When I opened up the most recent issue of the Source I was extremely disappointed to see that there was no mention of the last concert of the season, STP, at Les Schwab. The Stone Temple Pilots rocked the house like I have not seen in a loooong time.
Don’t Hate on STP
Posted inOpinion
Attack Ads Are The Real Waste
I keep hearing every night from Gordon Smith how much Jeff Merkley has wasted. I keep hearing every night from Jeff Merkley how much money Gordon Smith has wasted.
Posted inOpinion
Fair and Balanced
I found Sunday's editorial by John Costa "Convention Coverage Was Fair" to be laughable. I believe every publication has the right to espouse their beliefs, but why hide behind a smokescreen of impartiality when it is abundantly clear the Bulletin has been a GOP mouthpiece since the current owners took over? The Bulletin continually whines about its supposed impartiality and yet, every election year the Bulletin posts a list of ballot recommendations.
Posted inOpinion
Going Fisties at Phil’s Trail
Well the inevitable happened this Saturday when two mountain bikers collided with one another and I had the opportunity to witness it all. One cyclist was climbing, having the right of way, the other blasting down the trail on a 6" travel bike. The descender did not yield to the climber perhaps thinking he had speed, weight and a buddy to roll over the single climber. Well when their aluminum steeds met at high speed they were going to stop. They both dismounted and the bikes were dropped where they were and out came the bravado fists a flying….wooo weee the downhiller went down with two quick jabs to the chin by the thin, fit, tattooed XC rider. The second downhiller was about to intervene then I stepped in to assist the XC rider. I have been riding the trail network around here for two years and the amount of bozo riders out here are mounting by the months. Hey you bozo riders, those movies like Seasons, The Collective and Roam are done by professional riders in sectioned off areas with film crews, zip lines, medical staff, in pristine country with no other RIDERS climbing etc.
Posted inCulture
Under Pressure: Atelier 6000 gets things rolling … literally.
Last Sunday afternoon, a group of 27 artists, art aficionados and
curious bystanders crowded into the parking lot of Atelier 6000 - a
small art studio/workshop in the Old Mill District whose name was
derived from the French word for "workshop"-to watch an enormous
steamroller run over wooden plates that the artists spent as many as
four weeks working on. With the very real chance that the steamroller
would crush the plates and leave nothing but a mess of paint, wood
splinters and carpet padding, the crowd anxiously waited for the
steamroller to back away from the printing surface. Owner Pat Clark
along with Bruce Emerson and artist Dawn Emerson approached the area,
pulled back the padding and lifted the large white sheets of paper from
the plate. Emerson's design, a horse, survived the steamroller's
crushing weight and the resulting print drew applause and "oohs" and
"aahs" from the crowd.
Clark, an emeritus professor from the
California State system on a "failed retirement" says she wanted to do
an event like this because it gave artists an opportunity to create
prints on a larger scale and showed the community another side of print
making.
Posted inOutside
Ticked Off by Lyme Disease: Staying safe in the waning days of tick season
Female ticks pre and post meal. Summer is quickly sliding away, fall is soon to arrive and by October
we'll see the end of the so-called "tick season." Although rare,
tick-borne diseases can leave us with serious medical problems, perhaps
one of the worst is the dreaded specter, Lyme disease (LD).
This
illness is no laughing matter for the victim or the medical personnel
trying to figure out what to do about it. If allowed to remain in our
bodies for long, so many things can go wrong it becomes almost
impossible to know how to combat all the ailments, or what they are and
where they came from.
The "good news" is that the ticks in the
above photo are local wood ticks, and as of today, are not known to
carry Lyme disease bacterium. That distinction falls to the deer tick,
a close cousin.
Posted inOutside
Gratitude: Surviving a close call
I'm grateful to be alive.
