The Wandering Eye

An unusual marching band from Oregon will be part of Barack Obama's inaugural parade, but there's going to be something a little misleading about its musical repertoire.

The Oregonian's replacement for conservative columnist David Reinhard, who left the paper last fall to become a shill for the tobacco industry, calls herself "center-right," but to The Eye's eye she looks more right than center.

Things are tough all over, but they must be really tough for the New York Times: The venerable daily announced today that it has begun selling display ads on its front page.

Highway 97 has claimed its first life of 2009 - 16-year-old Mountain View High School cheerleader Shalae Rae Mortenson.

Thomas Beattie, Bend's Pregnant Man, made Arianna Huffington's long list of people and things she'd like to never hear about again after this year is over. That inspired The Eye to make up our own similar, though less extensive, list.

The Eye rarely has anything good to say about The Bulletin's editorial page, but this being the season of peace and good will, we're going to pass out accolades for its series of editorials on the David Black case.

Great news: The liberal blog Talking Points Memo announced the finalists for the 2008 Golden Duke Awards two days before Christmas, and - ta-da! - Oregon's own Bill Sizemore made the cut in the Best Local Scandal category.

Pegasus Books owners and blogger Duncan McGeary spotted a fascinating graph on the Portland Housing blog showing that, while other Oregon and Washington cities also experienced a real estate bubble from 2005 to 2007, Bend's bubble was by far the biggest and baddest.

It's one of those "66" days in Bend - 6 degrees on the thermometer and 6 inches of snow on the ground - so it seems like an appropriate time to talk about Central Oregonians' stud fetish.

The Bulletin's copy desk must be under standing orders to put a positive spin on the headline of absolutely every story, no matter how grim the actual news is.