Find us on Facebook Follow us on Twitter

Opinion

To the Editor:

Poetry & Art

Classified Ads

Back Issues

Blogs

The Commuter Blogs

Here are the most recent Commuter blog posts.


Wednesday, June 3, 2009

So long, and thanks for all the shoes

Editor-in-chief Greg Dewar hands the torch over to Ryan Henson and bids farewell and thanks to all.


---

Monday, June 1, 2009

I think I'm going to hate Eugene

I’ve always done most of my shopping in Eugene, living in such close proximity, but I’ve never really left the beltline or I-105. ...


---

Sunday, May 31, 2009

Interview Blues

There’s something about a job interview, regardless of how amazing the opportunity is, or how confident in your own abilities you are that...


---

Friday, May 29, 2009

Macommunism

Macs. Macintoshes. Apples. These words mean more than just trucks, noodles and cheese, raincoats, and braeburns. They’re synonymous with...


---

Monday, May 25, 2009

The Weekly Burger: That's-a Spicy Meatball

Something I crave from time to time is a delicious meatball sandwich. Complete the setup with some olives, garlic, mozzarella, and fresh tomato...


---

Friday, May 22, 2009

The Weekly Burger: the Scotch Egg

The Scotch egg is one of those “British-style” foods. It was traditionally served cold and in a salad or something of that nature on a...


---

Monday, May 11, 2009

They don't make 'em like they used to...

I had to explain to him was that this wasn’t the ’50s; cars weren’t produced with enough parts in common or bulk that you could cannibalize one vehicle for the other. Hell if you look under the hood of two different vehicles in the same size range chances are their engines aren’t remotely the same shape or size- from the same company.


---

Demons Dreaming...

It’s interesting to examine why our fantasy villains mirror real life villains, while our fantasy heroes are absolutely outrageous. In our minds, I believe, that we want to conquer what we can’t in reality.


---

Tuesday, May 5, 2009

64-bits to freedom

This weekend I decided to finally make the switch to a 64-bit OS(operating system). The impetus has been there for awhile. I had more than 4 GB...


---

Monday, April 20, 2009

The Weekly Burger: sustainable burger

Through perseverance and some very hungry vegetarian friends, a “burger” was born. Not just one that tasted pretty good for having no meat, but one that might be a bit more sustainable than our normal beef. So, without the wait, here is the Better Veggie Burger.


---

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

The Weekly Falafel

So, maybe you’ve decided you eat too much meat. I haven’t but I have been told this. A lot of my vegetarian friends keep telling me to be...


---

Wednesday, April 1, 2009

The Weekly Burger: Chorizo Chimichurri


---

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

The Weekly Burger: Chicken Fried Burger

There are few breakfast foods that I love more than gravy. What’s not to like, especially when it smothers a chicken fried steak. Toss a...


---

Wednesday, March 4, 2009

Left my heart in San Diego

I have more confidence than ever in our newspaper. We were original, the others were cookie-cutter. We had magazine-style covers, the others were generic black and white. We also generated all of our own content, and never rely on other news outlets for material. For our under-funded newspaper and barely compensated staff, we have a lot to be proud of. This trip proved that to all of us.


---

Tuesday, March 3, 2009

The San Diego Chronicles: Day 2

Having been a 21-year resident of my beloved state I expected sunshine, but nothing can really prepare you for the re-immersion into California weather after being away for so long


---

A surprise life lesson

After a few sessions I realized that we have something good going with our team. One thing that does happen often is learning a lesson where you never expected.


---

Fistful of list-sticks

Five reasons why Zombies are natural:
1. It’s the natural progression of the species to annihilate itself one way or another. This...


---

Camaraderie in San Diego

For the first time I’m happy since the military and I feel safe enough to trust any of these fine people to take point or cover the six.


---

The San Diego Chronicles: Day 1

The Commuter was sent down to attend the Associated Collegiate Press Journalism Conference in San Diego this last weekend. This is our story. Insert Law and Order noise


---

5 reasons to read my lists

When the Commuter staff took it’s trip to the ACP conference in San Diego this last week we learned a lot about each other … we want to share some of these lists with you


---

Sunday, February 22, 2009

Future Sucks?

