The latest recap of the news you may have missed… we’re assuming by accident.
They Sent Us Their Worst…
We’ll send them our best. Yep, former Oregon State University baseball coach Pat Casey might be heading over to Louisiana State University. To lay out the stats, it looks like this – one coach who won three national titles and retired with 900 wins over a 24-year career may be heading there, while we got a president who lasted less than a year with a back story that included telling his football coach to stop meeting young girls alone… and the coach didn’t listen.
Gov. Brown Gets Mail
Douglas County Commissioner Chris Boice has written a letter to Governor Kate Brown. It’s so nice when people go back to the good-old-day habits like letter writing. Until you realize that he wrote to ask Brown if she could please stop sending extra money to the unemployed people in his county. Turns out that at a recent job fair where 28 businesses were looking for 438 new employees, only 150 people turned up. He also noted that the Southern Oregon Workforce Investment Board did the math, and the average Southern Oregon employer would have to pay folks $19 per hour to match current unemployment benefits. Commissioners from 14 Eastern Oregon counties and three state representatives added their signatures to the letter. It’s such a pity when people go back to the good-old-day habits like letter writing for political purposes.
The A**Holes Win Again
A statue commemorating York, an enslaved man brought on the Lewis and Clark Expedition by his owner William Clark, was put up in Mt. Tabor Park in Portland [yep, that means the Lewis and Clark Expedition guys owned slaves, they were a**holes]. This happened after a Black Lives Matter protest ended in the tearing down of a statue of Harvey Scott – a longtime editor of The Oregonian who opposed women’s suffrage [a different brand of a**hole]. Modern-day a**hole Jeanette Grode decided that she should have the right to spray paint the pedestal where York’s bust sat. Portland City Commissioner Carmen Rubio said that the bust is “a much-needed reminder to city leaders to hasten our work of rooting out white supremacy in our institutions…” [Rubio does not appear to be an a**hole.]
The Good Guys Win One Too
The United States Senate unanimously approved a bill that will make Juneteenth a holiday. This would mean that June 19 – the day called Freedom Day and Jubilee Day and Liberation Day because chattel slavery ended in every state that day – will bring new highs of picnics and bbq’s and happiness.
Does Anyone Win Here
Critical Race Theory – a theory which discusses the impact of racism in American history – is being debated in the Portland schools. Educators and parents rallied against national legislation that wouldn’t allow them to teach the theory, saying that bullying and intimidation wouldn’t stop them. There is not any plan laid out disallowing the teachers to teach the theory in Oregon at the moment, but they just kind of wanted to let everyone else know where they stood. [Do the white teachers who tend to permeate our schools really think that race conflicts only level-up to bullying and intimidation? Really?]
In Apple News…
Apple detectives [because those exist in real life] have “rediscovered” seven kinds of apples that were considered extinct in Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. A former FBI agent named David Benscoter got bored with retirement life and founded the Lost Apple Project to scour fields and locate old varietals. Most recently, they came to the Pacific Northwest and found the Almota, the Ivanhoe, the Esper, and the Iowa Flat. In total, they have found 29 lost apples for the sheer joy of tasting something no one else has in many years.
That’s Two Points
Don’t golf with Powell Butte’s Meg Mendlin. She is the luckiest (or best) golfer in the world, having gotten two – count’em 2 – hole-in-one shots at the Brasada Canyons Member-Member Championship. For those of you who don’t golf, that’s a really good game. The chance of making two holes in one in a single round of the sport is 67 million to 1. [Not even gonna ask you to count the 67 million]
Welcome to The Golden Age of Bird Tracking
Scientists have been carefully trapping, measuring, and tagging birds for years, but now they’re adding antennas to the mix. The slim wires are attached to small “backpacks” that hide under feathers while the wire antenna looks like an extra little something-something on the bird’s tail. This new tech allows researchers to monitor each bird via satellite – meaning we can now watch a bird past breeding and into migration and back to breeding ‘cause birds gotta breed, ya know.
K-Pop Meets Mickey-D’s
So if you haven’t heard about the K-Pop group BTS, then you can move on to the next story although… if you love McDonald’s you might be more interested than you think. You see, part of the K-Pop allure is the band members doing cute advertisements to sell the advertisers’ goods and the band’s music, and the latest to buy in was none other than Mickey-D’s. The result was “complete and utter chaos” for Indonesia. Somewhere between four and six stores [perhaps five stores?] had to be closed for a few days [the range of days was not provided] to prevent spread of COVID amongst the crowd of people waiting their turn at a meal that consisted of 10 McNuggets, fries, a soda, and two sauces [sweet chili and Cajun].
In Other McDonald’s News…
Private information of McDonald’s customers and employees in South Korea and Taiwan has been hacked. Lucky for the folks in those countries, McDonald’s has invested in cybersecurity and was therefore able to quickly stop the steal. Those affected are being notified. The breach also affected US operations, but who cares about those guys, am I right?
Trash by Any Other Name…
It was probably meant to be a compliment, but the world leaders attending the G7 Summit might have thought otherwise. A Mount Rushmore-style sculpture of the leaders meeting this last week was made out of garbage by artist Joe Rush. It was made from trashed electronics as a way to remind the leaders that e-waste is becoming a significant problem. With a discarded fan making up a blue eye here and old keyboards filling in a mustache there, the English artist was able to recreate some decent likenesses. BTW The seven countries that make up the G7 contribute nearly 16 million metric tons of e-waste each year.
By Sally K Lehman
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