The Jefferson Exchange

School is out, and parents are looking for things to do with the kids.  Oh, look, a puppet show!  But Puppeteers For Fears says "Cthulhu: The Musical!" is NOT child-appropriate. 

The Halloween-themed show based on an H.P. Lovecraft story begins a summer tour this week, including several days in Hollywood. 

Josh Gross, our Rogue Sounds co-host, is the driving creative force behind P4F and the musical. 

The rise of the wine industry in the region uncorked a whole range of businesses. 

We have vineyards, and wineries, and places that have nothing to do with the actual growing of grapes (but are still a key part of the wine business). 

We put Medford's Pallet Wine Company in that final category.  The plant takes the grapes brought in by growers and turns them into wine. 

All growers need to bring is the grapes and the money.  Linda Donovan started Pallet after years in the wine business. 

It was the late 1960s... and Malcolm Terence did what a lot of people did in that time: looked for a different way to live. 

He'd been a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, and he was ready for a change.  Managing a rock band was fun, but also not the answer. 

So Malcolm found his way to the Black Bear Ranch, a commune nestled in the mountains by the Oregon-California state line.  That's where things got interesting, and Malcolm built himself a life. 

He tells the story in his first book, Beginner's Luck: Dispatches From the Klamath Mountains. 

A highlight of the entertainment season in Southern Oregon is the opening of the Elizabethan Theatre at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.  It is the heart of the original festival, with plays presented under the summer sky taking stage since 1935. 

The opening is celebrated with an outdoor meal, but also with a church service.  Church?  Yes, 1559 style. 

Trinity Episcopal Church offers a service that attempts to recreate a Church of England service from the time of Elizabeth I. 

The vaccine resistance continues to grow.  And Oregon remains one of the most un-vaccinated places in the country. 

Josephine County leads the state in avoiding vaccines for children, and Jackson County is not far behind. 

This is obviously a concern to the people who run the immunization program in the Oregon Health Authority. 

Thank Heaven for zombie movies.  Now we're at least familiar with the concept of people eating brains. 

Jokes aside, cannabalism--eating your fellow creatures--is well-established across the animal kingdom, as we explored last year with zoologist Bill Schutt. 

He wrote the book Cannibalism: A Perfect Natural History.  And for some reason, we have a taste for hearing the discussion again. 

It's a long way from the Oregon Coast to Philadelphia, both in distance and in feeling.  Jeff Brady takes it all in stride. 

Brady is one of NPR's correspondents, based on the East Coast after many years living and working in the West.  Those years include attending college at what is now Southern Oregon University, which will honor him with a distinguished alumni award as part of 2018 Commencement. 

Did we mention Jeff once worked for JPR?  We think he can still find the way to the studio. 

How Oregon and other tree-rich areas use their forests will figure prominently in both the creation and capture of greenhouse gases. 

Emissions studies show that Oregon's forest products industry creates the largest single chunk of the state's carbon emissions, through burning of fossil fuels in logging, among other activities.  At the same time, the forests themselves are capable of soaking up carbon emissions. 

A study that included Oregon State University calculated the carbon effects of several forest events: logging, reforestation, and fire among them. 

Remember when news got to us once a day, maybe twice?  Yeah, we barely do either. 

It bombards us all the time, through news and tweets and texts and more. 

Once a month we take stock of the media landscape with Precious Yamaguchi and Andrew Gay, who teach Communications courses at Southern Oregon University. 

It's another rich month of material to consider: think Roseanne Barr and the tweet that killed a TV show. 

Spend too much time consuming news, and you can get a real sense the world is in trouble.  Ignoring the news competely is probably not the answer. 

But perhaps an adjustment to our definition of hope is in order. 

Kate Davies certainly recommends such an adjustment in her book Intrinsic Hope: Living Courageously in Troubled Times.  This is a bit different from the kind of conventional hope most of us grew up with. 

It's not a bar fight, exactly, but it is a beer fight.  Or competition, let's say. 

Microbreweries are finding some difficulty in getting people to buy their beers in stores, so they're focusing attention on direct sales: people come into the taproom or brewery and buy beer there. 

Which limits the choices in stores and in bars that serve many different beer brands. 

Larry Chase of Standing Stone Brewing Co. in Ashland also sits on the board of the Brewers Association in Oregon. 

The very term "trophy hunting" can lead to some confusion: does it mean a hunter won a trophy for good shooting?  No, actually. 

It means a hunter pays a fee to kill an animal, and gets to keep a part of the animal's body as a trophy.  Like a head stuffed and mounted on a wall. 

Trophy hunters claim some conservation benefits for their practices; hunting does get people out of doors. 

But new research involving Oregon State University and other institutions points to the contradiction of conservation alongside the practice of killing animals for sport. 

Is advertising an art or a science?  The case can be made for either or both. 

Marketing has made huge strides in developing consumer behavior, and creating "needs" where there previously weren't even desires. 

Now the business itself has been turned on its head by the Internet and adbots and algorithms.  Ken Auletta, long a writer on the media in books and in the New Yorker, looks at the fate of advertising in our time in Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business (and Everything Else). 

The term "leafy neighborhood" came into common use a couple of years ago.  It signifies what a lot of people want: some cool shady trees to blunt the harsh urban/suburban experience. 

Well, there's a problem there: research indicates that urban tree cover is diminishing, just as the planet is getting warmer. 

David J. Nowak studies this and other trends for the U.S. Forest Service. 

The mountains are fun to look at and the ocean's cool. 

But it's the people who really make our region what it is.  We meet some truly colorful characters through Stories of Southern Oregon, compiled for the Southern Oregon Digital Archive by Maureen Flanagan Battistella. 

Maureen returns with Paul Tipton, a Vietnam veteran who talks about writing poetry inspired by his experiences in that war. 

You have to give credit to the people among us willing to try anything. 

Because they are probably the kinds of people who first discovered wine.  Would YOU have taken a risk and tried drinking grape juice that appeared to have gone bad?  Somebody did, and look at the fun we've had ever since. 

Journalist Kevin Begos followed some ancient leads and found himself on the trail of a big story: the history of wine.  The tale unfolds in Tasting the Past. 

How are you feeling lately?  That's a question more easily asked of an individual than a whole community, but somebody's trying. 

A community health assessment is being prepared for Jackson and Josephine Counties, to help hospitals and other health care organizations figure out community needs. 

Right now the process is in the acquisition phase... getting info from people living in the community. 

Jefferson Regional Health Alliance is one player in CHA process.