Articles

When we did PERS reform in 2003, we didn’t attach it to the budget as severely as you’re seeing in this 2013 version of the Hot Air Society. It’s stunning to see both parties and two branches of state government simultaneously tying the funding of education, public safety and human services so tightly to one target.

Monday nights are usually reserved for recovering from a big weekend or loathing the realities of a new week. At The Barn Light, however, Mondays take on a new meaning: game night. 

St. Paddy’s Day: America’s most Irish of holidays. Commemorating the Patron Saint of Ireland, St. Paddy’s has lost its religious meaning, particularly in the U.S., becoming instead an excuse to eat a lot, drink more and toast all things Eire.

The emotional barometer of bluegrass registers somewhere between hilarity and sorrow, like a hee-haw hiccup after an epic night of breakup drinking. Bluegrass laughs at funerals and cries at birthdays.

There are many bars and nightclubs where the ambiance and the pours can send us back a few decades in a woozy, boozy time travel machine — think ’80s night at John Henry’s — but the increased popularity of some cocktails take a century-deep plunge.

A self-described “townie” (he graduated from South Eugene High School), Eirrin’s Bistro and Pub bartender Teren Baker began tending bar two years ago at Emerald Valley Golf & Resort, where he mastered a mean Tom Collins.

If your band has been around for 15 years and you have released almost 20 albums and live DVDs combined, then you are definitely doing something right. Andy Farag — the percussionist for the popular progressive rock band Umphrey’s McGee — understands the secret to the band’s longevity.

When you inherit the wind, hold onto your hat: You never know where you might end up. Or do you? I’m speaking, of course, about the 1955 play Inherit the Wind, written by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee and dramatizing the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial.

I guess I let myself feel complacent, thinking that after the last election, when Obama and the Dems turned back the wingnuts, and D’Faz thrashed Tea-Partier Art Robinson, I could maybe relax a little, stop lathering about politics and concentrate on the pleasures of life: I’d think and write about my beamish grandkids, our bursting garden and, of course, bounties in wine.

They’ve checked to see if Pop Rocks and Coke will make your stomach explode and tried to tip over a car with a jet engine, but they’ve never put a poodle in the microwave (that would be cruel). The show started off busting “urban legends,” Mythbusters star Jamie Hyneman admits, but “Mythbusters sounds better than Legendbusters.”