The Vig

It was a coin-toss on whether to attend last night’s game.  Those who were there may have noted my absence.  As Dylan B. pointed out on his Twitter feed a week ago, the Hawks didn’t necessarily need to announce their attendance for the Brandon game, they could have just had everyone introduce themselves over the PA.  Last night wasn’t much better.

A friend asked me last night why I wasn’t at the game.  I told her the same story I wrote here last year.  There was a time not so long ago when I would have come to a mid-week game like last night just to see what happened.  I think those days are over.  The Hawks might win, they might lose, but if no one’s there, what’s the point?

Dylan B. got in a gentle dig at this reporter earlier this evening.  It takes real effort for me to be sly sometimes.  Dylan makes it an art.  I’ll take the bait.

Who exactly have the Winterhawks alienated with their price increase?  The same dead-enders who were there every night of the Goldsmith-era were sitting in their same seats last night, and paying 30-percent more.  From Piper’s perspective, what wasn’t to like?  Especially on a Wednesday night in November when the entire town is discussing the pending Blazer implosion.  Piper’ll take what he can get mid-week.

Now, this will be the first Saturday home game in almost a month.  Hopefully the Hawks have been pounding the phones to get folks out there.  They’re in the Rose Garden on a Saturday night against Seattle.  It should be an easy sell, but who knows.  This thing isn’t going to get rebuilt in a day.

In other news, the team is beginning to make Goldsmithian noises about renovating the Coliseum.  A five or six-thousand seat arena inside the Glass Palace would definitely be a community asset.  I wonder how much further this idea would get if someone were to jump on the Green Line and spend an afternoon talking to the folks at PSU about joining in.  The Vikings are in serious needs of new digs; if they were to join together and wrap the whole thing in a big green bow, I bet they could get something done.  It would be a win-win.  Goldsmith never pursued this.  Perhaps Piper will.

Alternatively, I had an enlightening conversation a few weeks back with a longtime observer of the local sports scene.  The subject turned to the new Beaver baseball stadium.  I mentioned they were talking about building the thing at the Clark County fairgrounds in Ridgefield.  I told him I live in Vancouver and Ridgefield was too far to drive to watch a game.  When I mentioned that, his eyes lit up.

“If the Beavers moved there, they would own Vancouver,” he said.  They would no longer be competing with all the other noise in Portland, they could just concentrate on that one location.  He argued it’s too difficult to market minor league sports in Portland.  A move to the suburbs would solve that.

It’s an interesting point and one I hadn’t considered.  This all works for the Hawks as well.  The dead-enders will all gladly make the drive to Beaverton or Vancouver to watch the team.  So they’re really not going to lose anything.  If anything, the team will gain.

Beaverton has its own paper, which you don’t read unless you happen to live there.  We have one up here in The Couv as well.  Either paper would be more than happy to put “their” team on the front page.  And locals would love to go see “their” team.  This theory is working all over the Puget Sound right now with both baseball and hockey.  That one conversation turned my thinking completely around on minor league sports and the suburbs.

Another friend took it one step further suggesting sticking an NHL arena somewhere in Washington County and booking the heck out of it.  The Blazers, for whatever reason, don’t seem at all interested in maximizing the Rose Garden.  They’ve missed out on dozens of shows (AC/DC, Depeche Mode, and Fleetwood Mac…as well as the seemingly never-ending Springsteen tour, just to name a few) that Mike Scanlon would have booked in a heartbeat.  A properly run big-league venue somewhere out Highway 26 could definitely work.

I’ve been a fan of Steve Martin’s for years now.  I’ll stop whatever it is I’m doing to watch The Jerk, and Roxanne and LA Story both remain among my all-time favorites.

In addition to the stuff you’ve seen on TV and in the movies, he’s also quite an author.  Shopgirl was fantastic and I just finished his memoir Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life.  Turns out there’s quite a mind inside the head that spent a decade with an arrow through it.

Wow.  What an AWFUL sentence.  We trudge on…

There’s been quite a controversy over in La Grande about a high school production of Martin’s play Picasso at the Lapin Agile.  Parents successfully petitioned the school to cancel the production.  Undeterred, the students took the whole thing off-campus and are presently scheduled to perform it on the campus at Eastern Oregon University in mid-May.

Martin has become aware of the issue and sent a letter to the La Grande Observer offering to pay for the production.  That’s the Steve Martin I love.

I’m going to try and get over to La Grande to see the production, not only to support the kids but also to support Martin.

I only got four days.  This guy got 11 months.

Tim Riley, Portland’s only newsman, hit the nail on the head today.

Should Sam Adams resign? Yes he should. Will he? Probably not. He’ll wait to the howling crowds calling for his flogging to tire themselves out as all politicians are confident will happen in their times of personal defeat.

This reporter considers himself a liberal on most social issues..blah, blah, blah, and so forth. This however, gives social conservatives an opportunity to wiggle an accusing finger and bellow, “You see, he was grooming that underage kid to have sex with him from the very beginning!” As difficult as it seems for a social liberal to admit, looks like this time and maybe one of the few times they were right.

