From what I've been reading, this may soon be a collector's item:

Maybe she and Harriet Miers can go out for drinks sometime and compare notes. For the rest of us, it's time to practice spelling "Pawlenty."

Indeed, maybe old Grandpappy McCain himself will go down over this. Romney-Pawlenty?

UPDATE, 12:02 p.m.: Here's another oddity: Why didn't the hospital where the baby was supposedly born show it on their public newborn-baby-photo website? Did the sitting governor of the state not want her baby's picture on the internet?

UPDATE, 9/1, 2:32 p.m.: More here.

Seven squared, to be exact. Forty-nine pies were entered in today's inaugural Portland Pie-Off, held at the Elephant House in Washington Park in Portland. I had the honor, along with fellow blogger Gary Walter and serious pastry chef Kir Jensen, of judging the competition, which meant taking at least one bite of each of the 49. When close calls appeared within the various categories, multiple bites were required. Then there were the pairings, each of which involved a taste of a beverage (beer or wine, as it turned out) along with the baked goods.

There were some incredible entries, and the cliché about the judges having to make impossible decisions was true in several categories. The tomato savory pie won the top prize, but it could have as easily been the monster Catalunyan mixed nut pie, or the strawberry balsamic cream, or several others. We had to choose between a crazy Dr. Pepper pie and a fine root beer float pie. The peach melba cheesecake topped with fresh raspberries was the best-looking entry, and the best made entirely out of local ingredients. There was a true meat pie and a veggie sausage pie, both of which were simply excellent. Have you had the Israeli carrot pie? Now I can say that I have.

And the fruit pies! More than 20 of them. Apple, berries, peach, rhubarb, lemon, key lime, even grapefruit. All but a few would have been welcome additions to our dining room table.

Thanks to the organizers for the invitation, to the volunteers who made the event such fun, and to the entrants and spectators, who showed saintly patience as we worked our way through all of the offerings. This contest was initially hatched on the internet, and it wouldn't have been any better if it had been set up any other way. Now I'm really looking forward to my next piece of homemade pie.

On Thanksgiving.

Photo courtesy Amber Case.

UPDATE, 8:28 p.m.: Lots of great photos here.

UPDATE, 8/31, 1:37 p.m.: And here.

Never before in six years of blogging have we been so besieged by hot comments from right-wing readers as we have been since yesterday's announcement of the selection of Sarah Palin as John McCain's running mate. Things were heating up during the historic Democratic Party convention, but they've really boiled over in the last 24 hours.

Why? Is it because the conservatives perceive (rightly or wrongly) that they have now lost the election? Whatever the cause, it's easy to see that the next few months are going to be one giant flame war in the blogosphere. Let's just hope the ending is happy.

We're talking pie here, folks -- and eating it.

It's football time again. There's a college game on in the background as I type this. And starting next week, the "big daddies" of the NFL will be back into their regular season.

Last year we had a good time following the pro teams through the season as we played in a unique underdog pool. The object of this game is to pick an underdog team that wins its game outright. Each participant picks just one game a week. Merely beating the point spread isn't enough -- the team picked has to win the game outright. But the point spread isn't completely irrelevant -- pool participants who pick a winning underdog earn the number of points by which the underdog was favored to lose. A running tally is kept of the weekly point winnings, and the participant who wins the most points over the entire season wins the grand prize, awarded after the last playoff game.

The pool is recruiting new players for this year. The entry fee is $20 for the season, and if more than 20 people sign up and pay to play, there will be a second prize and a third prize in addition to the grand prize. So far, we're told, we're pretty close to having the 20. If you are interested in playing, shoot us an e-mail here and we'll get you in touch with the poolmeister (who isn't us, BTW). As they say, you'll never watch pro football the same way again!

Here are the official rules, released by the pool's organizer today:

Sarah Palin is running for vice president. The blogosphere needs your insights.

Copyright law has abandoned its reason for being: to encourage learning and the creation of new works. Instead, its principal functions now are to preserve existing failed business models, to suppress new business models and technologies, and to obtain, if possible, enormous windfall profits from activity that not only causes no harm, but which is beneficial to copyright owners.

I'm really looking forward to being one of the three judges of this contest.

"I assume you watched the speech?" a friend asked last night.

No.

As wonderful and historic as the moment was, I couldn't bear to watch.

