Articles

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.”

Eugene needs a new place to grind. That’s why Ninkasi Brewing’s Pints for a Cause benefit March 18 will support the proposed Washington-Jefferson Skatepark and Urban Plaza.

Everyone crowded around the new “playscape” at the Co-op Family Center on Patterson Street, not far from the UO campus, on a crisp February morning; hugs were exchanged, parents, teachers and college students chatted, kids were zooming around the new sustainable gravel bike path and bellies filled with pancakes and orange juice kept everyone warm. It was the Family Center’s 18th Annual Pancake Breakfast, but it was also the playground dedication — a playground designed and constructed by the UO student organization designBridge. The co-op’s pedagogical coordinator, Ben Minnis, called the cluster of designBridge students up to the stage that they had imagined and built with their own hands to thank them. The crowd hooted and hollered, and a ceremonial ribbon was cut.

Attention seed-savers and gardeners: Lane County’s 4th Annual Spring Propagation Fair is coming up. It will take place in the Lane Community College Cafeteria (main campus) 11 am to 3 pm Saturday, March 23.