That, to me, is the crux of the matter.  I suppose in time we’ll know definitively whether Breedlove and Adams had sex before Breedlove was 18.  The point is Adams had a relationship with the kid, one which by his own admission contained a sexual chemistry.  Rather than telling the kid to go away and come find him when he was 18, Adams cultivated the relationship until he could legally sleep with him.  Illegal?  No.  But it shows bad character.

Sidebar: Porn producers get inquiries daily from young people across the country asking how to get into the industry once they turn 18.  Do you think any of them have the kids come down to the office to get a jump on paperwork?  No matter how earnest the kid was, a producer would be blackballed and thrown out of the industry if they had any professional contact with a minor.  End Sidebar.

A case was decided in Washington Statea couple of weeks ago which struck down a law forbidding teachers from having sex with their 18-year-old students.  That is an absolutely correct decision.  The state should have zero interest in what consenting adults do with other consenting adults.  None.  Now, should there be a professional consequence for such behavior?  Absolutely.  Any teacher having sex with students, no matter their age, should face professional consequences including being stripped of their license.   There’s no place for that.  Especially if the teacher had “chemistry” with the student prior to their turning 18.

I don’t believe Adams should be prosecuted for what he’s admitted to.  And I don’t believe the matter should be investigated beyond what we’ve already discovered.  I do believe though that Adams must go.  He’s more than the mayor.  As the first openly gay mayor of a major American city, he’s a role model.  And he’s failed.

Here’s a headline you don’t see every day.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

“Center-right” is talk-radio code designed to make their followers believe what they’re watching in the current conservative movement is somehow moderate.  That George Bush, Tom Delay, Bill Frist, Denny Hastert, and John Boener are just middle-of-the-road average dudes.  They’re not.  Sean Hannity, Hugh Hewitt, and Dennis Prager all use the phrase to describe themselves.  They’re all far from “center-right”.  To choose “that” phrase introduce oneself tells me everything I need to know about a particular conservative.

Welcome to Portland, Ms Hovde.  I trust Messers Campbell, Day, Nelson, and Atkinson have all updated their contacts.

Word out of Toronto is the Phoenix Coyotes, despite having a brand new arena, are in a heap of trouble financially.  It serves them right for building the thing in a cotton field in the middle of freaking nowhere.  When I lived down there, the talk was they were going to build the new arena at the old Los Arcos Mall, which would have been ideal given it’s proximity to the money in the 480 area code.  I can’t remember all the ins and outs of why the thing never got built.  As I recall, they wanted to build an aquarium next door and, of course, condos.  Ultimately it got torpedoed.

What does this mean for Portland?  Well, the Winter Hawks have a new moneybags owner and, as Dwight pointed out a few months back, he may have his eye on bringing the NHL to town.  It’s a pretty smart move.  Come to town, get to know the local who’s who, and see if it’s feasible.  Well, there may be no better time.  If the ‘Yotes file bankruptcy, they’ll be out of their lease and free agents.  Who’s to say someone can’t come in and swoop them up for a low nine-figure price.

The only obstacle, I would think, would be the price of oil.  Gallacher’s wealth is mostly in energy and banking.  It’s a lot easier to write that cheque when a barrel costs $140 US than it is when it’s only $35.  And don’t get me started on the financial markets.

There are quite a few teams out there besides Phoenix that are in trouble, and it could turn into a race to see who relocates first.  I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find an NHL team dropping the puck in the Rose Quarter within 2 years.

Three Everett WA cops with a total of six years of experience between them shot and killed a 31-year-old man last weekend.

Dustin Willard had returned home that night after having a few beers with some friends. Around the same time, neighbors called 911, reporting somebody breaking glass and kicking in a door at Willard’s house.Exactly what happened next, no one knows.

Police say they were greeted at the front door by Willard with a shotgun. Witnesses say they heard police shouting, followed almost instantly by about a dozen gunshots.

The guy had no criminal record and was by all accounts a good guy.  Man.  This stuff shouldn’t happen.

Having been at the business end of a couple of police handguns once upon a time, I can tell you it’s a frightening experience.  I had to trust those guys to do the right thing.  But there’s also some resonsibility on the suspect to follow commands.  As I told the guys who arrested me that night, it’s safer for everyone.

I hope the family finds their answers.

HT:  Horse’s Ass.

My fantasy team, Briansdong, went into the Seattle-Tampa game with a slim 8 point lead. It came down to the Tampa defense vs Jay Cutler. Tampa picked up 16 points on the hapless Hawks while Cutler somehow scratched together 9 in his losing effort tonight, giving the Dongs a one-point victory. More importantly, we’re once again tied for first place.

Like you care.

That’s what the O believes solar could be worth.  Of course we heard the same thing a few year back about biotech.

Of course the great unspoken truth here is high fuel prices no longer make it quite as cheap to build these things in China and ship them here.  The other incentive is with the historically weak dollar, a $50,000/year job doesn’t cost nearly as many euros or yen as it did five years ago.

As for our “green values”, there are some nasty industrial-strength chemicals used in the manufacture of “green technology”.  Stuff that makes LNG look like Pop Rocks.  Of course that’s not going to stop Teddy K. and the rest of Oregon’s economic “leadership” from looking the other way on regulating the proper disposal of such agents.  Afterall, it’s not about the environment at all.  It’s about the almighty dollar.