I’m indecisive. I spend more of my lunch break deciding what to eat than I do eating.
Thursday’s Big Night of Music: The Aggrolites, White Buffalo, The Poison Control Center
Posted inNews
Check Out the New Bend Roots Location Tonight and See Mosley Wotta, Too
You may or may not know that the Bend Roots Revival, the late-September local music extravaganza, is moving for this September’s festival. The super popular event quickly outgrew its previous location between Parrilla Grill and the Victorian Cafe and is now setting up shop in the Century Center, which includes the West Bend Tennis Center (1355 SW Commerce St.
Posted inNews
Dudley Ditches Debate
Ever since 1986, the July candidates’ debate sponsored by the Oregon Newspaper Publishers Association has marked the traditional start of the state’s gubernatorial campaigns. But not this year: Republican Chris Dudley has opted out.
Posted inCulture
The Zoo Story: Volcanic Theatre performs the Albee classic with a flourish
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about playwright Edward Albee's “The Zoo Story” is that he wrote it over a span of three weeks. Even more remarkable is how well the script holds up. The material is still timely and the characters even more likely to meet than they might have when the play was written in 1958.
Volcanic Theatre, which brought us Bobby Gould in Hell, made only two minor changes to the original script for the performance at the Silver Moon. One is adding Stephen King as one of the bookish character Peter's favorite writers and the other is having his annual salary pegged at $200,000 rather than the $50,000 in the original.
Posted inOutside
A Better Mousetrap: Why barn owls might be better pest control than poison
Let's face it. Man, in his continual struggle to make a living, stay healthy and put a little money in the bank has a hard time of it, and those who decide to make a living as farmers sometimes have it even tougher. They often have to put all their eggs into one basket (pun intended), or put another way, create a monoculture, like raising fields of alfalfa hay and nothing else but weeds, for example.
In mid summer, the efforts of all the water, fertilizer and changing pipes at the crack-of-dawn and general TLC to raise a crop of alfalfa are beautifully obvious. However, trouble is brewing because things farmers don't like are attracted to his alfalfa. But not to fear, help is near.
Posted inOutside
Wild and Wet: Oregon's wildflower bonanza, The SUP revolution and the world's toughest “tri”
Going Fast
If you missed it, there's still a small window of time to see it. If, on the other hand, you've been out enjoying the wildflower display this year, you've witnessed perhaps the best one in the past thirty years.
The combination of cool late spring weather along with more than normal precipitation caused the rash of brilliantly colored flowers. For many hikers, mountain bike riders and trail runners, areas like the Maston Allotment, which normally don't get much by way of wildflowers, were suddenly strewn with red, yellow, white and purple blooms for weeks. The display at the Maston, for example, was particularly striking as it livened up what is generally a pretty blah landscape.
Posted inCulture
Same Old Story: Despicable Me finds another animated feature taking the easy way out.
Let's say – just hypothetically – that you're launching a production studio for computer-animated features. Your inaugural effort is going to lay the groundwork for the way audiences will think about your brand name. And you have at least a couple of models out there for how you could do things. Do you: a) focus intently on nailing a story with real emotional honesty and resonance, or b) find a familiar, time-worn premise that you don't have to think too much about, and then pack it full of gags?
It's not incredibly surprising to see Illumination Entertainment choosing option “b” for its debut feature, Despicable Me. DreamWorks Animation hasn't exactly gone broke looking to that paradigm, nor have other late-comers like Blue Sky who followed in those footsteps. But with the way Pixar has raised the bar on animated storytelling by preferring option “a,” you really need to nail the execution if you're going to trot out a concept that's been done and done and done again. And Despicable Me appears content to deliver something that's merely diverting.
Posted inCulture
Predators vs. Predators: The latest laser-shooting alien flick is just a rehashing of a tired old genre
The combo of Robert Rodriguez (Sin City, Planet Terror) producing and Nimrod Antal (Kontroll, Vacancy) helming Predators, the latest installment in the dreadlocked-lizard-mantis-space-beasts franchise, sounded promising. With subject matter that's clocked in two features, two Alien crossovers, countless novels, video games and comic-book spin-offs, a spicy version seemed called for. What we get is a watered-down redux of the 1987 Schwarzenegger version with just a few twists.
Posted inCulture
Blown Away: New racer Split/Second lets you level the competition
Every year, some trend in videogaming comes from behind and delivers an outstanding streak of games. In 2009 there was an abundance of beautiful fighting games: Street Fighter IV for arcade fans, Fight Night Round 4 for sports lovers, DISSIDIA Final Fantasy for franchise fighting, and the decent Tekken 6 at the end of the year. The year before that was all about outstanding PSP games. Now 2010 is turning out to be the year of outstanding racing games.
Every system has its own solid racing title. The Wii has the venerable Mario Kart Wii, but the PS3 is catching up with this year's excellent kart fantasia ModNation Racers. 2010 has also given the PS3 and 360 MotoGP 09/10 for serious bike racing simulation. Split/Second joins the group as an arcade-paced racing game with an abundance of combat and explosions. Crashing airplanes, capsizing ships – the stuff of Roland Emmerich and Michael Bay movies as seen from the inside of a racecar in less than five minutes.
Posted inCulture
Get Out of My Brain, Mother!!
As a father of at least a couple dozen out-of-wedlock kids, I believe I can speak with some authority on the subject of child rearing. Tip #1: Don't call it “child rearing.” It's disgusting. Tip #2: Children are much like amoebas in the brain department, and therefore only require two things: the right to (a) stay up all night and (b) eat as much candy as possible. Offer them a Zagnut bar or an hour less of sleep, and you can get them to wash your car for a year. Tip #3: Kids will believe everything you tell them. For example, my mother told me that when I was a baby, she implanted a microphone in my brain, which would let her know what I was thinking every minute of the day. This totally psyched me out, and even though I was pretty sure “brain microphones” were a scientific impossibility, it worked like a charm. My efforts at mischief became clumsy and insecure. For example, when I'd try to steal candy from the cupboard, I'd invariably make enough noise to alert my mom, who would hop out from around the corner yelling, “AH-HAH! Your brain microphone told me you'd be doing that!!”