A raspberry -- the "Hothouse Plant" award -- to Granite Construction Co., for backing out of a planned forum Wednesday night on its proposed Liberty Quarry after learning that quarry opponents planned to pack the meeting place.

Save Our Southwest Hills, the opposition group, may be getting aggressive in its fight to stop the quarry from being built in the hills southwest of Temecula, but when did Granite become so fearful of confrontation that it's afraid to present its side of the argument?

A company spokeswoman said it didn't want to address scientific arguments from nonexperts. But why not? If its position is strong, what does it matter who makes the argument -- and a specious argument would be even easier to poke holes in than an informed one.

The real losers in this were residents -- primarily from the Temeku Hills neighborhood, whose homeowners group was sponsoring the event -- who had hoped to gain information on which to base their own opinions on the need for and possible dangers of the controversial granite mine.

The battle over this quarry is only getting warmed up. Granite had an opportunity to make its case to some 300 people Wednesday night. But if it is going to shy away from a small fight like this, how does it expect to persuade anyone that this project is in anyone's best interests but its own?

A belated rose -- the "Couldn't Have Happened to a Nicer Guy" award -- to Jerry Yang, the Temecula man who was launched to the top of the poker world last week with his amazing win at the World Series of Poker's climactic event. By all accounts, Yang, who only began playing poker two years ago, is a great guy -- humble, courteous and respectful.

His fellow players say Yang's personality is a polar opposite to his style of poker play. As aggressive as he is in his play -- he won dozens of pots at the final table simply by betting and raising other players so much they couldn't risk playing against him -- he is quiet, reserved and respectful at the table.

As soon as Yang advanced far enough in the tournament to be guaranteed to win some money, he pledged 10 percent of his winnings to charity. So Make-A-Wish Foundation, Feed the Children, the Ronald McDonald House and his alma mater, Loma Linda University are now in for some $800,000-plus out of his $8.25 million payday. Moreover, Yang, an ethnic Hmong who was born in the mountains of Laos, says he will devote some of his money to helping his impoverished homeland.

In this day and age of arrogant superstars, it's nice to see the old canard about nice guys finishing last disproved occasionally.

A raspberry -- the "Shades of Butterfly Ballots" award -- to the city of Temecula, MuniFinancial and primarily Western Graphics, a Minnesota-based company, for some botched mail ballots that will force the postponement of a minor election in the city until spring.

At issue were ballots asking 13,400 homeowners whether they wanted to pay more for landscape maintenance services. But an unknown number of the ballots were missing the "yes" checkbox (thankfully it wasn't the "no" box missing, or the conspiracy theorists would be out in force).

The city hired locally based MuniFinancial to handle the job of printing and mailing the ballots, and Muni in turn contracted out the printing job to Western Graphics, which admits to the error (it would be hard to deny). To its credit MuniFinancial has agreed to absorb the entire $28,000 cost for printing and mailing the ballots, and sent the city a check. (It will presumably turn to Western for much, if not all of that, but that's a matter between those businesses.)

City staff and the City Council approved the preliminary ballots, which had both checkboxes in place, but somewhere along the line the one box vanished from an unknown number of the 29 different versions of the ballot mailed out to the various homeowners groups.

While the primary blame may rest with Western, Muni and the city had the responsibility, in a "buck stops here" sense, to be double-checking the final products -- all 29 versions -- before they were sent out.