Sunbeams illuminating a coastal forest in Port Orford, Oregon

Chuggnutt!

Category: News

  • The Donald Trump/Bend urban legend

    Note: This post was originally written way back in 2005, when most of the world still considered Trump to be (at best) an orange-skinned clown with questionable tastes and shady dealings. Of course now it’s 2022 as I update this and we all know he’s even more of a racist shitbag who absolutely destroyed our democracy, so there’s really nothing more to see here.

    I just heard about this at work today, people claiming that Donald Trump said the number one place to invest in/develop/buy/smoke real estate is Bend, Oregon. One guy—a local land engineer even—claims that Trump said this on Larry King Live. He may even be developing something here!

    Folks, it just ain’t true. Someone’s blowing smoke up your ass. It’s a rumor someone started to get people talking about Bend real estate. There’s no information online alluding to this, and even the transcripts of the Larry King Live episode in question don’t bear it out. Bend is not even on Trump’s radar.

    Let’s move on now, m’kay?

  • Comments on some of the Bulletin’s news

    You can tell I’ve been busy these last few days: I’ve got a number of things to write about but haven’t had the time to until now. These next couple of things are about articles that appeared in the Bulletin.

    First: 7-story hotel planned for downtown. This, of course, will be literally right next to the five-story parking garage. I’m a little ambivalent about this. I don’t necessarily think it’s bad for downtown Bend, but does it have to be a seven-story monstrosity? Plus, it’ll turn into a cost-overrun, logistical nightmare typical of recent downtown development.

    To be fair, though, the city has yet to approve the application. We all know that that’s just a formality, though, right?

    And the plan is to put a swimming pool on the sixth floor. Uh, okay. I know I sure wouldn’t want any room directly beneath several thousand tons of water suspended 55 feet or so above the ground… but that’s just me.

    The other item is this: Post office will test for anthrax. Yeah, that’s timely and relevant, what, three years later? Is this really news? I think bioterrorists have probably figured out by now that anthrax is kind of a no-go anymore, and are more likely to have something different cooked up. Seems to me the post office should be expanding the scope of their testing, if they’re really worried about it…

  • That figures

    I guess I shouldn’t really be surprised when the oddball stuff happens around here anymore, but… Bend.com is reporting that during next week’s Great North American RV Rally in Redmond, participants will attempt to build the world’s largest s’more.

    The S’more will consist of about 40,000 marshmallows, 40,000 graham crackers and 14,000 chocolate bars, and it’ll be built by volunteers on Wednesday, July 13, from 10 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Construction is expected to take approximately three hours, with the final product covering 1,600 square feet. The World’s Largest S’more is sponsored by Reserve America, and is expected to break the current record of 1,600 pounds, which was established in May, 2003….

    People from as far away as Florida and Nova Scotia are expected be on-hand to construct, watch and maybe even eat the S’more.

    The world’s. Largest. S’more.

    Sigh.

  • "Pet Sematary" zombie dogs

    Okay, this is damn freaky. Apparently US scientists have succeeded in reanimating dead dogs—yup, bringing them back to life by replacing their blood, cooling them down, and shocking them with electricity.

    They claim the zombie dogs are “perfectly normal, with no brain damage.” Riiiiiight.

    There is no way I would trust a dog—or any animal really—to be normal again that died and was brought back to life like Frankenstein’s monster. I’ve seen Pet Sematary (just the movie; ironically it’s one of the few Stephen King novels I haven’t read), that just ain’t happenin’.

    On the other hand, when I clicked through to the article I just about wet myself laughing so hard at the totally inappropriate stock photo they used…

    Via Slashdot.

  • Jake’s influencing the news

    …Jake of UtterlyBoring that is. He posted an item today about our local Wal-Mart being open 24 hours, mentioned it to Barney, and a story showed up on the Z21 news NewsChannel 21 this evening. Barney confirms it in the comments.

    That’s hot.

  • Remembering Mt. St. Helens

    Mount St. Helens before it erupted
    Before
    Mount St. Helens after it erupted
    After

    Today is the 25th anniversary of the eruption of Mount St. Helens. How many of you reading are old enough to remember that day? Or were even born yet?

    I was in first grade, attending Alfalfa School. The main thing I remember from that time was the ash—it didn’t drift quite as far south as us, but it did make it to Redmond. My teacher was from Redmond (Alfalfa was—and still is—in the Redmond school district), and her car had a fine layer of ash all over it. That doesn’t seem like much—the cities and towns closer to the eruption had day turn into night from all the ash, so much that it looked like deep snowdrifts and blizzard conditions, people had to wear masks and cars actually stalled out and had their engines ruined from intaking the stuff—but to a seven-year-old even that light dusting really drove home the reality of having a live, active volcano in the relative neighborhood.