A bad ending to this story will be too much to take, and part of me can't allow myself to get too close to it. I'll be happy if he wins, but my badly depressed views of our country will go off the charts on the low end if we have to live with McCain. America can't be that stupid, can it?

Don't answer that.

The last two Presidential campaigns have sucked the life out of me. This is a real danger for the Democratic Party. We should be dancing in the streets right now, but we aren't. We know what happened last time, and the time before that. And how dark and bleak and awful it's become around here. We need to be excited -- to wake up the sleepers and get their votes -- but there is a dread among too many of us that's palpable.

I'll watch Obama's victory speech -- every single word. If he gets to give one.

A formidable pair.

Wily old John McCain -- he's got a female running mate.

O.k., all you Hillary supporters -- run right over. Who needs reproductive rights, anyway?

Interesting piece in the O about Portland commissioner Randy Leonard's draft report on the city's police bureau, which from all appearances he's about to take over.

Most striking is Leonard's conclusion that Police Bureau managers too often treat recommendations and suggestions from city staff, community members and their own officers with "defensiveness, suspicion and distrust."

"In conducting my research for this report, I was forced to draw the same conclusion when the reaction from the Police Bureau management to my inquiries and observations was defensive, and in some cases, obstructive," Leonard wrote.

And he left out "mean."

Will the frank remarks in the draft remain in the final report? And can Leonard do anything to change these attitudes as he takes over the bureau? Only time will tell.

The Three Rivers development in Central Oregon got the royal treatment in yesterday's Times. The big draw: You have to make your own electricity.

Our Maytag Neptune washing machine died in its sleep last week. It was approaching its 10th birthday.

We called Sears repair, and their guy came out today with the news. Apparently something called a motor control panel went out, and the only way he could fix it was to replace that panel, the motor itself, and some other doohickey whose name I didn't catch -- my eyes had glazed over by that point in his spiel. The repair job would cost north of 500 bucks, and we'd have to wait six to eight days for parts. The end.

If the control panel is bad, why must we replace the whole motor? Why doesn't Sears have the parts nearby? Why did I have to talk to someone in Asia to have a local repair man come to the house? Forget it, Jake -- it's Chinatown.

I never liked this washing machine. It was conveniently front-loading, water-efficient, and energy-efficient -- but man, it wrinkled everything that came out of it, and I mean badly. At times it was impossible to tell which type of clean clothing article you were withdrawing from the chamber until you shook out some major creases. Whatever energy we saved with the washer, we used in ironing. Ironing jeans. Ironing sheets and pillowcases. Ironing synthetic garments that shouldn't need ironing, ever. The Maytag Neptune was a serious wrinkle machine. Not only did the ironing burn energy, but it also burned time, which at our place is even more valuable. We will not be reliving that experience if we can at all help it.

What we're trying to determine now, as we shop for a new machine, is what aspect or aspects of the Neptune caused all the wrinkling. Was it the "high efficiency" water features, the fact that it was front loading, the size of the drum? We are willing to pay for more water if it saves us time, and we'd rather use energy washing than ironing.

We're inclined to stay away from Sears now, and the Neptune experience has killed off whatever cachet the Maytag name might have had around our place. Recommendations are welcome -- and we'll be asking Jake at the Appliance Blog to chime in as well.

Here's the Multnomah County counsel's opinion that we alluded to the other day -- the one that says that in order to be sheriff, a candidate must be an experienced law enforcement officer. As we noted and as the opinion itself acknowledges, other legal minds disagree -- including one of the county's own deputy district attorneys.

Interesting night last night. We had a bat in the house. The kids stayed pretty calm, but the Mrs. and I went into, shall we say, a stated of heightened awareness.

She: "Aaarrgh! There's a bird in the house!"

I: "What?"

She: "There's a bird or something flying around in the -- aaarrgh! How did it get in here?"

I, from behind a door that was open just a crack: "I think it's a bat! Open some windows and the doors! Try to get him to fly out!"

She: "I just took my contacts out!"

I: "Well, you better put 'em back in."

After a few minutes of spastic movements on my part (mostly ducking and hiding), the Mrs. finally shooed the poor thing out the back door with a broom.

Geez! A dang bat!

I remember a time years ago when we were visiting the headwaters of the Metolius, and I stopped in the park men's room there for a potty break. I was seated in the stall in a compromising position when under the door came limping an extremely sick bat, which apparently had been roaming around the nearby campground in broad daylight. I screamed bloody murder and, forgoing some of the fundamentals of personal hygiene for the moment, scrambled out of the building. A crowd of onlookers outside thought it was pretty funny.

