Sure, Bend is dog-friendly and many dog owners tote their furry friends around like kids. Dogs in the grocery store, dogs in the restaurant, dogs everywhere.
Damn Dog Owners
Posted inNews
Tonight in Free Music
Normal 0 0 1 149 866 The Source Weekly 19 10 1045 11.1282 0 0 0 It’s Wednesday, or “hump day” as some of you might call it (I don’t, I call it Wednesday) which, for whatever reason means there’s probably some quality music to be found in Bend.
Posted inOutside
Mirror, Mirror: Reflections from Mirror Pond and Mirror Lake
TRAGEDY ON THE RIVER
On a Monday evening two weeks ago, I put in behind the Park & Rec building to paddle upriver and meet a few friends for some whitewater play in the rapids above Bill Healy Bridge. It was 6:30 p.m., about 90 degrees, and the river was choked with floaters. As I began to paddle, I saw a dark colored shirt floating downstream and heard sirens start to wail. People yelled at me from the footbridge, “Look for someone in the water!”
Seventeen-year-old Aaron Garcia had been trying to swim across the river from Farewell Bend Park across the river with friends when he began to struggle and slipped below the surface.
Posted inCulture
Went Phishin': My surprisingly normal weekend with America's most dedicated music fans
After some 36 hours encamped on a stretch of dusty Central Washington farmland dotted by Honey Buckets, make-shift Bloody Mary bars, rented RVs and taking in about 40 songs from one of rock music's most storied live bands, here is how I'll remember the Phish shows at the Gorge Amphitheater last weekend…
Winding through the gleeful horde at the allegedly sold-out second show on Saturday night is a man seemingly in his 40s with an at-least-12-foot fishing pole protruding from a complex and clearly self-made, harness-like apparatus around his chest. Dangling from about six feet of fishing line at the end of the pole is a Homer Simpson doll adorned somehow with flashing lights and as he walks, fans both viciously and joyfully bat the doll around. Now, the doll itself isn't that strange. What's intriguing is the fact that someone would A) go through the effort of creating this thing B) somehow get it though the ostensibly rigid security at the gate and C) willfully wear this intentionally annoying and spatially impractical apparatus around for four hours.
Posted inOutside
Who Me? Couldn’t Be
Am I on Steroids?
Guess what? You might be on steroids. Last week, it became known that David Ortiz tested positive for one (or more than one) of those pesky performance-enhancing drugs back in 2003. But Ortiz says that he has no clue how he could have possibly ingested or been injected with steroids and they must have somehow been in some supplement he was taking.
That's right, this man unknowingly took steroids, just like Barry Bonds, Manny Ramirez and several other ball players who've used the “I don't know how that got in my system” defense after testing positive. This gave me pause, thinking: Could I, too, be unknowingly juicing?
Posted inCulture
wRite: Capture This Moment
The color of it moved something in him long forgotten. Make a list. Recite a litany. Remember…
…Where you've nothing else, construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them.
– Cormac McCarthy, The Road
This whole rhapsody, better go capture this moment
And hope it don't collapse on him…
– Eminem, “Lose Yourself”
I'm walking away from my credit union toward Fred Meyer. I have just failed to be able to use one of my new credit cards to get a cash advance so I can deposit it in my son's California bank account so he can pay his rent. He can't pay his rent because he is a writer living in Los Angeles who works every day for chump change, and in America, 2009, “Writer who works every day for chump change” is a redundancy. My mind is nothing but run-on sentences, bad practice for a writer.
Posted inOutside
Nina de la Tierra: Child of the Earth: The mystery of the Jerusalem Cricket
I've been getting phone calls and e-mails recently reminding me this is the time of the year when unsuspecting humans meet up with our colorful and common—but sometimes alarming—Jerusalem Cricket.
Of all the insects that live in, under, over and on Central Oregon, none can catch a person's eye and generate more fear, questions, admiration, revulsion and other human emotions like that of Stenopelmatus fuscus, the Jerusalem Cricket, AKA:
Posted inCulture
Treacherous Love
Amelia Gray's AM/PM
Amelia Gray's AM/PM (Featherproof Books, $12.95) consists of 120 impeccably compact stories of love, discomfort and concert souvenirs. The single-page stories were written, one in the morning and one in the evening, over the course of two months. This timeline, and their brevity, may make it sound like this is a simple little book, but it's not; like the best tiny tales and single lines, Gray's snapshot stories are treacherous and sly, capable of changing the cadence of your thoughts and tinting the way you look at the ordinary things around you.
Posted inCulture
An Epic in Your Palm: Monster Hunger proves hard to put down
Monsters have overrun the Snowy Mountains. Herbivorous Popo lumber across windswept ridges, defended by dense coats and scimitars of antlers.
Posted inFood & Drink
Peace, Love and Five Kinds of Gravy: Let the healing begin in CHOW's magic garden
Last Sunday morning found me a little worse for the weekend wear. But as disjointed text messages lamenting the night before and proposing breakfast started coming in, I realized that compared to my potential dining companions, I was in reasonably good shape. My one-too-many was certainly a far cry from the impressive 3 a.m. nightcap at Starz that one of them reported. I could tell it was going to be a delicate brunch with disaster looming around every corner. The slightest lapse in service or undercooked egg could send someone over the edge. I bargained that the best chance of pleasing four fragile, hungover friends (well, really three hungover and one still drunk) with many and varied sensitivities was CHOW.