Quick public service announcement: I’ve hacked together an RSS feed for the Bend Bulletin. It’s a first-pass, I’m scraping their Local, Business and Sports pages and building a summary feed only. If I have time, I may go one step further and pull each article on those pages, and provide a full-text feed.
Either way, here’s the RSS feed link [ed. note: no longer valid]. Enjoy!
I guess I was bound to comment on this sooner or later: The Crane Shed demolition here in Bend last Thursday, August 19th. It’s the big news around here. Here’s some recap:
And, here’s a good link about the Crane Shed: Brooks Scanlon Historic Crane Shed. Guess they’ll need to update their site now, though.
For my part, I think the city should have fought for the Crane Shed and prevented Crown Investment from demolishing it. I’m not sure it would have helped, though, considering Crown Investment’s highly questionable actions:
I hope Crown Investment gets the royal smackdown they deserve—and they look like they will, too. Plus, how hard do you think it will be for them to conduct future business in this town? I guess they got what they ultimately wanted, though: now they can sell off the land, which is already worth a bunch more now that the Shed is gone.
And in the meantime, yet another piece of historic Bend is gone. Sucks.
Following up to the post I made about the deputy arrested on sex abuse charges, there was this last bit from the Bend.com article about the arraignment that’s been bothering me:
In the front row for the arraignment was a supporter of Malloy’s, who had quite an unusual story to share.
“I know that he was a good police officer,” said Bend-area resident Janet Wickersham. But she also said that five years ago, after the officer came to her Spring River home to take a domestic-violence complaint (involving one of her four children’s fathers), Malloy, not in uniform asked if he could date her daughter—who was then 16 years old. (He would have been about 33 at the time.)
“I told him, ‘Not until she’s 18—then you can come and get her,’” Wickersham said. “He didn’t do anything out of the ordinary. He never did anything with my daughter…. He lived down the road from us.” She said the family moved to Newport for a couple years, and that her daughter, now 21, still lives there.
Acknowledging she was “a little drunk” at the time, Wickersham said she responded to Malloy’s request by putting her own arm around him and lifting her leg to do the same. “I said, ‘What do you want with a near-virgin with no experience, when you can have a mature woman like me?’ But guys like younger women.”
At one point during the court proceeding, as the judge set the new bail amount, Wickersham exclaimed: “He’s in deep!”
Holy shit, there is just so much wrong with that, that I don’t even know where to start. I’ve gotta give props to Barney for (I’m assuming) not just sitting there in slack-jawed horror after hearing that story.
It’s just like the embodiment of every cliché about white trash you could imagine, rolled up into that segment. Wow.
Disturbing local news: Deputy arrested on 180 child abuse, drug counts (from Bend.com) and the follow-up article: Deputy arraigned on 143 sex abuse, drug charges. This is way too creepy. The guy was a deputy for 10 years. So wrong.
The articles state that the “charge of using a child in a sexually explicit conduct is a Measure 11 offense and carries a mandatory minimum sentence of 70 months in prison”—I hope they apply the 70-month minimum to each and every charge he’s arraigned for (143 counts). That would put him at 10,010 months, or over 834 years. Otherwise, 70 months just doesn’t seem anywhere near long enough.
Sick freak.
Following up on my interview for the Bulletin last week, today I went over to the Bulletin building to have my photo taken for the article. Actually, it was myself, Jake, and Chris from monkeyinabox all there for photos.
Very interesting. The photographer took a bunch of pictures of each of us, then put us together in several ways; I’m very curious to see how they turn out. It was certainly a new experience for me—not that big a deal, really, but still kind of cool.
I’m told this article should be appearing in the Friday edition of the Bulletin. Stay tuned!
The Deschutes County Sheriff just can’t catch a break. Not only are they dealing with some eyebrow-raising issues dealing with their budget and money, which I blogged about here, but now they’re awash in controversy over the establishment of quotas (“don’t call them quotas”).
Jake has already written about this twice, here and here. And of course, since the story broke on Bend.com—and continues to unfold—here’s the links to the relevant articles:
I’m not as bothered by this as I was by the “found money” deal, but some people are. (You know who you are! *heh*) Hey, it’s what passes for drama here in the High Desert.
I was interviewed today by a reporter writing a story on local bloggers for the Bulletin. Very interesting, kind of cool. I’m not sure what will come of it other than myself sitting there yammering on semi-coherently, but the article will apparently be published next Thursday. I’ll have to pick up the paper to see.
And, the guy is interested in talking to as many bloggers as possible. Email me if you’re interested.
In other related news, Jake has an angry letter to the Bulletin on his site. That rant kind of spun out of this local story situation. Worth a read.
Isn’t it interesting that after the Deschutes County Sheriff’s Office pushed so hard to get a levy passed for more money, with all the hand-wringing and guilt trips about people losing jobs and criminals being let out of jail, now all of a sudden they have extra cash?
Aware of the likely criticism, Stiles insisted the rosier situation wasn’t clear before May’s vote to approve a 3-year levy, and that the funds come from non-levy sources.
Stiles and Jim Ross, the department’s business manager, explained that the agency’s 2003-04 ending fund balance, which they had conservatively estimated at $200,000, has turned out to be $874,000 instead.
And not small change, either. No, to the tune of two-thirds of a million dollars. And it might even be more:
And some said Stiles still may be under-shooting the amount of revenues he’ll have for the new budget year. “It’s going to get to $1.2 million,” said Commissioner Tom DeWolf; Maier said at least $1 million beginning balance is likely.
The best part? They insist it’s not levy money, and there will still be jail releases. Hello? Shouldn’t keeping criminals in jail be a priority here? Or is it just me?
As reported on Bend.com, Greyhound is leaving Central Oregon:
It is eliminating 260 stops, leaving 99 in the 13-state region.
In Oregon, the list of 35 communities losing Greyhound service ranges (alphabetically) from Albany to Zigzag, with Bend, Klamath Falls, La Pine, Madras, Redmond and Warm Springs among those in the middle.
Too bad. I suppose it’s a bit odd to lament the loss of a transportation service that’s in decline and is (let’s face it) mediocre at best, but I have some fond memories of Greyhound. For instance, growing up, every year my grandparents in Portland would ship our Christmas presents in a big package via Greyhound. And they were the best presents; they always got us the cool toys and video games.
(Strange in this day and age of UPS and FedEx everywhere that people would send packages via Greyhound, of all things, but there it is.)
Or the time my brother, when he was still living in Portland, made a surprise trip to visit the family on his birthday. I was in on it; he made an evening call and had us pick him up at the bus station around 10:30 that same night, and then surprised everyone the next day. That was a helluva lot of fun.
I even remember when the Greyhound station was downtown on the corner of Greenwood and Wall—when they had an actual station instead of sharing a gas station somewhere (as they’d been doing the last few years).
Ah, well. It’s a shame.
Is this for real?
Scientists Finding Strange Life Forms in Great Salt Lake
With levels now at a 30-year low, the salt in portions of the shrinking lake has reached saturation levels ten times the salinity of seawater. Westminster, the University of Maryland and George Mason University are not only finding life where life shouldn’t exist, but life, perhaps like nothing of this earth.
Instead of the rods, spheres and spiral shapes microbiologists are familiar with, they’re seeing organisms shaped like pyramids, triangles, squares and crescents.
Dr. Bonnie Baxter, Westminster College Microbiologist: “Completely novel sequences that don’t match up with anything in the databases. And one of our genome guys who was taking a look at these said this looks like alien DNA. It doesn’t match anything we have on earth.”
