My sister is a cardiac nurse in Portland, Ore. Although her workspace is not technically a COVID-19 unit, the number of patients the hospital admits who are battling the coronavirus has turned it into one. My superstar sibling has kept working throughout the pandemic, but she’s growing weary of watching people of all ages die—especially when a vaccine now exists that could’ve likely saved their lives.

I’m not trying to douse the festive flames of the holiday, but with the Omicron…

Throughout my decades-long tenure as an arts and entertainment writer and editor for various incarnations of weekly newspapers—the Cascadia Weekly among them—I’ve been lucky enough to talk to and meet a number of celebrities.

Over the years, I’ve engaged in phone interviews with the likes of actors and comedians Lily Tomlin, Margaret Cho, Arsenio Hall, and Paula Poundstone—who fell asleep during our conversation, but was in fine form a couple of weeks later during a show at the Mount…

Having sullied this esteemed periodical and its forbearers with my escapades for 20-plus years, I feel obliged to commemorate the final print edition of the Cascadia Weekly by relating an endeavor so outlandish and labor-intensive in its North Cascadian expenditure of effort that even now, more than two decades later, I still get a thrill thinking about how much backbreaking, dirty work it took.

More than any other terrestrial obstruction I’ve had the pleasure of moving off a trail,…

At the tail end of November, I compiled a holiday watch list of movies friends had suggested might make the long, dark nights merrier and brighter, or at least keep me entertained for a while.

Christmas was the main theme to be found among the plethora of films—whether they were comedies (Elf, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, A Christmas Story), family-friendly (Klaus, The Muppet Christmas Carol), or just plain weird (Gremlins, Prometheus, Grumpy Cat’s Worst Christmas Ever).

I…

A Bellingham woman has been sentenced to a year and a day in prison for sabotaging BNSF railroad tracks.

Ellen Brennan Reiche was one of two young women arrested on the railway near Bellingham in November 2020 after Whatcom County Sheriff’s deputies found them with equipment used to create a shunt. The devices are intended to disrupt train signaling and braking and could lead to a derailment of a train carrying hazardous materials.

Forty-one of the shunts were found on tracks around…

French onion soup is the world’s most elegant dish. Not the kind of elegance you’d find on a white tablecloth with extra silverware, but elegant in the sense that scientists use the word. Like when a simple equation can express the relationship between matter and energy with as few ingredients as a pot of French onion soup.

Onion, wine and butter are some of the most flavorful materials in the universe. Add energy in the form of heat from your stovetop, and plenty of time, which…

If not for Whatcom Museum docent Jean Madden, I might not have made the connection that the giant face that greets visitors to “Up Close & Personal: The Body in Contemporary Art” wasn’t actually a photograph, but was a watercolor painting by Till Freiwald, a German artist who was born in Peru.

It’s also possible I wouldn’t have realized that a smaller painting approximately 20 feet away was a likeness of the model Freiwald painted when she was directly in front of him, and…