More ice misconduct

A happy holiday season to all of greater Portlandia from your humble correspondent. I believe we’re up to seven swans a-swimming, but who’s counting?... With the new year come well-intentioned resolutions. Got any?... For yours truly, it’s to live well, and last at least long enough to read one big, beautiful obituary…

Rang out the old year with dinner at the toney Clarklewis, to which I'd surprsingly never been before. Started things off with bourbon on the rocks. The waiter asked me if I’d like a large cube of ice instead of several little ones. Sure, I said… At the end of the dinner, it was revealed that said large cube was 75 cents extra. I am not making this up…

Speaking of cheapskates, family members flying on Alaska Air over the holidays informed me that they did not get the usual pack of two Biscoff Lotus cookies. I could not believe my ears… You can buy them by the hundred at Costco, but come on, the two you got on every Alaska flight were as sure a thing as you could ever expect... I can live with the doors blowing off the planes every once in a while, but no Biscoff Lotus cookies? I don’t see how the Alaska CEO, Ben Minicucci, keeps his job… If you agree that this atrocity cannot stand, you can drop him a line: ben.minicucci@alaskaair.com...

According to media reports, the new Portland city manager, a.k.a. “administrator,” Raymond Lee, had his first official day on the payroll yesterday… Which seems like an odd day to pick to start a job, a Tuesday near the end of a month, in the middle of a holiday dead week… That is, until you consider that by contract, RL3's employee benefits start up on the first day of the month after he starts… And so he’s covered beginning tomorrow… The good news for Portland taxpayers, though, is that they can now claim Lee as a dependent on their 2025 income tax returns…

A familiar script played out in the Moda Center on Sunday: A fat and sassy older team cruised into town on a high and got slapped down by the upstart Trail Blazers… This time the victim was the Boston Celtics… Portland is six games below .500 and will be lucky to be in the post-season for even a single game, but they sure play a mean trap game at home…

Have you ever seen the comedian J-L Cauvin (pronouned koh-VAN)? This guy, a lawyer by trade, does a devastating impersonation of the American dictator. The hilarious bits are easy to find on the intertubes… But now Cauvin’s running for a vacant seat in Congress from near my old stomping grounds in North Jersey… He’s up against the Democratic machine, which back there has a lot of clout, but if smarts mean anything, Cauvin could wind up stealing that seat… Sure would be a breath of fresh air… And I mean that very strongly…

By now, you’ve probably heard about the change at the Post Office that is going to slow down the postmarking of mailed envelopes… They aren’t going to get marked until they reach a sorting facility, which may be a few days after the Post Office picks them up… This is going to screw up mail-in voting, tax payments, and plenty of other items whose filing deadline turns on a postmark… And here in Portland, where the City Hall revenuers are cut-throat about such things, they’ll be dinging more people than ever… Who says the Trumpies and the far-lefty politicians can’t work together?

We’re into Capricorn time now, and a few Oregonians’ birthdays pop up on the artificially intelligent radar screen….  Jan Wyers, the retired state senator and attorney, will be 87 on Friday… Gridiron great and neighbor Ndamukong Suh blows out 39 candles on Tuesday… But when I ask the A.I. robots for more Oregonian birthdays this week, a lot of what they come up with is wrong… Maybe Mrs. Wyden’s Nvidia stock isn’t worth that much after all… 

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