So... where the hell is Corvallis?

Some background on the town, for those of you who are not acquainted.

Corvallis is a town of approximately 50,000 people, located in the heart of the Willamette Valley in Western Oregon. The town is about 90 miles south of Portland, 45 miles north of Eugene, an hour from the Pacific Ocean and two hours from the Cascade Mountains. The Willamette Valley is wine country, home to some of the best pinot noirs in the world, and the region is utterly gorgeous -- green, lush, temperate. The rumors about Oregon rain are partly true, but the rains in this region are interspersed with periods of sun on most days, often leading to dramatic streams of light shining through billowing black clouds. Rainbow weather.

The town is host to Oregon State University, a PAC-10 conference university, and, as such, has all the trappings of typical college towns. Intellectuals and pseudointellectuals outnumber the rednecks, which is rare in Oregon, outside of Portland. There are plenty of restaurants, decent indie cinema and small-town theater, plenty of live music and Da Vinci Days, a festival dedicated to science and technology. That sure beats the typical "Olive Week!" type festivals I've attended. We have an abundance of locally-grown organic produce and an alternative cooperative grocery that sells only cruelty-free, organic foods. Downtown Corvallis is full of thriving shops, from quaint cross-stitch stores to high-end Italian furniture stores. There are no malls, no Wal-Mart (although we do have an older K-Mart) and the general feeling seems to be that the residents want to keep Corvallis small and friendly.

We have one local newspaper, the Corvallis Gazette-Times, circulation approximately 12,000. I have an ongoing love/hate relationship with the GT, as we call it, and will just put them on notice now: You are often going to be a target of this blog's diatribes. I worked there for five years and took real pride in contributing to the flow of vital local information to the populace. However, the parent company, Lee Enterprises, bought the Albany Democrat-Herald and merged the two local papers into a sort of minor conglomerate, with a shared Sunday issue. Since that time, the paper has seriously gone downhill. Local news is the emphasis, as it must be, with the fantastic Oregonian providing plenty of world, national and state-wide news and several other regional papers delivered here in town. But the GT has become sloppy, with too many AP wire articles cut short by several paragraphs (sometimes in mid-sentence!) and really awful proofreading and grammatical errors that detract from the news being provided. In addition, sometimes the search for a local side to larger stories seems like blatant pandering. On the other hand, sometimes that is better than the fluff pieces about homeless puppies. So, GT -- you stand warned.

I will also be covering local issues involving the city council and local school board. Not all issues, as I don't have the time to analyze every minor ordinance or cover every PTA meeting, but some.

For now, thank you for reading this far. I hope we can become better acquainted over the next few months. If you live in Corvallis and would like to see certain issues raised or discussed, please feel free to email me by clicking this link. If you want to be taken seriously, please provide enough detail that I can check your facts and confirm that you do actually live here.