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Good Morning, Portland: Well, bless your sweet cocktail; it's almost Highball Week. Did you know that I came up with that name, based on some story about Lunch Poems poet Frank O'Hara? I don't have anything to do with Highball Week (and back then all I did was offer up some name ideas), but I do like to participate in the drinking portion. NOW LET'S PARTICIPATE IN SOME NEWS!

IN LOCAL NEWS:
• Thousands of Portlanders flooded Pioneer Courthouse Square for May 1 / May Day / International Worker's Day, filling the red brick public gathering space with signs both earnest and one-liner. At least three gatherings (at PSU, at Pioneer Square, and at Terry Schrunk Plaza) throughout the city's downtown pulled thick streams of crowds between them. "What're y'all protesting?" asked a young woman by Pioneer Place Mall, as she watched a river of people flow down SW Yamhill. Replies to her included: celebrating May Day, protesting President Trump,  Elon Musk, mass and chaotic firings of federal workers, tariffs, forced deportations of US immigrants, threats of additional deportations, trans erasure, threats to reproductive rights. If you missed stomping around but still want to celebrate the workers, there are a number of events planned for May Day weekend.

• If you remember the rush hour road rage shooting in front of the Moxy Hotel in 2023, a jury found Geoffrey Hammond guilty of second degree murder on Thursday. It was the second attempt at trying Hammond, after a jury deadlocked in December. Readers may remember that Hammond shot Vancouver man Ryan Martin after a confrontation between the two, over Hammond's idling blockage of the road. Martin got out of his truck to approach and continue the angry exchange, and Hammond shot him once in the chest. He also shot a bystander filming the scene while driving away. Hammond is scheduled to be sentenced in June.

• While it isn't yet a law, legislators in the Oregon Senate passed a bill on Tuesday that would end the practice of publicly naming the state's lottery winners. The Oregonian reports that House Bill 3115 would eliminate "what was once considered a key transparency measure to maintain integrity and public trust in the games and the agency that runs them." It's yet unclear if Governor Kotek plans to sign the bill, as she has neglected to comment on it. She is presumably too busy incentivizing developers to build more new housing.

• Fans of the PDX airport roof, you now have a theme song. Mercury music columnist Jenni Moore writes: "DJ Avelanche, one Portland’s best producers—just dropped “PDX (Wooden Roof),” a new track and music video celebrating the airport’s glow-up, blowing a kiss to the city’s thriving hip-hop scene."

• The Melvins. They're great, but are they Portlanders—the answer is "no, but sort of" in the way all PNW peeps will never truly escape the grey skies we all return to when we, one day, die. Mercury contributor Melissa Locker informs us that the Melvins' latest record is a tribute to the band’s deep Pacific Northwest roots. My favorite part from this piece? "If it’s not abundantly clear from this interview, for the Melvins, the past is not particularly interesting. 'I'm not a ‘good old days’ type of guy,' Osbourne states. 'I'm more the ‘what you done lately’ type of guy.'”

• Bandcamp Friday is back today—popping up with very little fanfare to waive the cut that the streaming platform takes from artists who use its site to sell records, and "passing the funds directly to artists & labels." We asked Nolan Parker for five recently released local records that Porlanders might consider gripping on this day. Their picks are: Conspire, Turn a Blind Eye EP;  Crystal Quartez, Erospace, Dreckig, Eclipse EP,  the Blue Knots, Becoming Noise [which they profiled recently], and Darci Phenix, Sable [which Ben Salmon profiled in March]. The four other Bandcamp Fridays for 2025 are August 1, September 5, October 3, and December 5.

• Free Comic Book Day is a good way to get a bunch of teaser comics—I think you should just go buy the whole comics, personally. Here's a cute map of Portland comics shops participating on Saturday, illustrated by Ember Grace:

IN NATIONAL / INTERNATIONAL NEWS:
• President Trump signed an executive order Thursday, directing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and other federal agencies “to cease Federal funding for NPR and PBS,” the Associated Press reports. While we know that—in response to Richard Nixon's attempts to defund public broadcasting in the '70s—Gerald Ford set up a two year buffer around public media, directing Congress to fund it in advance to avoid federal tampering... it's not clear what this order will actually do. The CPB is already suing Trump over his firing of three people on its board. We find ourselves engaging int the old refrain: Can he do that? I don't know. Is he? It seems to be happening, for some reason.

• President Trump continued his Lucille Bluth impression this week, when he expressed US economic hardship with a metaphor about Americans buying dolls: American kids might “have two dolls instead of 30 dolls," he said:

• It never occurred to me that former VP nominee and Governor of Minnesota Tim Walz would bear a special grudge against President Trump's national security adviser, Mike Waltz—do they get each another's mail at the Capitol, or something? Anyway, the Trump administration removed WALTZ from his position on Thursday, saying that they were nominating him as ambassador to the United Nations. The Daily Beast reported WALTZ' sorrowful rejection on the tarmac.

Mike Waltz has left the chat.

— Governor Tim Walz (@governorwalz.mn.gov) May 1, 2025 at 8:50 AM

• In California, a federal judge has "issued a preliminary injunction forbidding the Border Patrol from conducting warrantless immigration stops" throughout a wide area of the state CalMatters journalists Sergio Olmos and Wendy Fry report:

Judge restricts Border Patrol in California: ‘You just can’t walk up to people with brown skin and say give me your papers” W/ @wendyfry.bsky.social calmatters.org/justice/2025...

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— Sergio olmos (@sergioolmos.bsky.social) April 29, 2025 at 3:29 PM

• Sending you into this bright weekend with some gardening wisdom—this has also been my approach to planning dedicated editorial guides: