Welcome to the boomtown.Deschutes County is just CRAZY in love with destination resorts.
Upfront realizes that the city of Bend catches a lot of crap from the community over its snow plowing practices. If the city isn't plowing enough, they're money-wasting morons who dumped all the city's nest egg into pet projects like bridge proclamations.
Bend’s next super subdivision? Most folks have lost track of how long the Bend City Council has been working to expand the city's UGB - long enough for the anachronistic term "UGB" to actually resonate with any partially informed observer of local politics. Earlier this week the city council put the finishing touches on what it hopes will be a blueprint for the next 20 years of growth in Bend - a roughly 8,500-acre expansion of the city's geographic footprint which is intended to add more land for housing and commercial development.
By a 4-2 vote councilors opted to finalize the plan known as Alternative 4A, which Upfront likes to think of as the "kitchen sink" alternative - as in it includes everything that landowners and developers wanted plus the kitchen sink for good measure.
The plan has no shortage of critics, including some skeptical state regulators that have balked at the size of the land grab, which they see as a recipe for sprawl.
On January 20th, Americans and the world will celebrate the inauguration of Barack Obama. But perhaps equally important, because Barack's legacy has yet to be written, on January 19th George W. Bush will spend his last full day in the White House. With the brilliant act of the Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at W out of shear frustration and anger, the world has been shown the way to say a fitting farewell to George the Second and his incredible Reign of Error (special thanks to Robin Williams!).
Rabbit ears work just fine for rabbits. They don't work so well for TV reception, especially here in Central Oregon, aka "The Middle of Nowhere," where over-the-air TV signals are few, weak and far between.
But rabbit ears will be the only technology available for Bend-area viewers who want to watch Fox Network programming after Dec. 31, unless KFXO, the local Fox affiliate, and BendBroadband, the only local cable TV provider, can come to an understanding before then. At this writing, negotiations appear to be stymied.
The dispute is pretty basic: KFXO says BendBroadband should pay it for Fox Network programs and BendBroadband says it shouldn't. From where we sit (parked in front of our 46-inch flat-screen high-definition TV watching the Giants play the Vikings on Fox) it looks like BendBroadband has the better argument.
It's no trade secret that any story or report related to Mt. Bachelor, good or bad, has a built in readership in this town. So it was with more than a passing interest that Upfront listened to a recent tipster who told us that Mt. B brass were getting ready to enforce a long-posted — but never adhered to — ban on sack lunches at Mt. B's slopeside lodges. Upfront didn't wait for the receiver to cool before putting in a call to Mt. B's marketing director, Alex Kaufman, who set the record straight on sack lunches. Contrary to what we had heard, Mt. B is not cracking down on brown baggers at Sunrise or Pine Marten lodge, Kaufman said. Quite the opposite, he said, the staff at Bachelor have actually added microwaves to allow more skiers and boarders to reheat food on the lower level of the main lodge. In addition, he said Bachelor has revamped the menu at the lower level café to focus on wallet-friendly foods like hot dogs and sandwiches.
Voila PR disaster averted.
This week's letter of the week comes from local activist Michael Funke who calls out president elect Obama for selecting anti-gay evangelical pastor Rick Warren to perform the invocation at his inauguration later this month. Thanks for the letter, Michael. You can pick up your prize, an Old Mill pint glass and a cool beverage to fill it, at our offices, 704 NW Georgia.
President-elect Barack Obama has thrown gay and lesbian supporters under the bus by inviting Saddleback Church Pastor Rick Warren to provide the invocation at his inauguration. I support Obama. But, I strongly disagree with the selection of Warren and have joined thousands of other supporters in registering my opposition at www.change.gov.
When Obama selected Warren to do the invocation, the Saddleback Church website included the following statement: "someone unwilling to repent of their homosexual lifestyle would not be accepted as a member at Saddleback Church."
Since Warren was selected, the church has erased that statement from the website.
The modus operandi of empires throughout history has been to create crisis, generate fear and promote panic. The current empire is no exception.
911 offered the empire the opportunity to rush through the Patriot Act essentially gutting the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The attack was a criminal act, not an act of war which is military aggression by one government against another. A declaration of war empowered the empire to attack Afghanistan even though most of the alleged perpetrators were from Saudi Arabia.
Weapons of mass destruction were used to justify the war against Iraq. Fear and panic led to the acceptance of torture, extraordinary rendition, secret prisons, Quantanamo Bay, the elimination of habeas corpus and other practices characteristic of closed societies.
I'd like to nominate H. Bruce Miller and his rant against studded tires for this week's WTF. He claims, "They're somewhat better at stopping a vehicle on glare ice". C'mon, we're talking about metal spikes here. As a snowboarder and waterfall ice climber, I've yet to see a rubber edged snowboard or rubber ice axe. Edges and ice picks are made out of metal because it gains purchase on "glare ice" like nothing else. Period.
Admittedly, studs marginally decrease stopping power on dry roads. So do cinders. Should ODOT stop putting those down as well? Like cinders, studs increase stopping power when roads are at their worst.
WOW! Didn't really expect such an outpouring of emotional gratitude from The Source community. I guess I must have struck a nerve of some sort, so I guess thanks for the print? I'm a bit humbled by being called out for the PPP, but my mother will not let me in the sandbox after school with some stranger, and besides that, MS.
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