Weekend Update, 4/1/07

One of my earliest posts on this blog was Biodiesel and the price of corn tortillas in Mexico. It should have been titled “Biofuels”, since corn is used to make ethanol, not biodiesel. The Oregonian‘s Business section yesterday carried news of American farmers planting more corn for ethanol. I think we should talk about the moral issue and problem with planting crops to burn in our cars, while people are starving in many places throughout the world.

Those not using the handy “recent posts” feature in the left sidebar, alerting frequent users to new comments in old posts, may have missed this week’s update in the comments of No Reply, regarding my letter to the Mayor and an e-mail from his Chief of Staff. Half a Reply? Check it out, and please consider signing up on the site even if you don’t plan to post comments, to get your personalized “recent posts” report each time you visit.

The Oregonian followed up on its coverage of harassment of the Roosevelt High School basketball team and its supporters in Eugene, with a nice article about Principal Deborah Peterson and recent social and academic successes at Roosevelt. Nice to see good publicity for Roosevelt’s entire program stemming from coverage of their basketball team.

Progress on the issue of unwanted phone books, recorded in the comments, thanks to the contributions of new blog participant Martin.

The “community conversation” over the four ballot measures on whether to change Portland’s Charter now has less than four weeks to pick up interest before Portlanders start voting. Websites for and against the form of government proposal are up and running. I’ve seen very little discussion on the other three measures – a fact I find both disturbing and sad. See Portland’s Future Charter for comprehensive links. The first community forum is coming up this Wednesday, April 4, at the Mercury‘s event, 7PM, ACME, 1305 SE 8th.

News specific to this blog: the number of visits per day averaged 569 in March. Visitors came here from 3,505 sites over the course of the month. Ninety-eight new users have registered on the site since the blog started in December.
Total visits to the blog = 47,251.