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Event producer Krysta Albert says she's gearing up for another year of celebrating all things Eugene, despite a lack of sufficient volunteers and wildfire smoke descending on the Festival of Eugene last year. The Festival of Eugene, created in response to the surprise cancellation of the Eugene Celebration in 2014, will take place Aug. 20-21 this year in Skinner Butte Park. Continue reading
Surprise! Fat people have sex. Fat people have really good sex and lots of it. If you believe what you see in the media, you would think I was full of beans. I am most assuredly not. We are portrayed as loud, obnoxious and completely devoid of style. We are never appreciated as sexual beings. We are never the leading lady. We are never the love interest. Instead, we are the butt of every dumb joke. We are made to look so unfortunate and homely — it’s offensive. This is antiquated and extremely problematic and not at all how the world actually works. Continue reading
Thanks to a gun law in Texas, Eugene is now home to relationship author and blogger Duana Welch. She moved to Eugene last year after her home state of Texas passed a law allowing guns in classrooms. As a college instructor, Welch says she retired in protest, and she and her husband moved to Eugene in search of political ideals more closely matched to their own. Continue reading
It’s hard to imagine creatures more enigmatic than the gray whales that migrate along the Oregon coast each year. Ever since the ban on the commercial slaughter of gray whales took effect in the 1930s, the species has slowly recovered, and now thousands of these graceful marine mammals make the yearly journey up and down the West Coast, from Alaska to Baja California and back. Each summer, around 200 whales decide that Oregon is the place to be, and rather than go back to Alaska for the summer, they stop in Oregon and hang out until it’s time to return to Mexico. Continue reading
[Editor’s Note: In 2001, EW’s very own Rick Levin was writing for The Stranger in Seattle. For that year’s annual Queer Issue, then-editor Dan Savage decided to assign all the stories to so-called straight writers. This is what happened.] Continue reading
Valentine hugs and kisses to all y’all! But first: Last month, we glanced briefly at benefits of maturing (aging) fine wines. The subject is too complex for one skimpy piece. Besides, we must tell the story of Bill Wilson, about time and wine and love. In 1985, Bill was already in his mid-60s, white hair, walked with a cane, always wore his father’s Iron Cross on a ribbon around his neck. He ambled into Ambrosia, introduced himself. We talked wine. Continue reading
A search for escarole seed late last summer led me to the excellent website of Adaptive Seeds (adaptiveseeds.com). The seed they sent so promptly (for escarole “Diva” and a locally bred fava bean, “Aprovecho”) was terrific, delivering uniform, vigorous germination at a rate close to 100 percent. “Diva” has proved exceptionally cold-hardy, and the beans are growing strong. Continue reading
Nature is stirring from her winter rest. She begins leisurely with buds slowly expanding and showing light green in the cracks of the bud scales. Indian plum is the first to be noticed because its eye-level buds are so big and flowers burst from them by the middle of February. I keep a sharp eye on the snowberry bushes because their early spring leaves join the Indian plum for the earliest flush of green in the valley forest understory. Snowberry flowers are much later, however, so the spring buds are small. Pussy-willow buds show fuzz soon. Continue reading
Marijuana: controlled substance or religious sacrament? In December 2015, the Portland branch of the United States Postal Service (USPS) seized a 5-ounce package of marijuana mailed from Eugene by Joy Graves — the leader of the Cottage Grove branch of Oklevueha Native American Church (ONAC) — who says it was intended to help an ailing ONAC member in Ohio. Continue reading
Eugene: The World’s Greatest City for the Arts and Outdoors. That was Eugene’s, ahem, slightly overstated city slogan until 2010. The city then rolled it back to: Eugene: A Great City for the Arts and Outdoors. Never has the chasm between “the” and “a” been so wide. Continue reading