The current economic climate, or as some like to call it, the “Holy F***ing ****storm of 2009,” was years away.


---

Monday, February 16, 2009

The struggle to survive

What met me was a cliff. A sheer cliff, 80 or 90 feet nearly straight down.
‘Oh, HELL no!’ I shouted, and backed away as if sickened.


---

The Weekly Burger: My Big Fat Greek Burger

Here’s one that I enjoy when the master of the house says, “You’ve been eating too many burgers, you need to eat more healthily!”


---

Sunday, February 15, 2009

Valentines Incongruity

I didn’t even know what day it was.
Though it seemed a normal day like any other.
I logged on for my usual OS25/Malygos 25 raid...


---

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Chinese acrobats aren't just for kids

A pleasure for adults and children alike.


---

Monday, February 9, 2009

Memories are a morass to trudge through

I finally got the gumption to start cleaning this weekend. It’s been, literally, a year since I cleaned my house. And while I normally...


---

An open letter to a broken home

And know that those favors are not ones that are easily forgotten by those that feel you owe them everything, that feel a score to have settled.


---

Two delicious backup (or front line) desserts

I will share with you two secret recipes that only require some basic baking ingredients that you very well may have in your kitchen and only take a few minutes to make.


---

Tuesday, February 3, 2009

If only we didn't need Black History Month

History tells the most beautiful story of all, regardless of how tragic, because it is truth.


---

Sunday, February 1, 2009

The Validity of Wikipedia

Many seem to mock its credentials, as it has become common knowledge that it’s open sourced, but they still seem to refer to it often enough that it’s apparent they use it in their everyday lives themselves.


---

Saturday, January 24, 2009

Kindness to the press

I’d just like to send out a personal ‘thank you’ to President Obama, for making our job so easy, and for giving student journalists a chance to be at the forefront of one of the most newsworthy events of the century.


---

Thursday, January 22, 2009

Life brings challenges and lessons

Often when we are faced with difficult times, it is because we are meant to learn something from them.


---

Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Obamanation

It’s common practice to vamp up distribution of wishes when you’re bargaining the public for the white house, but Jesus 2.0 built his tower a little too high.


---

Monday, January 12, 2009

Home Depot has no humanity

The heart of this problem is employee benefits. My previous job gave me two days a month, and more if I had a doctor’s note. Whatever I needed to be healthy and happy. My husband’s co-worker would not have come to work with pneumonia had she any sick time available to her, then no one else would have become ill.


---

Crab dribble with extra bull**** sauce

When asked by a reporter a few days later what exactly a “crab dribble” was, James said “..it’s something I work on in the summertime…”


---

Saturday, January 10, 2009

Who said it's been five weeks?

Blessing sometimes come in small, germ-covered packages.


---

Friday, January 9, 2009

Borg stole my winter

Winter’s broken. Or at least I think it is. I’m not entirely convinced that it happened. You see I hear people talk about “bad weather a...


---

Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Big Brother

My oldest brother: His face was less troubled than I’d ever seen, his eyes held less aggression


---

Friday, December 26, 2008

Digging Around...

They did this story over the summer, but I forgot to bring the print version into the office. It actually ran on page 2, so we’re technically famous.


---

Friday, December 19, 2008

What we talk about when we talk about snow

…here in western Oregon, when the newscaster says “wintry mix,” we drop what we’re doing and start looking out the window like whales in an fishbowl.


---

Friday, December 5, 2008

How long has it been?

The supreme court will take up today the issue of whether or not Barack Hussein Obama is a “natural-born citizen” as requried to be President.

There are many different variations to this argument, but I’ll outline a few of the most popular:


---

Pirates can't read either

Yes I know, you thought the day wouldn’t come, but it has. Pirates have made their eventual comeback to the world, taking pot shots at passing cruise ships and bringing words like scurvy back into the vernacular of mainstream society.


