Author: Melinda Bardon

For an intimate, elegant evening out, NE Portland’s Echo is a solid choice.

It is an unfortunate truth about Portland that genuine and pleasant restaurant service is rarer than decent coffee at 7-Eleven.

It’s the holidays, which means one thing: It’s time to get plastered! Yours truly has conducted a massive amount of in-depth research and I present to you for your drinking pleasure, four awesome drinks suitable for a holiday party, or a night alone because you have no friends.

Mario Kart is back, and it’s rocking even more tripped-out tracks, shell-lobbing good times and highly dangerous motorized vehicles than it ever has before. If by chance you have somehow missed out on playing a Mario Kart game before, you need not worry. The sixth incarnation of Mario Kart (new to the Wii) has been carefully designed by its developers, inviting new players to give it a try, but not forgetting the longtime fans of the series.

Prineville Middle School science teacher Michael Geisen was recognized Thursday afternoon in the Smith Memorial Student Union for his educational achievements by being named the 2008 National Teacher of the Year.

If you’ve never rattled off a machine-gun blast into a crowd of people, you’ve never really lived. But that’s why God (OK, Rockstar Games) invented Grand Theft Auto. The newest installment of the video game, Grand Theft Auto IV, returns to Liberty City, where you play as the generically Eastern European Niko Bellic. After a cinematic opening, you are greeted at the docks by your drunk cousin Roman, who naturally makes you, the dude who just arrived two minutes ago, drive his taxi back to his inner-city hovel.

They move up and down. Again and again, for hours and hours. Wednesday afternoon, members representing two Portland State University fraternities are riding on a giant homemade teeter-totter in the South Park Blocks as passerby’s watch and wish them luck. But this is not merely for fun. It is for a cause. The Phi Delta Theta and Kappa Sigma fraternities have teamed up for the second consecutive year to put on their 48-hour Teeter-Totter-a-Thon.

Professor John Erdman says he is fed up with the exorbitant costs of textbooks being pushed by the publishing companies. Publishers are keeping prices high, he said, while doing less work on the publishing process than they have in the past. This is why in 2006, he self-published a free, open mathematics textbook of his own.

Some people have really interesting stories that are waiting to be told. Some people live their lives unnoticed by most. They may do memorable things in their time, and they may make life better for dozens of people. Their memory, however, will be relegated to a photo album or a dusty cassette tape recording of their voice, completely overlooked by the rest of the world.

Imagine a world where the lines between literature, music and visual arts are blurred. Where free-form expression reigns supreme and constant artistic collaboration is the norm. That is the world of Born Magazine, an 11-year-old Pacific Northwest publication you’ve probably never heard of.