Editorial

No, What I said was I need some EXERCISE!Upfront likes to spend some of our idle hours browsing through the Central Oregon real estate offerings on craigslist, just to get a feel for what's currently on the market.
Most of the time what we come across is pretty routine - faux-Craftsman bungalows in Northwest Crossing, cookie-cutter McMansions on the Eastside, "quaint cottages" (read: falling-down former mill workers' shacks) on the Westside.
So you can imagine our astonishment, and delight, when we discovered a "Beautiful Tuscan Home" for sale in … MADRAS?!?

Life can get kind of lonely for a military recruiter sitting around in an office in a shopping center all day. So the good ladies of the anti-war group Code Pink are planning a nice Valentine's Day visit to the Army recruiting office in Bend.
Two local Code Pink members, Joy Newhart and Thiel Larson, passed out fliers during Bend Winterfest last weekend and plan to do it again from 4 to 5 pm outside the recruiting office next to ShopKo on Third Street. The fliers say "Make Out, Not War" on the front, and on the other side list what Code Pink says are eight ways the military misrepresents the facts to prospective recruits.
The fliers are "very informative, and everyone we gave them to (mostly young people) was very appreciative of the information," said Larson. "
This type of information is crucial for our young people. … They are being courted by the military at a very vulnerable age."
Thursday's demonstration will be part of a nationwide Valentine's Day event planned by Code Pink, according to Larson.
"No doubt we will start out in front of the recruiting office and then have to move to the street sidewalk if there are complaints," she said.

Kyle Ohlson lays it down on PBEvery few years a snowfall comes along that allows us to indulge in some unusual fantasies.
An igloo in the front yard? Check.
An Apple computer logo snow sculpture on Franklin? Check.
The most recent in-town dumps allowed a few determined DIYers to do what many skiers and boarders have pondered, but probably never done - put down fresh tracks on Pilot Butte. Upfront had heard whispers of people schralping the Butte. But got our first visual confirmation this past Sunday when presented with a cell phone video of an acquaintance busting turns through the scrub Juniper in a piece of low-res video that would have brought a smile to Warren Miller's face.

Beckham after learning he just poked a hole in the Ozone.Which human being has the biggest carbon footprint in the world? According to British environmentalists, it's soccer star David Beckham.

As reported in the UK's Daily Star newspaper, Beckham - who now plays for the Los Angeles Galaxy - won the dubious distinction largely because of the tremendous amount of jet-setting he does around the world.
"The amount of flying David does means he holds the dubious crown of having the largest carbon footprint in human history," said a spokesman for the Carbon Trust. "In the last year he has traveled more than 250,000 air miles, a length which could have taken him to the far side of the moon and beyond."

You have to be a little crazy to be passionate about chess. Spending endless hours memorizing variations of the Nimzo-Indian Defense and more endless hours moving little pieces of wood around on a board isn't a pursuit for the completely rational.
Bobby Fischer, one of the greatest players of all time and considered by many to be the greatest American player ever, took both chess and craziness to new levels. He died last week at age 64 in Reykjavik, Iceland, where his own eccentricity had exiled him.
The Chicago-born Fischer got his first chess set at age 6, and the achievements came quickly - youngest player ever to win the U.S. Junior Chess Championship (1956), youngest ever to be ranked as a Grandmaster (1958), youngest ever to win the U.S. Chess Championship (1958).
But it was the world championship match against Soviet star Boris Spassky that captured the imagination of Fischer's fellow Americans and established his place as an icon not just in the rarefied world of high-level chess but in popular culture. Through July and into August of 1972, instead of baseball games, TV sets in bars across America were tuned to PBS to watch the play-by-play of the match from Reykjavik.
Fischer reamed the Russian, 12 points to 8 - roughly the equivalent of one football team beating another by 42-14. The victory, at a time when the US and USSR were still hotly engaged in the Cold War, made Fischer both a celebrity and a national hero. He met President Nixon at the White House. He was on the cover of Life and Sports Illustrated.
But chess prodigies tend to burn out early, and Fischer followed the pattern. Withdrawing behind a wall of reclusiveness and hostility, he refused huge financial offers to play Spassky again while becoming involved with fringe religions and, reportedly, neo-Nazi ideology. Voluntarily exiling himself from his native country, Fischer lived in obscurity in Japan, Hungary, the Philippines and Switzerland before finally renouncing his U.S. citizenship and moving to Iceland in 2005. He surfaced from time to time in radio broadcasts in which he railed against the United States and "the international Jewish conspiracy." (His mother was a Jew.) On Sept. 11, 2001, he told a radio talk show host in the Philippines that the terrorist attack was "wonderful news" and called for President Bush's death - remarks that got him booted out of the United States Chess Federation.
But in the end it will be for his contributions to the game, not his crazed rants, that Fischer will be remembered. "After 1972, we lost so many great pieces of art," chess teacher Bruce Pandolfini told the Times, "hundreds of masterpieces he would have created if he had stayed a sane being."