When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.

[February 23rd, 2005] * This week, word is minor league baseball's Portland Beavers will announce a new ownership group—closing the door on the tangled, sour-tasting deal that launched the Triple-A team, funded PGE Park's renovation and also left Portland taxpayers holding the bag when team revenue fell short. Coincidentally, the change comes just over a month after creditors took over the bankrupt Rose Garden , finishing off another ill-conceived sports-arena deal. The architect of both fiascos, former Blazers exec Marshall Glickman , has moved on to other projects.

* Meanwhile, the current Blazers crew isn't having that great a time, either. The team's feud with The Oregonian—specifically sports columnist John Canzano —prompted the club to drop its advertising with the daily. Last Sunday, New York Times hoops columnist Liz Robbins proclaimed the embattled Maurice Cheeks "the next coach to be fired." And judging by rumblings from within the Blazers, the front office is packed with unhappy campers. Stay tuned.

* Impreglio-Healy, the construction partnership that's digging the westside Big Pipe , is protesting the city's decision to hand the sewer project's $500 million eastside section to another outfit, led by the construction giant Kiewit. Something the protest doesn't mention: Kiewit is a defendant in a class-action suit stemming from its work on the Yucca Mountain nuclear-waste dump in Nevada. According to Nevada officials and lawyers, Kiewit ignored safety precautions, and more than 30 miners on the project ended up with fatal respiratory problems . "Evidence-wise, this is the best case I've ever had," says an attorney for the plaintiffs. "This is a case of shocking disregard." Oddly, the Portland selection committee singled out Kiewit's safety commitment in making its choice.

* Even as the city's cop watchdog, Richard Rosenthal, tries to get the power to investigate potential legal actions against officers (see cover story, page 14), some doubt he'll use it. Critics are fuming over his decision not to pursue a case involving Officer Leo Besner, who arrested protester Bill Ellis on the downtown transit mall ostensibly because the sign he carried extended a couple of feet over the sidewalk and obstructed TriMet buses. Police videos, however, showed the only thing obstructing buses was a police truck—and indicated Ellis was targeted because he was a leader of the protest. Defending his decision, Rosenthal cited a settlement signed by Ellis in which the man agrees to dismiss all "claims"—which lawyer Rosenthal says includes the protester's complaint against the officer.

* Mayor Tom Potter's budget proposal (see page 7) yanks funding from the city's biggest needle exchange, run by Outside In. In a recent letter to Potter, the nonprofit's director, Kathy Oliver, pleaded for reinstating funding for her program, which receives about a quarter of its budget from the city. In addition to slowing the spread of diseases like AIDS and keeping errant needles out of playgrounds, Oliver wrote, needle exchanges serve "a growing number of injection drug users using Meth."

* "Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits, a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo cage." —The late Hunter S. Thompson