Giants once roamed the Earth in our region. Mammoths and mastodons, elephant-like creatures, were common until humans hunted them to extinction. Evidence of their presence can still be found, including mammoth tracks on a dry lake bed in Lake County (Oregon). University of Oregon paleontologist Gregory Retallack has been investigating the tracks, which indicate mammoths traveling in a group (and one might have been limping).

Acting may be fun and rewarding work, but it requires a lot of the actor; preparation, audition, rehearsal, and more. Theatre professionals Jackie Apodaca and Michael Kostroff shared an advice column for working or nearly-working actors for a decade in "Backstage," a trade paper. They compiled some of their best work in the book Answers from "The Working Actor": Two Backstage Columnists Share Ten Years of Advice . Jackie Apodaca is a professor in the theatre department at Southern Oregon

Did you leave your brolly in the boot of your car? If the phrase makes immediate sense, you might be British. We share a language with the United Kingdom, but there are many differences in the version we speak in the United States. Lynne Murphy is perfectly situated to research and write about the differences, being from here and living there, in England. Her blog "Separated by a Common Language" grew into a book, The Prodigal Tongue .

Federal farm bills, are, by nature, monsters. They contain federal attitudes toward farming and food in thousands of avenues, from crop insurance to food stamps. What you might NOT expect in a farm bill is a discussion of suicide. But there's a call for attention to mental health care in our rural areas; by some counts, farmers commit suicide at several times the rate of the general population. Michael Rosmann is a clinical psychologist and a farmer, providing his services through AgriWellness,

Lots of us work in restaurants at some point in our lives. And at the moment, it's one of the fastest-growing sectors of the economy. Also one of the most likely to spur complaints of sexual harassment. The Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC United) tracks issues for restaurant workers, and has plenty to report on the prevalence of sexual harassment.

Any young person despairing of figuring out the right direction in life should consider a road trip. It works for many people, and there are even guides to the process. Those include Roadmap: The Get-It-Together Guide for Figuring Out What to Do with Your Life . The book is an outgrowth of the documentary series "Roadtrip Nation." Co-author Nathan Gebhard visited when the book came out three years ago.

The occupant of the Oregon State Senate District 3 seat will change this fall, for the second time in a little more than two years. Alan Bates died in office in the late summer of 2016; Alan DeBoer won the special election for a two-year term but opted not to run again. A flock of candidates from both parties filed for the open seat. Today we visit with the two Republicans filed, Curt Ankerberg and Jessica Gomez .

They may be beautiful, but they came from ugly circumstances. Spirituals are, at heart, songs from slavery in America. And Ashland-based Siskiyou Singers present a program of them in two concerts this weekend, "Who’ll Be a Witness: The Power of the American Spiritual." Performances Saturday and Sunday will be narrated by Eileen Guenther, who wrote In Their Own Words: Slave Life and the Power of Spirituals .

The occupant of the Oregon State Senate District 3 seat will change this fall, for the second time in a little more than two years. Alan Bates died in office in the late summer of 2016; Alan DeBoer won the special election for a two-year term but opted not to run again. A flock of candidates from both parties filed for the open seat. Today we visit with Democrats Julian Bell , Athena Goldberg , Jeff Golden , and Kevin Stine .

The fears of a Japanese attack on the mainland United States actually came true during the second World War. But no one knew it at the time. The discovery of a balloon bomb near Bly, Oregon in the spring of 1945 resulted in the deaths of six people. That case and others were kept under wraps by government censors at the time. Our Underground History segment with the archaeologists of the Southern Oregon University Laboratory of Anthropology (SOULA) focuses on the balloon bombings this month.