Culture Features

Customers stopping into Pakit Liquidators this past weekend, hoping to quietly pick up a replacement door handle or storm window, got a surprise. Giant metal and, well, trash sculptures were displayed along Pakit's lawn and a purple hearse topped with a black ambulance siren welcomed customers and visitors. Inside Pakit, the near-eastside liquidator and all purpose secondhand/junk store, people of all ages and artistic abilities picked through piles of Pakit's inventory. But instead of a storm window, they were looking to find the perfect “finger” for a garbage gargoyle, or a wrench that best suggested a trumpet player's forearm.

Doug Benson has made a career out of lampooning celebrities, talking about movies and making people laugh in the process. Oh, and he's also done just fine for himself by getting super-duper stoned, then telling jokes, or even making a movie about it.
But sometimes Benson isn't necessarily funny, like when he chats on the phone from his home in L.A. in the days before one of his many cross-continental weekend comedy tours. Rather, he's damn smart, pumping out one piece of cultural, political or social commentary after another. There are laughs during a 20-minute discussion with Benson, but these moments of hilarity are outweighed by the “holy-shit-he's-got-a-point” sort of instances the comic creates when he, for example, unleashes a deft critique of reality television in which he argues, quite convincingly, that American Idol is TV's most worthwhile reality program. And don't get him started on Celebrity Apprentice.

This late winter and early spring, I have become a slave to the beep. Beep, beep, beep – a quick metallic staccato as our metal detector, the Garrett Ace250, teases us with the possibility of unearthing a rare coin, a lost Rolex or an antique diamond ring. Armed with our “kit,” slang in the metal detecting culture for our detector, a pin-pointer, a shovel and an ice pick, my husband and I have scaled hill and dale in the hopes of finding that elusive buried treasure.
Metal detecting, like gambling, attracts the eternal optimist. Who else would spend a sunny Saturday afternoon waving a metal wand for hours over countless acres of park, forest and desert on the slim chance of striking it rich?
If you are a group-joining type, you can sit in on a meeting of the High Desert Treasure Club. They meet the second Wednesday of every month at the Bend VFW Hall at 7pm.

One wouldn't think that mentioning the anatomy of an extinct animal could offend anyone, but comedian Cash Levy learned otherwise when he told a joke in one of his shows that included the phrase “pterodactyl scrotum.” A couple just couldn't handle the fact that he'd made such a comment and voiced their concern. Perhaps they were offended by the mere size of prehistoric junk, or maybe it's still too soon to poke fun at dinosaurs because, well, they've had a rough go over the past couple hundred million years.