Glass Slipper

Last week the Bend Parks Board wisely put the breaks on a plan to include a Mirror Pond management study in a proposed November bond request that includes a number of attractive projects, including the completion of the Bend River Trail through some key property acquisitions, the reconstruction of the perilous Colorado Avenue spillway and the construction of a seasonal ice rink on the former site of the Mt. Bachelor Park and Ride lot. The district, which owns much of the land around Mirror Pond in the form of Drake and Harmon parks was under a fair amount of pressure to take the lead on the Mirror Pond project.

Everybody seems to agree that milk is good for kids. It’s got protein, calcium, Vitamin D and other nourishing stuff. But when milk is tarted up with sugar or high fructose corn syrup and flavorings to make it taste like chocolate, strawberry or root beer, the benefits become a lot less clear.
Many nutritionists and doctors say flavored milk, along with other sweetened beverages including colas and fruit juices, is a big contributor to the growing epidemic of childhood obesity. Driven by such concerns, school districts across the country – including Los Angeles Unified, the nation’s second-largest – have banished flavored milk and sweetened fruit juices from their cafeterias.

They call it a “server farm,” but Old McDonald would never recognize it: acres and acres of tall racks full of high-speed computers, humming away 24/7 so that you can upload a picture of your new puppy to Facebook or download the latest Rihanna album from iTunes.
It’s truly a marvel of modern technology, but it comes at a high environmental price: Server farms are energy hogs. Despite significant advances in efficiency, all those computers suck up a hell of a lot of power – not to mention the power needed to keep the building cool so they don’t overheat.

Although they talk a lot about “leadership,” politicians typically prefer not to do much leading. Rather than starting parades, they like to wait until one gets rolling and then jump out in front of it and pretend to be the drum major.
But last week we saw a rare instance of actual leadership by an American politician – and at the highest level of the game. On Wednesday, President Obama announced that he personally believes Americans of the same sex should be allowed to marry.

Bend has become famous for two things: beer and the Deschutes River. So it's fitting that Bend's biggest brewery – which also takes its own name from the river – has decided to make a significant contribution to the river's health.
Last week the Deschutes Brewery and the Deschutes River Conservancy, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting and improving the river, announced that the brewery is buying a billion gallons of water a year to improve stream flows in the Middle Deschutes.
This doesn't mean the brewery is going to buy trillions of bottles of Evian and pour them into the Deschutes. Instead it will donate $25,000 a year to buy irrigation water rights from landowners who no longer need them.

Helicopters have their place, but the sky over Crater Lake isn't one of them. Thanks to Ron Wyden, their racket won't be disturbing the serenity of Oregon's only national park – at least not for a while.
Back in 2009, a Bend-based company called Leading Edge Aviation proposed to run as many as 300 helicopter tours a year over the rim of the lake. Company officials said the helicopters would stay far away from the visitor center, would fly at least 1,000 feet above the lake and cause minimal disruption – “an RV on the rim road would generate more noise,” one of them claimed.

On Dec. 6, a group of constituents went to Rep. Greg Walden's office in Bend. The congressman wasn't there, which wasn't surprising; he rarely is. Other groups showed up at Walden's offices in Medford and LaGrande. (He wasn't there either.)
Holding signs saying We Are the 99 Percent and a banner that asked Where's Walden? The protesters demanded that Walden hold more town hall meetings in places where more of his constituents can conveniently attend.
The response of Walden's staffers to that perfectly reasonable request was to call the cops. A total of 14 Occupy Walden demonstrators were arrested, cited for criminal trespass, and ordered not to visit Walden's offices again unless invited.

Gary Haugen probably deserves to die for his crimes. At 19 years old he beat the father of his girlfriend to death with a baseball bat and a hammer. But a life in prison didn't thwart Haugen's homicidal tendencies. He and a fellow prisoner murdered another inmate in 2003, stabbing the victim more than 80 times and crushing his skull.
Apparently, Haugen agrees with the sentiment, and the death sentence that was handed down in 2007. Unlike the dozens of others on Oregon's death row, Haugen decided to remove the obstacles and appeals that can effectively stymie the administration of a lethal injection, Oregon's preferred method of capital punishment. Over his attorneys' objections, Haugen effectively set a Dec. 6 execution date. And, until last week, it appeared as though Haugen would get his death wish. The Supreme Court, amid questions of Haugen's mental competence, declined to step in. The death chamber was readied. Press access plans were issued to the media that was clamoring to report on the first death sentence to be carried out in more than a decade.

October 2002 was a low-water mark for the Klamath River, in more ways than one.
In the preceding spring the George W. Bush administration had overridden the recommendations of biologists and allowed irrigators to draw more water from the Klamath. The summer was a hot one, and when migrating salmon arrived from the Pacific Ocean there wasn't enough water for them to get upstream to their spawning grounds.
Crowded into pools of warm water downstream, the fish were easy prey for disease. In the end, more than 30,000 of them died.
There was one positive thing about that disaster: It shocked people into realizing something had to be done about the mess in the Klamath Basin.
For decades, a variety of interests – state and federal governments, Pacific Power, farmers, fishermen, conservation groups and Indian tribes – had fought over the Klamath's limited supply of water. While they wrangled, the salmon and steelhead populations inexorably declined. The Klamath salmon fishery, once the third most productive in the West, had deteriorated by the 21st Century to the point where commercial fishermen weren't allowed to take any salmon at all in some seasons.