Spring Fling Thing: COTA trail build ing, adopt-a-road (ride) and more

Posted inOutside

Spring Fling Thing: COTA trail build ing, adopt-a-road (ride) and more

Intern

COTA volunteer Dave Caplan repairs the Farewell Bend trail at last year’s COTA Spring Fling.COTA Spring Fling
 
Thanks to last week's rains, the mountain bike trails are in prime shape. With mountain biking on the mind, it's a good time to support the Central Oregon Trail Alliance (COTA) Annual Spring Fling and BBQ that takes place Saturday, June 7. CogWild, Green Energy Tours, and WebCyclery will provide shuttles to the work site, leaving at 8am from WebCyclery. Trail crews will build and repair trails until 1:00 pm, then volunteers will be shuttled back to town for the after-party BBQ. Volunteers should bring plenty of water and wear sturdy footwear and clothing, including gloves and glasses. The after-party begins at 2:00 pm at WebCyclery on SW Industrial Way. Food and beverages will be provided by COTA and Seventh Mountain Resort, while Blackstrap will play live bluegrass, and COTA will announce awards including the Volunteer of the Year and Lifetime Achievement Award. Trail crew volunteers will receive free food and beverages at the BBQ. The public is also invited to join the after-party and to become a member of COTA. All new and renewing members will be entered into a drawing for a Niner EMD 9 Twenty9er bicycle frame. For event details and membership information, go to www.cotamtb.com.

Posted inCulture

Fii-tness Test: Is the Wii Fit for You?

Shawn Wallbaum

step it up on the wii Fit. When the Nintendo Wii hit the market, the first thing people noticed was that it required users to move their bodies while playing. Nintendo has decided to take advantage of this feature - and the fact that most Americans don't get enough exercise - by creating a video game with elements of a workout video. The Wii Fit offers up to 40 different exercises and mini games that are supposed to help players not only get into shape, but actually have fun while working off the love handles. Nintendo has packaged the game with a balance board, which is a cross between a weight scale and a video game controller. The board is a fancy looking step board that connects to the Wii wireless and can sense weight and movement, which creates lots of possibilities.. In a sense, the game presents a realistic looking personal trainer who walks you through a bunch of yoga exercises while also testing your strength. You perform the yoga, standing on the balance board as it keeps track of your center of balance and lets you know if you are shifting your weight too much to one side or the other. This helps you perform the exercises correctly and allows you to get the most out of each movement. In the strength-building part, you can do push ups, twists, squats and earn points based on how well you perform each movement.

Posted inCulture

Dam it All: River Ways tackles controversial Northwest dams

Intern

Tribal fisherman have suffered along with the salmon on the columbia river. Who says all fish-talk is boring? River Ways proves the opposite in a documentary about four controversial Snake Rivers dams. Set against the backdrop of the collapse of a once unrivaled salmon fishery on the Columbia River and a campaign to have four dams that have contributed to that decline removed, River Ways finds there are no easy solutions, or easy villains in this story.
River follows three essential characters-Frank Sutterlict, a Yakama tribal fisherman, Ben Branston, a wheat farmer, and Mark Ihander, a commercial fisherman. It keeps most interviews short and to the point, highlighting viewpoints from both sides of the river debate. The other perspectives include conservationists, protesters, board members, biologists and river advocates. The big river draws in a huge spectrum of interests, both economic and environmental, and there is plenty of acrimony between the extremes. One scene shows gun-toting, racist fishermen making a stand at what they consider "their river" when a Native American tries to fish the same stream.

Posted inCulture

People are Strange: Stock scares and abrupt ending hurt The Strangers

Intern

refuses to clean up her room. The Strangers will piss off a lot of people, but probably not for the same reasons as me. It has its moments as it's an odd twist of a film. It's all about a victimizing, murderous act and any substance beyond that is all but lost. Relying only on scare tactics, the film has virtually no plot. This can be a good thing, but in this case it leads to an unredeemable finale with a supremely uncalled for ending.
 
The beginning has that good ol' horror movie promise with narration and "inspired by true events" facts straight out of Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Strangers keeps the suspense up and will undeniably creep you out. (The sound of a knock on a door might never be the same for you again.)
Kristin (Liv Tyler) and James (Scott Speedman) are back from a party early because Kristen has re-buffed James' marriage proposal and they're in a sad quandary as to what to do next. Staying at his folks' remotely situated house, they receive a knock at the door from a seemingly lost girl. They send her on her way and the trouble begins. Knocks turn into pounds, windows break, and masked figures begin to appear. (Props go to the creepiest masks ever: doll-face and pillow-head.)

Posted inFood & Drink

Quick Bites-The Scene Goes Round: May Restaurant Round Up

Intern

Although our unsteady spring weather may have kept most of us inside, it hasn’t put a damper on the happenings in the ever-changing food industry.

Volo is officially open downtown, serving a plethora of upscale comfort food in the sleek new 919 Bond Street Building. View the menu at www.volobend.com. Cork now has a full bar with mixed drinks as well as their innovative wine list. Blacksmith will offer beer tastings every Wednesday in June to be overseen by their in-house intoxicologist, John Hansen. Try a different beer genre each week. The $25 price includes appetizers. Get the details at www.bendblacksmith.com. On Tuesday, June 24 there is a rare opportunity to taste two 1988 vintage Bordeaux’s at Bistro Corlise’s Wine dinner lead by sommelier/chef Jason Logan. Find out more about the dinner at www.bistrocorlise.com.

