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Looking for things to do this weekend? After you ArtWalk come hear fellow EW staffer Alex Notman, a plethora of funny people and I tell naughty Christmas stories on Friday at Cozmic. Not only will we crack ourselves up, there will be wine, beer and food and it's a fundraiser for Planned Parenthood. Continue reading
• EmX funding still has more public process to go through and the deadline for written testimony is Dec. 2 for pending action by the Central Lane Metropolitan Planning Organization. The MPO will be looking at whether to earmark Oregon Lottery funds to help finance EmX expansion. Send comments to mpo@lcog.org Continue reading
We wrote about The Barn Light in this column back in August and its plans to open a new bar and coffee shop in September. The classy new watering hole finally opened the evening of Thanksgiving Day at 924 Willamette, in the newly rebuilt Broadway Commerce Center. Owners are Thomas Pettus-Czar and Dustin Kinsey, who met and worked together at a popular bar and coffee shop in Lawrence, Kan. “We look forward to participating in the rebirth of a thriving, vibrant center of commerce and community in downtown Eugene,” says Kinsey. Continue reading
Michael Hogan has stepped down after 39 years as a judge in federal courts, and the $100,000-plus privately funded retirement bash planned in his honor has been downsized at his request. The change in plans also follows a story in Willamette Week Nov. 21 that quotes Portland attorney Michael Esler saying “The ostentatiousness makes us lawyers look even worse than we already look.” Continue reading
Local car dealer Ridley's Rides is getting some attention from Ad Week and elsewhere for its eBay listings that supposedly use the owner's daughter to sell cars, sexy-style. I notice that they don't use sexy pics for the station wagons. Continue reading
• A beach clean-up day in the Florence area is planned for 10:30 am Sunday, Nov. 25, by the Surfrider Foundation. See oregon.surfrider.org/events or email jonandjaine@bmi.net or call (800) 743-SURF. • A petition From Cascadia Wildlands at wkly.ws/1e0 urges the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to maintain federal protections for wolves in the Pacific Northwest. Wolves, even those with collars, are being hunted and killed in Northwestern states. See more information at the Forest Web of Cottage Grove Facebook page. Continue reading
MECCA, the Materials Exchange Center for Community Arts, is expanding its store hours at 449 Willamette St., next to the Amtrak station. MECCA will now be open afternoons and early evenings, and will be celebrating its new hours with a public ceremony at 11 am Saturday, Dec. 1. Officiating will be MECCA Executive Director Jija Adrade and Slug Queen Sadie Slimy Stitches. The nonprofit store acts as a clearing house for scraps and discards that can be used creatively and sold at low prices to artists, teachers and others. Continue reading
The news that clearcutting would be suspended on 914 acres of the Elliott State Forest came to logging opponents through a September memo that was posted on the Oregon Department of Forestry (ODF) website, Josh Laughlin of Cascadia Wildlands says. He says this was welcome news for an endangered sea bird that nests in Oregon’s coastal old-growth forests. Cascadia Wildlands and other groups filed a suit in federal court in July to try protect the threatened marbled murrelet and its habitat, and that suit has led to the temporary cease in clearcutting. Continue reading
Protesters in Texas have put up treesits and locked themselves to machinery to stop the Keystone XL pipeline; thousands of activists gathered around the White House Nov. 18 to call on President Obama to reject the controversial tar sands conduit; and here in Eugene, as part of a week of solidarity actions, local activists faced high winds and rain to voice their concerns about tar sands oil. Continue reading
Project Censored has been documenting inadequate media coverage of crucial stories since it began in 1967 at Sonoma State University. Each year, the group considers hundreds of news stories submitted by readers, evaluating their merits. Students search LexisNexis and other databases to see if the stories were underreported, and if so, the stories are fact-checked by professors and experts in relevant fields. Continue reading