• It’s Best of Eugene and time to party! Celebrate 30 years of the Best of Eugene readers poll and all the amazing winners at WOW Hall Saturday, Oct. 31 from 11 am to 3 pm. Free to enter and check out the bands, food carts and awesome Eugene Weekly vibes!
• The time to mail them is past — walk your ballots to the nearest ballot box (even if you live in another county). If you haven’t turned it in already, drop your ballot off in downtown Eugene Oct. 31. Combine partying with the Weekly, trick or treating and saving democracy! If you head down to Amazon Park at 2 pm, you can drop your ballot off at the pool and stop by the Amazon Community Center for a Thrill The World Eugene performance — the zombie-fied “Thriller” flashmob.
• Speaking of the Nov. 3 election. Here at team commie rag, we tend to shop local, so you will not be surprised to learn that we only just now noticed there’s no The Cheesecake Factory in Eugene. Thanks, Obama.
• Who knew Lane County’s efforts to address its largest source of greenhouse gases — Short Mountain Landfill — with its CleanLane waste recovery and recycling project would cause so much drama. Contracting with local company Bulk Handling Systems pissed off Waste Connections, the giant parent company of Sanipac. The proposed Goshen location angered neighbors, and then garbage-hauler spokesperson Jake Pelroy jumped into the Lane County commissioner race to take on incumbent progressive commissioner Heather Buch. Then digital news source Lookout Eugene-Springfield entered the fray with a story and editorial alleging a potential CleanLane “catastrophe,” and now the county and its longtime administrator in turn allege the reporting was incorrect. Read our story this issue.
• This week in higher education. It’s midterms at Lane Community College and the University of Oregon — awkwardly timed for Halloween week and the damn time change. (Here is your reminder that at 2 am local time on Nov. 1 your digital clocks fall back one hour to 1 am.) Also losing sleep? Educators and administrators worried about budgets. LCC announced Oct. 23 that it will offer incentives to some longtime employees who volunteer to leave or retire to try to cut $4.2 million from this year’s budget. Meanwhile, at the UO, graduate students and faculty in programs in the College of Arts and Sciences are protesting the proposed sunsetting of programs like graduate studies in history and comparative literature. There’s an irony here to cutting back on educators and programs that teach you to think and read, isn’t there?