Freakin' bats.

Yesterday I had another one of those dead-tree media moments. Out of my usual routine, I grabbed a stray hard copy of a paper, and wound up getting stuff out of it that the online version wouldn't match. Particularly from the ads.

I was over at the Convention Center Burgerville enjoying a Diestel turkey burger -- truly one of the best sandwiches around. (No cheese, hold the mayo, add onions.) Finding nothing in the front section of the O worth reading, I picked up a copy of the Portland Observer. The eclectic news coverage was interesting, but there were a couple of full-page ads that caught my attention even more.

One was a pretty effective ad from the union for several categories of workers at Legacy Emanuel Hospital. It complained that the cheapskate wages being paid to union members are making it hard to retain good help and diminishing the quality of care that patients receive at that institution. I had no idea.

Then there was an ad from the Portland Development Commission telling the world that that agency does indeed provide loans, grants, training and contracts to minority businesses, and inviting said businesses to come on down and get theirs. It was all pretty vague -- as I understand it, there hasn't ever been much love between the PDC and the African-American community at whom the Observer is targeted -- but hey, it's a nice gesture.

Word is out that Target Corp. has agreed to pay $6 million in damages and make its website fully accessible to blind customers as part of a class action settlement. Blind people can use specialized keyboards and software to translate websites into speech or Braille, but the technology can't do its thing if a site is improperly coded, which the lawsuit said was the case with Target.com. Some background on the issue is here.

Literally.

Here's a great story of loss and discovery.

The deterioration of the news media in this country seems to be accelerating. Now it looks as though strapped news organizations may start to bail on their memberships in the Associated Press, which if taken to an extreme could threaten the AP itself. Once it's gone, blogs absolutely would not be able to replace it. America without a strong free press would turn into a truly scary place.

It is so, so difficult.

KOIN apparently doesn't know what the Oregon Secretary of State looks like:

Saturday, September 6 is SoWhat Day in Portland. All afternoon we'll huddle in the concrete canyons formed by the ghastly condo towers and look up with wondrous gaze at the foreclosures. It will be worth the traffic hassles to see where the city's financial future went.

When the Thanksgiving turkey coma wears off in South Carolina, it's a great time to head out and buy yourself a gun. That's because the state has a special sales tax holiday on guns scheduled for November 28 and 29, the Friday and Saturday of that weekend. No better way to start the Christmas season than to purchase some deadly weapons for yourself and those special people on your gift list. [Via Don't Mess with Taxes.]

As we were leaving the Statute of Liberty, the question became whether we wanted to take in Ellis Island, too. There was plenty left of this hot day, and so we thought, sure, why not?

The boats that take you from Jersey City and Manhattan to Liberty Island also loop through Ellis Island, and so it was an easy connection. And it's a good thing we took advantage of it, because in some ways Ellis is even more of a trip than the statue.

Through these portals passed 12 million people moving to the United States from Europe between 1892 and 1924. Some never made it through. For one reason or another -- sickness, lack of money, a criminal past, perceived mental deficiency -- they were sent back to their countries of origin. A cruel fate, considering how nasty, unhealthy, and otherwise hazardous a trans-Atlantic sail was in those days. Still others eventually made their way into America, but only after being detained on the island for extended periods of time. Although the exhibits we saw didn't discuss it, I'm sure that many a would-be immigrant died there.

When I walked the same steps that the immigrants did, I felt a glow that I experience only once in a great while. A little shining. It was a bit like the first trip we took to Edgefield, years ago when it first opened as a hotel. The ghosts were definitely watching.

They may not have included my kin. All eight of my great-grandparents came from Europe to New York, but it's not clear to me that they all came through Ellis Island. That facility opened in 1892, and my grandparents were all born shortly after that. Their parents, the immigrants, may have come through an earlier station on the Battery in Manhattan, but conditions there were probably similar in some respects.

Only part of Ellis Island has been restored, and it's a real shame that the rest of it hasn't been, but you get a fairly clear picture of what life was like there from the exhibits, which are quite good. Throughout the place are listening stations, where you pick up a replica of an old-fashioned telephone receiver and hear the voices of Ellis immigrants telling their stories many years later. Boffo stuff, even if you're not the biggest fan of history.

