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Hallelujah — Bend has made another of those "Top 10" lists. This time it's NorthWest Crossing being hailed as one of the "Top 10 Cottage Neighborhoods" in America by Cottage Living magazine.

You've probably seen the TV ad accusing Jeff Merkley, Gordon Smith's Democratic rival for the US Senate, of voting for $2 billion worth of new taxes as a member of the Oregon House. Smith has been repeating the same charge as he stumps around the state.

Conservative political activist Bill Sizemore, who's had his share of legal problems, just got another one: An Oregon progressive organization filed a criminal complaint today charging him and his associates with fraud in gathering signatures for initiative petitions.

Is this Central Oregon's Summer of Weirdness? First we had the Pregnant Man giving birth to a baby girl, then the Balloon Man flying all the way from Bend to Idaho in a lawn chair … and now comes news that doctors have removed a 140-pound tumor from a Redmond woman.

You wouldn't normally expect a campaign for the prosaic office of state treasurer to get down and dirty, but the race between Republican Allen Alley and Democrat Ben Westlund just did.

You think things are weird in Bend? Over in Portland, open war seems to be breaking out between motorists and bicyclists.

Dr. Lynn Barton McDonald, a longtime Bend physician whose body was pulled from the Deschutes River on Monday, might have been an indirect casualty of the Bend real estate boom and bust.

When is a campaign ad not a campaign ad? The outcome of the Gordon Smith - Jeff Merkley Senate race could hinge on the answer.

That's the provocative headline on a blog post in Great Britain's The Guardian newspaper about Bend's own Kent Couch, the gas station proprietor who flew a lawn chair attached to 150 giant helium balloons from Bend to Idaho on Saturday.

Is Bend, Oregon on its way to becoming known as the national capital of weirdness?