever so carefully, just a few strands at a time, until they were just so.

It was all fairly idyllic, except for one year. We got our tree home from Whitey's, set it up in the stand, got a little water on the base, and after a few minutes noticed an odor.

A familiar odor.

A badly familiar odor.

One of the cats at Whitey's had decided, sometime in the month of December, that he needed to mark his turf.

I'm sure we all waited a while to see if it would subside. Maybe sprayed a little room deodorizer around. But come on, people, this was some potent stuff, produced by a danged Down Neck Newark alley cat. Few smells on the planet are meaner. After some intense consultation with the other grownups in our crowded four-plex, our folks decided that the tree had to go, and they'd have to see what kind of deal could be worked out with Whitey the next day. I can't imagine that swear words were not said.

As I recall, there ensued some debate around the house as to whether Whitey was at fault for our problem. Did the sale come with an implied promise that the tree would be cat-pee-free? Did we assume that risk, as we knew how the trees would be stored? Would it matter if it was a cat that wasn't even Whitey's? Did Whitey even have a cat? (I think he had a German shepherd.) Was this an unavoidable act of God? Nowadays there might be a lawsuit over such matters, but back then people lived in uneasy peace with life's little insults all the time.

Now normally, we kids would always be invited along to Whitey's to pick out, and pick up, our tree, but we stayed home for that particular return visit. Whitey was understanding and apologetic, but not surprisingly, all he had left at that point was a scraggly, small old thing that nobody else had wanted. Not only had we lost a day of tree-trimming opportunity, but now we also had the lamest tree on the block.

Of course, we made do.

Early in the '60s, mass-marketed artificial trees showed up. Lights got smaller and cooler. I remember one year when our uncle upstairs even invested in one of those all-white tin trees that you set a lighted color wheel in front of so that it changed colors. It was the latest thing, in those days. But it was a long time before we would say goodbye to Whitey's lot. We always did well down there.

Except for that one year.

UPDATE, 1/29/08, 4:25 p.m.: An update here.

Here's a potential gold mine for Portland and Oregon.

The reference in this story in the Times to Portland, Ore. is wrong. It didn't happen here.

Over on The Huffington Post, someone seems to have gotten a little ahead of himself, wouldn't you say?

Jeff Merkley is challenging Gordon Smith for the U.S. Senate in Oregon. Jeff is currently the Speaker of the Oregon House of Representatives, which just completed the most progressive and productive legislative session in the last 30 years in Oregon.

What are you drinking?

"I need to spend more time with my babes."

I dreamed I was hanging out on a street corner in a bad part of Jersey City chatting at length with Mike Huckabee.

It's a big day for holiday parties. We're having one ourselves here later today. Try not to pass out before 2:30, and come on back. BYOB!

If you're in Portland, and you're in charge of what used to be called your garbage, then you know that the heaviest time of year is right around the corner. So don't blow this:

Finally, a concession from the White House on greenhouse gases.

A bizarre case out of Tar Heel country.