Off Piste

If there ever was a homer newspaper columnists it was the late Herb Caen of the San Francisco Chronicle. Caen loved his city its grandeur, its people and its unique way of life.

The cat is out of the bag (www.mtbachelor.

Hollywood’s hype machine is currently running on high touting Amelia the upcoming biopic on the life of famed 1930s aviatrix Amelia Earhart. From interviews with actress Hilary Swank, who plays Earhart, it’s clear the film tries to be true to Earhart’s rise to fame and eventual disappearance over the Pacific on her 1937 around the world flight.

There are probably people who, like me, who tend to take some of our local special places for granted. Special places like Shevlin Park.

Currently there’s a brouhaha brewing over Deschutes County’s intentions to close down NW Wimp Way thereby eliminating an alternate access route into and out of Crooked River Ranch. If you don’t know NW Wimp Way it’s the roadway that heads west off Highway 97  just north of Terrebonne and just south of the Rex T.

In a town where everyone is either: a) a former Olympian/World Champion, b) a really important big deal someplace else before they moved here, and c) wealthy beyond your wildest dreams, add professional photographer to the list. If my calculations are correct, there are more professional photographers in Bend than there are medical professionals.

From age eight I lived for baseball. The kids in my neighborhood took over two adjoining vacant lots and created a diamond where games were played almost daily from when the snow melted in April through until late October.

“Man,” noted a Canadian journalist who called this week with some questions, “for a town that’s the poster child for a depressed economy due to the fallout from the housing boom and greed era, Bend sure has a lot of entertainment going on all the time.”Ah yes, this is the town with the endless array of entertainment possibilities from downtown fairs/festivals that are interchangeable no matter what season they celebrate to concerts galore, a glut of music in general, art walks, you name it, we got it in  spades.

As I write this it’s cold and rainy outside. That’s cold, according to The Weather Channel, as in twenty-five degrees below normal for this time of year.

We, my friend Steve and I, went in search of big rainbow trout. Destination Diamond Lake where the successful ridding the lake of chubs and assorted crap fish has helped bring back a healthy rainbow population.