Am I the only one who is fed up with our tipping culture? According to The New York Times, tipping has been a part of our culture since the nation was founded. Apparently Thomas Jefferson and George Washington even tipped their slaves. We've had tip jars...
Bend is, in the words of a guy I recently met, a "frickin' magical place." Many of us have moved to this High Desert playground for its myriad of recreational opportunities–hiking, cycling, tubing, fishing, you name it, we got it. And so, we take this...
For most of the year, it's just too damn early to get up and out in time to get good sunrise photos. But the winter is a different story. While in Vancouver, B.C. last week, I noticed on my phone that sunrise wasn't until around...
The truly magisterial thing about life is that, when you wake up each morning, you can never be completely certain about what the day has in store for you. This applies to President Obama, Pope Francis, a weird guy I hired to rake leaves at...
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....
When it comes to barbers, I've never been very monogamous. Oh sure, I've had some good barbers whom I was faithful to for periods of time over the years. But something always comes between us–a long line of others waiting for the same guy, a...
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,...
" Free Pre-Paid Cremation! Details Inside" Purveyors of direct mail have many different ways to get you to open junk mail. The most common tactic is to create a sense of urgency. The actual verbiage can vary but the undertone is this: Open this fucking letter...
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...
"You got any trash for me?" asked the cute teenage girl at the Shell station dressed in an all-white 1950s soda-jerk style uniform. I thought I had heard her wrong. New to Oregon and its delightful law mandating that gas station attendants, not customers, pump the...
There are plenty of places to commune with nature in and around Bend, but I'd be hard pressed to think of a better place to spend the night than in a tent by the banks of the Metolius River at the Allen Springs Campground inside...
Where else but in Bend, Oregon can you take out 100 books at a time and then return them up to 7 days late with no fine? I'll be damned if I know. We moved to Bend from Evanston, Illinois, and I used to be...
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...
I don't expect PR flacks to be creative writers, but a little originality would be nice for a change. This morning I read this story in The New York Timesabout how Rutgers University cut their new quarterback, Philip Nelson, after he was implicated in a...
Is it my imagination or is every shitty fast food restaurant in America using the word "Tuscan" to describe menu items that have no connection to Tuscany whatsoever? First, at the risk of sounding like a big, I've been to Tuscany so give me a...
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...
Poor Ethan Couch. Poor little rich kid, 16 years old, from North Texas was so spoiled rotten that he had no idea that there was anything wrong with driving well over the speed limit, shitfaced, three times the legal limit and carrying seven friends in...
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...
For more than four years, the parents of David Gimelfarb, a graduate student from Highland Park who went missing while on a hike in Costa Rica in 2009, have maintained hope that their son is still alive. They have returned to Costa Rica each August,...
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 all for cheap drinks but sometimes a drink is so cheap you can't help but be suspicious. On a recent trip to Spain I found myself shopping for sangria in a Barcelona supermarket. There were three choices: one was ˆ1.35, another ˆ1.10, and a...