---

Wednesday, December 3, 2008

Desperate Attempts to Save Christmas (By me and some Christians).

Queen Hot took pity on the king and set her best surgeons about repairing him, and her best craftsman about tricking out his OSHA carriage. She stayed by his side the entire time and slowly fell in love with his face, wondering if his personality matched.


---

Tuesday, December 2, 2008

The Slimmest Black Friday Ever

It was about 8 a.m. so we shambled over to the packed Shari’s where my sister and Jon both managed to offend the waitress, after we’d gotten our food, luckily. It seemed to invigorate us enough to drive home from Salem.


---

A Holiday Story...

Back in the mid to late nineties, a group of 10 male college students decided to try and enrich their campus with an a cappella group. The group...


---

Monday, December 1, 2008

Neighbors, spiders, and feeding your cat cereal

First it was losing a diamond out of my ring, then it was caressing a spider (you don’t want to know…), followed by a visit from my parents. Then finding myself outside at 7am in the freezing cold, with a migraine, helping the neighbor I barely know break into her own house after her son locked the house, and car, keys in the car. Whoops!


---

A blog about no blogs

In general, I avoid blogging.

I hate putting my opinions down on paper (or the internet) anywhere, but as no one has put anything down in...


---

Friday, November 14, 2008

It's the most wonderful 6 months of the year

It’s a scam ladies and gentlemen; they’re trying to get you all worked up now so you’ll go giraffeshit and buy a dozen tickle me Snuffleupagus’ or whatever the hell them kids are into.


---

If a man yells in the street and no one hears him, is he still crazy?

So much emphasis lately has been put on politics and elected officials that promise to turn our world around, to make everything better and quietly usher those crazy guys yelling at us to a place where we cannot hear them any longer.


---

Thursday, November 13, 2008

Free speech?

Is this a violation of free speech?


---

Thursday, November 6, 2008

Obama's victory celebration in photos

These are the moments photojournalists dream of.


---

Thursday, October 30, 2008

Look, Mom! I went to a journalism conference!

Unfortunately, the early hours of the first meeting left me with my head nodding, and the only thing that could keep my focus was Steve Novick’s tiny, tiny feet swinging in the air.


---

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Don't pander to women, woman!

Intelligent women in American are looking for a strong leader, not one who references quotes off her Starbucks cups during her speeches. Not a beauty queen who can’t string a single intelligent sentence together during an interview, and certainly not one who can’t take a bit of the blame for it.


---

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

On bras and breast cancer

Last week was so exciting I nearly peed my pants. Daily.


---

Monday, October 27, 2008

Sleep is for pussies

I like many of you have slept before, I close my eyes, I dream of a land where Grandpa isn’t dead and has enough rifles for all of us. But when I awaken come the rotation of the Earth, I find disappointment is all that waits for me in this land called reality. I begin to question the point of sleep, is it really a process of repair for your body or God’s way of saying “I see you there, and I still don’t like you.”


---

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

This week's cover (picture inside)

Shame is a hindrance to health, and an easy thing to change.


---

Monday, October 20, 2008

Election: Obama

If he loses, I will eat my words and apologize.

But here’s the thing: He BETTER not!


---

Friday, October 17, 2008

It's called globophobia, thank you very much

As soon as I walked through the door my eyes saw one thing: BALLOONS. They were everywhere. They were taped to my desk. What this some kind of sick joke?


---

Thursday, October 16, 2008

Polluted Blogosphere

Hey, I’m Rick and this is my blog.

Hurray!Rick Casillas








---

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

"For the love of Pete!"

At that point, I knew that the presidential race of 2008 was going to be interesting. It was going to take one hell of a leader to turn the country around. Whoever took the all-important position of leader of the USA was going to have to fill in some really, REALLY, big holes.


---

Sunday, October 12, 2008

One of many ways to write music

The next step is what we call the microphone game. Everyone gets a microphone, and everything said while the microphones are on must be said into the microphone. One of us usually has a voice recorder to practice outside of practice with. The microphone game makes for some interesting playbacks on those voice recorders.


