Welcome to March, alert Weekend Reader readers! As always, there’s a lot to get to this week, but first, a couple of notes from management:

First, please take the time to list in the comments section five things you got done last week. Bullet points will suffice. An answer like “Drove my Tesla off a cliff in an act of lonely protest” will count as one of your bullet points. After all, we’re just trying to figure out if you’re alive.

And just a couple of quick comments about President Trump’s. um, “meeting” Friday with Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy: First, Trump’s comment at the end — “This is going to be great television” — tells you a lot, but I trust you to draw your own conclusions.

Here’s way more than you need to know about the big controversy surrounding Zelenskyy’s attire during his visit to the Oval Office. It sounds as if the Ukrainian held his own. Nevertheless, I encourage him to use this line — free of charge — the next time an idiot asks a similar question: “I would have worn my new suit, but a Russian missile destroyed my tailor’s shop.” And, Volodymyr: If you need additional comic material of this same high quality, just email me. I work cheap.

Alert readers might recall a conversation from a few months back with a reader who wondered whether billionaires could actually be good owners of newspapers. I said back then that it depended on the billionaire, and pointed to Amazon’s Jeff Bezos as an example of a billionaire who had done a good job of staying out of the newsroom. The reader, shall we say, had his doubts.

Well. I stand before you today to say that I was wrong and the reader was right. Bezos this week announced that people who disagreed with his stances on free trade and personal liberty need not bother trying to have their opinions printed on the Post’s editorial pages because those opinions are no longer welcome there.

Don’t misunderstand: The issue here isn’t so much that Bezos wants his editorial writers to focus on writing “every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets.” He’s the owner of the paper, which means he gets to make the final call about the Post’s editorials. If you’re the editor of the opinion pages, and you can’t live with that, you always can resign — which is, in fact, what happened.

The bigger issue here is that the Post’s opinion pages no longer are places for dissenting views about those two “pillars,” and — in fact, that stance would seem to fly against Bezos’ desire to hype “personal liberties.” But I’ve noticed that these contradictions are giving no pause to these billionaires — especially as they go out of their way to curry favor with the Trump administration. (In fact, these contradictions are giving no pause to members of the administration, but we’ll come back to that in future weeks.) Bezos’ new stance also shows a profound misunderstanding of the purpose of a newspaper’s editorial pages, which is to welcome debate from all sides.

After a long stretch in which Bezos did seem to be making an effort to stay out of the newsroom, he has done substantial and possibly irreparable damage to the Post over just the past few months, as George Packer lays out in this piece in The Atlantic.

Joshua Benton over at the Nieman Lab offers additional insight into the new marching orders at the Post, which until recently had as its slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” Now, of course, we know that democracy can be killed in the light of day underneath a blizzard of memos and executive orders.

Speaking of Bezos, you might have missed the recent news that Amazon now has gained creative control over the James Bond franchise. So let me pitch a bunch of ideas — based on some of the Bond classics — that might jump-start new films in the series: “No Time for Democracy,” “The Autocrat Who Loved Me,” “Billions Are Forever,” “On Her Majesty’s Delivery Service,” and some titles that don’t need any alteration at all: “The World is Not Enough,” “Dr. No” and, of course, “From Russia with Love.” I’ll expand on these in a separate blog post. In the meantime, though, if Amazon executives want to follow up with me on any of these ideas, I think they know where I live.

The bad news keeps coming for long-suffering Portland: Now, it’s lost its title as the site of the world’s smallest park to some upstart tiny park in Japan. Fun fact about this sad story: The Portland park in question, Mills End Park, came about in part because of the long-running efforts of a newspaper columnist. At least Portland can content itself with the knowledge that it’s home to what appears to be the world’s cutest baby elephant.

Rest in peace, Gene Hackman. If you want a refresher course into how good he was — across a variety of very different movies — Lindsay Bahr of The Associated Press has compiled a list of his essential roles. And may I add that “The Conversation” is just as timely today as it was in 1974.

In all the excitement, you probably missed this nutritional advice that was issued last week from the U.S. government: You should hunt and eat nutrias. No word yet from the city of Corvallis on when open season begins in Sunset Park.

Meanwhile, Oscar fans should know that my annual prediction contest is up and running, and there’s real money at stake — or, at least a $25 gift certificate to your favorite multiplex. All you need to do is check out my predictions for Sunday’s ceremony, chuckle over which ones will certainly turn out to be incorrect, and send me your own set of predictions (before the ceremony starts, please). Click here to check out my predictions and to enter the contest. Or click here to read the predictions from The New York Times reporter who actually is paid to track awards season. Or click here to read the predictions from The Atlantic’s David Sims.

That’s it for this weekend. We’ll gather back here next week to lament our wayward Oscar picks. Don’t forget about those bullet points.