by HOWIE STALWICK

The Spokane Chiefs, far removed from their glory days, had finished the year in last place. Al Conroy was fired as coach and the Chiefs shocked more than a few outsiders when they opted to replace a former NHL player like Conroy with a former Junior B player/rink manager/hockey school director who had just guided a college team to a (blush) 3-23-2 season. Full Story

Steady Your Rifles High

by LUKE BAUMGARTEN

It's fitting that Band of Annuals will be featured in the May/June issue of No Depression, the final print edition of the august but foundering journal of alt country music. An absolutely brilliant six-piece that gets little press even in its hometown of Salt Lake City, Band of Annuals represents the falling fortunes of a genre that once commanded entire magazines of coverage but is now most often mentioned in online tabloid stories that begin with "Ryan Adams started a bar fight last night...." It deserves better than it gets. Full Story

Citizen Birthrights

by ROBERT HEROLD

Don Barbieri, the Spokane land developer and unsuccessful Democratic candidate for Congress in 2004, recently had published a letter to the editor in the Spokesman-Review calling for Avista to stop shutting off the river during the late summer months. Citizens, wrote Barbieri, should be able to see the river, as did his ancestors. Avista, he charges, is denying Spokanites their "birthright" — access to the Spokane River. Full Story

Hot Water

by KEVIN TAYLOR

"If you want to know how an elected official can get unpopular real quick, just use the word 'mandatory.'"

This was the way Post Falls Mayor Clay Larkin introduced the topic of restricting summertime lawn sprinkling to a roomful of fellow elected officials, water purveyors and scientists at the second "Regional Water Management Dialogue," held recently at the Spokane Convention Center. Full Story

The Perfect Food Shortage

by ARI LEVAUX

The United Nations is calling the recent increase in world hunger a "silent tsunami," as if it were triggered by an event at the bottom of the ocean. I'd call the crisis a storm, brewed by several converging forces, all of which, it turns out, are man-made. It's a storm that some have been predicting for a long time, and now, finally, the U.N. is taking notice. Full Story

There Is No Racetrack

by ED SYMKUS

The unwritten rule in Hollywood (actually it's probably written all over the place, in big black boldface script) is that once you hit it big, you've got nothing left to do but outdo yourself. So there sat the Wachowski brothers, wondering what to direct after they imagined, then brought to life, a world that we'd never seen on the screen in their Matrix trilogy. Both in their early 40s, they'd no doubt watched Speed Racer on TV when they were kids. It's obvious that they like the idea of fast-moving vehicles – think about that wild fistfight atop a barreling 18-wheeler in The Matrix Reloaded — and they now have the clout to make anything they damn well please. Full Story

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