Calling Captain Renault

From the No-Surprise Dept.: The gambling scandal that has derailed the coaching career of the Trail Blazers' Chauncey Billups is just the tip of an enormous iceberg...  In the past week, both college basketball and major league baseball have had harsh light shed on their own dirty linen... With so much wagering, now legal, on every play, on every pitch, players' and coaches' cheating to help shady gambler pals is certainly a commonplace occurrence... You don't have to throw the game. Just start with a curve ball rather than a slider, or pass rather than shoot... One student hoopster claims he was once told by his coach not to score any more points that night...

Speaking of sports and rules, I see that ex-Blazer Chris Dudley is floating trial balloons in the Weed about his running for governor again. He'd be a formidable primary opponent for Christine Drazan, who lost to the Comet Kohoutek three years ago... But Dudley's name familiarity isn't what it once was. He last hung up his NBA uniform in 2003... And then there is the little matter of that house he kept in Clark County to avoid paying Oregon income tax on the money he made from road games and investments while a Blazer. This raised some eyebrows when the Dud ran in 2010... Nowadays he lives in Sisters... I think...

While on the subject of ex-Blazers, did you see that Mychal Thompson's old Dunthorpe mansion is on the market again?... It's quite the abode, a quarter-acre of luxury indoor space, and priced to sell at only $5.3 million... This is the childhood home of Mychal's son, Klay, who now plays for the Dallas Mavericks. So you can own a historic site... Plus, take a short walk down the street and you can hang with neighbor Stuart Lindquist, who owns the ICE jail property...

Meanwhile, from our nation's capital comes news that Nancy Pelosi is retiring from the House of Representatives. At age 85½, she's been there since the Coolidge administration... She's leaving Washington and returning to San Francisco to spend more time with her Nvidia options... It's about time the former speaker stepped down and let the young kids take over, like Oregon's Suzanne Bonamici, who just turned 71... The average age of Oregon's House members is 60... Over in the "upper chamber," we of the Beaver State have spritely Gatsby Wyden, clocking in at 76½, and Jeff Merkley, a youngster at 69... The word "Senate" comes from the Latin word for old man... So does the word "senile"... Take it from a 1970's Classics major...

Here in Portlandia, the mayor's talking like an adult again... He's instructed the cops to approach some of the sidewalk tent dwellers and present them with two options for the night: a shelter bed or a jail bed... This makes way too much sense for the People's Republic, and you can bet on the City Council putting a stop to it pronto...

It's that season when the smart people with money start thinking about their taxes for the year... There's still a month and half to make last-minute maneuvers that will cut their bills... As for the little people who just shut up and pay what they owe, they'd better not plan to use the IRS's free "direct file" program again next year. The Trumpies, beholden to the likes of TurboTax and H. & R. Block, are killing it...  One more outrage on a humongous mound of disgraces... 

A shout-out to Dave Rogoway, ex-KISN deejay extraordinaire and proprietor of the highly entertaining Stumptown Blogger franchise...  That blog was on WordPress, and so like the original TaxProf Blog, it's been taken off the air... Fortunately, Dave's still getting it done on Facebook, and the other day, he included some text in a format that looks vaguely familiar... This city needs all the columnists it can get. But accept no substitutes...

Jeff Knight is the former dining and entertainment columnist of the Jersey Journal. Send news tips to Jeff at jeffknightpdx@gmail.com.