Water drains into a hole, approximately 6 feet in diameter, near the shore of Lost Lake in spring 2015. 

The news of Bend’s googly eyes on public art went viral last weekend, in case you were snoozing.

As my colleague Morgan Owen reported earlier this week, “the story appeared on Steven Colbert’s late night show and in the New York Times, BBC and Associated Press News in addition to other publications.”

An old colleague back in Florida saw the viral news item and messaged me, “Knock it off with the googly eyes, Googly Eye Man.”

I wish I were the culprit, because mule deer sculptures with cartoonish eyes do look hilarious, I must admit. The only vandalism I commit involves scuffing up curbs with my skateboard.

On the other hand, after two decades spent writing about the arts for The Bulletin, I just can’t help but think about the artists behind the sculptures, which they conceived and built with their own hands: If they’d intended googly eyes, they would’ve incorporated them, no? When I was talking about the matter with my daughter Lilly, 22, she said the same thing, unprompted by me, so I know I’m not alone.

However, I’m not ambivalent about the viral energy with which the world embraced the news from our part of earth over the past week, with the Associated Press and BBC among the news agencies that spread the googly-eyed word.

This won’t be the last time Central Oregon news has gone viral; it’s also not the first. This got us talking Monday at our weekly news staff meeting about other times something that happened in Bend has gone viral. Here are five we remember.

1. Kent Couch, the Bend gas station owner who in the 2000s made a few flights in a lawn chair tethered to enough helium-filled balloons that he was able to fly from Bend to Baker City in 2007, and then to Cambridge, Idaho, about 240 miles away, in 2008. In 2010, Bulletin reporter Ed Merriman, wrote, “‘It was all over the news,’ Couch said, rattling off CNN, Fox News, ‘Good Morning America,’ ‘Inside Edition’ and ‘The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.’” Those wouldn’t be his last balloon flights, either.

2. “The pregnant man.” In 2007, Thomas Beatie, a trans man who was assigned female at birth and retained female sex organs, became pregnant through artificial insemination. The news of the Bend family blew up after Beatie wrote about the experience for the magazine The Advocate in ‘08, after which Beatie became largely referred to in the media as “the pregnant man” — or “The World’s First Married Man to Give Birth” as Guinness Book of World Records dubbed him — and appeared on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” and in People mag, the latter of which named him a pop-culture icon, according to Wikipedia.

3. Losing Lost Lake. In April 2015, former Bulletin reporter Scott Hammers reported on ”Lost Lake Shrinking Down a Hole,” as the headline read, referring to the lake near Hoodoo Ski Area along U.S. Highway 20 with a hole through which lake waters drain each spring.

“The hole has been there as long as anyone can remember … and is the result of an open lava tube,” Hammers reported. That didn’t stop a video posted three weeks later from going viral. The Bulletin’s video has 6.4 million views, as of this writing, and a video by Plane Flygirl has over 2.5 million views. 

See The Bulletin’s Lost Lake video here

3. In case you hadn’t heard, the last Blockbuster video rental store is located in Bend, and it can’t seem to stay out of the news. Its clever 2023 Superbowl ad, “Until the Bitter End” — which “aired” at the Bend store and on social media during the game — depicted a cockroach in a post-apocalyptic setting heading into the world’s last and only Blockbuster. This October, it made headlines again, at least in the state, when false rumors circulated that it was closing at the end of that month, which helped boost sales of Blockbuster merchandise threefold, according to a piece by my colleague Suzanne Roig.

“Our plans are to still stay here,” Sandi Harding said at that time. “We still are able to get movies to renters. We can still pay our employees. We can still do our thing.”

Last Blockbuster on Earth is now a place for school field trips

4. A December 2021 Youtube video (37,000 views to date) showed a woman in a Prius trying to get out of her vehicle which was basically sliding down a neighborhood street in Bend. Bystanders shouted for her to get back in her vehicle as a Volvo came sliding toward her. Somehow, after the collision, the Prius driver ended up kneeling in the street saying to witnesses, “I don’t want to be here.” I don’t recommend reading the comments unless you enjoy people being mean.

5. This one is my favorite because I was there for this viral moment. In spring 2023, videos of Bend skater Lachlan Wood and his ill-conceived attempt at dropping in — hey, that’s the name of this column! — during the grand opening of Warm Springs Skatepark went viral on Instagram. A video of Wood on one account alone, The Berrics, which now has 3 million followers, garnered 111,000 likes just days after the failed drop-in.

In my April 6 column that year, I wrote about witnessing the 6’3” then-22-year-old attempt to drop in on a transition with a tiny radius and 10 true feet of vertical, a decorative feature not necessarily meant to be dropped in from the top of. Like so many others at the event, I got out my phone and began recording when I saw him perched up there. It did not go well for Wood, who fell spread-eagle to the concrete below, but he wasn’t seriously injured.

“That’s the name of the game in skateboarding,” Wood told me. “Some days you win, and some days you concrete bellyflop.”

And some other days, you go viral.