A 51-year-old ER nurse proved that the right to bear arms is indeed irrelevant...if you have a frickin' bear's arms. Susan Kuhnhausen, who The Oregonian reported was about 5-foot-7 and 260 pounds, strangled a 5-foot-9, 180-pound intruder in self-defense last Wednesday after she found the man in her Southeast Portland home.

Portland Public Schools are again safe for Boy Scout recruiters. The Oregon Supreme Court decided Friday that the God-fearing group didn't discriminate against godless tykes when it doled out Scout info during school hours a decade ago.

The push to let customers know Meier & Frank is now called Macy's fattened up The Oregonian's pages like the good old days. At least for one week, the 30-plus pages of advertising that Macy's placed in the daily must have brought smiles to the O's sales staff.

Maybe "fixies" are OK after all on Portland bike lanes. Cyclists are celebrating a judge's ruling last week that pedaling backward on a "fixie" counts as braking. That counters another judge who ruled in July that fixed-gear bikes were illegal because they didn't have separate hand brakes.

LOSERS

Jurors last week handed OHSU its most expensive medicine in years: a $1.4 million judgment to be paid to ex-KATU host Ken Ackerman for injuring his spinal cord in a 2003 operation, leaving him partially paralyzed.

And the PR blows keep on coming for the Catholic Church, which produced another jaw-dropper last week. Somehow the church only recently "discovered" records in its files that the former president of Jesuit-run Gonzaga University molested underage males in the '60s. Ex-prez Father John Leary won't face earthly discipline, having died in 1993.

Rather than canning an officer who conned women into exposing themselves, Multnomah County Sheriff Bernie Giusto took the deputy off the street and gave him a cushy training job. So what is it exactly you have to do to get fired from the force?