    And in the days and weeks that followed, the news would show that time-lapse footage of the entire north face of St. Helens exploding and disappearing, followed by the unimaginable image of acre after acre of mud and felled trees and grey wasteland. Even to this day it’s mind-boggling at just how violent that event was.

    Jack over at The Grumpy Forester has an amazing recollection of the eruption, and Wikipedia, as usual, has a terrific article on it.

  • Followup to the Time Traveler Convention

    Wired News has a followup article about the time traveler convention that I blogged about the other day. Apparently no one from the future showed up.

    But when attendees gathered outside for a raucous countdown at 10 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, nothing appeared on the makeshift landing pad at the coordinates Dorai set for the time travelers….

    It’s actually a blessing that no one from the future showed up on Saturday night, said David Batchelor, the NASA physicist who wrote “The Science of Star Trek.”

    Speaking on his own behalf and not for NASA in a phone interview, Batchelor noted the same potential risks mentioned by speakers at the convention, such as the displacement of matter in a finite universe caused by the introduction of someone from another time. He also touched on the paradoxes arising from such acts as going back in time and killing one’s own ancestors.

    “We should breathe a sigh of relief,” said Batchelor, who considered his decision not to go to the convention a safe bet. “It means we were protected from the chaos that would result if someone came back and changed something.”

    The thought that struck me as I read this was, if time travelers came from the future to attend the convention “after the fact”—wouldn’t our memories change to match the altered timeline? In other words, we wouldn’t know that no one from the future appeared, because they in fact did and time was changed.

    Alternatively, travelers from the future did attend the convention, only that spun off into an alternate timeline and our own timeline is undisturbed.

  • Cougar! Forever

    Just when you thought you’d heard the last of it, Mellencamp the cougar is back in the news. There’s an article in today’s Bulletin, more or less reiterating the cougar report on Z21 News last night. It was spotted near Newport Avenue and Fourth, but officials had no luck tracking it.

    Last week the Bulletin also ran an interesting article on Jack Spencer, the wildlife specialist for Deschutes County heading up the cougar search. It’s a good read, and shows just how crazy that kind of job is: he’s been bitten by a rattlesnake, caught bubonic plague (!), even tranked himself while trying to get a bear out of a cougar trap. You gotta love that kind of stuff.

  • The Time Traveler Convention

    I don’t know whether to file this under “weird” or “science” or “brilliant”: MIT is hosting a time traveler convention on May 7.

    What is it?

    Technically, you would only need one time traveler convention. Time travelers from all eras could meet at a specific place at a specific time, and they could make as many repeat visits as they wanted. We are hosting the first and only Time Traveler Convention at MIT in one week, and WE NEED YOUR HELP!

    Why do you need my help?

    We need you to help PUBLICIZE the event so that future time travelers will know about the convention and attend. This web page is insufficient; in less than a year it will be taken down when I graduate, and futhermore, the World Wide Web is unlikely to remain in its present form permanently. We need volunteers to publish the details of the convention in enduring forms, so that the time travelers of future millennia will be aware of the convention. This convention can never be forgotten! We need publicity in MAJOR outlets, not just Internet news. Think New York Times, Washington Post, books, that sort of thing. If you have any strings, please pull them.

    Great idea, I’d love to help! What should I do?

    Write the details down on a piece of acid-free paper, and slip them into obscure books in academic libraries! Carve them into a clay tablet! If you write for a newspaper, insert a few details about the convention! Tell your friends, so that word of the convention will be preserved in our oral history! A note: Time travel is a hard problem, and it may not be invented until long after MIT has faded into oblivion. Thus, we ask that you include the latitude/longitude information when you publicize the convention.

    You can also make an absolute commitment to publicize the convention afterwards. In that case, bring a time capsule or whatever it may be to the party, and then bury it afterwards.

    I wish I’d thought of that. :)

  • 55,000 year old trees at Yachats

    This story from Bend.com last week reminded me of the Stumps posting I made a year ago.

    An Oregon State University oceanographer has discovered remnants of an ancient forest in a seaside cliff near Yachats, with exposed tree sections that have been dated at older than 55,000 years.

    Those trees, which apparently were flattened during an ancient landslide and preserved in sediment, are now being exposed – and may help shed light on the tumultuous historical natural conditions along the Oregon coast, researchers said.

    Of course, those trees at 55,000 (or greater) years old trumps the “merely” 2,000 year-old trees at Neskowin, but it’s amazing to me the kinds of things that are washing up on the Oregon Coast recently.