INSIDE: DEAR ABBY, HOROSCOPE, PUZZLES & FEATURES
C1
B USINESS
THE BULLETIN • SUNDAY, JANUARY 10, 2021
bendbulletin.com/business
Central Oregon business
Financially fragile
Local businesses struggle, sacrifice
in order to survive the pandemic
Rita Dunlavy works on
straightening a piece
of art on display at the
Red Chair Gallery in
Bend.
BY SUZANNE ROIG • The Bulletin
Ryan Brennecke/
The Bulletin
G
etting through the pandemic for The Red Chair Gal-
lery required Rita Dunlavy to take a hard look at her
finances.
The owner of the downtown Bend gallery asked her-
self some hard questions: Did she need property in-
surance, utilities, the water cooler and the advertising items in her
budget? Where could she cut and how could she keep her artists
paying to display their art even though no customers were allowed
inside?
Dunlavy slashed her budget and emerged this summer with a
cleaner, freshly painted gallery and a healthy budget that will enable
the business to carry on for another year using the cash on hand.
Businesses have faced the fear, the uncertainty and the doubt
since the pandemic or they restructured and have emerged stron-
ger, reshaping their business. Still others have failed to stay afloat.
“I have enough cash stashed aside that I’m confident that unless
we completely close down or go to only by appointment, we can
last another year,” Dunlavy said. “By the end of January, we plan to
have online shopping on our website.”
Red Chair Gallery in
downtown Bend fea-
tured the works of
photographer Sue
Dougherty, pictured,
along with acrylics
and monotypes by
Michelle Lindblom
during the month of
June. Member art-
ists also took pains to
paint the group gal-
lery’s walls during the
spring 2020 closure.
See Fragile / C8
Submitted photo
The ‘Star Trek’ futuristic technology that exists today
L
ike many of you, I was a huge
fan of the TV series “Star Trek”
as a kid, and all the spin-offs
as well. After a total of 726 episodes
(including all the spin-offs), this
ground-breaking series is forever tat-
tooed on our collective consciousness.
It’s creator, Gene Roddenberry,
foresaw (or was the seed of) many
of the technologies we use today.
Star Trek influenced such luminar-
ies as Bill Gates, who dressed up as
Spock on stage to launch a new ver-
sion of Windows. Other famous fans
EDGE
OF TECH
By Preston Callicott
(“Trekkies”) include famous tech
CEO’s such as Jeff Bezos (Amazon),
Elon Musk (Tesla, SpaceX, Boring
Inc., Starlink, Neuralink) and Steve
Wozniak (Apple). My favorite Trek-
kie was Steven Hawking, the great
physicist.
He even starred in a “Star Trek –
Next Generation” episode (“Descent,
Part 1”), where he appeared as a com-
puterized version of himself, the only
guest star to appear as himself in the
entire series. To be fair, nearly every-
one in tech is a fan, because of its in-
fluence on tech innovation. Here are
some of the show’s futuristic technol-
ogies that came to fruition.
Communicator = cell phone
Captain Kirk flips open what looks
like an old Nokia flip-phone and talks
to his crew. However, the mighty iP-
hone or Galaxy can do so much more.
You can thank a hardcore Trekkie fan,
Martin Cooper. He was an engineer at
Motorola when he decided to recreate
Captain Kirk’s communicator, and he
made the first cellular phone call on
his invention in 1973.
PADDS = laptops and iPads
The Personal Access Display De-
vices, (PADDs, HoloPADDs) were
used by Starfleet and many alien
races. Today, its progeny are laptop
computer and iPads. Considering
that the computers of that era were
massive, football-field-sized behe-
moths with very limited capabilities,
the idea of a PADD was an amazing
creative spark, well out of the realm
of reality.
Tricorder = handheld medical
monitoring devices
“Star Trek” grumpy doctor, McCoy
(“Bones”), carried around a tricorder,
which could diagnose all sorts of
physical and mental illnesses.
See Preston / C3