Campus love slapped! Gay play banned!

[September 14th, 2005] WINNERS

FEMA might be clueless (see Rogue of the Week, page 8), but North Portland pastor Mary Overstreet showed the feds how to get it together in Katrina's wake. Overstreet's one-woman relief program evacuated more than 30 people from the Gulf to Portland, where they'll stay in rent-free apartments and may get job training.

Crowds disregarding guards' orders, jockeying to enter a convention center, pounding on doors like an unruly mob...scenes from Katrina? No, this was UnPresident Al Gore 's talk on global warming at the Oregon Convention Center last week. Like a charitable rock star, Gore agreed to a second show that night.

Environmental doomsayers also felt a quiver of vindication when scientists predicted that wild Pacific salmon will die out completely by the year 2100 without radical action. An expected population surge in the Northwest-50 million people?-is largely to blame for the scaly ones' anticipated Armageddon.

LOSERS

Squeamish Southridge High School last week cancelled a production of the acclaimed play The Laramie Project-based on the real-life murder of a 21-year-old gay man-citing "controversial" language. This pretty much nixes the prospect of the suburban Washington County school ever performing Shakespeare's Henry II: "He did not just say 'rampallian,' did he?" (For the latest on this loser, go to WW's Murmurs online at www.wweek.com).

The spoilsports on the state board of higher ed ixnayed one of the unofficial benefits of being a professor-scoring with tasty undergrads. If he/she's in your class, you must pass, the board decreed. (Upside: If you identify a hottie who is not your student, employee, advisee, etc., game on!)

Not that the Oregon Legislature needs help adding to its tarnished rep, but your lawmakers never stop working. Ex-Rep. Dan Doyle (R-Salem) pleaded guilty last week to misreporting campaign donations he used for his own expenses. And current Rep. Kelley Wirth (right, D-Corvallis) was hospitalized after getting rammed by a car driven by a woman whose boyfriend, a Capitol janitor, says he had an affair with the legislator.