---

Friday, October 10, 2008

Stuff

I don’t have a lot of interesting things to say, so I’ll just add some links of cool stuff I’ve seen recently:


---

Monday, September 29, 2008

On Writing

Heres how it is; Im relly a grate riter. Don’t let anyonebody tell you difrent. here’ss why: I relly now my stuff.


---

Friday, September 26, 2008

Give us your input

We check them and our emails (commuter@linnbenton.edu) daily.

Or give us a call! 541-917-4451.

Or stop by! We’re at F-222. That’s upstairs, facing the courtyard, right before the entrance to North Santiam Hall.


---

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Democrats sue over possible vote tampering

Just follow the links and thinks for yourself


---

Friday, September 12, 2008

Reader Response: Downtown noise

Downtown noise, and what should and should not be acceptable to hear at 6 a.m.? Read and give your response!


---

Obama on "The O'Reilly Factor"

After watching all four parts of the interview O’Reilly recently conducted with Obama, it’s clear that something in the country is changing.


---

Surfs up!

I grabbed on and with a little hop mounted the board and started paddling to get some momentum as the wave crested and launched me forward through the water. I felt my cheeks tighten as I smiled uncontrollably.


---

Thursday, September 11, 2008

Skateboarding is a crime part 1

As I reached Springfield city center I entered the city blocks: stop and go traffic, stop signs, and crosswalks became an unhithertofore perceieved threat. These seemed to outnumber the few, if any, pedestrians. I made my way down a quiet-looking street and found myself under the city hall and police department. A gaggle of officers was outside talking, they moved for me as I skated by, some with mild curiosity, others with absolute disinterest. It was at that moment I realized that in two hours of skating I had yet to see a single no-skateboarding sign anywhere. And it seemed like it was for good reason. This turned out to be the least skate-friendliest city on the planet: hardly any good street obstacles to skate and it was always a hellacious endeavour to continue forward. And I was smack-dab in the middle of it. Sidewalks turned to ruptured cement whose top layer, long since worn off, presented layers of rocks that ground me almost to a halt. Patches of fresh, new, instant-mix cement that wasn’t from 1925 provided reprieves, only to steal all my thunder(and speed) as I either ran into more terrible sidewalks, grass, oil, and sunken blocks that would force me to ollie just to stay on my board. However, going so slow; I had the height to ollie over a fire hydrant, but not the speed to escape the blocks with my back wheels.


---

Saturday, September 6, 2008

Scientists discover thought control

There is little difference in brain function between something happening and remembering it later.


---

Sunday, August 31, 2008

The minority race

To the very root of our society we’ve become a TV culture that can’t pay attention to anything that isn’t flash and over-the-top. We’ve an entertainment culture. Not only has this affected our obesity and health levels, but it’s rocked our governmental system to the core.
Democracy doesn’t work if people don’t care.
And democracy doesn’t work if people only pay attention to the candidate with the better song and dance.


---

Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Power Bubbles

We shouldn’t be ashamed to say “Yeah, my mom picked out my suit” or “My boyfriend picked out the name for the baby”.


---

Friday, August 22, 2008

Tech Blog: Getting Xfire to work with the Warhammer Online Beta

And voila, you may use X-fire in a limited fashion with the Warhammer Online 3.3+ Beta, though they will log your hours as if they were Beta 2.1 hours. Oh well!

Enjoy your logged hours!

XFire may be acquired at: www.xfire.com
You may find out more about Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning at: www.warhammeronline.com


---

Thursday, August 21, 2008

Sk8 Boards and broken bones

Less than a week after writing about my first spill on the coast, I had a few too many beers and ate it on the River Front in Corvallis. I took a...
---

Monday, August 18, 2008

The sex offender next door

At that moment, the man appeared from his house, watching us from his front porch. The children turned quiet, even cold. In the hot summer sun these children were shivering.


---

Sunday, August 17, 2008

Where the hell...