The buildings are truly impressive. You can imagine what an "immigrant processing station" would look like if the federal government built one today -- probably a compound of glorified double-wide trailers with a barbed-wire fence around it. But for Ellis, the architects and construction folks pulled out all the stops. It's a grand old set of buildings -- one that sent all sorts of strong messages to the immigrants, to our own citizens, and to the rest of the world.

Seeing what the less fortunate of the newcomers were subjected to was fascinating, and it prompted some serious reflections about immigration -- what it was then, what it is now, and what it should be now. There are no easy answers, but an hour or two on Ellis Island will have you asking yourself many of the right questions, at least.

God rest our immigrant ancestors. And God bless our children, who took in the sights on the island with us; when it's time for them to figure out what kind of country they want to present to people who want to move here from other parts of the world, may their memories of this place help guide them.

The Whole Foods guy must be sweating bullets. Rocked by the recession, he's now going to try to lure thrifty shoppers into his stores. As if! Tonight they sent someone around our neighborhood hanging coupons on people's front doors. Fifty cents off on a can of tuna at Whole Foods. Wow! With the savings, you can buy a third of a lemon.

First we couldn't figure out whether it's legal for the county to spend the car rental tax on something other than roads. Now we can't figure out whether you need to be a law enforcement officer in order to be elected sheriff. State lawyers say one thing, county counsel says another. What a goofy place sometimes.

I have only one personal Kevin Duckworth story. It was the heyday of the Drexler Blazers, and I sat at the next table from Duck at a fancy Sunday brunch -- I believe it was in the restaurant at the then-still-pretty-new Riverplace Alexis Hotel.

The guy was huge. He was there with a young gal of about the same age, whom he absolutely dwarfed.

In those days, I ate and drank all I could at any sort of all-you-can-eat deal, and that midday meal was no different. Duck, however, seemed a little out of place, and as I recall he wasn't chowing down very hard at all. He was quiet, and the rest of the hoops fans in the place were like us -- we left him and his guest to their food.

A lot of geezers like me talk about how great the Blazers would have been if they had been able to get Arvydas Sabonis out from behind the Iron Curtain while he was still in his prime. "They would have beaten Isiah and Jordan. They would have had three rings." But we had Duck -- close, but no cigar.

That's a lousy place in history for a guy to wind up. Today's a day for thinking about the Blazers that were, not the ones that could have been. The runs that the team had in Duck's era were magical, and the team has not been the same since. Sports fans should leave it at that, and let the guy's friends and colleagues help us remember and mourn the person rather than the stat sheet.

The O has some photos posted here, but the guy who knows more than any of us about the story sums it up here.

We blogged recently about the City of Portland's call for bids to sell the city a variety of promotional items -- all manner of swag, from t-shirts to coffee mugs to umbrellas to bookmarks that turn into plant starts to esoteric mountain climbing gear. Why fix the streets when you can give away cool city stuff?

As it turns out, the bid process by which a vendor of such junk will be selected is showing signs of being as crazy as the giveaways themselves. Already the city has amended the original bid solicitation twice. Yesterday the second addendum went up on the web, and it is strong evidence that some folks at City Hall have entirely too much time on their hands.

Here is the second addendum, in all its glory. Check it out, and compare it to the first addendum, which was released last Tuesday. You will see that all they changed yesterday was a single dollar amount in the sample pricing form that they want bidders to submit. Instead of "B. Reusable Coffee Mug, ceramic, approx. $8 charge after min. qty level discount," the sample form now reads "B. Reusable Coffee Mug, ceramic, approx. $3 charge after min. qty level discount."

But hey, wait a minute! The document that they went out of their way to amend yesterday is just an example of the form that the prospective vendors are supposed to use. When they submit their forms, they'll use their own prices, whatever they may be. The mugs might be priced at $3, or $8, or any other amount -- it's up to the vendor. The documents are very specific: "Use your own quantity levels and pricing as well as discounts off of list price, this is only an example."

So let me get this straight: We drafted an addendum, with an accompanying memo, and posted it to the web yesterday, just to change the dollar amount in an example on a sample form -- and the vendors are all going to change the dollar amount as a matter of course? That, ladies and gentlemen, would be bureaucracy at its finest. Let's hope I'm missing something.

I gave McCain a hard time a while back for being born outside of U.S. territory -- calling into question whether he is a "natural born citizen" of the United States and thus eligible to be President. Here's someone who accuses the Democratic Presidential nominee of having a more serious eligibility problem.