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Plunk.
That’s the sound of your NCAA basketball tournament bracket – which you spent half of your Monday painstakingly completing – hitting the bottom of your trashcan.
Some of the Tea Party troops were outside Rep. Greg Walden’s Bend office Monday afternoon to register their opposition to health care reform, marching around and holding up signs saying things like “No Socialism!” and “Obama = Tyranny.
That's the percentage of Bend homeowners who are underwater on their mortgages, meaning that they owe more on their homes than those homes are currently worth in the post-bubble real estate world. The number was good, or bad, enough to put our town on the list of the ten most “underwater” housing markets in America, right behind Greeley, CO, (45 percent underwater) and Minneapolis/St.
“Oregon calls flat unemployment a win,” said the headline in yesterday’s Oregonian.
The gist of the story was that although the state lost 1,200 jobs in February, the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate remained the same as in January at 10.
Nun: Do you ever wake up scared in the early hours of the morning?
Me (the cop): Almost every night.
Nun: And does this fear originate somewhere in the area of the navel.
Me: Above the navel, somewhere between the navel and the solar plexus.
Nun: And what do you do about it?
Me: My mind finds specific things to worry about, and the fear gets absorbed.
Nun: These things you worry about, are they to do with recent acts, statements, events you have set in motion?
Me: Always.
Nun: Good. You're not going to understand immediately, but this vulnerable area around your navel is the only thing about you that is fully human.
– John Burdett
Back in the '50s, a great horned owl was using an old hawk's nest adjacent to the “City 40,” a plot of land the city of Bend used for sewage affluent, and I took a librarian out to see the nest, hoping to impress her with my acumen and coolness. She, however, impressed me with her keen interest and wanted to climb up and see the baby owls. “You bet!” I said, and up she went. Just about the time that lovely young women peeked over the lip of the nest – right out of nowhere – a magnificent, very large golden eagle swooped over her head.
The adult owl leaped into the air with the eagle in hot pursuit, and crashed into a willow thicket along the irrigation ditch. Needless to say, this was an unexpected event for all participants. When the shaking librarian arrived back on the ground she said, “Don't call me, I'll call you,” and I never saw her again…
The Green Zone is what action movies are supposed to look like. A suspenseful, high-voltage, in-your-face action drama with a plausible scenario, this may be the best action flick I've ever seen. And if film editor Christopher Rouse doesn't get an Academy Award for his work, there is no justice in this world.
With a premise inspired by the real-life events found in Rajiv Chandrasekaran's 2006 book Imperial Life in the Emerald City, Green Zone is the story of a U.S. Army officer who went rogue after discovering faulty intelligence and was instrumental in blowing the lid off the truth behind WMDs during the same year the Pentagon and the White House were declaring “mission accomplished.” The movie takes its cues from the ignorance and objectives that came from inside the Green Zone, a safety area including the old Republican Palace where American decision-makers were cut off from Iraqi reality.
How to describe Remember Me? It's this decade's Cruel Intentions. There's the snappy, self-conscious dialogue and the ambitious plotting and the self-important ending. And, oh, what a self-important ending there is. However, it's not as crass as other reviewers will have you believe and certainly not as tasteless as they are righteously suggesting. It's actually darn creatively executed, and if only it had finished just two or three brief scenes earlier it would be just fine, and interesting.
Robert Pattinson plays Tyler, a New-York-bohemian-apartment-dwelling, chain-smoking, wittily verbose, terribly well-read, 21-year-old Strand bookstore employee who scribbles endlessly in dirty notebooks and rides a bike. Emilie de Ravin plays Ally, the daughter of the cop who arrests Tyler during a drunken brawl, and who Tyler decides to date on a dare. She has a patchy personality, mostly hanging on two points: That she likes to eat her dessert before her main course in restaurants, and that she witnessed the murder of her mother on a subway platform. Tyler has a mean, distant dad played by Pierce Brosnan, a very likeably precocious little sister and a brother who committed suicide. The pair are brought closer when Ally's father flips out and hits her, and yet closer by the mutual mess that ensues.
I Love Television™ reader Amy Ann writes: “Dear Wm.™ Steven Humphrey: Sandra Bullock rocks!! she does not have a mustache. And she should win best actress award. She has acomplished more in her life then u have. All u do is write stupid columns in a free paper. Get over yourself.”
In a similar vein, I Love Television™ reader Lauren writes: “I really wish people would think before they spoke. So what you don't like Sandra. You make it seems like she took the roll in The Blind Side just to spite black people. You must be very lonely to have that much [hate] for a person.”
Every spring, right around daylight savings, my anxiety over cooking winter's hearty greens reaches its apex. I'm eager for asparagus, morels, English peas, tomatoes and corn. Roughly 25 dinners separate winter and springtime in my kitchen. Stores have artichokes from far-flung locales tempting me with spring flavors at designer prices. But if I can make the most of winter's bounty, you can too.
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