…are my beta keys for Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, Best Buy?


---

Thursday, August 7, 2008

It's a gamer's life

What does this roughly translate into? 4.5 years of my life spent gaming in one way shape or form.
And that’s staggering to think about at first. For a split second it was almost discouraging.


---

The goal

Our personal goals my vary, but for our publication, there is but one truth: Make it better.


---

Wednesday, August 6, 2008

New Jobs and Old Hats

We also need to start training for the school year, when things will not only get hot and heavy, but we’ll have full terms of classes to deal with. GG.


---

Saturday, August 2, 2008

WELCOME NEW JERSEY! Trenton’s #1 Podcaster, Sol Storrs

Sol’s show, ‘Sol Sez’, is podcasted and available right here!!!


---

Friday, August 1, 2008

Zen and the art of wearing nice clothes

I turned around and looked in the mirror. I saw a nobody looking back at me, a nobody in ratty clothes who shopped at the “Srift Thor”, someone you wouldn’t hold a door open for. I was nothing.


---

Insane Gas Prices, Lets try 140-plus mpg

I can go 60 MPG if I were to modify my car
V6 Gas engine getting 30 mpg is outstanding


---

Wednesday, July 30, 2008

How's my driving?

It’s one thing to drive like and idiot and endanger yourself and your friend. It’s another to endanger a child who has no choice in the matter.


---

Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Sk8 Boards and Bloody Knees

My first big wipe out took place in a beach house community in Waldport, Oregon. I had been skating for about two months at this point and was itching to go skate some hills.


---

Thursday, July 24, 2008

On Comments

However, it seems that our website has become a forum for right-wing conservatives, which is fine, but where are all the left-wing liberals to combat them?


---

Dodging death at the 2008 Highland Games

Next thing I knew a huge weight reminiscent of a prisoner’s ball and chain whizzed past my innocently extended legs and into the stomach of the women standing next to me.


---

Monday, July 21, 2008

Totally Cellular (Attitude Part Two)

“You can earn a trip to Disneyland!” The trainer told me. It was easy: All I had to do was sell 70 contracts a month for 7 months, plus meet all the other requirements. In all his years with the company, the trainer had seen one guy earn this trip, yet it was “totally possible” I could be the next shining star of sales and earn my free trip to Disneyland.


---

Saturday, July 19, 2008

A simple thought

Article 1. All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.


---

Friday, July 18, 2008

Tony Snow's loss felt deeply

Snow’s life as a journalist and public figure is an example of how one can positively touch the lives of those around them.


---

Apartment Living: Why I want OUT!

For some apartment living is grand. You’re away from the parents, possibly for the first time and you feel freedom. I’m in my apartment right now. I feel far from freedom. And this is why…


---

Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Enabling Interaction

This week I did a photo essay on the Oregon Country Fair ’08 and an Iraq War Memorial that stood outside of it. They were my first real photo essays and I did them entirely with an $80 “point-and-shoot” digital camera. Of course, I left the time and date stamp on (incorrectly, to boot), because I’m such a professional.


---

Monday, July 14, 2008

Has Corvallis Really Gone That Cheap?

My first thought was, “oh, sweet! Maybe they’ll be better than the fireworks Corvallis shot off on the fourth.”


---

Monday, July 7, 2008

Foresters: Chapter One.

He only chuckled. She was right, she always was, and he never argued too much. He knew how clumsy his dwarven weapon was, but at close range, a single blast could kill, maim, and stun a group of enemies.


---

Tuesday, July 1, 2008

Attitude is more important than fact! (Attitude Part One)

Say it with a smile and screwing people over isn’t so bad, is it?


---

Learning center: Helpful and offensive

An ominous presence has occupied the second floor lobby virtually from the library’s launch the beginning of spring term.


---

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Nobody wants to hear about your personal life: Part 2

“I’m pretty sure its NOT herpes, but I just don’t know! Is it a sore? See, look at it.” My stomach clenched.


---

Manifest Destiny (First!)

…this is The Commuter’s latent response to information age.


---