CHEERS for baseball. We want you all to take a moment to go out to the ball game, to go out with the crowd, to grab some peanuts and Cracker Jacks and… well, you get where we’re going here, and you can do those things twice as much because (1) the Oregon State Men’s team has brought the NCAA regionals back to Corvallis and (2) the Corvallis Knights are starting their 2022 season. After all, they say baseball will make you not care if you ever get back.
CHEERS AND A COKE for Corvallis’s very own Shawn Hinz, who has been chosen to perform with the Voices of Liberty. Hinz will be representing our little ole burg as the Epcot group’s featured soloist in the opening ceremonies for the Special Olympics USA Games. The opening ceremony will happen June 5 beginning at 9:30 a.m. EDT – meaning 6:30 a.m. our time.
CHEERS AND A DOUBLE REED to Women in music. The 2022 International Alliance for Women in Music Conference is happening at our lovely OSU campus this weekend. You can check out the performances, the lectures, or even the keynote given by Nina Eidsheim from UCLA, titled “The Body as Music’s Terroir.” For those not in the know, a terroir is a nature environment in which certain wines are produced… meaning females ferment music… or musician bodies are places to develop vintage things… or vintners are musical inspirations… or…
CHEERS AND A PAIR OF HIKING BOOTS to go with our beautiful forests. And if you’ve ever wondered what it takes to manage our lovely wooded areas, there are two opportunities to find out. The first is our Super Duper Fun-for-all CitySpeak Livestream event this coming Tuesday [June 7, 6:30 p.m.] where you can ask forest experts all sorts of things like how many trees there are [they won’t know] or how to tell if a tree is following you [no, it’s not]. Also in the month of June, you can take a once-in-a-year tour of the Corvallis Watershed forest [June 15, and pre-reg is required] where you’ll be able to see exactly which water droplets you’ll be drinking the next day [provided you don’t mind all of the other droplets being in there too]. So go out there, learn stuff about trees and have some fun in the well-shaded sun of our local forests.
THUMBS UP for the participants in the Great Fire Evacuation Drill of 2022 [BTW, Corvallis Fire, you can use that name in years to come if you want ** cough cough, hint hint **]. 2022 brought more people out, in their cars and evading imaginary fires in preparation for real fires, and we want to thank them all for staying alert. We often joke about stuff here, but being ready for fire as the Earth dries out and the wildfire seasons get worse and worse is an incredibly important thing. And these people rocked it.
FURROWED BROWS over the possibility of an industrial chicken ranch in our neck of the Mid-Valley. Yes, a ranch in Linn County wants to supply Foster Farms with 3,400,000 chicken carcasses every year. The only thing holding them back is the Department of Ag giving the official okee dokee to the water runoff plans for the 4,500 tons of manure this would create. [In easier to comprehend numbering, that would be 9,000,000 pounds of bird poop.]
JEERS for a Eugene-based sneaker reseller. We know, you all hate Eugene, so here’s something specifically in Eugene that we can all hate on together. Zadeh Kicks is under investigation for scamming its customers out of millions of dollars, leaving founder Michael Malezadeh seeking police protection for his family as enraged “Sneakerheads” came looking at the West Eugene warehouse for their limited edition, one-of-a-kind, crazy expensive shoes… or at least their money. There was even a report of shots fired. Malezadeh wasn’t able to provide shoes or dollars, because the company is in receivership and the Feds are looking into it. [They’re just shoes, folks, there are more important things going on… Alternatively, it’s just money, kids, it comes and goes and your’s is probably in the “goes” side of the equation by now.]
HANGING OUR HEADS for the election that is finally, slowly ending. As of May 30, of the 116,045 ballots received by Clackamas County officials, 111,092 had been counted, and a completed tally is supposed to be in the hands of Sec. of State Shemia Fagan by, well, yesterday. And of the tallies completed, for the first time in 42 years, a sitting representative [aka Kurt Schrader – who was seeking an eighth term of office] was voted out of office in spite of having the POTUS endorsement – who knows what’ll happen come November.
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