Knight stays true to his school, Castillo sells ours.

[December 12th, 2007]

Winners

1 We’ve intercepted this exchange of notes among lucky Stanford undergrads : “God, this prof is borrrrring. Anybody else wanna get hammered after class? Luv, Muffy.” “I’ll go. Party on, Phil!” “Awesome. Biff.” Huh? The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Nike gazillionaire and Stanford Business School grad Phil Knight still takes an occasional writing class there and has been known to go out for brewskis afterward. Chug, Phil, chug!

2 Downtown’s homeless and the swollen-bladdered bar crowd got a bit of relief from Randy Leonard. The city commissioner scored $244,000 in the fall budget to build several solar-powered streetside restrooms. Downtown Starbucks locations also gain from fewer requests for “the key.”

3 Gorge windsurfers and their snot-covered boards finally got taken seriously when state health officials agreed to study “river nose”—an upper-respiratory ailment that Columbia River surfers say they’ve long suffered from. Our prediction: Docs will have their hands full finding a cause—what with Hanford, pesticides, and all those surfers’ noses stuck in the air.

Losers

1 Public education came with a price tag after State Superintendent of Public Instruction Susan Castillo advised local schools in 2004 that they could charge tuition for full-day kindergarten. Now state lawyers say charging tuition is illegal, and Castillo wants the Legislature to bail her out (see , which broke the story Friday). Don’t be surprised if Castillo must shift her focus from class curriculum to a class-action suit by parents.

2 A nearly two-week strike by some employees of the Multnomah Education Service District , including educational assistants, has yet to produce a new contract. Nearly 100 substitutes have been called in. To avoid confusion, students have taken to calling their new teachers Mr. or Mrs. Scab.

3 OHSU scientist Dr. Miles Novy woke up on Dec. 7 to find his car tagged with the words “sadist” and “ALF.” The Animal Liberation Front took credit for the vandalism, in protest of Novy’s research on monkeys to prevent premature birth in humans. Maybe it was the monkeys with the spray cans.

4 If dairy cows could cry like the Washington dairy farmers who suffered devastating flood losses, a giant moo-hoo would have sounded. While Oregon dairy farmers escaped huge weather losses, nearly 800 dairy cows drowned in Lewis County.