On Labor Day, I decided to go for a quick
little late-afternoon out-and-back ride on Skyliner. I was just about
home, cruising down Galveston toward the Flaming Chicken, when a beige
Toyota Prius in the oncoming lane suddenly turned left directly into my
path. The scene has been replaying itself over and over in my mind in
slow motion. I braked hard, but there was absolutely nothing I could
do. My bike and my body slammed into the front quarter panel and
passenger side door, ripping off the side view mirror. I somersaulted
across the windshield and crash landed on the other side. Intense pain
set in about 10 seconds later.
People were instantly there as I
lay on the asphalt, clutching my left shoulder and moaning in pain. I
remember yelling "Call an ambulance!" and then repeating two phrases:
"Can someone give me pain medication?" and "It's not fair." A person in
the small crowd came up to me, I think his name was Bill, and said,
"I'm a first responder." He started the process of assessing me for
head trauma and spinal cord injury and stabilizing my spine.
Posted inCulture
Time to blow more stuff up! – Mercenaries 2:World in Flames
Back in 2005, game developers Pandemic and LucasArts released
Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction on the original Xbox and
PlayStation 2 systems. This game was one of the few that was able to
take the sandbox game-play of the Grand Theft Auto series and put a fun
and exciting spin on it. As in the first game, Mercenaries 2 is a
third-person sandbox game with a few additions and improvements
including an online co-op play mode, an upgraded physics game engine,
the ability for characters to swim and a cool option to burn stuff in
hopes of creating more chaos.
The game has three characters from
the previous game to choose from including Chris Jacobs, Jennifer Mui
and Mattias Nilsson. You get to choose what character to play and each
has his or her own unique abilities to get the job done. The story
places the player in pursuit of a drug lord named Solano who contracted
the services of a mercenary (that's you) and then gives you the finger
instead of paying you your hard-earned cash. With the overthrow of the
Venezuela government, Solano takes the reins as a dictator, and thus
takes control of the country's oil supply. As this chaos ensues, other
factions arise against Solano and as a betrayed mercenary, you side
with any of them to seek your revenge and maybe make some pocket change
along the way. At its heart, Mercenaries 2 is a game about finding
trouble and blowing stuff up.
Posted inCulture
Hell and Back Again: Lakeview Terrace doesn’t add anything new to a familiar thriller sub-genre
There’s a place where I can go…It took Lakeview Terrace to remind me that we didn't know how good we
had it in the early 1990s. The Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall had
crumbled, leaving post-Cold War America without a real international
threat; terrorism was a vague concept. Yet if you were to judge by the
movies, we were all buckets of free-floating anxiety convinced that
everyone around us would stab us in the neck with a letter opener if we
looked at them sideways.
Yes, it was the golden age of the
"fill-in-the-blank from hell" thriller-that time when your babysitter
(The Hand That Rocks the Cradle), your roommate (Single White Female),
your co-worker (The Temp), the girl next door (The Crush) or your kid's
new stepparent (Domestic Disturbance) was a psycho-in-waiting. Lakeview
Terrace appears in an age when paranoia seems just a bit more
justified, and you'd think that there would be room to re-explore the
genre in light of this. Instead, we get more or less what we would have
gotten 18 years ago: middling melodrama too concerned with providing
visceral kicks to uncover anything truly psychologically insightful.
Posted inCulture
Self Righteous: DeNiro and Pacino take on water at every turn
Even the dynamic duo can’t save this disaster. Expectations abound for a movie co-starring Al Pacino and Robert De
Niro. Their only recent movie together, Heat, although considered
brilliant by most observers, had just one scene in which they were on
screen together. In their new film Righteous Kill, they are Siamese
twins, cop buddies, together in virtually every scene.
And let's be
honest, these two can carry a mediocre film on their collective backs.
They both have careers which need no buoying up, and if any two actors
working today could be called living legends, it's probably these two.
What's
not derivative these days in a cop movie? We start with the killings of
people whom the world would not miss: child rapists, Russian mobsters,
a seedy collection of low lives whose deaths probably serve to improve
the lives of others in New York.