Posted inFood & Drink

Quick Bites-The Scene Goes Round: May Restaurant Round Up

Intern

Although our unsteady spring weather may have kept most of us inside, it hasn't put a damper on the happenings in the ever-changing food industry.
 
Volo is officially open downtown, serving a plethora of upscale comfort food in the sleek new 919 Bond Street Building. View the menu at www.volobend.com. Cork now has a full bar with mixed drinks as well as their innovative wine list. Blacksmith will offer beer tastings every Wednesday in June to be overseen by their in-house intoxicologist, John Hansen. Try a different beer genre each week. The $25 price includes appetizers. Get the details at www.bendblacksmith.com. On Tuesday, June 24 there is a rare opportunity to taste two 1988 vintage Bordeaux's at Bistro Corlise's Wine dinner lead by sommelier/chef Jason Logan. Find out more about the dinner at www.bistrocorlise.com.

Posted inFood & Drink

Baba Good: Redmond gets a new helping of Szechuan

Intern

Baba brings familiar favorites to redmond. The Long family has built themselves an Asian food empire in Central Oregon. With their flagship “Szechuan” restaurant on Third Street, they own a total of seven spots, including their newest addition Baba Chinese in Redmond.
Located in a historic Sixth Street building downtown, Baba bucks the trend of traditional, ornate décor for a clean and modern look.
The remodel includes sleek black tile flooring, built-in and lit alcoves showcasing teapots, and a peak-through shelving with vases sporting post-modern design. A bamboo forest decorates one wall and the rest of the surfaces are either shiny black, bright red, or a soothing tea green.
The menu is daunting; four pages of dishes ranging from noodles to meat to seafood. The recommended dishes are listed on the nightly insert, a formidable list and the one we chose to order from.
To start, the server brought over a dish of fried wonton skins and a brilliantly red-orange sweet-and-sour dipping sauce that was more sweet than sour. As addicting as potato chips at a picnic, or tortilla chips at a Mexican restaurant, these will fill you up if you’re not careful. A pot of steaming tea accompanies the wonton skins to sip while perusing the expansive menu.

Posted inFood & Drink

Baba Good: Redmond gets a new helping of Szechuan

Intern

Baba brings familiar favorites to redmond. The Long family has built themselves an Asian food empire in Central Oregon. With their flagship "Szechuan" restaurant on Third Street, they own a total of seven spots, including their newest addition Baba Chinese in Redmond.
Located in a historic Sixth Street building downtown, Baba bucks the trend of traditional, ornate décor for a clean and modern look.
The remodel includes sleek black tile flooring, built-in and lit alcoves showcasing teapots, and a peak-through shelving with vases sporting post-modern design. A bamboo forest decorates one wall and the rest of the surfaces are either shiny black, bright red, or a soothing tea green.
The menu is daunting; four pages of dishes ranging from noodles to meat to seafood. The recommended dishes are listed on the nightly insert, a formidable list and the one we chose to order from.
To start, the server brought over a dish of fried wonton skins and a brilliantly red-orange sweet-and-sour dipping sauce that was more sweet than sour. As addicting as potato chips at a picnic, or tortilla chips at a Mexican restaurant, these will fill you up if you're not careful. A pot of steaming tea accompanies the wonton skins to sip while perusing the expansive menu.

Posted inMusic

Santogold

Intern

Santogold
Santogold
Downtown/Lizard King ★★★★★

Starting her music career in the post-punk group Stiffed and then working as a major-label A&R scout, Santogold has emerged as the most defiant, genre-bending explosion of the past year. A Brooklynite, Santogold (real name: Santi White) has a sound that embodies many different styles and resonates as if it's coming from a Run-DMC style cassette boom box on a Brooklyn brownstone stoop.

Posted inMusic

Party in the Plaza: Downtown Sound rolls 14 acts into nine hours

Mike Bookey

There is typically something artistic going down at Mirror Pond Plaza (often referred to as "The Circle" among locals), the picturesque brick area bordering Drake Park. Most times there is a guitar strumming busker or perhaps some fire dancing or juggling, or maybe something a bit more structured - I once saw a group of 15 or so pre-teens perform a musical number from Aladdin in full costumes.
On Saturday, there won't be any youth productions of Disney musicals - I don't think - but there will be a remarkably diverse showcase of Bend's local music. Often thought of as the unofficial center of downtown Bend, the Plaza makes for the most fitting location for the first-ever Downtown Sound; a free all-day gathering of 14 local acts ranging from indie rock to hip-hop.
Seeing as how the show sprang in part from the brain of Jay Tablet (JT) an MC in Bend's own Cloaked Characters (who are slated for an evening performance before Mosley Wotta closes out the show), the music does lean toward the DJ and hip-hop faction as the day goes on. That said, the diversity of acts is nonetheless impressive and is another sign of what seems to be a recent synergy taking place between Bend's different musical camps. We're probably not going to see a bluegrass/punk/hip-hop collaboration at Downtown Sound, but the range of artists on the bill suggests that we might not be too far from that sort of hootenanny taking shape.

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