Crispin Scott’s semester abroad in Barcelona was supposed to be the adventure of a lifetime. But on January 6, 2012, the night before he was to attend the program’s orientation session, the handsome 20-year-old math major and rugby star at Dartmouth met a tragic fate....

Until I injured my knee playing tennis a month ago, I used to be one of Bend’s FitBit People. Now I’ve joined the sedentary class . I know that some of the folks you see riding motorized scooters around big-box stores really need them. When...

I’m cheap and I don’t care as much about my appearance as I probably should. That’s why I don’t mind patronizing beauty schools, where you can get a haircut—and sometimes a shampoo—for as little as five bucks. It takes longer because the students often have...

Here’s a question I bet you haven’t given much thought to: why the bloody hell is sexually assaulting a dog only a MISDEMEANOR in Oregon? Behold this revolting story in the (Bend)Bulletin about this depraved couple who are accused of sexually abusing children and also,...

Visitors might wrongly assume that Bend is a bastion of crunchy, left-wing, kombucha swilling vegans who wear hemp, recycle toilet paper and look forward to listening to NPR’s Wait-Wait-Don’t Tell Me on weekends. After all, this is the small, outdoorsy city that shows up in...

If a place like Sparks Lake existed within 100 miles of a major city, the place would be a zoo. Thankfully it’s in Central Oregon, just about a 40-minute drive from Bend along the Cascade Lakes Scenic Byway. On a recent Saturday morning, there were...

The evolution of digital photography has made it cost effective to be a narcissist. And the emergence of social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and others provides today’s Digital Narcissist (DN)-LOOK AT ME! LIKE THIS! FOLLOW ME!- with ample platforms to indulge their apparently...

When you’re traveling across America via our interstate highways, it’s easy to slip into a zombie-like trance where you are still awake and alive but only in a technical sense. For all intents and purposes, you are a dead man driving- drifting from one chain...

Please listen carefully, as our menu options have changed. Why does seemingly every corporation in America place this empty warning in their phone tree message? I’m going to answer my own question here: because they know we are impatient bastards who want to press 0 to...

The news this week that Pope Francis told a woman married to a divorced man that she had the right to take communion had me thinking about another initiative I’d like to see the Pontiff tackle: streamlining mass. Don’t get me wrong- I’d also like...

White Sox fans are used to feeling like members of a cult, shunned by Chicagoland’s mainstream Cubbie-centric culture; their rooting allegiance considered nothing more than a deviant fetish. But until this week, I never considered the fact that this cultural bias would spill over into...

36 brochures, weighing in at a total of 4.2 pounds, 23 business cards, a flash drive from Indonesia, a microfiber cloth from Quebec, and a bookmark from Yap, a remote Pacific island where they still use stone money. That’s what I brought home from my...

If you’ve spent any time on this blog, you’ve probably noticed that I sometimes like to share nuggets of wisdom with you, my dear readers. Here’s a tip I learned from reading a story in theBuffalo News today: if you’re on your way to court...

I’ve been a compulsive traveler for more than twenty years. During that time, I have taken well over 100 trips to 45 U.S. states, 6 Canadian provinces and more than 50 countries. I have never, ever regretted a single trip. Travel is the one expenditure...

My son James is only 4 but he’s already smart enough to know that he doesn’t want to work for a living. His preschool is hosting a career dress up day this week where the students are supposed to dress up like a person working...

Every time I come back to the U.S. from a Mediterranean country, I feel like I live in the quietest, most boring place on earth. And I live in Chicago, dear reader, not Glad Valley, South Dakota, (America’s McFarthest place) or Henderson, Nevada. (The most...

I’m a curmudgeon, I know. But at the risk of sounding like the late Andy Rooney, can someone please tell me why the fuck anyone would spend good money on a magnet that says “Yay! Me!” I saw this and dozens of other “Yay!” magnets...

If someone asked you, at age 5, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” What would you have said? My five-year-old son, Leo, graduated from preschool today and while you might laugh at the notion of a preschool commencement exercise, I have...

It was a perfectly imperfect game. Everyone made contact with the ball. Eventually. Errors were made- typically several on each play, though I’m not sure how the scoring works when teammates tackle each other in a rugby scrum fighting for a ground ball. And no...

If I ever become the world’s fattest man, I won’t be granting any interviews. And I definitely won’t be posing for photo shoots. I read with fascination astory by Sarah Lyall in The New York Times last week about Paul Mason, a British man who...